The End
In any case, much of their work had been usurped by Party functionaries.90 Here the level of political commitment was still far greater, and where it was flagging a sense of self-protection against possibly costly reproaches from higher Party offices could produce its own activism.91 Local and District Leaders, down to Block Leaders based in tenement blocks, would do all they could to carry out the directions of the Gauleiter in all matters of civil defence, organizing anti-aircraft batteries, the running of air-raid bunkers, clearing up after air raids and, through the NSV, providing whatever social welfare was possible.92 But all this frenetic activism was coupled with still unceasing attempts to mobilize the population and instil in them the need to fight on. However ineffective the actions of the local Party functionaries were in practice, and whatever antipathies they now encountered as the end approached, they still served as a crucial control mechanism on the population. Even the NSV, the huge Party welfare organization (which had employed more than 60,000 people full-time, mainly women, in mid-194493), was in essence still a vehicle for political control, whatever work it did – in addition to (and often in competition with) state-run welfare – to help the victims of bombing raids, provide for wounded soldiers, organize evacuations or take care of refugees. The Party’s organizational structures, still incorporating (if affiliates are included) huge numbers of citizens, mobilizing young Germans as ‘flak helpers’ in anti-aircraft defence, and half a million women for service as ‘Wehrmacht assistants’ (then some of these even for fighting),94 ensured that the overwhelming majority of citizens remained compliant even as the regime crumbled. Few were prepared to risk stepping out of line. Political dissidence could prove lethal for any individual, and was regarded by most people as not just foolhardy but unnecessary as the end loomed.
At higher levels of state administration, the erosion had intensified. Following the heavy bombing of the government district of Berlin in early February, especially, the work of major state ministries was heavily impaired. New addresses were circulated almost weekly as improvised accommodation had to be found for the ministerial staff. The Finance Minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, for example, had to move his office to his home in the suburb of Dahlem.95 Parts of ministries were now increasingly evacuated from the Reich capital. It was seen by many as ‘rats leaving the sinking ship’.96 Coordination of work was ever more difficult. Written communication between ministerial officials could often only be achieved now through a courier service. And much of the work was merely trying to reconstitute files destroyed in bombing raids. Central government administration increasingly resembled rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.97
Practically all matters of substance outside the military sphere had anyway been taken over by the Party. The Gauleiter remained the key figures in the provinces still not occupied – bulwarks of loyalty to Hitler and diehards without a future, who in varying degrees according to ability, temperament and attitude represented the radical drive of the Party to mobilize all forces for the ‘last stand’, even when any semblance of rationality told them that all was lost. Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr of Württemberg, for instance, Party boss in the region since 1928, was determined, in the face of the evident longing of the people of the area for peace, that there would be no surrender in his domain. He threatened instant execution for anyone showing a white flag or obstructing German defences.98 Karl Wahl, the Gauleiter of Swabia, centred on the city of Augsburg in the west of Bavaria, had also run his province without interruption since 1928. He counted as one of the less extreme of the Gauleiter (an image he was keen to burnish after the war), and as a result did not stand high in the esteem of Hitler and Bormann.99 In mid-March, however, after the debacle of Remagen, Wahl recommended to Bormann the use of suicide pilots to fly their planes loaded with bombs into the Americans’ temporary supply bridges over the Rhine. A new heroism, not known in history, was needed, he claimed. ‘There are surely sufficient loyal followers of the Führer who would be prepared to sacrifice themselves if they could save the people through their deed…. Is it not better that a few dozen choose to die than that, by not undertaking this essential emergency measure, tens of thousands must lose their lives …’100 Nothing came of the idea. Perhaps Wahl proposed it cynically, reckoning with its rejection but believing it would uphold his credentials as a fanatical backer of the Führer’s cause. Even so, the proposal illustrates the stance that Germany’s ruling cohorts felt they had to display in the last weeks of the war. It was rapidly coming to be the rule of the desperadoes.
