Apart from desertion, any perceived undermining of the war effort brought rapid and harsh retribution. The contrast in severity, both with the sentencing in the German army in the First World War and with that of the Allies in the Second, is striking. For a variety of perceived serious offences, a total of 150 German soldiers had been sentenced to death in the First World War, 48 of whom were actually executed. German military courts passed, in all, some 30,000 death sentences against German soldiers during the Second World War, with 20,000 carried out. During the Second World War the British executed 40, the French 103, the Americans 146.50
The higher the rank, the less likely it was that perceived military failings would incur severe sanction. Generals might be dismissed, as Harpe, Reinhardt and Hoßbach had been on the eastern front in January. But they were not disgraced, let alone sentenced to death or subjected to other forms of severe punishment (though not a few voices in the public could be heard still talking darkly, in tones reminiscent of the aftermath of the July plot in 1944, of ‘traitors and saboteurs’ in high places51). Still, as the military situation worsened and the regime became increasingly ready in its mounting desperation to resort to violence within, even high officers needed to tread warily. Colonel Thilo von Trotha, in the Army General Staff, would have recognized the warning shot across the bows from a personal acquaintance, none other than Colonel-General Schörner, in late February. ‘Among ourselves, a frank word,’ wrote Schörner. ‘I received a hint yesterday, most confidentially, of course, that your attitude to the Party and its representatives is occasionally somewhat reserved. One could have the impression that you don’t place sufficient value in certain things such as the National Socialist leadership of the army….’ ‘Dear Trotha,’ he continued, ‘I trust you have understood me. Either we succeed in having fanatical supporters and unconditional loyalists of the Führer at the top, or things will go wrong again.’52
A few days later, in a lengthy and secret missive to the commanders-in-chief and generals in command, Schörner amplified this message in a broad attack on the failure of leadership in the staffs of some parts of the army. He praised the soldiers who had learnt to be brutal and fanatical in ‘almost four years of an Asiatic war’, and had recently in fighting on the river Neiße taken no prisoners. In contrast, he scourged the indifference, bourgeois lifestyles, lack of ‘soldier personalities’ and ‘defeatist tiredness of spirit’ of officers who were unable to stir the troops through fanaticism. ‘I am in agreement with the commanders-in-chief and generals in command and with every front soldier,’ he wrote, ‘that in the Asiatic war we need revolutionary and dynamic officers.’ Stalin, he added, would have got nowhere if he had waged war with bourgeois methods. Schörner demanded ‘clear and unambigous fanaticism, nothing else’.53
The scarcely veiled threat in Schörner’s letter to Trotha and his exhortation to leading generals is a further pointer to the lack of unity in the higher ranks of the army. Though many high-ranking officers had long since inwardly turned against the Nazi regime, the spectrum of attitudes reached at the opposite extreme as far as fanatics like Schörner. In such a climate of division, distrust and fear, any prospect of a common front against Hitler could be completely ruled out.
