The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Hans Kammler, the senior SS officer who had been the key figure in the recruitment and exploitation of forced labour at the Dora-Central Works rocket factory, had acquired one last promotion from a grateful Hitler, who just before the end of the war had given him the entirely meaningless title ‘Plenipotentiary of the Leader for Jet Aircraft’. After travelling across Germany trying to rally SS forces for a last stand, Kammler finally arrived in Prague, where he was shot by his adjutant, on his own command, at the very end of the war, desperate to avoid falling into the hands of Czech partisans.216 Theodor Dannecker, the roving ambassasdor of death responsible for the deportation of many Jews to Auschwitz from different countries, fled to relatives in the north German town of Celle at the end of the war, but was arrested on a visit to his wife in Berlin on 9 December 1945, where he was denounced by her neighbours. The following day, he hanged himself in prison. On hearing of his death, his wife decided to kill herself along with their two young sons, but, as she was murdering the older boy, his cries awoke his younger brother, and she was unable to complete the killings. She was arrested and tried, but acquitted on grounds of diminished responsibility, and emigrated to Australia.217 Another senior SS officer, Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s personal Chancellery and organizer of the ‘euthanasia’ murders of the mentally ill and handicapped, killed himself together with his wife on 19 May 1945.218

  Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust committed suicide on 8 May 1945, finally belying the reputation for indecision he had acquired during his years of office. Reich Justice Minister Otto-Georg Thierack was arrested by the British, and killed himself in an internment camp on 2 November 1946. The President of the Reich Supreme Court, Erwin Bumke, killed himself too, while the Reich Doctors’ Leader Leonardo Conti, who was arrested and imprisoned prior to being tried in Nuremberg for his part in the murder of mental patients, hanged himself in his cell on 6 October 1945. Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Nazis, killed himself after being captured by the Americans. Altogether, 8 out of 41 Regional Leaders, 7 out of 47 Higher SS and Police Leaders, 53 out of 554 army generals, 14 out of 98 air force generals and 11 out of 53 admirals killed themselves. Field Marshal Walter Model, Hitler’s favourite military man, shot himself in a forest near D̈sseldorf towards the end of April 1945 in order to avoid the shame of surrendering, in conformity with the injunction Hitler himself had issued to all German troops. Another general, Johannes Blaskowitz, who had been denied promotion after condemning German atrocities in Poland in 1939, was none the less arraigned for war crimes and eventually killed himself by jumping out of his cell window at Nuremberg on 5 February 1948. Regional Leader Jakob Sprenger of Hesse-Nassau committed suicide along with his wife as soon as he heard of Hitler’s death.219

  Many others contemplated suicide. Rudolf Ḧss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, considered death as an option in 1945. ‘With the Leader gone, our world had gone. Was there any point in going on living?’ Eventually, after much debate, Ḧss and his wife decided in the end to live on ‘because of the children’. He later came to regret this decision. ‘We were bound and fettered to that other world, and we should have disappeared with it.’220

  His attitude was shared by many other Nazis, especially young people whose adult lives had been wholly bound up with the regime. Melita Maschmann

  was firmly convinced that I would not outlive the ‘Third Reich’. If it was condemned to go under, then so was I. The one thing would automatically follow the other without my having to do anything about it. I did not picture my death as a last sacrifice which I should have to make. Nor did I think of suicide. I was filled with a shadowy impression that ‘my world’ would be flung off its course, like a constellation in a cosmic catastrophe, and would drag me with it - like a tiny speck of dust - into outer darkness.221

  She and her friends did not, she confessed, ‘want anything to outlive the Third Reich’.222 In the event, she too decided to live on and face the unknown terrors of a future without Nazism. Others were more determined. Interviewed by Gitta Sereny in 1991, Martin Bormann’s son told how he had been driven to the Obersalzberg when his school, the Reich School of the Nazi Party at Feldafing, was closed on 23 April 1945, and was sitting with many of the staff from his father’s office and the Berghof in a nearby inn on 1 May when the radio announced Hitler’s death. Everyone was still and silent for a while, he remembered, ‘but very soon afterwards, people started to go outside, first one - then there was a shot. Then another, and yet another. Not a word inside, no other sound except those shots from outside, but one felt that that was all there was, that all of us would have to die.’ So the fifteen-year-old Bormann too went out, carrying his gun. ‘My world was shattered; I couldn’t see any future at all.’ But in the back yard of the inn, ‘where bodies were already lying all over the small garden’, he saw another boy, aged eighteen, sitting on a log, and he ‘told me to come and sit with him. The air smelled good, the birds sang, and we talked ourselves out of it.’223

