Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Support for the war effort among the German population as a whole began to decline steadily from 1941. The failure to clinch defeat of the Soviet Union in 1941, when Hitler had confidently claimed victory in October, reflected poorly on the credibility of Hitler’s promises. In a postwar survey of German wartime morale it was found that 38 per cent of the respondents thought the war was already lost by January 1942. In April 1942 Hitler gave one of his last major speeches. It was not a good performance. His demands for greater sacrifice from a home front already short of food and fuel, his hints of another winter campaign in the Soviet Union, struck the wrong note. Goebbels thought it sounded like the ‘cry of a drowning man’, and insisted that German propaganda at home should be couched in more realistic, even pessimistic, tones to prepare people for a harsh struggle.84 By the autumn deep pessimism needed little fabrication. Through the winter of 1942, during the long slugging match at Stalingrad, the residual confidence of the German people in the prospect of victory slowly evaporated. News of the Soviet counter-attack seeped out in Berlin through the official wall of silence. The heavy lossess could not be disguised. An air of deep gloom descended on the German population. Off the record Goebbels told a group of foreign correspondents in December that ‘only a hair’s breadth separates us from the abyss’.85

  The defeat at Stalingrad brought about a real moral crisis in the German war effort. The mood in the capital was one of sorrow and exasperation. Rumours abounded that Germany might sue for an armistice. One neutral observer noticed in the mood of ‘desperation’ and ‘anxiety’ an open willingness to blame Hitler for what had gone wrong.86 The regime made a virtue of necessity and used the crisis as an opportunity to shift the moral ground of the conflict from uncritical confidence in victory to a sombre defence of the homeland against the barbaric Bolshevik threat. Goebbels was the inspiration behind the change. Hitler disliked the idea of a war of defence, since it smacked of weakness, but he accepted Goebbels’s suggestion that moral justification should now be based on the idea of a life or death struggle between European civilisation, shielded by Germany, and Asiatic barbarism. Goebbels thought the message should be uncompromising so that even non-Nazis could see that ‘everybody will have his throat cut if we are defeated’. The propaganda was never quite so blunt, but Goebbels relayed to the nation on 30 January 1943, in a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, the crux of Hitler’s new realism: ‘In this war there will be neither victors nor vanquished, but only survivors and annihilated.’87 The issue was no longer a triumphant war of imperial conquest, but the survival of the German people. No one could fail to see that the new language suggested a nation under siege. The Party took up the theme of Europe’s final defence against the east, inverting the reality of the war entirely, but in the process succeeding to some extent in rallying forces more willing to defend the fatherland than to conquer living-space. Confidence in eventual victory, on the other hand, continued to decline. The postwar survey of morale found that by January 1944 77 per cent of the sample regarded the war as lost. By early 1944, the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell wrote in his diary that ‘anxiety and horror hold sway’. Hitler, he thought, had caused nothing but ‘spiritual confusion and moral deterioration’. A secret police report from March 1944 observed that morale had reached the lowest point since the war began.88

  It was against this background of moral decline that the German resistance took the decision that the only way to end the war was to kill Hitler. This was not a simple choice. For the soldiers of the opposition it meant a betrayal of their oath of loyalty, and mutiny against their Supreme Commander. For all the assassins, plotting Hitler’s death was high treason. During the autumn of 1942 the resisters considered carefully the justification for so radical a step. They appealed to a higher morality. They searched for historical precedents. They yielded to the argument that their duty to the fatherland was greater than their duty to any one individual, especially one whose orders were manifestly criminal. ‘If ever in history an assassination was justifiable’, wrote one of the few survivors of the plot, ‘this was one.’ The soldiers who were willing to break their oath of allegiance did so in the belief that they acted in accord with ‘the highest standards of ethics, morality and patriotism’.89

  The real problem was not squaring their consciences but doing the deed. Men who moved whole armies around on a battlefield found the job of murdering one man almost impossibly complex. They discussed shooting him at the daily conference, but thought the risk of failure too high. Baron Georg von Boeselager offered to storm Hitler’s headquarters with his whole regiment but was never posted near enough to carry out the threat. Finally it was decided that a time bomb was the answer. This brought new difficulties. German explosives were not well suited to assassination. The fuses available made a hissing noise. The plotters found that the best material was British plastic explosive, triggered by British-made timing devices. The army had a quantity of both, picked up from supplies parachuted by British planes to agents in Europe. The bomb was disguised as two bottles of Cointreau, a present for someone at Hitler’s headquarters. On 13 March 1943 General Henning von Treschkow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff arrived at von Kluge’s headquarters in Smolensk for a meeting with Hitler. The Führer arrived surrounded by bodyguards. At lunch, prepared by his personal cook, Hitler’s physician tasted every course first. At the airport, following the conference, the parcel of liqueur was handed to one of Hitler’s staff, the fuse primed. Hitler’s aircraft, with his armour-plated cabin and seat fitted with a parachute, had been divided into compartments to reduce the effects of bomb blast; it flew off to East Prussia surrounded by a shield of fighter planes. The bomb failed to detonate. Before it had even been discovered, the conspirators recovered the package the following day on the pretext that the wrong gift had been sent.90

