The End

they were key agents for Goebbels’ total-war drive to comb out last reserves of manpower from offices and workplaces to raise men for the Wehrmacht. The increase in the Party’s dominance did nothing to create a streamlined administration. But it did massively strengthen its grip over government and society. In the last months of the war, Germany was as close to a totally mobilized and militarized society as it is possible to get. The mass of Germans were oppressed, browbeaten and marshalled as never before. There was by now scarcely any avenue of life remaining free from the intrusions of the Party and its affiliates.

A big step towards the complete militarization of society was the introduction of the Volkssturm in the autumn of 1944. It was militarily as good as useless. It was lampooned as the awaited ‘miracle weapon’ and generally derided. And it was a sign, recognized by all, of how desperate things had become. Sensible individuals did all they could to avoid having to serve in it, with justification given its high loss rate, especially on the eastern front. But as a control structure for the regime, it was far from devoid of significance. And its leadership was often in the hands of fervent Nazis, increasingly involved in many policing ‘actions’, including atrocities against other Germans viewed as cowards or defeatists.

Despite the drain of actual power away from the state bureaucracy—reduced largely to an instrument of administrative implementation—and increasingly into the hands of the Party at all levels, the regime was also sustained to the end by a sophisticated and experienced bureaucratic machine. This surmounted any number of huge difficulties to keep on functioning, if with sharply decreasing effectiveness, especially in the last months, till there was little or nothing left to administer. Without the organizational capacity that came from educated, well- trained civil servants at different levels, the administration would surely have collapsed much earlier. The judicial system, too, still meting out draconian sentences, continued to function to the end, sustaining the radicalized terror against German citizens and against persecuted minorities. Throughout the civil service, there was an almost unthinking loyalty, not specifically to Hitler but to the abstraction of ‘the state’, and commitment to what was seen as ‘duty’. Even for civil servants scornful of Hitler and disdainful of Nazi bosses, it was enough to provide support for a system in terminal collapse. We saw the near incomprehension of Kritzinger, the State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery, when asked by his post-war interrogators why he had continued to work so hard when all was so obviously lost, replying: ‘As a long-standing civil servant I was duty-bound in loyalty to the state.’ The mentality was replicated at top and bottom of the large civil service.

The savagery of the war in the east provided its own motivation for carrying on fighting and rejecting all thoughts of surrender. This was a war quite unlike the conflict in the west. Military leaders and rank-and-file soldiers alike were well aware that they had been responsible for or implicated in countless atrocities in the east— torched villages, mass executions of partisans, shootings of tens of thousands of Jews. The barbarity of warfare on the eastern front meant, as they well knew, that they could expect no mercy if they fell into Soviet hands.

The propaganda image of Nemmersdorf, scene of Soviet atrocities in October 1944, was worse than the reality—but that had certainly been bad enough. Nemmersdorf encapsulated the fear of Bolshevism, something hammered home over the years in incessant propaganda but now no longer an abstraction. For soldiers fighting in the east, or those elsewhere with families in the threatened eastern regions, there was not simply an ideological reason for fighting on. The ideological fight against ‘Asiatic hordes’ and ‘Bolshevik beasts’, and even the patriotic defence of the nation, merged subliminally into a desperate attempt to stave off the very obvious threat to families and homes or to avenge the atrocities of the Red Army. Beyond these motives, soldiers fought out of group solidarity for their immediate comrades and, in the last resort, for their own survival.

Vital to the regime’s ability to fight on was, not least, the role of the officer corps of the armed forces. The war brought soaring numbers—to nearly 200,000, including reserve officers, in early 1944—and a very rapid turnover. The army lost 269,000 officers during the war, 87,000 of them killed. In September 1944 an average of 317 officers a day—mostly low-ranking—were killed, wounded or taken captive. The junior and middle-ranking officers were crucial cogs in the military machine. Many had swallowed tenets of Nazi doctrine in the Hitler Youth and in subsequent training courses, and had been hardened by battle and involvement in murderous ‘pacification’ and genocidal actions in the east.⁷ As we noted, Nazi penetration of the armed forces was sharply intensified after the failed bomb plot with the introduction of the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting instead of the traditional military salute and extended use of NSFOs to instil fanaticism and loyalty in the troops. The brutal reprisals against those involved in the Stauffenberg plot and the repeated tirades of vilification of army officers by Nazi leaders, from Hitler downwards, also produced their own pressure not just to conform but to display enthusiastic commitment.

