The End

  Elsewhere, far away from the eastern borders of the Reich, another – extremely telling – reason was given for being unimpressed by the horror propaganda about Nemmersdorf. The SD office in Stuttgart reported in early November that people were calling the press stories ‘shameless’ and asking what the intention of the leadership might be in publishing pictures of the atrocities. Surely the Reich’s leaders must realize, the report went on,

  that every thinking person, seeing these gory victims, will immediately contemplate the atrocities that we have perpetrated on enemy soil, and even in Germany. Have we not slaughtered Jews in their thousands? Don’t soldiers tell over and again that Jews in Poland had to dig their own graves? And what did we do with the Jews who were in the concentration camp [Natzweiler] in Alsace? The Jews are also human beings. By acting in this way, we have shown the enemy what they might do to us in the event of their victory…. We can’t accuse the Russians of behaving just as gruesomely towards other peoples as our own people have done against their own Germans.

  There was no need to get too worked up ‘because they have killed a few people in East Prussia. After all, what does human life amount to here in Germany.’82

  The Reich was a large country. And Stuttgart was almost as far from Nemmersdorf as it was possible to be. Revealing as these reported remarks are about knowledge of German crimes against humanity, especially of genocidal actions towards Jews, the people of Stuttgart could feel that there was much distance between themselves and whatever Soviet atrocities had taken place on the Reich’s easternmost borders. The population of the eastern areas of Germany had every reason to be more alarmed at the proximity of the Red Army. For ordinary civilians, helplessly squeezed between the refusal of the Party authorities to evacuate them westwards and the oncoming assault from demonized enemy forces, the horror propaganda from Nemmersdorf almost certainly helped to induce a sense of intense fear. Certainly, there was profound relief when the Wehrmacht beat off the incursion and some stability returned to the area.83 In trumpeting the successes in repelling the enemy, propaganda did not hesitate to emphasize the value of all the work that had gone into building the fortifications in the east, which, it was claimed, had held up the Red Army. The Volkssturm engagement was also glorified.84 But Goebbels was keen not to overplay the ‘miracle of East Prussia’. It was important, he remarked, ‘not to praise the day before evening’.85 This was a sensible sentiment. When the Red Army returned to East Prussia, this time to stay, in January 1945, blind panic, not determination to fight to the last, characterized the behaviour of the vast majority of the civilian population of the region.

  It would be as well, however, not to presume that scepticism or cynicism about the propaganda reports about Nemmersdorf meant that Goebbels’ efforts had been fruitless. Contrary to indications that the atrocity stories had failed in their impact, the summary report from propaganda offices in mid-November claimed that those who had initially doubted the written accounts had altered their views in the light of the published photographs. People were ‘filled with hatred’, ready to fight to the extreme.86 However varied the response of the civilian population had been, it seems certain that for two groups in particular – groups that bore power – Nemmersdorf carried a message less of panic than of the need to hold out at any cost.

  For representatives, high and low, of the Nazi Party and its affiliates, the violence and cruelty of the invaders in East Prussia had offered a foretaste of what seemed certain to await them should they fall into Soviet hands. Hitler himself reacted characteristically to the news and pictures from Nemmersdorf. ‘He swore revenge and fanned the flames of hatred,’ his most junior secretary, Traudl Junge, later wrote. ‘ “They’re not human beings any more, they’re animals from the steppes of Asia, and the war I am waging against them is a war for the dignity of European mankind,” he fumed. “We have to be hard and fight with all the means at our disposal.” ’87 Hitler, least of all, was under no illusions about his fate should the Soviets capture him. On no account could that be allowed to happen. The route he would eventually take out of catastrophic defeat was already prefigured. He had informed the Gauleiter of Vienna and former Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, as early as mid-1943 that the only way he could end the war was by shooting himself in the head.88

