The End

The population of numerous places on the Mosel acted in similar fashion, exhorting the troops to cease fighting to avoid further destruction.31 A despairing SD agent wrote to Bormann of his bitter disappointment, shared with the many now serving on the western front who had come from the east and had, like himself, lost everything at the hands of the Bolsheviks, when they saw the defeatist attitude of the civilian population in Gau Moselland as Allied troops approached. People showed friendliness towards the Americans, he reported, but hostility towards their own troops. Propaganda attempts to inculcate hatred of the enemy were a complete failure. The Hitler greeting had disappeared from use; no rooms any longer had pictures of the Führer adorning them; white flags had replaced the swastika banner. Weapons were concealed or thrown away. There was, of course, no willingness to serve in the Volkssturm. And the attitude towards the Party was one of total ‘annihilatory’ rejection.32

  In the Rhineland, civilians were said to have hurled insults at soldiers, accusing them of prolonging the war and causing additional misery by blowing up bridges and digging tank traps. They cut wires and engaged in minor acts of sabotage, prepared white flags of surrender, burnt Party emblems and uniforms and encouraged soldiers to put on civilian clothes and desert.33 Such acts of localized opposition were, even so, not typical of the majority of the population. The longing for an end to the war was certainly near universal, but doing anything to shorten it was highly risky. Most people were not prepared to risk their lives at the last moment. This, together with an ingrained acceptance of authority, meant that resigned compliance rather than resistance was the norm.34 And however extensive outward expressions of rejection of the continued war effort were on the western front, they were rare if not non-existent in the east, where the civilian population was wholly dependent on the fighting troops to keep the feared enemy from their throats.

  Army discipline still held by and large, and not just in the east. Even so, desertion by troops was by now a serious concern for the military and Party leadership. Goebbels noted in early March that ‘the desertion plague has worryingly increased. Tens of thousands of soldiers, allegedly stragglers but in reality wanting to avoid frontline service, are said to be in the big cities of the Reich.’35 Discussions in the Party Chancellery to tackle the problem included the suggestion – found to be impracticable in the circumstances of mounting disorganization – of a nationwide ‘general raid’ on a specific day to round up all detached soldiers. Another was to leave executed deserters hanging for a few days in prominent places, a tactic said to have been effectively deployed in the east as a deterrent. (One woman, describing her flight from Silesia as a young girl, recalled her horror at seeing four corpses left to swing from lamp-posts with notices pinned to their bodies, telling passers-by: ‘I Didn’t Believe in the Führer’, or ‘I am a Coward’.36) Such fearsome reprisals, which probably had much support from those who felt they were doing their utmost for the war effort,37 were to be accompanied by emphasizing the motto of Gauleiter Hanke, holed up in besieged Breslau, that ‘he who fears death in honour will suffer it in dishonour’.38 On 12 March, Field-Marshal Kesselring, the new Commander-in-Chief West, announced as one of his first orders the establishment of a motorized special command unit of military police to round up ‘stragglers’, who, he declared, were threatening to endanger the entire prosecution of the war in the west. Three days earlier, a ‘flying court martial’ (mentioned in the previous chapter) had been set up under the fervent loyalist Lieutenant-General Rudolf Hübner – a dentist in civilian life and cheerful executioner who allegedly said it gave him great satisfaction to shoot a general who had neglected his duty – to counter desertion and defeatism.39 The first victims were five officers found guilty of failing to detonate the bridge at Remagen and peremptorily condemned to death.40 Four were shot that very day. The fifth, luckily for him, had been captured by the Americans.41 Model and Kesselring proclaimed the verdict to all their troops as a deterrent example, adding that the ‘greatest severity’ was expected of the courts martial.42

  As the desperation increased, other frontline commanders also threatened, and deployed, harsh enforcement of discipline, even if Colonel-General Schörner stood out, as we have seen, for the scale of his brutality. Rendulic´ ordered unwounded ‘stragglers’ who had left their units to be summarily shot. Himmler, as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula, published orders that after 25 March any ‘straggler’ would be sentenced by drumhead court and shot on the spot.43 Demands for fanatical defence of the Reich accompanied such severity. Unambiguous politicized fanaticism, as Stalin’s troops had displayed, was required by Schörner in the east.44

