As the autumn wore on and Hitler, after his brief return for a final time to the centre of people’s attention, again faded from most people’s daily consciousness, attitudes against him in the same region hardened still further. On 6 November, the Stuttgart SD office recorded opinion which could in variants, it suggested, be frequently heard: ‘It’s always claimed that the Führer has been sent to us from God. I don’t doubt it. The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it. Providence has determined the destruction of the German people, and Hitler is the executor of this will.’91
Sometimes, irrational belief was all that was left. A teenage girl, writing in her diary at the end of August and in early September 1944, saw blow following blow in Germany’s war effort: the attack on the Führer’s life, advances of the western Allies, constant German retreat on the eastern front, the incessant bombing, and the collapse of the Reich’s alliance-partners. ‘On one side there is victory, which is becoming ever more doubtful, and on the other Bolshevism,’ she wrote. ‘But then: rather sacrifice everything, absolutely everything, for victory, than for Bolshevism. If that should come, then you shouldn’t think further. What would I still go to school for if I’m going to end up in Siberia? What for? What for? A whole number of questions line up like this. But if we all wanted to think in this way, there would be no hope left. So, head high. Trust in our will and our leadership!!!’92
As this diary-entry suggests, the fear of Bolshevism was by now among the most central cohesive elements sustaining support for the German war effort and militating against any collapse of morale at home. Even so, as the news of defeats, destruction, and desertion of allies mounted without relief, and as losses of property and possessions, homes and loved ones piled misery on misery, the first signs of disintegration were visible. The German greeting, ‘Heil Hitler’, was increasingly replaced by ‘Good morning’, ‘Good day’, or, in south Germany, ‘Grüß Gott’. The evacuation of the Aachen area – the old seat of Charlemagne’s empire, where the Allies had broken through – in early September was accompanied by ‘a more or less panic-type of flight by the German civilian population’, according to a report to Himmler.93 Wehrmacht reports from the western front spoke later in the month of mounting lack of discipline and indications of disintegration among the troops, with increasing numbers of desertions, reflected in a sharp rise in draconian punishment meted out by military courts.94
Some of the deserters in the west made their way to Cologne. This great city on the Rhine had by now been largely bombed into dereliction – though, amazingly, its magnificent Gothic cathedral was still standing – with much of its population evacuated. Amid the rubble and the ruins, in the cellars of burnt-out buildings, forms of opposition to the Nazi regime approaching partisan activity emerged. Here, heterogeneous groups of deserted soldiers, foreign workers – now forming around 20 per cent of the Reich’s work-force and presenting the Nazi authorities with increasing worries about insurrection – members of dissident bands of disaffected youth (known picturesquely as ‘Edelweiß Pirates’), and the Communist underground organization (infiltrated and smashed many times but always managing to replenish itself) blended together in the autumn of 1944 into short-lived but, for the regime, troublesome resistance. The Gestapo recorded some two dozen small resistance groups of up to twenty individuals, and one large body of around 120 persons. They stole food, broke into Wehrmacht camps and depots to get weapons, and organized minor forms of sabotage. It came on occasion to shoot-outs with camp guards and police. Their actions were politically directed: they killed, among others, several Gestapo men, including the head of the Cologne Gestapo, an SA man, and a Nazi Party functionary. In all, twenty-nine killings were attributed to them by the Gestapo. Attacks on the Hitler Youth and other Nazi formations by the ‘Edelweiß Pirates’ were commonplace. With the explosives they acquired, their intention was to blow up the Gestapo headquarters and the city’s law-courts, and to shoot a leading attorney and several members of the Party organization.95 Possibly, had the Allied advance in the west not slowed, the quasi-partisan activity in Cologne might have spread to other cities in the Rhine and Ruhr region. The problems of combating it would then have magnified. As it was, the Gestapo, aided by Wehrmacht units, was able to strike back with devastating effect in the autumn. The resistance groups did not give up without a fight. One group waged an armed battle for twelve hours before the ruined cellar which served as its ‘fortress’ was blown up. Another group defended itself with hand grenades and a machine-gun, finally breaking through a police cordon and escaping.96 By the time the Gestapo were finished, however, some 200 members of the resistance groups had been arrested, the groups themselves totally destroyed, their leaders executed, and many other members imprisoned.97
Had the Stauffenberg bomb-plot succeeded, it is possible that the types of grass-roots political activism experienced in Cologne could have swelled into a revolutionary ferment from a base in western Germany. But many – and quite conflicting – scenarios could be imagined had Hitler been assassinated on 20 July. The actual outcome was that resistance from below – from Communists, Socialists, youth-rebels, foreign workers, deserted soldiers and others – was, whatever the continued courage of those involved, robbed of any prospect of success. The regime had been challenged internally. But the blow to its heart had not proved lethal. It now reacted with all the ferocity at its disposal. At least for the time being, it was able to regroup and reconsolidate, delaying the end for several more months, prolonging the agony of millions caught up in the intensifying maelstrom of death and destruction. Hitler and the Nazi leadership had survived. But there was no way leading from the self-destructive path on which they were embarked.
