The collapsing communications network also contributed to the undermining of central control. By early April it was almost impossible to sustain contact between Berlin and the Gaue in southern Germany and Austria. A motorbike courier service was proposed to relay urgent messages. The ‘communications calamity’ had never been so great.60 Where communications still functioned, they brought an unceasing flood of new decrees and directives from Bormann, ‘thoroughly useless stuff’ according to Goebbels, and largely ignored by Gauleiter who did not even have time to read them. The Propaganda Minister contemptuously dismissed Bormann’s efforts, saying he had turned the Party Chancellery into ‘a paper Chancellery’.61
A glimpse of the profound lack of realism at lower levels of the Party, existing to the end, can be found in the directive of the Kreisleiter of Freiberg in Saxony, as late as 28 April. ‘Now that a certain stabilization of the situation has taken place,’ he wrote (two days before Hitler’s suicide), ‘it is necessary again to turn intensively to Party work.’ A whole array of duties followed.62
In Vienna, the Party was in a desolate state weeks before the city fell to the Red Army. There were reports of a rebellious mood among the working class (which indeed manifested itself in attempts by underground Communist groups to assist the Soviets when they entered the city), and high levels of antagonism towards the Party. Functionaries were insulted, even spat at, and did not dare walk round after air raids unless armed. There was strong criticism of the Gauleiter (and one-time Hitler Youth leader), Baldur von Schirach, and of Hitler. Women were said to have been especially prominent in the agitation, even inciting troops to mutiny.63
Goebbels could still try to claim, not least for Hitler’s benefit, that the ‘Werwolf’ activity marked a return to the revolutionary ethos of the Party’s ‘time of struggle’ before the ‘seizure of power’ in 1933.64 He continued to press for radical action. And he acted ruthlessly without hesitation. When 200 men and women stormed bakers’ shops in a district of Berlin to get bread he saw it as a symptom of ‘inner weakness and budding defeatism’, deciding instantly to stamp it out ‘with brutal methods’. Two of those singled out as ringleaders, a man and a woman, were summarily sentenced to death by the People’s Court that afternoon and beheaded the next night. Posters, radio broadcasts and a meeting held by the Kreisleiter about the incident aimed at discouraging any repetition.65
As Goebbels knew, such ruthlessness could not hide the evident fact that the Party was disintegrating. The constant propaganda slogans to ‘hold out to the last’, and to go down fighting in defence of towns and villages stood in stark contrast to the behaviour of many Party functionaries who disappeared into thin air at the approach of the enemy. The Party Chancellery repeatedly reminded functionaries to set the best example to the population. The Führer expected political leaders to master the situation in their Gaue with lightning speed and maximum severity, Bormann told them in mid-April. They had to educate their District Leaders in the same way. ‘Leaders by nature have burnt their bridges and show extreme commitment,’ he added. ‘The honour of each one is worth only as much as his steadfastness, his commitment and his deeds.’66 The appeals fell mainly on deaf ears. ‘The poor examples presented by the Party have had an extraordinarily repellent impact on the population,’ Goebbels remarked at the beginning of April. Its reputation had been badly tarnished.67 A few days later, he admitted that the behaviour of Gau- and Kreisleiter in the west had led to a huge drop in confidence in the Party. ‘The population believed it could expect that our Gauleiter would fight in their Gaue and, if necessary, die there. This has not been the case in any instance. As a result, the Party is fairly played out in the west.’68
Some Gauleiter (and beneath them many Kreisleiter and lower functionaries of the Party) had simply left the people in their areas in the lurch and fled.69 Much to the disgust of Goebbels, Josef Grohé, Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen, had failed to defend his Gau in March as the Americans entered and left in advance of the civilian population with his staff in a motor boat. He retained a skeletal staff for a short time at Bensberg, then dissolved his Gau administration entirely on 8 April and moved to Field-Marshal Model’s headquarters before discarding his uniform a week later and setting out under an assumed name in a vain attempt to locate his family in central Germany.70 Albert Hoffmann, Gauleiter of Westphalia-South, had tried in previous weeks through ‘extreme severity’ to combat signs of collapsing morale and defeatism in his