By the end of March Wahl was promoting in his Gau the creation by Goebbels and Labour Front leader Robert Ley of partisan organizations to engage in terroristic guerrilla activity to hinder the enemy advance (and at the same time to combat and deter defeatism), the so-called ‘Werwolf’ and ‘Freikorps “Adolf Hitler” ’.101 The idea of a partisan-style movement had been first mooted in 1943, and it took preliminary organizational shape under the aegis of the SS in the autumn of the following year, when the name ‘Werwolf’ – resonating in German tradition with connotations of ferocious defiance as well as shadowy lupine terror – was attached to it.102 Some guerrilla activity was carried out on the eastern front and to a lesser extent in the west in the winter months of 1944–5, though it could inflict no more than pinpricks on the advancing enemy. Its most notable activities were terroristic in nature. A number of American-appointed mayors in the newly occupied parts of western Germany were assassinated, for instance, most notably the Mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, in March 1945. Once the western front had crumbled and the Allies were pressing deep into Germany, underground resistance movements began to gain more importance in Nazi thinking, particularly when the Party leadership started to show interest in them. Martin Bormann saw their potential for tackling defeatism and possible insurgency within the Reich. But ‘Werwolf’ took shape, however dimly, in public consciousness only when Goebbels turned it into a propaganda enterprise, muscling in on the territory both of the Party Chancellery and of the SS, though with Hitler’s backing.
On 1 April, Werwolf Radio began broadcasting its tirades against the Allies, exultant news of real or imaginary acts of sabotage, and dark threats against ‘defeatists’ and ‘traitors’ in the homeland.103 Just before this, Ley, one of the zanier zealots in the last phase, had approached Hitler with the notion of creating an organization similar to that of the Werwolf, aimed at mobilizing young fanatical activists, equipped with little more than bicycles and bazookas, to shoot down approaching enemy tanks. Hitler agreed to the establishment of a Freikorps bearing his own name. Goebbels’ only objection was that it was under the leadership of a man he regarded as little more than a clown. He himself expected much of the partisan activity, chiefly ‘to hunt down every German traitor on the side of the western enemy’, though he prided himself that the Werwolf had caused horror in the enemy camp and aroused fears of a ‘partisan Germany’ that would cause unrest in Europe for years.104 This was an overestimation of Allied fears – though the Allies certainly took seriously the prospect of having to combat guerrilla warfare as they fought their way through Germany, and of the likelihood of a ‘national redoubt’ in the Alps where the Nazis would continue to hold out.105 It also grossly overrated the appetite for partisan activity among the exhausted German people.
Overall, the Werwolf and Freikorps ‘Adolf Hitler’ added up to little. Their victims – an estimated 3,000–5,000 killed (including continued post-war activity) were not insignificant in number.106 But for the Allies, they were – beyond the worries they initially aroused – no more than a minor irritant. And among the German population they had little support – though there was undoubtedly some appeal to fanaticized Hitler Youth members.107 Their main capacity was to terrorize, and this they did to the very last days of the war, when they were still engaged in sporadic and horrific murders of those wanting to avoid rather than promote pointless destruction as the Allies marched in. Ultimately, the partisan organizations of these weeks represented the regim
e’s lasting and massive capability for destructiveness. But just as great in these weeks was its capacity for self-destructiveness.