For the ordinary German, too, there was no way out. It was taken for granted that the regime was finished. The only hope was that the British and Americans would hold off the Bolsheviks. The most common reactions, as yet another war winter loomed, were apathy, resignation, fatalism. ‘It’s all the same to me. I can’t judge the situation any longer. I’ll just work further in my job, wait, and accept what comes’ – this approach, reported by the regional agencies of the Propaganda Ministry in autumn 1944, was said to be prevalent not just with ‘the man on the street’, but also among Party members and even functionaries, some of whom were no longer wanting to wear their Party insignia.98 It was a clear sign that the end was on the way.
III
The institutional pillars of the regime – the Wehrmacht, the Party, ministries of state, and the SS-controlled security apparatus – remained intact in the second half of 1944. And Hitler, the keystone bonding the regime’s structure together, was still, paradoxically, indispensable to its survival while – by now even in the eyes of some close to the leadership – at the same time driving Germany inexorably towards perdition. The predictable rallying round Hitler following the July assassination attempt could not, therefore, for long conceal the fact that the regime’s edifice was beginning to crumble as the Nazi empire throughout Europe shrivelled and the increasing certainty of a lost war made even some of those who had gained most from Nazism possible exit-routes. The aftermath of the bomb-plot saw the regime enter its most radical phase. But it was a radicalism that mirrored an increasingly desperate regime’s reaction to internal as well as external crisis.
Hitler’s own obvious reaction in the wake of the shock of Stauffenberg’s bomb had been to turn to his firm loyalist base, the Party leadership, and to his most long-standing and trusted band of paladins. In the backs-to-the-wall atmosphere of the last months, the Party was to play a more dominant role than at any time since the ‘seizure of power’, invoking the overcoming of adversity in the ‘time of struggle’,99 attempting to instil the ‘fighting spirit of National Socialism’ throughout the entire people in the increasingly vain attempt to combat overwhelming Allied arms and material superiority by little more than fanatical willpower.
As had invariably been the case in a crisis, Hi
tler had lost no time following the attempted coup on 20 July in ensuring the continued loyalty of the Gauleiter, the Party’s provincial chieftains. Among them were some who had been among his most dependable lieutenants for close on two decades. Collectively, the Gauleiter constituted now, as before, a vital prop of his rule. His provincial viceroys were now, their Party positions enhanced through their extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars, his insurance against any prospect of army-led unrest or possible insurrection in the regions. Bormann had sent out a string of circulars to the Gauleiter on 20 July and immediately thereafter, ensuring that they were well informed of the gravity of what had taken place and the steps taken to crush the uprising.100 Within days, he was arranging a conference of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter to take place in Posen on 3–4 August, as he put it ‘to intensify the war effort’.101 Speer, Himmler, Goebbels, and Bormann himself were among those to address the Party leaders. Speer was able to impress them with figures on armaments production – far greater than they had imagined and helping calm their nerves. Himmler fired them with a lengthy prehistory of the ‘treachery’ of 20 July, and with his plans for a thorough reorganization, ‘according to National Socialist principles’, of the Reserve Army, whose command Hitler had placed in his hands. Goebbels told them that the state and the army had caused the Führer only problems. ‘That is going to end now,’ he declared. ‘The party will take over.’102
Next day, the Party leaders travelled to the Wolf’s Lair. Hitler limply held out his uninjured left hand as he greeted each of them individually. They then trooped into the film-projection room where he addressed them about the consequences of the assassination attempt. He said nothing that he had not said to his closest circle immediately after the event. He told them he was necessary for the nation, which ‘needs a man who does not capitulate under any circumstances but unswervingly holds high the flag of faith and confidence’. He would in the end settle with his enemies, he said. But the basis of this, he added, appealing, as always, to the support of his most trusted comrades, was to know that he had behind him ‘absolute certainty, faithful trust, and loyal cooperation’. Once more, his words were sufficient to impress his audience and to bolster their morale.103 This was crucial. Increasingly over the next months, as the threads of state administration started to fray and ultimately fell apart, the Party chieftains – especially those who acted as Reich Defence Commissars in their regions – were decisive in holding together in the provinces what was left of Nazi rule.104
Extended scope for propaganda, mobilization, and tightened control over the population – the overriding tasks of the Party as most people looked beyond the end of the regime and looming military defeat into an uncertain future – fell to the Reich Defence Commissars in the last desperate drive to maximize resources for ‘total war’. The shortages of available men to be sent to the front, and workers for the armaments industries, had mounted alarmingly throughout the first half of 1944. Hitler’s authorization in January to Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, to make up the manpower shortages through forced labour extracted from the occupied territories, while at the same time according Speer protection for the labour employed in his armaments plants in France had done nothing to resolve the difficulty and merely sharpened the conflict between Sauckel and Speer.105 Apart from Speer, the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Party had also proved adept at preventing any inroads into their personnel. Bormann had even presided over a 51 per cent increase in the number of ‘reserved occupations’, exempt from call-up, in the Party administration between May 1943 and June 1944.106
