The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  THE FINAL DEFEAT

  I

  In the mounting chaos and destruction of the last months of the war, Hitler’s influence over the German masses finally disappeared. Even supporters of the regime, noted the SS Security Service on 28 March 1945, were criticizing him. Nobody believed his assurances of victory any longer.172 ‘Do you believe then,’ some were reported as saying, ‘that the German people has completely given up thinking? Do you think then that the German people can be kept going for much longer with empty phrases and promises?’ In 1941 Hitler had announced that the last battle-ready Russian divisions had been destroyed. With the Russians now at the gates, ‘who can take it badly when we don’t believe the Leader’s word any more?’173 ‘Doubts about our leadership,’ the Security Service was forced to admit, ‘are making no exception of the Leader’s person.’ When Hitler’s proclamation of 24 February 1945 was read out over the radio, it did not make a favourable impression on listeners. ‘The Leader is making another prophecy,’ mocked a lower Nazi official in L̈neburg. ‘It’s the old record yet again,’ said another.174 Anger at the Nazi leadership had become general. People now feared the threat of the SS and of die-hard Nazi activists more than they feared defeat.175 Among ordinary Germans, from whom his identity as a Jew was carefully kept hidden, Victor Klemperer now began to find spontaneous, mostly retrospective expressions of sympathy for the Jews, ‘these poor people’.176 Only a few still professed belief in Hitler, blaming others for Germany’s defeat.177 People began removing swastikas from buildings and destroying other Nazi insignia displayed in public places.178

  There was increasing anger, too, at the Nazi leadership’s failure to surrender when everything was so obviously lost. Those who remembered the First World War recalled that the military leaders of the day had thrown in the towel when they had realized that they were about to be defeated, thus saving many lives. ‘What decent people Hindenburg and Ludendorff were by comparison,’ one said. ‘When they saw that the game was up, they brought it to an end and didn’t let us go on being murdered, But these people! Just so they can rule for another couple of weeks ...’179 Millions were indeed dying in this final phase of the war. Lore Walb reflected bitterly on Hitler’s ‘really great guilt. Why,’ she asked on 23 April 1945, ‘doesn’t he finally give up the fight - and why is he rushing us all into a civil war at the end as well?’ She was deeply angered by what she called the ‘unreason of the fanatics’, amongst whom she now clearly numbered Hitler himself.180 And indeed, far from deciding to bring the death and destruction to an end, Hitler was determined if anything to make it worse. Faced with an invasion of German territory by the autumn of 1944, and perhaps taking a leaf out of Stalin’s book, he urged a policy of ‘scorched earth’, denying the enemy armies the ability to live off the land, just as the Russians had tried to do earlier in the war. The idea was completely unrealistic. Allied forces had ample supplies from their own bases. The only victims would have been German civilians. Government ministries agreed that the idea was impracticable, and Speer persuaded Hitler to disable industry in the battle zone by removing vital components rather than by blowing up factories or flooding mines. The armaments minister still thought that it would be possible to reoccupy the conquered territories in the near future and wanted essential production facilities to be ready for reuse. But after the Battle of the Bulge and the resumption of the Soviet advance at the beginning of 1945, Speer finally realized the inevitability of defeat. He decided that the German people would need as far as possible to inherit a functioning economy after the war was over, and he began, no doubt, to be concerned about his own reputation with the Allies. The main person now standing in the way of a managed surrender was Hitler himself. In mid-February 1945, according to his own later account, Speer conceived the idea of dropping poison gas down a ventilation shaft into Hitler’s bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. He managed to get the air filter system removed in response to Hitler’s complaints that the air below ground was stuffy. But he was still casting around for a suitable chemical when Hitler, obsessed with security after the July bomb plot, recalled that poison gas was heavier than air, had a ten-foot chimney built over the air intake to the bunker and posted SS sentries all around the roof, which was now equipped with searchlights to identify anyone found lurking there at night. Speer quietly abandoned the project; whether it had ever existed outside his own fantasies remained unclear. 181