The divisions ran throughout society. Far from the united ‘community of fate’ trumpeted by Nazi propaganda, this was a riven society where individuals looked more and more to their own narrow interests – acquisition of the necessities of life and, above all else, survival. ‘Never have the German people lived in such inner division,’ was the verdict of one colonel in February 1945.54
Despite the flood of reports telling them they were fighting a losing battle, Goebbels’ propaganda chiefs intensified rather than lessened their efforts as Germany’s plight worsened. Newspapers were distributed in Ruhr cities even after the worst bombing raids (though a suggestion that they be dropped by aeroplane was rejected as absurdly impractical).55 But even Goebbels himself was sick of the empty pathos of repeated exhortations to ‘Believe and Fight’, or to stay ‘With the Führer to Final Victory’.56 In the absence of reliable information and in often frank disbelief of official reports, rumour inevitably spread like wildfire and was difficult to control, most of all when it related to evacuation of the population in areas close to the front.57 One suggestion (later adopted) was to dispatch special units of, in all, around 1,500 Political Leaders of the Party to key points on the eastern and western fronts to stiffen morale, notably in the west, given the expected hostilities there, to prevent ‘signs of crisis’ arising as had been the case in the east as areas had been evacuated and then fallen to the Red Army. The special propaganda units would not come under Wehrmacht command, but be directed by Bormann and Himmler, with the task of ‘organizing and mobilizing the entire strength of the people of the areas in question for total deployment and the war effort’.58
Directives for verbal propaganda issued in mid-February tried to do the near impossible in emphasizing the positives for Germany in the current war situation. The Soviet advance into German eastern territories had been at such a cost of men and matériel that the Bolshevik fighting strength was decisively weakened, it was claimed, opening ‘an extraordinary chance’ for German counter-attacks. The German leadership knew that attack was the best form of defence, and would act accordingly. In the west, the length of Allied supply lines was a weakness, whereas German lines were short, units more easily manoeuvrable and, through the addition of the People’s Grenadier divisions, the Wehrmacht was stronger than the previous summer in Normandy. Not least, the deep-echelon fortifications system, it was claimed, allowed reserves to be directed at the right moment to positions under pressure and at the same time force the enemy into a damaging war of attrition.59
Little of this sounded convincing. And rallying-cries such as Himmler’s to his divisional commanders in Army Group Vistula, passed on for wider circulation, that ‘strong hearts triumph over mass and matériel’, accompanied by examples of heroic action at the front, must have sounded empty to most people.60 Other than in reinforcing defiance among the already committed regime loyalists, propaganda was for the most part by now visibly failing in its objectives.
There was, however, one notable exception. Fear, all the more so after the traumatic events in January, was the prime motivator to hold out and fight on in the east. It formed a bond – even in a negative way forging a kind of integration as all else was falling apart. And in embellishing the already existing – and well-justified – anxieties of the consequences of Soviet conquest, propaganda still had a significant role to play, both among civilians and in the Wehrmacht. Troops were drilled with the need to combat the ‘Asiatic storm from the east’, and reminded through examples from distant history – such as the defeat of the Hungarians near Augsburg in 955 and of Ottoman forces besieging Vienna in 1683 – that such attacks had always been repelled by fanatical defence when the enemy reached German soil.61 Even for some leading Nazis, playing on the fears of a population whose nerves were so stretched through the emphasis on Soviet atrocities went too far.62 But there could be no question of playing down one of the last effective propaganda weapons to hand. Already in mid-February propaganda preparations were being laid for the defence of Berlin. Leaflets were drafted, addressed to ‘The Defenders of Berlin’, urging ‘fanatical hatred’ in the fight to repel the Bolsheviks. ‘It’s about countless German women and children who place their trust in you,’ the draft proclamation ran. ‘Every house a fortress, every street passage a mass grave for the Red hordes.’ ‘Hatred against hatred! Fight to the last! Bloody revenge and thousandfold retaliation for the Bolshevik atrocities in our homeland!’63
Fear of Bolshevism was undoubtedly an important factor in sustaining the readiness to fight on, particularly in those parts of Germany most obviously exposed to advances by the Red Army. The further the population was removed from the immediate threat of Soviet occupation, and the more probable it was that the area would fall to the western Allies, the le
ss direct resonance, however, the shrill anti-Bolshevik hate-propaganda was likely to have. And in the western parts of the Reich, there was little outright fear of Anglo-American occupation, other than among diehard Nazis and funtionaries of the regime. Reports filtering back from areas already occupied even led to claims that the behaviour of the Americans was better ‘than our German troops’.64 The reality was that, however much the propaganda machine went into overdrive, only a dwindling minority of Germans remained fully committed to the regime. These did, however, include among their number those who still had power of life and death in their hands. A word out of place could bring a denunciation and the direst of consequences. As the hold of the regime slipped and propaganda was widely disbelieved, repression was increasingly all that was left.
