3. Members of the Munich police constabulary, for instance, were paid continually through to May 1945. Backpay for a cleaner in the department who had not been paid in April was claimed at the end of June.—BHStA, Munich, Minn 72417, Nr. 2415f27, Gehaltszahlung, 28.6.45, 2415f28, Zahlung von Arbeitslohnen, 28.6.45. At the other end of the spectrum, Himmler’s former chief of his personal staff and in the last phase of the war Wehrmacht plenipotentiary in Italy, General der Waffen-SS Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff, still drew a salary of 2,226.80 Reich Marks (1,551.90 Reich Marks net) in April 1945, at a time when he was in fact secretly plotting the unilateral surrender of German troops in his region.—BAB, BDC, SSO-Karl Wolff, Gehaltsabrechnung, April 1945, 31.3.45. I am grateful to Horst Moller and Michael Buddrus for this information, and to Jonathan Steinberg for the suggestion to look for it.
4. Information kindly provided by Wolfgang Holl, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Bad-Godesberg, and by Holger Impekoven, currently working on a history of the Stiftung between 1925 and 1945, to whom I am indebted for an expose of his project.
5. Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1969, p. 467; BA/MA, N648/1, NL Dethleffsen, Erinnerungen, fo. 7 (1945–6).
6. Andreas Forschler, Stuttgart 1945: Kriegsende und Neubeginn, Gudensberg- Gleichen, 2004, p. 10.
7. Christian Hartmann and Johannes Hurter, Die letzten 100 Tage des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Munich, 2005, Day 78, 21 Feb. 1945 (and for the following). The football hardly measured up to modern Premiership standards. The teams had to be improvised from what players—often soldiers on leave —were available. The last final for the German championship took place on 16 June 1944 in front of 70,000 spectators in Berlin, when Dresden beat Hamburg 4–0. After that, because of limited transport capacity and the ever worsening war fortunes, matches were restricted to regional ‘Sportgaue’.
8. For an interesting comparison of the potential for a coup d’etat in Italy and in Germany, see Jerzy W. Borejsza, ‘Der 25. Juli 1943 in Italien und der 20. Juli 1944 in Deutschland: Zur Technik des Staatsstreichs im totalitaren System’, in Jurgen Schmadeke and Peter Steinbach (eds.), Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, Munich and Zurich, 1986, pp. 1079–85.
9. Michael Geyer, ‘Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction’, in Alf Ludtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, Gottingen, 2006, p. 40. An almost identical question was posed by Doris L. Bergen, ‘Death Throes and Killing Frenzies: A Response to Hans Mommsen’s “The Dissolution of the Third Reich: Crisis Management and Collapse, 1943–1945”’, German Historical Institute, Washington DC, Bulletin, 27 (2000), pp. 26–7: ‘We need to ask what made people not only tolerate [Hitler’s regime] but fight and kill for it until the bitter end.’
10. Alfred Vagts, ‘Unconditional Surrender—vor und nach 1943’, Vf Z, 7 (1959), p. 300. The demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ had arisen from the perception, especially strong in the USA, that it had been a costly mistake to concede an armistice instead of insisting on German surrender in 1918, thereby opening the way for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend propagated on the German Right that Germany had not been militarily defeated at all in the First World War. This time, the Americans and the British were agreed, there would be no repeat of the mistake and no scope for misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Germany’s unconditional surrender was regarded as the very basis for lasting future peace.—See Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 438–9.
11. A number of leading German generals were adamant after the war that the Allied demand had been a mistake and had lengthened the conflict.—Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War Two, New Brunswick, NJ, 1961, pp. 137–47. General Westphal remarked in his memoirs that the demand for unconditional surrender ‘had welded us to a certain extent on to the Nazi regime’, and that it was impossible to have laid down weapons and opened up the western front to the Allies without being given some sort of security for Germany. He claimed that news of the Morgenthau Plan to break up Germany and turn it into a pre-industrial country, then the result of the Yalta Conference, ‘left every initiative by us completely without prospect’ and that there was, therefore, no other way than to fight on.—Siegfried Westphal, Erinnerungen, Mainz, 1975, pp. 326, 341. Grand-Admiral Donitz’s adjutant, Walter Ludde-Neurath, also claimed that it had been decisive for the readiness to fight on at any price.—Walter Ludde- Neurath, Regierung Donitz: Die letzten Tage des Dritten Reiches, 5th edn., Leoni am Starnberger See, 1981, p. 22.
12. Reiner Pommerin, ‘The Wehrmacht: Eastern Front’, in David Wingeate Pike (ed.), The Closing of the Second World War: Twilight of a Totalitarianism, New York, 2001, p. 46. See also the comment of Klaus-Jurgen Muller, ‘The Wehrmacht: Western Front’, in the same volume, p. 56, that ‘unconditional surrender’ added to the fear of senior military leaders of being accused of perpetrating another ‘stab in the back’.
13. Bodo Scheurig, Alfred Jodl: Gehorsam und Verhangnis, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1991, p. 286, remarks that for General Jodl (and unquestionably for other military leaders) the demand for unconditional surrender provided a ‘flimsy excuse’ (‘fadenscheiniger Vorwand’).
14. Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939–45, pb. edn., Novato, Calif., n.d. (original Eng. language edn., London, 1964), p. 316.
15. The classics were Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1951, and Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.
16. See Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert, Bonn, 1999, for a collection of later evaluations and applications of the concept.
17. See, as representative of the new research trend, Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2009.
18. Heinrich Jaenecke, ‘Mythos Hitler: Ein Nachruf’, in Kriegsende in Deutschland, Hamburg, 2005, p. 223.
19. This notion underpinned the path-breaking ‘Bavaria Project’ in the 1970s. The volumes of essays arising from the project and published in the series Bayern in der NS-Zeit, ed. Martin Broszat, Elke Frohlich et al., Munich, 1977–83, carried the subtitle ‘Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt’ (‘system of rule and society in conflict’).
20. Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won, London, 1979.
21. See especially, Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermachtigung, Hamburg, 2007 (though the work deals only with the pre-war period) and Peter Fritsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2008.
22. DRZW, 9/2 (Herf), p. 202.
23. Gotz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2005.
24. See Fritsche, pp. 266–96.
25. Quotations from Fritsche, pp. 269–71.
26. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford, 2001, pp. 1, 3, 226.
27. For a thoughtful analysis of the importance of the legacy of 1918, not just for Hitler but for the entire Nazi regime, see Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich: Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft, Opladen, 1977, ch. 1.
28. The most forthright statement of this is in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Nationalsozialismus: Bewegung, Fuhrerherrschaft, Verbrechen, Munich, 2009, esp. chs. 2, 7, 11, 14, extracts assembled from his monumental Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4: 1914– 1949, 3rd edn., Munich, 2008. The concept of ‘charismatic rule’ is, of course, drawn from Max Weber. See his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundri? der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th rev. edn., Tubingen, 1980, pp. 140–47, 654–87. Although Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma: Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias, Frankfurt am Main, 2010, criticizes notions that Hitler began his ‘career’ with innate personal charismatic qualities—something few serious historians have claimed—and emphasizes the