  Another fifteen months passed before a second serious attempt. This time the plotters enjoyed an even wider circle of sympathisers among senior military officers; the assassination was planned as part of a general coup d’etat which would, it was hoped, precipitate an end to the war. The assassination was to be masterminded by an outstanding young staff officer, Colonel Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. From a devout Catholic background, Stauffenberg was an unconventional soldier. In his youth he was brought under the spell of the German symbolist poet Stefan George, whose spiritual rejection of the modern age and its soulless materialism, his mystical appeal to the eternal values of German culture, linked the young soldier with traditions of chivalric behaviour and patriotic duty. He came to see the killing of Hitler as an act of spiritual redemption, St George slaying the dragon.91

  He was none the less not an ideal assassin. He had been badly wounded in North Africa, where he lost an eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left hand. He refused to abandon his military calling, and a few months after his injuries he returned to active duty in Germany as Chief-of-Staff for the General Army Office in Berlin, organising recruitment and training. While he helped to coordinate the plans for a coup, the resistance attempted again and again to kill Hitler. A second consignment of the British explosive, shipped to East Prussia, mysteriously exploded in its hiding-place. Then it was planned to use a display of new uniforms as the opportunity for the assassination. A soldier modelling the new kit, primed with explosives, was to throw himself on the Führer and detonate the bomb, killing them both. Though the event was scheduled three times, Hitler never had time to inspect the new outfits. Finally in desperation it was agreed that Hitler should be lured to army headquarters in Russia, and there, like Caesar in the Senate, be done to death by the circle of men around him. But Hitler never went.

  The conspirators became increasingly disillusioned. Some argued that they might just as well wait for the Allies to finish the job for them. Finally von Stauffenberg undertook to do the deed himself. Twice in July 1944 he arrived at conferences carrying in his briefcase a time bomb which he had learned to prime with his remaining three fingers. At the first Himmler was not p
resent and Stauffenberg preferred to wait until he could kill him too. At the second meeting Hitler left before the bomb could be detonated. Finally on 20 July at Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters at Rastenberg Stauffenberg succeeded in smuggling his bomb through the three security zones surrounding the buildings, and into the conference room itself. Instead of the meeting being held in the usual heavy concrete bunker, where the blast would have been deadly, it was held that day in a small wooden building. The bomb was primed, and Stauffenberg slipped it under the large oak map table, inches from Hitler. He left the conference to answer a fictitious telephone call, too soon to notice another officer, having bumped his legs on the briefcase, push it farther under the table, behind the large oak support. When the bomb exploded the hut was torn apart. Stauffenberg, crouched in hiding outside, saw bodies hurled into the air. Satisfied that Hitler must be dead he bluffed his way through the security net, and flew to Berlin to seize power from the Party. The bomb blast had not done the job. The thin wooden walls released the impact, throwing most of those present out of the room. Four people were killed, but Hitler was shielded by the thick oak table. He emerged shaken and grazed, his trousers torn to shreds, consumed by a livid rage against the traitors. Within hours of arriving in Berlin Stauffenberg was arrested by fellow officers and executed in the courtyard of the War Ministry.92

  The failure of the assassination attempt on 20 July had dire consequences for the opposition to the war. Hitler took the opportunity to exact a savage revenge. Thousands of senior soldiers, ministers, and officials were rounded up and subjected to torture, imprisonment and, for many, a grisly death. Confessions were extracted with all the apparatus of a mediaeval dungeon – thumbscrews, the rack, the iron maiden. The heart was torn out of the resistance. The Party and all those who followed willingly in its wake reaffirmed their fanatical loyalty to their leader; even those hostile to the regime, and conscious of Germany’s imminent defeat, were forced into line. Himmler’s SS were unleashed in a wave of lawlessness across Germany. Any hint of defeatism or demoralisation was punished with a brutal indifference. Between July 1944 and the end of the war, the full apparatus of terror and barbarism practised in the east was turned on the German people. Caught between a remorseless enemy and a vicious despotism the population continued to fight and work in conditions of increasing desperation. All but a fraction accepted that the war was lost. Postwar findings suggested that by the end of 1944 almost three-quarters of Germans wanted to give up the war at once. The proportion willing to fight to the very end, 29 per cent, may not all have been Nazis, but the figure was close to Hitler’s share of the vote in the last free elections, in November 1932.93

  In both Germany and Japan confidence in victory ebbed away long before the final battles. In both states important sections of the ruling class were hostile to the war. Popular enthusiasm was muted. A hard core of committed supporters kept the war effort going despite the widespread demoralisation on the home front. Soldiers and civilians alike were subjected to ever harsher discipline to keep them fighting and working in conditions of terrible hardship. Yet both states continued their defence right up to the point where further resistance was no longer possible. As the end drew nearer both peoples were consumed with a dread at what might happen to them after their defeat. In Japan the official line made it clear that the enemy was bent on annihilation and oppression. When Japanese were asked after the war what they expected the Americans to do to them, more than two-thirds believed they would suffer starvation, enslavement or annihilation, and only 4 per cent expected to be treated humanely. One munitions worker explained that at school young Japanese were told that the Americans would torture and murder them: ‘I thought it would be better to be dead than captured.’94 In Germany the war effort in 1944 and 1945 owed a good deal to popular dread, fuelled by the propaganda machine and rumours from the east, of what would happen when the Soviets arrived. A mirror image of German atrocity was projected on to the advancing enemy. Most anti-Nazis were united in the view that they did not want to be ruled by Stalin any more than by Hitler.