V
The deepening fissures in the foundations were now starting to show, too, among the regime leadership. One sign was the increasing desperation with which, even at this late hour, efforts were made to prompt a search for a political solution to the end of the war. As war fortunes had plummeted, leading Nazis – among them Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Göring and even Himmler – had pondered seeking a negotiated exit route from the path leading inexorably towards Germany’s doom. But whenever tentative suggestions had been made for exploring an opening, whether with the western powers or even with the arch-enemy, Bolshevik Russia, Hitler had been dismissive. He persisted with his dogmatic stance that negotiations were carried out from a position of strength, so could only follow a major German military success. The Ardennes offensive had been a last attempt to acquire such a bargaining position. Since then, the calamitous cave-in on the eastern front followed by the disastrous collapse in the west as the Allies pushed over the Rhine and Mosel meant that hopes of acquiring any sort of worthwhile negotiating position became more illusory by the day. Even at the beginning of March, Hitler purported to believe – or at least held to the fiction – that the Rhine could be held, the Soviets pushed back, and some sort of deal then done with Stalin.108 He was shrewd enough to know how unrealistic this was, even before the Rhine was crossed. Any negotiated end would, in any case, have inevitably meant Hitler’s own end, as he well knew. Negotiations would now more than ever have amounted to capitulation. This would have upturned everything that had driven his political ‘career’: that there would be no repeat of the ‘shameful’ capitulation of 1918.
Hitler retained at the core an extraordinary inner consistency – a dogmatic inflexibility that had terrible consequences for his country. Refusal to contemplate negotiations was for him both logically consistent and easy since his own life was forfeit anyway whether Germany capitulated or fought on. It was not that he worked out a ‘choreography’ of downfall.109 It was quite simply that there was no way out. With the war lost (as even he, inwardly, by now recognized) there could be no possible alternative in his mind to fighting on to the last. Going down in glory was for him, wedded to the heroic myths of the Germanic past, inconceivably greater than the ‘coward’s’ way out of surrender – and negotiations from weakness amounted to the same thing. The ‘heroism’ would set an example for later generations, as he emphasized to Goebbels.110 To his soldiers, he underlined once again on Heroes’ Memorial Day in mid-March: ‘The year 1918 will… not repeat itself.’111
Of the top-ranking Nazi leadership below Hitler, only Goebbels, still the worshipping acolyte, was prepared to follow the same line to its logical conclusion. He had at numerous points wanted to negotiate. But after the Allies crossed the Rhine, he was clear-sighted enough to see that Germany’s last hope of a political settlement had collapsed.112 His decision, as he told Hitler in early March, that he, his wife Magda and their six children would stay in Berlin come what may was consistent with his view that fighting on with honour was all that was left.113
He was scornful when he heard, early in March, that Ribbentrop – whom he utterly despised (a sentiment that unified the otherwise scarcely harmonious Nazi leadership) – was making overtures to the western powers. He was then irritated when these led to exaggerated stories in the western press, but full of derision when the ‘abortive escapade’ predictably came to nothing. At least it was plain, he remarked, ‘that hopes of an internal revolution in Germany against National Socialism or the person of the Führer are illusory’.114
Even now, however, Ribbentrop had not wholly given up. In mid-March, immediately following this failed attempt, he summoned Dr Werner Dankwort, deputy ambassador in Stockholm, to fly back to Berlin. He told an incredulous Dankwort that it was now a matter of gaining time to unleash the new weapons, long in preparation but now almost ready, which would restore the initiative to Germany, turn around the fortunes of war and fend off the threat to the country’s existence. ‘Germany has won the war if it does not lose it,’ he said, with his own brand of reasoning. The western Allies had rejected every attempt he had made to help prevent the westwards advance of Bolshevism. Other ways had to be tried. Dankwort was left to ponder these thoughts over the following days, when he was summoned twice more to Ribbentrop’s presence. On his third visit, Ribbentrop, in some excitement, informed him that the redoubtable Soviet emissary in Stockholm, Mme Alexandra Michailowna Kollontay, was leaving for Moscow and not expected to return. He wanted Dankwort to find a suitable intermediary to propose a message for her to take to Moscow: that the western Allies would, once the war was over, use their military superiority to remove from the Soviet Union territory it had conquered during the war, and that Germany alone would be in a position to guarantee a large portion of the lands would stay in Soviet hands.