  In the west it was scarcely less savage. Paul Hausser, a Waffen-SS general commanding Army Group G in the south of the front, recommended the imprisonment of family members as a deterrent and ordered his soldiers under pain of punishment immediately to open fire on any soldier seen crossing the lines.45 The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group H, based in the Netherlands, Colonel-General Blaskowitz, was certainly no SS extremist. In fact, he had been castigated by Hitler in 1939 for ‘Salvation Army methods’ for courageously criticizing the barbarity of the SS in Poland. But in the harshness of the treatment of his own troops in the last war months, Blaskowitz was no different to other generals, threatening deserting soldiers on 5 March with being ‘summarily condemned and shot’.46 ‘The enemy must have to fight for every step in German land through the highest possible bloody losses,’ Rundstedt had ordered at the beginning of March.47 His successor in the western command, Kesselring, sought the assistance of the Party’s Gauleiter to impress upon the public the need to fight for German towns and villages, now within the war zone, with absolute fanaticism. ‘This struggle for the existence or non-existence of the German people does not exclude in its cruelty cultural monuments or other objects of cultural value,’ he proclaimed.48 Jodl appealed to commanders in the west to ensure that the enemy encountered a ‘fanatical will to fight’ among troops defending the Reich. Regard for the population, he added, could currently be no consideration.49

  Generals were no mere tools of Hitler, much as they claimed to have been such in their post-war apologetics. They acted from conviction, doing all in their power to inspire, and compel, their troops to ever greater efforts. Though they subsequently liked to portray themselves as professional soldiers doing no more than their patriotic duty, they were in fact the most indispensable component of the dying regime. Though few shared Schörner’s undiluted belief in the doctrine of National Socialism, they all accepted some of its articles of faith. The combination of extreme nationalism (meaning belief in German superiority and the unique glory of the Reich) and anti-Communism, together with a passionate resolve to prevent the occupation and – as they mostly believed – the destruction of Germany, sufficed to sustain their undiminished exertions in a lost cause. A distorted sense of duty was a strong additive. Without their extraordinary commitment to continuing the struggle when rational assessment demanded an end to the destruction, the regime would have collapsed.50

  Among the military leaders displaying greatest fanaticism in the final weeks of the Reich, counter to the post-war image he cultivated, was Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. His series of short situation reports were seen as so valuable by Bormann for their defiant fighting spirit that he had them sent out to Gauleiter and other leading Party functionaries. The first of Dönitz’s reports, on 4 March, began:

  There is no need to explain to you that in our situation capitulation is suicide and means certain death; that capitulation will bring the death, the quick or slower destruction, of millions of Germans, and that, in comparison with this, the blood toll even of the harshest fighting is small. Only if we stand and fight have we any chance at all of turning round our fate. If we voluntarily surrender, every possibility of this is at an end. Above all, our honour demands that we fight to the last. Our pride rebels against crawling before a people like the Russians or the sanctimony, arrogance and lack o
f culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

  He appealed for a sense of ‘duty, honour and pride’ to fight to the last.51

  In the navy, more than in the Luftwaffe (where morale had suffered from its heavy losses and from the drastic decline in public standing as Allied bombers dominated the skies) or the army, such appeals were not without effect. In 1918, the revolution had begun with the mutiny of sailors in Kiel. Sailors schooled in the Third Reich were well aware of this ‘stain’ on the navy’s history. Not that there was any likelihood of a repeat in 1945. As in the other branches of the Wehrmacht, attitudes and forms of behaviour varied widely. War-weariness was evident. But desertion, mutiny and indiscipline in the navy were rare. For the most part, morale remained high and readiness to fight on was present to the end – when, indeed, thousands of sailors were transferred to help in the battle of Berlin. Since taking over as Commander-in-Chief at the end of January 1943, Dönitz had done all he could to instil in the navy the ‘most brutal will to victory’ that derived from National Socialist ideology. Bolstering the readiness to utmost resistance in the ‘fight with the western powers, Bolshevism and Jewry’ was the message passed on by one of his subordinate officers, the head of a destroyer flotilla based at Brest.52 How much this sort of rhetoric shaped the unbroken fighting spirit of ordinary sailors is nevertheless hard to judge. Other factors may well have been more significant.