  The effect of being caught between terror on the home front and a terrible enemy was to produce a pronounced fatalism among both peoples. As the end neared there developed a do-or-die mentality among the troops. Japanese society prepared for the last stand, or kessen, when thousands of their number were to perish in suicidal attacks on the invading enemy. The military wanted to fight with everything to hand, to die with honour. Faithful to his view that the war was a sacred conflict, Admiral Ugaki refused to accept Japan’s surrender. On the day it was announced, he arrived at an air squadron headquarters, commandeered an aircraft, and set off to crash into the American fleet at Okinawa. He left a suicide note behind: ‘I am going to ram into the arrogant American ships, displaying the real spirit of a Japanese warrior.’95 A young German student later recalled the odd air of calmness in the young men she knew preparing to leave for the final battles of the war: ‘There was nothing morbid about the way they accepted their fate, although none of them wanted to die for one man’s insanity. When they left, they knew that soon … they would be killed, and that the war was already lost for Germany.’ They were sustained by the view that their death would in some sense atone for the cruelty and folly all around them. Not one of them survived.96 While German soldiers came to terms with the reality of death and defeat, their masters prepared to abandon them. Thousands of Nazi functionaries began to flee the threatened areas of Germany. When the war ended thousands more committed suicide. Among their number was Heinrich Himmler, the man whose empire of genocide and terror had turned Germany into a moral desert. He disguised himself in a police sergeant’s uniform and took the papers of another sergeant shot for ‘defeatism’; his familiar moustache was shaved off and he wore a black patch over one eye. Two weeks after the end of the war he was caught at a British checkpoint, though no one at first recognised who he was. A few days later he declared his identity. In the middle of a strip search by British interrogators he bit on a phial of cyanide and could not be revived.97

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  The Allies’ moral coalition lived on after the war. The remaining Nazi Party leaders and military chiefs, together with a host of lesser officials, soldiers and businessmen, were taken into custody to await trial as war criminals. The decision to indict the leaders of the Nazi state was taken late in the war. Up to the last months the predominant view was in favour of summary execution by military firing squad, an idea proposed by the British. To their surprise Stalin strongly opposed the suggestion, on the grounds that the Allies would be accused of being afraid to give their enemies a fair trial. Roosevelt did not reject the idea of treating German leaders harshly, even of finishing the job swiftly in ‘kangaroo courts’. But his successor as President, Harold Truman, was horrified by the suggestion that a liberal state should be engaged in lawless killing. In May 1945 he insisted that war criminals should be brought before an international tribunal, to answer for their crimes at the bar of world opinion.

  This was easier said than done. There were arguments about who was, and who was not, a war criminal. There was widespread unease at the absence of any precedent in international law – bar the exile of Napoleon to St Helena – for formally imposing the victors’ justice on the vanquished. There was the vexed question of what precisely the leading war criminals could be accused of. The decision to indict them for ‘Crimes against Peace’ and ‘Crimes against Humanity’ was regarded in some quarters as a mockery as long as Soviet judges sat on the bench, while its legal propriety was clearly questionable. The trials finally opened at Nuremberg, spiritual home of the Nazi movement, on 20 November 1945. The opening statement by the American justice, Robert H. Jackson, indicated the wider moral purpose of the trials, which was nothing less than to set on record, for all the world to see, the contrast between ‘imperilled civilisation’ and the evil cause she had fought: ‘Against their opponents … the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality and annihilat
ion as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian era …’98

  The tribunal took nine months to demonstrate the justness of the Allied cause. The Soviet judges treated the occasion like a Stalinist show trial, bullying and hectoring the defendants. At a dinner in honour of the Soviet deputy Foreign Minister, Andrei Vishinsky, who had been Stalin’s chief prosecutor during the Moscow show trials of 1936–8, proposed a toast to the defendants: ‘May their paths lead straight from the courthouse to the grave!’99 The trials gave more opportunity than their instigators could ever have intended for the chief war criminals to argue their side of the case. The prisoners reacted to their moral indictment in different ways. Some showed no remorse. Göring stood by everything he had done and tried to force the other prisoners to do the same. Speer on the other hand admitted his guilt and that of all those beguiled by the system, a confession that probably saved his life. In fact most of them, when brought unavoidably face to face with what they or their companions had done, were shocked or stunned by the realisation.