  He extended the implications of his own fate to that of the German people. He had told his assembled Gauleiter as long ago as October 1943 that the German people had burnt their bridges; the only way was forward. Their very existence was at stake.89 He was not alone in the sentiment that there was nothing to lose. Goebbels was glad that bridges had been burnt; it bound people to the cause. In informing Party leaders of the mass killing of the Jews the previous autumn, Himmler had also been deliberately spreading the complicity, so that those present knew that there was no escape from the conspiracy of the implicated.90 At lower levels of the Party, too, the behaviour of many functionaries on the approach of the enemy – attempts to conceal membership of Nazi organizations, burning insignia, hiding uniforms and, most commonly, flight – betrayed their anxieties about what awaited them if they fell into enemy hands. But where the petty apparatchiks might hope for safety in obscurity, the Nazi bigwigs were left with no obvious choice other than to hold out. Desperation bred determination.

  The other crucial sector in which the impact of Nemmersdorf and all that it signified was unmistakable was within the army, especially among those soldiers who came from eastern parts of Germany. In the west, the collapse following the Allied breakthrough in France had brought disarray and damaged morale. The recovery there could not conceal the fervent desire among many soldiers for a swift end to the purgatory of continued fighting. It was possible to see falling into enemy hands in the west as a release. The likely death sentence appeared to be to fight on rather than end up a captive. In the east, the feelings were very different. Colonel-General Reinhardt reflected undoubted widespread sentiments when he saw what the Soviet troops had done in East Prussia almost immediately following their expulsion from the area. He wrote to his wife of the ‘rage, the hatred, which fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen’. ‘There can be no other aim for us’, he added, ‘than to hold out and to protect our homeland.’ For soldiers from East Prussia and neighbouring regions, it was no longer a matter of abstract patriotic defence of the homeland, however, let alone fighting for the cause of the Führer. The lives and well-being of their loved ones were at stake. The fury and thirst for revenge at what had been done was palpable. ‘I was there yesterday [25 October 1944] in this area to visit my troops after their successful attack,’ Reinhardt went on, and ‘experienced the blind fury with which they have slain entire regiments’.91

  A glimpse, if at a later date, of the impact of events in East Prussia on the mentalities of ordinary soldiers far from the areas in possession of the Red Army is provided by the diary of a member of the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief’s staff in Norway. The reports of ‘murder, torture, rapes, abduction to bordellos, deportations’ had a devasting effect on the troops, he recalled. It encouraged the ‘mystical belief’ that salvation would come at the last. Those with a clearer view of the likely future kept quiet since maintaining the discipline that, below the surface, had weakened was the imperative, and this seemed feasible only ‘with the aid of false hopes’. Concern for relatives was, however, growing by the hour.92

  Of course, soldiers, even those from the directly affected eastern border areas of the Reich, did not all think alike. But sufficient numbers fighting on the eastern front, and also many of those transferred to the west, appear to have been convinced that they were indeed engaged, as Hitler, Goebbels and others kept reminding them, in a struggle for their very existence, and that of their comrades and loved ones back home. The Soviet incursion served as a graphically horrible reinforcement of existing stereotypes about the ‘Bolsheviks’.93 It was not in the first instance a matter of firm ideolog
ical belief in Nazi doctrine or the redemptive powers of the Führer.94 It was simply a belief that, in the east at least, it was a life-or-death struggle against barbaric enemies. And for those less than wholly convinced, there was the intensified apparatus of repression, control and severe punishment within the Wehrmacht itself. A rising trend in death sentences for desertion, unwillingness to fight, undermining morale and other offences mirrored the decline in Germany’s military fortunes.95