Gau. But, despite giving Speer the impression that he backed his attempts to prevent unnecessary destruction, he personally ordered a number of bridges to be blown up and made plans for his departure at the beginning of April. He moved to the headquarters of Model’s Army Group B and was seldom seen thereafter in his Gau offices. Without consulting either Hitler or Bormann, at a meeting with his Kreisleiter on 13 April he announced the dissolution of the Nazi Party in Gau Westphalia-South, fled that same evening and vanished before joining his family in the middle of May disguised as a farmhand.71 Gauleiter Koch, who for years had ruled East Prussia with a rod of iron and had been the target of much hatred for the belated and mismanaged evacuation of the population in January, was still in April producing slogans in the besieged provincial capital such as ‘Victory is Ours – Königsberg will be the Grave of the Bolsheviks’.72 At the same time he was making preparations to take himself, his family and his possessions to safety. He made a final departure from East Prussia by air on 25 April, just before the harbour at Pillau was taken by the Red Army and the fate of around 100,000 refugees still stranded on the Samland was sealed. From the Hela peninsula he transferred to the ice-breaker Ostpreußen, apparently with his Mercedes on board, and sailed to Denmark before travelling on to Flensburg, where he vainly demanded a U-boat to take him to South America.73
If these were the most blatant cases of the flight of the Party’s ‘Golden Pheasants’, few Gauleiter were prepared to entertain the prospect of the ‘heroic’ death that the image of the leading Nazi ‘fighters’ demanded. Only two out of forty-three serving Gauleiter, Karl Gerland of Kurhessen and the notably brutal Karl Holz of Franconia died at their posts in the fighting.74 Holz’s last report from Nuremberg, sent late in the evening on 17 April, painted a depressing picture of the situation in the city (though the most negative sections were crossed out, perhaps in the Party Chancellery’s Munich office). The troops were worn down by the enemy superiority in matériel. The poor morale of ‘stragglers’ was evident. One group of thirty or so men had approached the enemy with white flags before being shot down by machine-gun fire from their own side. The population simply awaited its fate, cowering in the cellars and bunkers. He proudly reported that he had sent out some of his staff to organize the Werwolf, and that his Gau had managed to assemble within only a few weeks a regiment of tank-destroying troops from the Hitler Youth, who had fought courageously, though with big losses, so that one battalion was already nearly ‘wiped out’. He and the mayor of the city, Willi Liebel, had decided to stay in Nuremberg and fight rather than leave the city.75 Next day, Nuremberg was under fire.
Holtz’s report to Hitler declared that ‘in these hours my heart beats more than ever in love and loyalty to you and the wonderful German Reich and people’, and ‘that the National Socialist idea will be victorious’, for which he was rewarded with the Golden Cross of the German Order, the highest honour of Party and state. Just before midnight on 19 April, Holz again wired Hitler – for the last time: ‘Our loyalty, our love, our lives belong to you, my Führer. All our good wishes for your birthday’ (the next day). He refused to contemplate surrender and threatened even now to have anyone showing a white flag shot. On that day, 20 April, the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’ surrendered. Holz had just dispatched the local SA leader to fight his way through to report to Hitler ‘that we have defended Nuremberg to the last man’. His final act was to order the SS men in his company to open fire on some policemen who were trying to cross to the Americans. An absolute fanatic to the end, Holz was am
ong a group that continued the fighting in the ruins of the police headquarters, where he was killed.76
Farther east, Gauleiter Karl Hanke was coming to symbolize the genuine Nazi ‘hero’ in the beleaguered city of Breslau. The situation there was worsening daily. From the beginning of April, with the loss of the aerodrome at Gandau, even provisioning of the city from the air was no longer possible. Houses were bulldozed, inflicting further misery on local inhabitants, in order to construct an emergency air-strip. The living conditions of the population, still numbering more than 200,000, were meanwhile indescribable, and became almost impossible when non-stop bombing raids on Easter Monday, 2 April, obliterated practically the entire city centre.77 They were paying a terrible price for Hanke’s decision in January to defend ‘Fortress Breslau’ to the last. In Nazi eyes, however, he signified the indomitable spirit that refused to capitulate.