  Dönitz had ensured that naval crews had good welfare provision – material and psychological. And the war at sea, for all its perils, was somewhat detached from the daily brutalities of the land war in the east. For some, indeed, the part they played in helping to rescue tens of thousands of stranded refugees gave the continued war some purpose and sense of idealism. Others perhaps found purpose in the claims of the naval leadership that the continued war at sea was tying down enemy forces, and that the navy would be an important bargaining counter in any negotiated settlement. Most important of all, however, was almost certainly the feeling of comradeship, enhanced by the close confines of a ship or submarine, where class divisions were less apparent than on land as officers and men lived cheek by jowl sharing exactly the same dangers.53

  Finally, as in the remainder of the Wehrmacht and among the civilian population, there was another factor at work, impossible to quantify, but doubtless widespread: passive acceptance of the situation since there was no obvious alternative. If this did not amount to positive motivation, it certainly did not pose any barrier to the military system continuing to function – and, with that, to the war continuing.

  III

  High-ranking military officers had possibilities of a wider perspective on the war than might be expected among the rank-and-file. What did the generals see as the purpose of still fighting on at this stage? Was there any sense of rationality, or was nothing left beyond a fatalistic dynamic that could not be halted short of total defeat? Was there any clear-sightedness at all?

  Colonel-General Heinrich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, in the last phase of the war Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in Italy, pointed out a few years later that, following the great increase of size of the army in the course of the conflict, the number of generals by 1945 had risen to around 1,250, though he estimated that only about fifty had any insight into the overall strategic position. Addressing the question of potential political power of the generals to block the disastrous course of the war, he took the view, naturally involving more than a tinge of apologetics, that ‘even among the field-marshals, the slightest attempt to bring together a majority to unified action against Hitler would have been condemned to failure, and become known to Hitler, apart from the fact that the troops would have refused to go along with such a move’. He rejected the notion that generals serving at the front could have resigned in protest. This would simply have meant abandoning their troops, and would have flown in the face of all sense of comradeship and honour. It would have been cowardice. Finally, voluntary capitulation would have been feasible only if the troops had been prepared to follow the order, which they would not have done, he claimed.54

  The war, Vietinghoff wrote on release from captivity, was unquestionably lost once the Rhine front had collapsed in March 1945. Ending it at that point would have spared countless victims and massive destruction. It was the duty of the Reich leadership to draw the consequences and negotiate with the enemy. Since Hitler refused to entertain such a proposition, this duty fell to everyone in a position of responsibility able to do something to achieve that end. ‘In this situation, the duty of obedience reached its limits. Loyalty to the people and to the soldiers entrusted to him was a higher duty’ for the commander. However, in taking such action he had to be sure that the troops would follow him. This Vietinghoff still felt, at the beginning of April, with German troops holding a line south of Bologna, unable to guarantee. The majority of the troops, he claimed – an exaggerated claim at this stage, in all probability – still had faith in Hitler. And the regime would swiftly have blamed the commander for treachery, exhorting the troops not to obey him. Solidarity among the fighting troops would have collapsed, as some would have wanted to carry on the fight, others to surrender.55 It would be some weeks yet before Vietinghoff finally agreed to a capitulation in Italy. Even then, he was unsure until late in the day, so he later implied, about the readiness of the troops to surrender.