  On 18 March 1945 Speer sent Hitler a memorandum outlining plans for the preservation of Germany’s economic infrastructure to allow reconstruction after the end of the war. Hitler told the military briefing that evening that there would be no point in taking such a course of action. The German nation had failed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. The future belonged to the victors. Those Germans remaining after the struggle was over would be poor racial stock because the best had been killed. So it was not necessary to provide them with the basis for their future existence, on however primitive a level. Then he turned his anger on to Speer’s memorandum. His response to it was to strip his Armaments Minister of most of his powers. On 19 March 1945 Hitler issued what quickly came to be known as his ‘Nero order’, after the Roman Emperor who had supposedly commanded the destruction of the city of Rome by fire. All military, transport, communication, industrial and supply installations and equipment within the Reich that might fall into the hands of the enemy were to be destroyed. ‘It is an error,’ Hitler said, ‘to believe that after the recapture of lost areas it will be possible to use undamaged or only temporarily paralysed transport, communications, industrial and supply installations again for one’s own purposes.’ When the enemy was finally beaten back, he would ‘leave only scorched earth behind him and . . . abandon all concern for the population’.182 This was a fantasy on several different levels, of course. But it could cause immense suffering if implemented. Albert Speer determined to stop it. He toured the battle-fronts and arranged with sympathetic army commanders that Hitler’s command to destroy everything should be ignored. Speer learned that the Regional Leaders were preparing to flood the coalmines, blow up the lift machinery and block the canals. Speer and his team quietly disposed of the explosives and other equipment that would be needed to carry out the plan, met with the Regional Leaders and went some way towards persuading them of its impracticality. He had already arranged with Heinrici, Model and Guderian to preserve the physical infrastructure of the invaded areas, east and west, as far as was possible under conditions of war.183

  Back in Berlin, Hitler accused his Armaments Minister of trying to persuade the Regional Leaders to countermand his orders, and told him that he would only keep his job if he could convince himself that the war could still be won. Speer demurred. There was no doubt that the war was lost, he said. Hitler asked him again, in ‘an almost pleading tone, and for a moment,’ Speer later recalled, ‘I thought that in his piteousness he was even more persuasive than in his masterful poses. Under other circumstances I would probably have weakened and given in. This time, what kept me from submitting to his spell was the thought of his destructive plans.’184 Hitler gave him twenty-four hours to come up with an answer. Speer drafted a letter of refusal, but Hitler’s secretaries informed him they had been forbidden to type it on the special large-character typewriter used for documents to be perused by the short-sighted Leader, so Hitler would not be able to read it. Speer gave in. Back in the Chancellery, he told Hitler: ‘My Leader, I stand unreservedly behind you.’ Hitler’s eyes filled with tears of affection and relief. Speer had avoided dismissal. Indeed, he secured Hitler’s authority to implement the Nero order himself and regained most of his powers. On 30 March 1945, following this interview, Speer persuaded Hitler to issue a clarification of the Nero order, which laid down that the destruction had to take place only in order to deny the enemy the use of industrial plant to bolster his own military strength. It was permissible to do this by crippling plant rather than destroying it. Speer continued to work against Party fanatics who
wanted to destroy everything. In practice, too, by this stage both industrial firms and their workers had every incentive to protect their factories and mines from destruction, and many of them did so.185 In any case, such arguments were becoming increasingly academic as the Allied troops advanced further into the heartland of Germany.