For his personal leadership of the defence of Breslau, and to his great delight, Hitler bestowed upon the Gauleiter the Golden Cross of the German Order.78 In mid-April, Albert Speer sent Hanke a personal letter effusively thanking him for his personal friendship, ‘for all that you have done for me’, and praising him for his ‘achievements as defender of Breslau’, through which he had ‘given much to Germany today’. ‘Your example,’ Speer went on, ‘yet to be recognized in its greatness, will later have the inestimable high value for the people of only few heroes of German history.’ He did not pity him, Speer concluded. ‘You are heading for a fine and honourable end to your life.’79 The ‘hero’ had, however, no intention of going down with the city he had condemned to near total destruction. Hours before Breslau’s capitulation on 5 May, Hanke would make his escape in a Fieseler Storch, perhaps the only plane ever to leave the improvised air-strip in the city.80
V
The brutal message which Bormann dispatched in Hitler’s name to members of the Party on 1 April clearly signalled, in its call to utter ruthlessness in demanding a fight to the last, the gathering desperation of the regime’s leadership:
After the collapse of 1918 we devoted ourselves with life and limb to the struggle for the right of existence of our people. Now the high point of our test has come: the danger of renewed enslavement facing our people demands our last and supreme effort. From now on the following applies: The fight against the enemy who has forced his way into the Reich is to be uncomprisingly conducted everywhere without pity. Gauleiter and Kreisleiter, other political leaders and heads of affiliates are to fight in their Gau and district, to conquer or to fall. Any scumbag who leaves his Gau when under attack without express order of the Führer, anyone not fighting to the last breath, will be proscribed and treated as a deserter. Raise your hearts and overcome all weaknesses! Now there is only one slogan: conquer or fall! Long live Germany. Long live Adolf Hitler.81
It was a callous attempt at the final hour to turn back the tide. It could do nothing to stave off collapse as the inexorable military defeat grew closer by the day. Even so, in these last weeks it set the tone for the gathering wave of unbridled violence against the regime’s declared enemies as its control crumbled.
Even the regime’s high representatives were not immune from its venom. Gauleiter Fritz Wächtler – a prominent functionary in Thuringia almost since the time he joined the NSDAP in 1926, appointed Thuringian Minister of the Interior in 1933, and since 1935 Gauleiter of the Bayerische Ostmark with honorary status as an SS-Obergruppenführer – had, as we saw, been unresponsive to missives from the Party Chancellery towards the end of the first week of April. This may have contributed to the readiness of Bormann and Hitler to believe the malicious report of his deputy that Wächtler had deserted his Gau. Whether communications difficulties prevented Wächtler from letting Führer Headquarters know his position is unclear. He certainly did face major problems at the time. Bayreuth, the seat of his Gau headquarters, had been heavily bombed three times in early April, and by the middle of the month looked like a ghost-town. Most of the Volkssturm men, who had been mobilized to defend the city, fled, followed by the Kreisleiter and his staff, before American tanks reached the outskirts in the night of 13 April. The Party had by then effectively abdicated its power in the city, which was defended by no more than 200 or so soldiers under a ‘combat commandant’ (Kampfkommandant).