Meanwhile, the labour shortage had been greatly magnified through the double military disaster in June of the Allied landing in Normandy and the Red Army’s devastating offensive on the eastern front. This had prompted Goebbels and Speer to link their efforts to persuade Hitler to agree to a drastic radicalization of the ‘home front’ to comb out all remaining manpower for the war effort.107 Both had sent him lengthy memoranda in mid-July, promising huge labour savings to tide over the situation until new weaponry became available and the anti-German coalition broke up.108 But before the Stauffenberg bomb, Hitler had, as we have noted, shown little readiness to comply with their radical demands. Whatever the accompanying rhetoric, and the undoubted feeling (which Goebbels’s own propaganda had helped feed) among the under-privileged that many of the better-off were still able to escape the burdens of war, and were not pulling their weight in the national cause, such demands were bound to be unpopular in many circles, antagonize powerful vested interests, and also convey an impression of desperation. And, as the state administration rushed to point out, the gains might well be less than impressive; only one in twelve of those in the civil service who had not been called up was under forty-three, and more than two-thirds were over fifty-five years old.109
Hitler had told his Propaganda Minister as recently as June that the time was not ripe for ‘a big appeal to total war in the true meaning of the word’, that the crises would be surmounted ‘in the usual way’, but that he would be ready to introduce ‘wholly abnormal measures’ should ‘more serious crises take place’.110 Hitler’s change of mind, directly following the failed assassination attempt, in deciding to grant Goebbels the new authority he had coveted, as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort (Reichsbevollmächtigter für den totalen Kriegseinsatz), was a tacit admission that the regime was faced with a more fundamental crisis than ever before.
Goebbels’s decisive action to put down the uprising on 20 July unquestionably weighed heavily in his favour when Hitler looked for the man to supervise the radicalization of the home front. And where before he had faced a hesitant Hitler, he was now pushing at an open door in his demands for draconian measures. The decision had in effect already been taken when, at a meeting of ministerial representatives along with some other leading figures in the regime two days after Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, head of the Reich Chancellery Lammers proposed the bestowing of wide-ranging powers on the Propaganda Minister to bring about the reform of the state and public life. Himmler was given extensive complementary powers at the same time to reorganize the Wehrmacht and comb out all remaining manpower.111 The following day, 23 July, the regime’s leaders, now joined by Göring, assembled at the Wolf’s Lair, where Hitler himself, heavily leaning on Goebbels’s memorandum of the previous week, confirmed the new role of the Propaganda Minister. Hitler demanded ‘something fundamental’ if the war were still to be won. Massive reserves were available, he claimed, but had not been deployed. This would now have to be done without respect to person, position, or office. He pointed to the Party in the early days, which had achieved ‘the greatest historic success’ with only a simple administrative apparatus. Goebbels noted with interest the change in Hitler’s views since their previous meeting a month or so earlier. The assassination attempt and the events on the eastern front had produced clarity in his decisions, Goebbels noted in his diary.112 To his own staff, the Propaganda Minister laconically remarked that ‘it takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason’.113
Hitler’s decree of 25 July, appointing Goebbels to his new position, indicated that the proposal for the establishment of a ‘Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort’ had come from Göring, in his long-standing (but wholly ineffectual) capacity as Chairman of the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich.114 In fact, the formulation had been suggested by Goebbels himself, then carefully drafted by Lammers, to save face for Göring, who had objected to the further diminution of his own authority and, as usual, been able to rely on Hitler’s unwillingness to dent his prestige. Even so, the Reich Marshal retreated in high dudgeon to his East Prussian hunting estate at Rominten and could not be persuaded for weeks to return to the Wolf’s Lair.115 Goebbels relished his moment of triumph. He appeared to have finally achieved what he had desired for so long: control over the ‘home front’ with ‘the most extensive plenipotentiary powers… that have up to now been granted
in the National Socialist Reich’, with rights – the decisive factor in his view – to issue directives to ministers and the highest-ranking governmental authorities.116 To his staff, he spoke of having ‘practically full dictatorial powers’ within the Reich.117
However, nothing was ever quite what it seemed in the Third Reich. The decree itself limited Goebbels’s powers in some respects. He could issue directives to the ‘highest Reich authorities’. But only they could issue any consequential decrees and ordinances. And these had to be agreed with Lammers, Bormann, and Himmler (in the capacity he had adopted when becoming Interior Minister, as Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration). Any directives related to the Party itself had to have Bormann’s support (and, behind Bormann, to correspond with Hitler’s own wishes). Any unresolved objections to Goebbels’s directives had to pass to Lammers for Hitler’s own final decision. Beyond the wording of the decree itself, Hitler let Goebbels know that those authorities directly responsible to him – those involved in the rebuilding plans for Berlin, Munich, and Linz, his motor-vehicle staff, and the personnel of the Reich Chancellery, Presidential Chancellery, and Party Chancellery – were also excluded from the directives. 118 The Wehrmacht, under Himmler’s authority, had been exempt from the outset.