  Hitler’s mood of apocalyptic defeatism alternated during these final weeks with outward displays of defiant confidence in his ability to turn the situation round. He continued to hope for a split in the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. Some, like the Chief of the Army General Staff Heinz Guderian, advocated surrendering in the west and throwing all Germany’s troops and resources into the defence of Berlin against the Red Army, in the hope that this would persuade Britain and America to join a new struggle against the Soviet domination of Central Europe. But Hitler would not hear of any kind of surrender, not even a partial one, and accused Guderian of committing high treason. For the moment he took no further action, but from late January 1945 onwards, his meetings with the Chief of the Army General Staff were held with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SS Security Service, a silently menacing witness, in attendance. Others too, however, thought of pursuing a similar line, including Ribbentrop and G̈ring. Yet they were unwilling to take any serious steps towards a negotiated peace in the west in the light of Hitler’s intransigence. Hitler himself blamed Britain’s persistence in opposing him on Churchill’s love of conflict, but he also thought that it would be easier to make peace with Stalin, who would not have to contend with the kind of independent public opinion that hamstrung the Western leaders. At the same time, however, he did not think Stalin could be brought to the negotiating table unless the Red Army was so severely beaten before the gates of Berlin that he saw no alternative, so the end result was the same here too: Germany had no alternative but to fight on.186

  Hitler had not survived the attempt to kill him on 20 July 1944 entirely unscathed. Although the blast temporarily cured his Parkinsonian tremor, most easily visible in the shaking of his left hand and lower arm, it was back by the middle of September 1944, and to it was added dizziness, an inability to stand for long periods, and a serious ear injury that took many weeks to overcome. On 23 September 1944 he had developed severe stomach cramps, and four days later symptoms of jaundice. He had become exhausted, developed a high temperature and taken to his bed. Only on 2 October 1944 had he begun to recover; by this time he had lost 16 pounds in weight. The doctor treating him for his ear problem had tried to blame his symptoms on the pills Morell was prescribing him, and he had won the support of Hitler’s other attending physicians, including Karl Brandt, but Hitler’s reaction had simply been to dismiss them all and reaffirm his faith in Morell’s expertise. Indeed, the fact that Hitler had recovered while continuing to take the pills gave the lie to their assertion that Morell was trying to poison the Nazi Leader.187 Nevertheless, in the last months of his life, according to Albert Speer, Hitler’s health continued to deteriorate. By early 1945, Hitler was, he wrote,

  shrivelling up like an old man. His limbs trembled; he walked stooped, with dragging footsteps. Even his voice became quavering and lost its old master-fulness. Its force had given way to a faltering, toneless manner of speaking. When he became excited, as he frequently did in a senile way, his voice would start breaking . . . His complexion was sallow, his face swollen; his uniform, which in the past he had kept scrupulously neat, was often neglected in this last period of life and stained by the food he had eaten with a shaking hand.188

  Perhaps it was pity for him, Speer thought, that kept his entourage from raising any objections ‘when, in the long since hopeless situation, he continued to commit non-existent divisions or to order units supplied by planes that could no longer fly for lack of fuel’.189 They listened in silence when he told them that Stalin and the west would surely come to blows before they had won the war, or claimed that, in such a situation, the west would find it impossible to do without him. Speer himself was still happy enough to spend time with him poring over the plans they had drawn up for the rebuilding of Linz after the war. Yet Hitler’s charisma was now ebbing away even amongst his immediate following. Speer noted later that where once everyone had stood when he entered a room, ‘now conversations continued, people remained seated, servants took their orders from guests, associates who had drunk too much went to sleep in their chairs, and others talked loudly and uninhibitedly’.190

  Hitler now spent increasing amounts of time in the bunker complex beneath the Reich Chancellery. Initially he still lunched in the undamaged part of the Chancellery, but his apartment had been destroyed along with much else in an air raid on 3 February 1945, and he worked and slept underground, coming up only to exercise his dog Blondi in the Chancellery garden, surrounded by heaps of rubble. He would rise at midday or shortly afterwards, shave and dress, then have lunch before conducting a conference on the military situation, attended not only by senior commanders but also by Himmler, Bormann, Kaltenbrunner and sometimes Ribbentrop. After dinner, at around eight, there would be another military briefing, after which he would retire to his study and hold forth in his accustomed manner to his entourage until he went to bed, often at five or six in the morning.191 On 24 February 1945, on the anniversary of the promulgation of the Nazi Party programme in 1920, Hitler held a final meeting for the Nazi Party Regional Leaders in a still-standing hall in the Reich Chancellery. Arriving from all over Germany, the ‘Old Fighters’, many of whom had not seen him for some months, were shocked by the way he had aged. He shuffled rather than walked into the room, his eyes were bloodshot, his left hand and arm were visibly trembling, and he had to give up an attempt to raise a glass of water to his mouth to refresh himself. One participant noticed that he occasionally dribbled as he spoke. Attempting to rally them for one last effort, he promised yet again the arrival of wonder-weapons that would change the course of the war. They had to get the people of their districts to fight on until the new weapons were deployed, he said. Otherwise, if the German people were defeated, it would be clear that they did not deserve to win. The faith he expressed in the wonder-weapons was patently not sincere. But his belief in the Darwinian doom about to overtake the German people certainly was.192