A major reflection of the enhanced emphasis on repression and terror within was the decree issued on Hitler’s orders on 15 February by the Reich Justice Minister, Otto Georg Thierack (and impatiently awaited by Gauleiter in threatened areas65), introducing the establishment of summary courts martial (Standgerichte) in areas threatened by the enemy. Each court was to be chaired by a judge and to comprise in addition a Political Leader of the NSDAP or one of its affiliates and an officer of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS or police. The members of the court were to be nominated by the Gauleiter, as Reich Defence Commissar for the region. The court was to deal with all offences that could endanger fighting morale and could issue only three verdicts: death penalty, exoneration or transfer to a regular court. The Reich Defence Commissar was to confirm the verdict and determine place, time and manner of an execution. ‘The Führer expects’, Bormann added in his covering ordinance to the Gauleiter, ‘that the Gauleiter will implement the task placed before them with the necessary severity and consistency and ruthlessly suppress every sign of disintegration, cowardice and defeatism with the death sentences of the summary courts martial. Anyone not prepared to fight for his people but who stabs it in the back in its gravest hour does not deserve to live and must fall to the executioner.’66 Some days earlier, Bormann had informed the Gauleiter that this now gave them ‘the weapon to destroy all those pests of the people’ and declared his expectation ‘that this instrument will be used as the Führer would wish, ruthlessly and without respect to the standing or position of the person concerned’.67
Bormann’s guidelines, indicating Hitler’s wishes, give clear enough indication that the new courts had little to do with conventional justice. They were, in fact, no more than a façade for increasingly arbitrary and wild terror, ‘instruments of destruction in legal drapery’.68 Death sentences were scarcely more than a formality, all the more so since the judges were themselves under pressure to show their loyalty.69 Around 6,000–7,000 death sentences are known to have been handed out by the summary courts martial, though in countless other cases the executioners did not even wait for the farce of a quasi-judicial sentence.70 The summary justice became even more arbitrary and unconstrained after 9 March, when their reach was extended by Hitler’s decree creating the ‘flying court martial’ (fliegendes Standgericht).71 The courts travelled around Germany dealing with those accused of undermining the war effort in whatever way, and wasting no time before reaching their verdict – usually sentence of death, meted out by the senior officer presiding over the court, and without any appeal.72 By then, all semblance of centralized control over judicial action was visibly disintegrating, and authorized lawlessness and criminality in the name of upholding the struggle of the German people were becoming rampant as the last phase of the regime was entered.
IV
In lashing out wildly at anyone seen to impair in the slightest the imperative of fighting to the last in an obviously lost war, the regime was like a wounded animal in its death-throes. Any action that smacked of nonconformity could spell disaster for ordinary German citizens. For the designated internal enemies of the regime, the terror by now knew no bounds. Armies of foreign workers (many of them from the Soviet Union and other parts of eastern Europe) and vast numbers of prisoners in jails and concentration camps were now exposed, within Germany itself, to the untrammelled brutality of the regime’s desperate henchmen. The terror, greatly escalating since the autumn, was hugely magnified by the impact of the collapse of the eastern front.