At the top, the generals held the key. Most were too old to have been schooled in Nazism like the more junior officers. But their older nationalist mentalities had blended easily with Nazi ideals and they had wide experience of—and support for—the ideological ‘war of annihilation’ on the eastern front. Only loyalists were left after the purge that followed the failed bomb plot. That did not prevent serious disputes over tactics developing between individual generals and Hitler. Numerous generals were made scapegoats for defeats or for their inability to fulfil absurd orders. But they were not temperamentally or organizationally capable of challenging Hitler or staging another attempted military coup. Most generals took their oath of allegiance to Hitler extremely seriously and were tortured by the thought that they might be compelled to disobey orders. Even where the oath served as little more than a pretext for compliance and a retreat from any political responsibility on the grounds that they were purely soldiers carrying out their duty, the traditional military imperatives of order and obedience were distorted in the Third Reich to an extreme readiness to yield to the commands of the Fuhrer, however irrational.⁸ Ultimately, a deeply inculcated but utterly warped sense of duty provided both motivation and alibi for the Third Reich’s military leaders.⁹

The generals were divided among themselves. The bugged conversations of those in British captivity, referred to on several occasions in preceding chapters, reveal sharp divergence in views.¹⁰ It was no different among those generals still holding positions of high command in Germany and on its borders. As fervent nationalists, they saw it as axiomatic to be ready to do their utmost for the defence of the Reich, even where they had inwardly broken with Hitler or despised the Party and its representatives. But some, in fact, remained fanatical backers of Hitler, like the brutal Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schorner, whose ruthlessness in enforcing discipline made him notorious even in the top ranks of the army, or Grand-Admiral Karl Donitz, who demanded in April 1945 that every ship and naval base be defended to the last in accordance with the Fuhrer’s orders, offering his men the choice of victory or death. Most high-ranking officers, like Donitz, held to the fiction that they were ‘unpolitical’, and that political decisions were solely and rightly the concern of the state leadership. But without their support, whatever their motives, it is plain that the state leadership could not have continued, and nor could the war.

Even where they disagreed fundamentally with Hitler’s tactics, the generals did not dispute his right to issue them, and fought on loyally. Faced with increasingly insane orders for the defence of Berlin, Colonel-General Heinrici nonetheless felt that to refuse them was to commit treason. The example of Field-Marshal Kesselring, refusing even at the end of April 1945 to condone surrender in Italy as long as the Fuhrer was alive, is a further graphic case.

Crucial in enabling the regime to fight on was also the radicalization of the structure of power beneath Hitler in the last months. In the wake of Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, the regime was swiftly buttressed. Changes were made that shored it up in the last months and ruled out any internal collapse, with power below Hitler largely divided between the four Nazi grandees. Bormann, as we saw, greatly expanded the mobilizing and controlling role of the Party, extending its hold over almost all facets of daily life. Goebbels now combined the key areas of propaganda and mobilization for the total-war effort. Without the million extra men that he raised by the end of 1944, the Wehrmacht would simply not have been able to replace the extraordinary losses it was suffering. Himmler, with his takeover of the command of the Replacement Army (from whose headquarters Stauffenberg had orchestrated the plot to kill Hitler), extended his terror apparatus into the Wehrmacht itself. Only the Replacement Army had been capable of planning the attempted coup d’etat in 1944. In Himmler’s hands, that potential was removed. And Speer achieved miracles of management and organization in producing sufficient armaments, despite the growing crisis of production and transport through Allied bombing and territorial losses, to ensure that the troops still had weapons to fight with. If Speer, who was very late in accepting that the war was irredeemably lost, had worked half as hard, Germany could not have held out for remotely so long.

The quadrumvirate of Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler and Speer—three of them among the most brutal and radical fanatics, the fourth an ambitious, power-hungry organizational genius—was instrumental to the continuation of the war. But the four were divided among themselves and suspicious of each other—a characteristic of the Nazi state. And each of them knew that his power depended on a higher authority—that of Hitler.