  Out of the many who contemplated killing themselves at this time, however, a good number did indeed take the fatal step. The wave of suicides went far beyond the ranks of committed Nazis. In a report on popular behaviour and morale drawn up at the end of March 1945, the Security Service of the SS recorded an atmosphere such as might be found at the end of the world:

  A large part of the people has become used to living only for the day. Any kind of pleasures that present themselves are exploited. Even the most pointless occasion is taken as an opportunity to drink down the last bottle, originally reserved for the celebration of victory, the end of the blackout, the return of husband and son. People are getting used to the idea of making an end to themselves. Everywhere there is a great demand for poison, for a pistol, and for other means of putting an end to life. Suicides out of genuine despair at the catastrophe that is expected with certainty are on the agenda.224

  Earlier the same month, the pastor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin had felt it necessary to deliver a sermon against suicide. But his words were not heeded. Official statistics recorded a jump from 238 suicides in the capital city in March 1945 to no fewer than 3,881 the following month, falling to 977 in May. Ordinary citizens were disoriented, despairing, unable to see a future after the collapse of the Third Reich. Suicide notes discovered by the police mentioned ‘the current situation’, or ‘fear of the Russian invasion’, as a reason for killing oneself, without going into further detail. As one said, ‘life did not have a point’ any more after the end of the Third Reich. A number of parents underlined their lack of a future perspective by killing their children before they killed themselves.’225

  Suicide rates rose almost everywhere, including in Catholic regions, though here it is likely that they were affected by an influx of refugees from Protestant areas, where the taboo on killing oneself was not so strong. In Upper Bavaria, for example, there were 421 suicides in April and May 1945, in comparison to only three to five in the same months in previous years. But such increases were dwarfed by those recorded in the areas invaded by the Red Army, including Berlin. In the city’s district of Friedrichshain, a grammar-school student reported that more than a hundred people killed themselves the day the Russians arrived. ‘A blessing that there is no gas,’ she added, ‘otherwise even more would have taken their lives; perhaps we might also be dead.’226 In the Pomeranian village of Schivelbein, a Protestant clergyman reported that ‘whole good, churchgoing families took their lives, drowned themselves, hanged themselves, slit their wrists, or allowed themselves to be burned up along with their homes’ as soon as the Red Army arrived. Mass suicides were reported from other small Pomeranian towns - 500 in Scḧnlanke, for example, and 700 in Demmin, following the arrival of the Red Army. The burial register for the town of Teterow, where some 10,000 people lived in 1946, recorded 120 suicides in early May. Rapes by Russian soldiers were undoubtedly a major reason for this increase. In Teterow, shame and wounded masculinity after such incidents drove f
athers of families to kill their wives and children, often with the woman’s consent, before killing themselves. In the Sudetenland, it was reported that ‘whole families would dress up in their Sunday finest, surrounded by flowers, crosses and family albums, and then kill themselves by hanging or poison’.227