  Post-war memoirs by former military leaders frequently, like Vietinghoff’s, have a self-serving flavour. They can nonetheless still illustrate ways of thinking that shaped behaviour. Vietinghoff shared the sense of obedience, honour and duty that had long been bred into the officer corps and posed a psychological barrier to anything that smacked of treason. He at least did eventually act, though by then the Red Army was almost literally at the portals of the Reich Chancellery. His uncertainty about the readiness of the troops to follow orders to surrender also sounds plausible. And whether he would have sought a partial capitulation even at such a late stage had he been serving on the eastern or western front might reasonably be doubted. For all its apologetics, Vietinghoff’s account gives an indication of why German generals could not contemplate breaking with the regime.

  Though numerous generals confided their opinions to paper after the end of the war, contemporary expressions of their private views are relatively rare. Few generals in those hectic weeks had time to compile diary entries or other current reactions to events. They had in any case, like everyone else, to be wary of expressing any critical, let alone defeatist, comments that might fall into the wrong hands. Penetrating their public stance is, therefore, difficult.

  Some insight into the mentality of German generals in the last phase of the war can be gleaned from the private conversations – which they did not know were being bugged – of those in British captivity. These were, of course, by now viewing events from afar and without any internal insights into developments. On the other hand, they could express their views freely without fear that they would be denounced as traitors or defeatists and suffer for their criticism of the regime. Strikingly, despite recognition that the war was undoubtely lost, these high-ranking officers drew quite varied conclusions – depending, in part, on their susceptibility to Nazi thinking and propaganda. Some of the more Nazified officers believed that ‘if Bolshevism triumphs today, then it will be a question of the biological annihilation of our people’. Speculation after the failure of the Ardennes offensive that Rundstedt might surrender in the west in order to fight on in the east was dismissed as impracticable. The western Allies would not accept a partial surrender; Rundstedt could in any case do nothing because SS panzer divisions among his Army Group would not allow it; and there was the fear that anyone attempting such unilateral action would be killed immediately.56 Non-Nazi, relatively critical, officers were still in February and March 1945 evoking ‘elementary military honour’ in demanding that ‘nobody in the front line, not even the commander-in-chief, can even consider whether or not he should carry on fighting’. Honour was a crucial consideration. ‘Whateve
r defeats they may yet suffer,’ ran another comment, ‘this nation can only go down with honour.’57

  A lower-ranking officer, captured at Alzey (between Worms and Mainz) in mid-March 1945, gave his Allied interrogators his own views, based on what he had gleaned at Army General Staff headquarters at Zossen, on why the Germans kept on fighting. The ‘realists’ in the General Staff, he said, ‘expected the Rhine and Elbe lines to collapse and meant to go down fighting. Whilst Hitler was in power it was not considered possible for the German forces to lay down their arms.’ Any attempt to overthrow him was presumed out of the question after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot the previous July. The intentions were to hold the line of the Oder as long as possible and when this was no longer tenable to make a fighting withdrawal to the Elbe. In the west, the priority was to wipe out the Remagen bridgehead. It was not anticipated that the Allies would be able to cross the Rhine anywhere else. In the north, troops would be withdrawn from western Holland to hold the line on the Lower Rhine. ‘It was believed’, he added, ‘that the line of the Elbe in the east and of the Rhine in the west could be held for as long as proved necessary. It was envisaged that sooner or later a split would occur between the US and UK on the one hand and the USSR on the other, which would enable Germany to restore her position.’ The re-emergence of the Luftwaffe, with production of jet-fighters as a first priority, was seen as a prerequisite for the strategy, so oil refineries and other vital installations were provided with especially heavy anti-aircraft defences.58

  One contemporary glimpse of the thinking of a high-ranking officer based inside the Reich, away from the front lines, is afforded by letters (cautiously couched to avoid anything smacking of defeatism) of Colonel Curt Pollex, from 9 January 1945 Chief of Staff to the head of Wehrmacht Armaments. Pollex was a cultured individual and no Nazi. But he was fatalistic and passive, accepting that he could do nothing other than continue with his duties – which, of course, helped the regime in his own sphere still function – and brace himself for the hurricane soon to come. He had a realistic sense of impending disaster, but felt in his way as helpless as the millions of soldiers and civilians in lowly positions to do anything to prevent it, or see any alternative.