  The ‘war of annihilation’ on the eastern front had always been qualitatively different from the nature of the conflict in the west. The ideological confrontation in the east, the savagery of the fighting on both sides, the ‘barbarisation of warfare’96 that openly targeted the wholesale destruction of civilian life, and, not least, the genocidal dimension present from the launch of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in June 1941, had no real equivalents in the west, even though their impact was felt throughout the German-occupied parts of the European continent. This is not to underplay the severity of the bitter fighting in the west, such as in Normandy following the Allied landings, where German troops, certainly down to the collapse in mid-August, had fought tenaciously and with losses that for a time matched the rate of attrition in the east.97 Nor is it to forget the harshness of civilian life under German occupation beyond eastern Europe, let alone the tentacles of genocidal policy that reached out into all corners of the Nazi empire. The subjugated peoples of the Balkans, Greece, Italy (in the last phase of the war) and other countries suffered grievously from mounting atrocities and merciless reprisals for any form of resistance as occupying German forces became more desperate. The Germans perpetrated atrocities in the west, too, most horrifically the massacre by the Waffen-SS of hundreds of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane in France in June 1944. But what was rare in the west was the norm in the east. Awareness of the fundamentally different character of the war in east and west had been recognized throughout German society since the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The incursion of the Red Army onto German soil, and the terrible experiences for the civilian population that ensued, now sharpened the perceptions of that division between eastern and western fronts, both for soldiers and civilians.

  For the latter, experiences of the war in the west were now almost entirely dominated by the wanton destruction and terror from the skies. Goebbels’ postbag was almost exclusively taken up with letters – which he thought ‘to some extent alarming’ – about the effects of the air raids and the despair that there was no defence against them. What was the use of morale, the letter-writers were asking, if the bombing was wrecking the means to carry on the fight? The letters, Goebbels remarked, reflected a worrying level of apathy in continuing the struggle.98 For most people in the western regions so badly afflicted by the bombing, the end of the war could not come soon enough. It would mean liberation from the misery. True, few preferred the prospect of life under an occupying force. But life would nevertheless go on. Propaganda claims that conquest by the western Allies would destroy German existence were widely disbelieved. There was little fear of the Americans or British. The fear here was of the bombers. ‘Fear, fear, fear, nothing else is known to me,’ wrote one mother in September 1944, worried sick about her daughter at school as bombers crossed the skies in broad daylight, and anxious too about her husband at the front. At least he was in the west, she wrote. ‘To fall into the hands of the Soviets would mean the end.’99

  In the eastern regions, fear of the Soviets was all-encompassing, and borne out by Nemmersdorf and what that signified. It encouraged the readiness among civilians to dig ditches, undergo any necessary privations and do all that was humanly possible to fend off the worst. It also produced mass panic when occupation was imminent. Naturally, people in these regions, too, desperately wanted the war to end. But for most of them, still largely unaffected by the bombing that was a daily scourge for the western population, the end of the war in any acceptable way had to entail release from the dreadful fear of a Soviet takeover and saving their families, possessions and homeland from occupation by a hated and feared enemy. So desire for a rapid end to the terrible conflict was mixed with the desire for the war to continue until those ends were attained. This meant that hopes had to be invested in the capacity of the Wehrmacht to continue the fight and to stave off the worst.

  For soldiers, the divide between east and west was little different. Certainly, troops on the western front fought doggedly and resolutely. According to later reflections of a high-ranking officer under Model’s command, they had no great ideals any longer, though there was often still some flickering belief in Hitler and hopes in the promised miracle weapons. Most of all, they had nothing more to lose.100 Their fighting qualities were often grudgingly admired by the western Allies. But outright fanaticism was mainly to be found among units of the Waffen-SS. And, for most soldiers, the prospect of capture was not the end of the world. On the eastern front, fanaticism, though not omnipresent, was far more commonplace. The mere thought of falling into Soviet hands meant that holding out was an imperative. No quarter could be expected from the enemy. Nemmersdorf showed, it seemed, that fears of Soviet occupation were more than justified, that propaganda imagery of ‘Bolshevik bestiality’ was correct. The war in the east could not be given up. There could be no contemplation of surrender when what was in store was so unimaginably terrible.

  V

  Increasingly dreadful though the predicament was of the German population, bombed incessantly in the west and living in terror of Soviet invasion in the east, the fate of Nazism’s prime ideological target, the Jews, was infinitely worse.