  Yet suicide was always a minority action. Many committed Nazis were thrown into confusion without succumbing to despair. Charlotte L., born in 1921 and employed doing welfare work in the Reich Labour Service, was a convinced Nazi who seems to have had no thought of killing herself. Political education had inspired a burning commitment in her. Writing in her diary on 5 February 1940, she had recorded the ‘pleasure’ with which she had taken a class on ‘the consequences of Jewry’.228 By 22 April 1945 the Americans had occupied her home town of Helmstedt, but Charlotte still refused to accept that the war was lost. ‘I believe firmly in our Leader,’ she wrote, ‘& that Germany has a future that we Germans deserve.’ Her world collapsed when she heard that Hitler was dead. ‘Our beloved Leader, who has done everything for us, for Germany.’ She was disgusted at how many people were now changing their views. ‘As wonderful as things were under the Leadership of Adolf Hitler,’ she wrote on 3 June 1945, ‘they can no longer be for a long time. The newspapers are telling lies and screwing up their propaganda beyond measure. Behind all this stands the Jew. Will the world ever realize that the Jew is the evil for us all?’ she asked. Inge Molter, daughter of an active Nazi, also carried on hoping for victory until the very end. But gradually such people also began to achieve distance from the Nazi leadership. After her husband, the former stormtrooper Alfred, had gone missing during the final battle for Berlin, she obtained a job as a nurse in a hospital where a doctor told her at length of the atrocities the Nazis had committed. ‘I often really don’t know any more,’ she wrote to her absent husband, in whose death she still refused to believe, ‘how I regard all those things.

  Sometimes I really have to think now that it wouldn’t have been good if we had won the war.’229

  IV

  On 5 May 1945 the soldier and former stormtrooper Gerhard M. found time once more to write an entry in his diary. ‘Our Leader Adolf Hitler,’ he began, ‘is no more.’ But, he continued with evident puzzlement, ‘This fact has not shattered us as one might have supposed.’ With his comrades he had spent a little time reminiscing about the adventures of the previous twenty years. ‘Then, however, everyday life carried on anyway, and we reconciled ourselves to it. Life goes on, even if the last Leader of the Great German Reich is no more.’230 Similar reactions were reported by others. The German people had been officially told in a radio broadcast just before half-past ten at night on 1 May 1945 that Hitler had died heroically fighting to defend the capital of the Reich against the Bolshevik hordes. The truth would have undermined any further will to fight, and thereby destroyed any last remaining possibility of a negotiated settlement - a possibility that in fact only existed in the imagination of the new leaders of the Reich. Indeed, when the German commander in Berlin told his troops to lay down their arms, on 2 May 1945, he justified his order by telling them that Hitler had abandoned them by killing himself.231 Many people refused to believe what seemed to them an unlikely story, and speculated that Hitler had taken poison. In any case, with his death, the last remaining reason for supporting Nazism had evaporated. There were no scenes of grief. No distraught citizens wept in public, as Russians were to do on the death of Stalin eight years later. The eighteen-year-old Erika S. went out on to the streets of Hamburg shortly after the announcement of Hitler’s death to see how people were reacting. ‘Strange,’ she reported, ‘nobody wept or even looked sad, although the beloved, honoured Leader, whom the total idiots regarded almost as a God, is no longer alive . . . Strange . . .’ Only in school did she see a few girls weeping after the announcement in the morning assembly.232

  Lore Walb, whose admiration of Hitler had been boundless five years before, now wrote, on 2 May 1945:

  Hitler fallen, now he is at rest, it’s surely the best thing for him. But ourselves? We’re abandoned and delivered up to all and sundry and in our lifetime we can’t rebuild any more what this war has destroyed. In the beginning the ideas Hitler wanted to realize were positive, and in domestic policy some good things happened. But he failed totally in foreign policy, and particularly as the supreme warlord. ‘The path of an idea’. What a path! And the people must now pay for it . . . What a bitter end . . . Hitler is dead now. But we and those who are to come will carry throughout our lives the burden he laid on us.233

  ‘That’s now the end,’ wrote a twenty-three-year-old office worker in Hamburg on 2 May 1945. ‘Our Leader, who promised us so much, has achieved what nobody in power in Germany has so far achieved, he has left behind a Germany that is totally destroyed, he has taken away everyone’s house and home, he has driven them from their homeland, he has caused millions to die, in short, he has achieved an appalling chaos.’234