It was an unlikely proposition. In any case, as Ribbentrop told Dankwort, he had first to obtain the Führer’s approval. The Foreign Minister promptly rang Hitler’s bunker, to be told that the Führer was in a briefing which would last until midnight. An air-raid alarm disturbed the wait, allowing Dankwort to experience the dismal mood – ‘below zero’ – as the Foreign Minister’s staff descended into the cellars. Ribbentrop himself disappeared into his private air-raid shelter. It was after midnight when the all-clear sounded and, back in Ribbentrop’s office, the call from Hitler finally came through. It was a short conversation. Dankwort heard Ribbentrop say in a resigned tone: ‘Thank you. Good night.’ The Foreign Minister turned to Dankwort. ‘The Führer let me know that he regards every attempt as pointless. We must fight to the last moment.’ Dankwort could scarcely believe the pointlessness of his arduous journey to the Reich capital. He took the first plane he could back to Stockholm, heartily relieved to escape from the Berlin madhouse.115
Himmler had by now for some time been secretly looking to a possible future after Hitler, while continuing to show himself to be the most loyal of the Führer’s paladins. SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service in the Reich Security Head Office, had persuaded Himmler in mid-February to meet Count Folke Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family and vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross. Bernadotte was in Berlin to explore possibilities of negotiating the release of prisoners, especially those from Scandinavia, from concentration camps. From Himmler’s point of view, it was a chance to show himself in a good light – conciliatory, an honest broker – and to look to a possible opening to the west. The Swedish connection was taken further in March through the intermediacy of Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, who had moved to Sweden, though he retained property in Germany. The fact that the end of the war was evidently approaching, that Hitler as adamantly as ever excluded all possible exit routes other than going down in flames, and that Himmler had no intention of joining him in the self-immolation made the Reichsführer open to the potential that Bernadotte and his foreign connections might offer. When Goebbels visited him in hospital in Hohenlychen at the beginning of March, where the Reichsführer was suffering from an angina attack, Himmler accepted that the morale of the troops had slumped and that the war could not be militarily won, but he thought from instinct that ‘a political possibility’ would open up sooner or later.116
By the middle of March, he was all the more ready to contemplate alternatives after enduring an almighty dressing-down from Hitler over his failings as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula. (Hitler had apparently already in February rebuked Himmler as a ‘defeatist’. In his command of the defence of Pomerania, Himmler had actually been too weak to countermand tactical interference from Hitler which he knew to be catastrophic, as well as demonstrating that he had no knowledge of how to handle an army.117) Hitler, in his characteristic search for scapegoats, held Himmler personally responsible for the inability to hold the Red Army in Pomerania, reproaching him with ‘secret sabot
age’ and direct disobedience. The Reichsführer was relieved of his command on 20 March. The retreat, against orders, of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS-Panzer Army in Hungary, resulting in Hitler’s furious demand that Himmler remove the insignia of the ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’, was a further humiliation for the Reichsführer. Guderian claimed to have tried on 21 March, just prior to his own dismissal, to persuade Himmler to use his foreign connections to try to secure an armistice.118 Himmler refused point-blank. He could still not risk an open breach with Hitler.
Himmler had the reputation of being the most feared man in Germany. But he himself knew that was not true. He was fully aware that he remained completely dependent on a higher power. He feared Hitler even at this stage – and with justification. But a serious estrangement had now clouded their relations. Himmler was practically in disgrace. His resentment must have encouraged him to take further his soundings with Bernadotte. Against Hitler’s wishes, he agreed to allow concentration camps to be handed over to the enemy (a promise he did not keep), and permitted small numbers of Jews and thousands of Scandinavian prisoners to be released. There was still no direct suggestion from Himmler that he might be involved in negotiations with the west. But by the beginning of April, Schellenberg – doubtless at Himmler’s prompting – was sounding out Bernadotte about the possibility of arranging a capitulation on the western front. Bernadotte refused, saying that the initiative had to come from Himmler. At this juncture it was still not forthcoming. But Bernadotte recalled Schellenberg telling him that Himmler had talked of a capitulation in the west and ‘but for Hitler’ would not have hesitated to ask him to approach the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower. It would not be long before Himmler made his move.119