  Hitler had sought in the spring to harden fighting morale and commitment to Nazi principles of all-out racial struggle when he addressed a large gathering of generals and other officers about to head for the front. He told them how essential it had been to deal so ruthlessly with the Jews, whose victory in the war would bring the destruction of the German people. The entire bestiality of Bolshevism, he ranted, had been a product of the Jews. He pointed to the danger to Germany posed by Hungary, a state he depicted as completely under Jewish domination, but added that he had now intervened – through the occupation of the country that had taken place in March – and that the ‘problem’ would soon be solved there, too. The military commanders interrupted the speech on several occasions with rapturous applause.101 They were being made complicit through their knowledge of what had happened to the Jews in much of Europe and was now happening in Hungary.

  In the summer of 1944, as the Red Army was smashing through Army Group Centre in Belorussia, trainloads of Jews were still being ferried from Hungary to their deaths in the massive extermination unit in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Upper Silesia. By the time the deportations were stopped in early July by a Hungarian leadership responding to the mounting pressure from abroad, the Nazi assault on the largest remaining Jewish community in Europe had accounted for over 430,000 Jews.102 The crematoria in Auschwitz struggled to keep up with the numbers being gassed to death – more than 10,000 a day that summer.103 At the end of July, the Red Army, advancing through Poland, had liberated Majdanek near Lublin, and encountered for the first time the monstrosity of the death camps, publicizing the findings in the world’s press (though few in Germany had access to this).104 Auschwitz-Birkenau was, however, still carrying out its grisly work. With the closure of Belz˙ec, Sobibor and Treblinka in 1943, and a final burst of exterminatory work at Chełmno in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp, was the last in operation. Jews from the Łódz´ ghetto in Poland were gassed there in August; transports from Slovakia and the camp at Theresienstadt on what had once been Czech territory arrived in September and October. In November, satisfied that the ‘Jewish Question’ had, to all intents and purposes, been solved through the killing of millions and anxious at the growing proximity of the Red Army, Himmler ordered the gassing installations to be demolished.105

  It is striking how little thought of what might be happening to Jews appears t
o have impinged upon the consciousness of Germans, wholly and not unnaturally preoccupied with their own suffering and anxieties. Propaganda continued to pour out its anti-Jewish vitriol, blaming Jews for the war, and linking them with Germany’s destruction.106 But these were by now weary platitudinous abstractions. Most ordinary citizens appear to have given no consideration to the actual fate of the Jews or to have pondered much about what might have happened to them. Relatively few people within Germany had first-hand, detailed knowledge of the murderous events that continued to unfold to the east; the ‘Final Solution’ was, of course, officially still preserved as a closely guarded state secret. But, in any case, overwhelmed by their own anxieties, few Germans were interested in what was happening, far away, to an unloved, where not thoroughly hated, minority.

  For most, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, apart from the nagging worry that the ill-deeds perpetrated by German overlords might well come back to haunt them in defeat and occupation. This concern was present in two ways, both more subliminal than overt. As the reported comments from Stuttgart, referred to earlier, indicate, there was a gathering sense that Germany was now reaping what it had sown, that the misery its population was undergoing amounted to retribution for what had been done to the Jews and others. And another sentiment not infrequently encountered in this period was that the Jews would return with the occupying forces to take their revenge. The sentiment, commonplace enough, was directly expressed in one letter home from the front in August 1944. ‘You know that the Jew will exact his bloody revenge, mainly on Party people. Unfortunately, I was one of those who wore the Party uniform. I’ve already regretted it. I urge you to get rid of the uniform, it doesn’t matter where, even if you have to burn the lot.’107 Not a few, especially no doubt among hardened Nazi believers, felt that the bombing and destruction of German towns and cities itself amounted to that revenge. Incessant Nazi propaganda about the power of world Jewry had made a lasting mark.108