The closer Germany’s enemies approached the borders of the Reich, and the more imminent defeat became, the more the representatives of the regime saw cause to worry about the security threat from the millions of foreign workers labouring under conditions of near slavery to keep the armaments industry going and to keep the country fed (since almost half of those employed in agriculture were foreigners). The precise number of foreign workers by February 1945 is unknown. The previous summer, there had been not far short of 6 million, all forced labourers, and almost 2 million prisoners of war registered within Germany – in all comprising over a quarter of the total workforce. Of these, some 4.5 million – probably, in fact, an underestimate – were from the east, predominantly Poland and the Soviet Union, and were regarded both as racial inferiors and as a particular danger.73 The threat of internal unrest, not in terms of a revolution by the German population but as a possible rising by internal enemies, not least foreign workers, was taken seriously by the regime. Instructions were laid down, for example, at the beginning of February for the defence of the government district in Berlin in the event of internal unrest.74
The feeling that foreign workers could pose a serious problem as military defeat loomed was not confined to Nazi paranoiacs. Even the previous August, one general in British captivity had mused that 10 million foreign workers would rise up at the approach of enemy armies.75 Women – their husbands and sons away at the front, or dead – left to run farms with the aid of foreign workers, were worried about their personal safety (though as it turned out they seldom had actual cause to fear).76 In the big cities, the anxieties were palpable. In Berlin the previous autumn Friedrichstraße station had housed, according to Ursula von Kardorff, a young journalist, an ‘underworld’ almost excusively inhabited by foreigners, including ‘Poles with glances of hatred’, and a ‘mix of peoples such as was probably never to be seen in a German city’. Any outsider was looked at with suspicion, she wrote. The foreign workers were reputedly ‘excellently organized’, with their own agents, weapons and radio equipment. ‘There are 12 million foreign workers in Germany,’ she said in a telling exaggeration perhaps reflecting her own inner concern, ‘an army in itself. Some are calling it the Trojan Horse of the current war.’77
Numerous reports pointed out that foreign workers were becoming increasingly assertive as they sensed the end of their torment approaching. They were also a very visible presence in big cities. The perception that they were an internal danger mirrored in good measure the appalling living and working conditions to which they had been reduced. Bombing had left hundred of thousands of them homeless, with no alternative but to frequent air-raid shelters, station waiting-rooms, or other public places, or find the floor of a ruined office or apartment block to lay their heads down. Food shortages meant they were often forced to steal or loot bombed-out buildings to survive. As any semblance of an ordered society broke down – the fabled ‘peace and quiet’ beloved of the German middle classes was long a thing of the past – the foreign workers offered an obvious scapegoat for the upsurge in criminality and lawlessness. Their image had come to resemble the caricature portrayed by the increasingly worried authorities, who reacted with characteristic harshness. Minor offences were dealt with savagely. Foreign workers were regarded not just as brigands, but also as saboteurs, though in fact there was little action that amounted to political resistance; for the most part it was simply a daily struggle for survival.78
Already in November 1944 Himmler had issued a decree empowering regional offices of the Gestapo to implement ‘measures of atonement’ as ‘reprisal for grave acts of terror and sabotage’. The measures were to be directed ‘usually against persons from foreign peoples who don’t come
into question as perpetrators but belong to the entourage of the perpetrator’.79 The terror was plainly aimed to serve as a deterrent, opening up thereby a freeway to arbitrary killings, decided at the local level. Gestapo execution squads were recruited in numerous cities and equipped with a general remit to shoot ‘looters, deserters and other rabble’.80 The decentralization of any control over executions effectively became complete by February 1945 when the head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, authorized local police chiefs to use their own discretion on when they saw fit to execute foreign workers, especially Russians.81 The heads of the Gestapo stations in Düsseldorf, Münster, Dortmund and Cologne had been warned on 24 January that ‘elements among the foreign workers and also former German Communists’ would take advantage of the current situation to engage in ‘subversive’ action. In all reported cases, the response should be ‘immediate and brutal’. Those involved were to ‘be destroyed, without requesting special treatment beforehand from Reich Security Head Office’.82
Arbitrary executions of foreign workers now became commonplace. At least 14 Russians were executed by a shot in the back of the head, then tumbled into a ready-made pit, in a labour camp near Dortmund on 4 February; 24 members of a presumed subversive group, the ‘Kowalenko Gang’, were hanged or shot in Duisburg between 7 and 10 February; 74 persons were murdered in Cologne83 (where, as we noted in an earlier chapter, something approaching a local war between dissidents and the police had been going on since the autumn) on 27 February and another 50 hanged in Gestapo headquarters on the day before the Americans occupied the city at the beginning of March. In the north of Germany, the Kiel Gestapo regularly carried out mass executions from January onwards, totalling around 200 prisoners by the end of April. One such was the shooting of 20–25 persons in late January or early February, and 17 Russian prisoners on 1 March. In the east of the country, in the penitentiary of Sonnenburg, near Frankfurt an der Oder, as many as 753 Gestapo prisoners, among them around 200 foreigners, were massacred on 30–31 January.84 Even this was only the beginning of an orgy of killings of foreign workers in big cities across Germany in the final weeks of the war.