  II

  By now, indeed, Hitler was looking mainly to what he imagined would be his place in history. Issuing a proclamation to the armed forces on 11 March 1945 (‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’), he announced that he had decided to provide the world with an example, going down, he implied, fighting, rather than surrendering cravenly as had been the case in 1918. Goebbels too decided that, if defeat was to come, then it would be a heroic defeat. He would devote his final weeks to creating inspiring images of Nazi self-sacrifice for future generations. Goebbels tried to persuade Hitler to broadcast to the nation again, but the Leader replied gloomily that he had nothing new to offer, and he was aware of reports from the Security Service of the SS that his proclamation of 24 February 1945 had not met with a positive reception. Goebbels was deeply frustrated. But Hitler knew that propaganda had finally failed in the face of the hard facts of invasion and defeat. At another level, as he moved increasingly depleted and in some cases non-existent armies around on his map in the bunker conference room, Hitler was now living a life almost entirely removed from reality. Such illusions were shared in full by Martin Bormann, who exercised his power over the Nazi Party by issuing a stream of directives, decrees and exhortations on a whole variety of issues. Goebbels complained that he was making a paper chancellery out of the Party Chancellery. The Regional Leaders, he thought, would not have the time to read the decrees, let alone the means to implement them. In government ministries, civil servants continued working despite their rapidly shrinking sphere of influence, like cartoon characters running off the edge of a cliff and keeping going despite the yawning abyss beneath.193

  At the Berlin headquarters of the Hitler Youth at this time, wrote Melita Maschmann:

  Every one of us worked with
hectic energy. Countless projects were started up, knocked out by the effects of the war, abandoned, taken up again, cancelled, altered, rejected once again and so on. During the last months of this, the feeling crept over us that all this feverish activity on the part of the Reich Youth Leadership was hardly producing the slightest response in the country. Our office was like a termites’ nest, gradually pervaded by a sense of the coming collapse without a single person daring to breathe a syllable about it . . . Our brains gave birth to plans and still more plans, lest we should have a moment to stop and think and then to have to recognize that all this bustle was already beginning to resemble the convulsions of a dance of death.194

  In the last weeks of the war, she gave up anything more than the occasional appearance at the office, and busied herself with helping refugees fleeing from the Red Army. Coming across a group of injured anti-aircraft auxiliaries, all schoolboys, many weeping after a bomb had destroyed their emplacement and killed many of their comrades, she heard one say when asked if he was in pain: ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter, Germany must triumph.’195 ‘From all those weeks which immediately preceded the collapse of Germany,’ she recalled, ‘I cannot remember a single conversation in which the probability of our defeat was mentioned. ’196 But she moved in circles of true Nazi believers, of course. And even here, the atmosphere began to take on the bizarre characteristics of the last days of a crumbling empire. While Berlin burned, Maschmann’s boss, Reich Youth Leader Arthur Axmann, a man who boasted regularly of his working-class origins, held social evenings at the Youth Leadership’s inn at Gatow, to the west of Berlin, where, according to the puritanical Maschmann, by her account a reluctant participant, ‘the eating and drinking there was often sheer gluttony’, and the party-goers included film starlets, ‘charlatans and self-important egoists’.197