Wächtler also secretly left Bayreuth about the same time with his Gau staff to head south and take up residence in a hotel in Herzogau, a district of the small town of Waldmünchen, in the Upper Palatinate, close to the Czech border. It seems probable that Wächtler was transferring his command post rather than deserting. But his deputy and long-standing rival, Ludwig Ruckdeschel, who had himself transferred his base to Regensburg, chose not to see it like that. It appears that Ruckdeschel contacted Führer Headquarters in Berlin, accusing Wächtler of desertion. In the early morning of 19 April, Ruckdeschel and a squad of 35 SS-men arrived at Wächtler’s hotel. Ruckdeschel ignored Wächtler’s plea that he had removed his staff to organize resistance from Waldmünchen, and without hesitation pronounced the death sentence. Screaming ‘dirty treason’, Wächtler was taken away, stood up against a nearby tree and immediately shot dead by a firing-squad. Ruckdeschel proclaimed that Wächtler had been thrown out of the Nazi Party and executed for cowardice in the face of the enemy, threatening any ‘scoundrel and traitor’ acting similarly with the same fate.82
For ordinary citizens, compliance through fear of instant and arbitrary reprisals was a rational form of behaviour. Anyone showing the least sign of opposing the regime’s own death wish of senseless ‘holding out’ against impossible odds faced great peril. Himmler decreed on 3 April that ‘in a house in which a white flag appears, all males are to be shot’. He was responding to an initiative from the Party, referred to him by the OKW, which had recommended the burning down of any house showing a white flag.83 On 12 April, the High Command of the Wehrmacht issued an order, signed by Keitel, Himmler and Bormann, that every town was to be defended to the last. Any offer or promise by the enemy should the town surrender was to be rejected out of hand. The assigned ‘combat commandant’ was personally responsible for ensuring that the defence of the town was carried out. Anyone acting against this order, or any official seeking to hinder the commandant in fulfilling his duty, would be sentenced to death. Publishing this order in Nuremberg, the Gauleiter and Reich Defence Commissar for Franconia, Karl Holz, added his own rider: ‘Every traitor hoisting a white flag will without fail be hanged. Every house where a white flag is hanging will be blown up or burnt down. Villages that raise white flags communally will be burnt down.’84
Despite such uncompromising orders, backed by ruthless terror (even if the threat to burn down entire German villages does not appear to have been carried out), there were numerous cases of localized opposition. Few people wanted to end their lives in a futile show of ‘heroism’ or to see their homes and workplaces blown up senselessly. Whether they were able to avoid the worst of the destruction varied from place to place, depending on local conditions and the actions of those still holding the reins of power in their hands. Representatives of the dying regime in threatened areas – local government officials, Party functionaries, town commandants who were handed military control over a locality – did not behave uniformly. In western regions, localized power-struggles often decided whether a town was surrendered without a fight or went down in a hail of destruction.85 Many mayors of towns and even local Party leaders behaved responsibly in defying demands to fight on. This could, however, bring savage reprisals if local desperadoes – Party fanatics or SS men, usually – gained the upper hand. In other instances, regime zealots still controlled the local levers of power and condemned inhabitants of towns or villages to unnecessary death and destruction in the final hours before occupation – and before, as a rule, they themselves fled at the last minute. There was no clear pattern.
In many eastern areas, the approach of such a feared enemy brought not thoughts of handing over a town or village without a fight, but pan
ic and attempts to flee – usually after Party representatives, knowing what awaited them if they fell into Soviet hands, had abandoned them. Cottbus in Brandenburg was one of many such examples. Almost all the civilians in the town and surrounding area fled westwards in the days before the Soviet assault on Cottbus began on 21 April. By the early hours of the next morning, all the regular troops, including an SS panzer unit, had pulled out, destroying bridges as they went. Only the Volkssturm and a few groups of ‘stragglers’ remained to defend the town. The last 200 soldiers or Volkssturm men fled that day. ‘That was the last of the German Wehrmacht that I saw,’ recalled one eyewitness. The Party Kreisleiter also vanished. The ‘fortress commandant’ in Cottbus accepted that without regular troops the town was indefensible. This decision, and the speed of the Red Army’s advance, meant that the last act in the fall of the town came quickly and without further fighting or additional pointless destruction (though Soviet soldiers set on fire houses in which they found Nazi symbols).86
The fate of a village or town depended heavily upon the stance of the combat commandant and the actions of prominent citizens. The lovely university town of Greifswald, close to the Pomeranian coast, was fortunate in avoiding destruction. The rector of the university, a fifteenth-century foundation, and a small group of professors and prominent citizens were able to gain the backing of the combat commandant for the surrender of the town to the Soviets without a fight, despite the insistence of the Kreisleiter that it be defended even if it held up the Red Army for only an hour. Without the support of the combat commandant (who encouraged citizens to put out white flags from their homes), the Party officials in the town were powerless.87