  After experiencing the bombing of her home town of Siegen and then hand-to-hand fighting between German and American troops as she cowered in a cellar, one fifteen-year-old girl who had believed in the promise that Germany would win at the last minute with new, secret weapons could see all was lost. ‘I had to go into the dining room on my own, and there I threw myself on to the sofa and wept bitterly.’ Everything had been destroyed. ‘At first I didn’t feel any resentment against the Leader . . . but now, now I have fought through to the opinion that the Leader isn’t worth feeling sorry for.’ She felt betrayed by him, and by the other Nazi leaders, who were now committing suicide one after the other. Now indeed she could see the sense of the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, which she had condemned so bitterly at the time. ‘The men of 20th July had realized that the Leader’s death was Germany’s only salvation.’235 In Hamburg on 30 April 1945, hearing of Hitler’s death, which she believed to have been caused by his having poisoned himself, Luise Solmitz at last felt free to release the hatred that she had been building up for him over the previous months. He was, she wrote in her diary, ‘the shabbiest failure in world history’. He was ‘uncompromising, unbridled, irresponsible’, qualities that had at first brought him success but then led to catastrophe. ‘National Socialism,’ she now thought, ‘brought together all the crimes and depravities of all the centuries.’ Twelve years previously she had thought very differently, but ‘Hitler turned me from a meek and mild being into an opponent of war.’ Goebbels was also dead: but ‘no death can expunge such crimes’. As for Hitler: ‘Now that we hopefully have his unimaginable crimes, lies, meannesses behind us, his botch-ups and his incompetence, his 5 years and 8 months of war, most Germans are saying: the best day of our life!’ She noted: ‘Hitler’s promise: “Give me 10 years and you’ll see what I’ve made out of Germany” has for months been his most often-quoted, out of bitterness.’ On 5 May 1945 the Solmitzes burned their Nazi flag. But it was not just Nazism that was defeated. ‘Never has a people supported such a bad cause with such enthusiasm,’ she wrote on 8 May 1945, perhaps thinking of her own earlier attitudes, ‘never so impelled itself to self-annihilation’. The Germans were ‘lemmings’ rushing to self-destruction. Not only the Nazis, but also the Germans, she concluded, had lost.236

  Life went on not least because most people were far too busy trying to keep themselves alive amidst the ruins of the Reich to worry overmuch about Hitler’s death, its meaning or its possible consequences. The arrangements Hitler made in his Political Testament for the continuation of government were an irrelevance in a situation where most of the Reich was now in the hands of the Allies. He rewarded Grand Admiral Karl D̈nitz for his loyalty by making him Reich President, a post which Hitler had once said was so bound up with the memory of the previous incumbent, Paul von Hindenburg, that it should never be reinvented. Clearly, inconsistency was not going to get in the way of Hitler’s own exclusive purchase on the title ‘Leader’. D̈nitz was also made head of the armed forces. Goebbels was named Reich Chancellor and B
ormann Party Minister. Goebbels had managed finally to secure the dismissal of his hated and despised rival Joachim von Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister and his replacement by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, while Karl Hanke, a Regional Leader still resisting the Red Army in beleaguered Breslau, was named Himmler’s successor as Reich Leader of the SS. The disloyal Speer was replaced as Armaments Minister by Karl-Otto Saur, and Goebbels’s State Secretary Werner Naumann was promoted to the position of Propaganda Minister. A few existing ministers, like Backe, Funk, Schwerin von Krosigk and Thierack were allowed to continue in government. But by now they had virtually nothing left to govern. From his headquarters in Flensburg, near the Danish border in Schleswig-Holstein, D̈nitz tried to buy time to allow the troops still fighting the Red Army to withdraw to the west by agreeing to the surrender of the German forces in northern Italy, north-west Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The German armies in Austria and Bavaria capitulated as well, under orders from their commander, Albert Kesselring. D̈nitz’s tactic was partially successful, allowing over one and three-quarter million German troops to surrender to the Americans or the British instead of the Soviets, whose tally of prisoners amounted to less than a third of the total. But his bid to negotiate a separate general capitulation to the Western Allies met with a brusque rejection. Under threat of a continuation of bombing raids, Jodl agreed to a total and unconditional surrender, to be effective by the end of 8 May 1945, authorized reluctantly by D̈nitz and signed in the early hours of 7 May 1945. The act was repeated with the full text drawn up earlier by all four Allies at Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters outside Berlin two days later, back-dated to the previous day. The war was over.237