The End

places the figure at more than 100,000.—Manfred Messerschmidt, ‘Deserteure im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Wolfram Wette (ed.), Deserteure der Wehrmacht, Essen, 1995, p. 62. A further 35,000 were sentenced for other contraventions of military law (Ziemann, p. 604). On the procedures for carrying out the death penalty in the Wehrmacht, see Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1933–1945, Paderborn, 2005, pp. 393–400.

50. Messerschmidt, ‘Deserteure im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, p. 61; Haase, p. 85 and p. 100 n. 26; DRZW, 9/1 (Echternkamp), p. 50. While the western liberal democracies executed few soldiers, Germany was not alone among authoritarian regimes in its draconian punishment. Japan executed 22,253 soldiers; estimates (though detailed research remains to be carried out) suggest that as many as 150,000 may have been executed in the Soviet Union.—Ulrich Baumann and Markus Koch (eds.), ‘Was damals Recht war…’: Soldaten und Zivilisten vor Gerichten der Wehrmacht, Berlin-Brandenburg, 2008, p. 184.

51. e.g. BAB, R55/620, fo. 132, SD report to State Secretary Dr Naumann, Propaganda Ministry, ‘Stimmung und Haltung der Arbeiterschaft’ (reported opinion among workers in Mecklenburg), 1.3.45.

52. BA/MA, N60/17, NL Schorner, letter from Schorner to Oberst i.G. Thilo von Trotha, Generalstab des Heeres, Chef Operations-Abt., 22.2.45. Partially quoted also in Andreas Kunz, Wehrmacht und Niederlage: Die bewaffnete Macht in der Endphase der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft 1944 bis 1945, Munich, 2007, p. 113.

53. BAB, NS6/354, fos. 163–165^v, PK Bekanntgabe 149/45g, 19.3.45, attaching a copy of Schorner’s four-page message dated 27.2.45.

54. BA/MA, N712/15, NL Pollex, Colonel Curt Pollex, Auszuge aus Briefen, fo. 35, 18.2.45.

55. BAB, R55/610, fos. 156–9, correspondence related to propaganda in the Ruhr, 19.12.44–12.1.45.

56. Von Oven, Finale Furioso, p. 584 (22.2.45).

57. See Bormann’s attempt to check the spread of rumour, in BAB, NS6/353, fos. 16–17, ‘Bekampfung beunruhigender Geruchte uber die Frontlage’, 1.2.45.

58. IfZ, Fa 91/2, fos. 278–81, ‘Vorlage: Sondereinsatz Politischer Leiter an Brennpunkten der Ost- und Westfront’, 17.2.45.

59. BAB, R55/608, fos. 35–6, Chef des Propagandastabes, Mundpropagandaanweisung, betr. Kriegslage, 17.2.45.

60. BHStA, Reichsstatthalter Epp 681/1–8, Reich Minister of the Interior to Reich Defence Commissars, etc., 28.2.45.

61. BA/MA, RH19/IV/228, fo. 10, Hinweis fur die NS-Fuhrung der Truppe, 4.2.45.

62. DZW, 6, p. 627, citing a letter to Bormann of Joachim Albrecht Eggeling, Gauleiter of Halle-Merseburg, 10.2.45.

63. BAB, NS6/137, fos. 40–41, Flugblatt (im Entwurf): ‘An die Verteidiger von Berlin’, 24.2.45.

64. Quoted in Steinert, p. 559.

65. TBJG, II/15, p. 352 (10.2.45).

66. BAB, NS6/354, fos. 137–138^v, PK Anordnung 79/45g, Standgerichte, 15.2.45, and ‘Verordnung uber die Errichtung von Standgerichten vom 15. February 1945’, Reichsgesetzblatt, Teil 1, Nr. 6, 20.2.45, p. 30; printed in Muller and Ueberschar, pp. 161–2.

67. BAB, NS19/3705, fo. 4, Vorbereitungen auf Feindoffensive im Westen, Fernschreiben from Bormann to the western Gauleiter, undated appendix to his letter to Himmler, 8.2.45.

68. Henke, p. 845.

69. Henke, p. 846.

70. Haase, p. 86.

71. ‘Fuhrer-Erlasse’ 1939–1945, ed. Martin Moll, Stuttgart, 1997, p. 483; also printed in Muller and Ueberschar, pp. 163–4. For the operation of the summary courts martial, see Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1933–1945, pp. 411–15; and also Jurgen Zarusky, ‘Von der Sondergerichtsbarkeit zum Endphasenterror: Loyalitatserzwingung und Rache am Widerstand in Zusammenbruch des NS-Regimes’, in Cord Arendes, Edgar Wolfrum and Jorg Zedler (eds.), Terror nach Innen: Verbrechen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Gottingen, 2006, p. 114. The extension to the ‘flying courts martial’ is indicated in Bormann’s circular to the Gauleiter, NS6/354, fo. 88^v, RS 123/45g, 9.3.45.

72. See Henke, pp. 846ff., for examples of their practice.

73. Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des ‘Auslander-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, Bonn, 1985, pp. 270–71, p. 430 n. 3.

74. BAB, R43II/650c, fos. 119–25, Kampfkommandant Reichskanzlei, Fuhrerbefehl v. 4.2.45 uber ‘Verteidigung der Reichskanzlei bei inneren Unruhen’, 4–10.2.45.

75. NAL, WO208/5622, fo. 122A, 29.8.44. The general in question, Dietrich von Choltitz, had been the Wehrmacht commander in Paris at the time of the city’s liberation in August 1944.

76. Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Wurttemberg under the Nazis, London, 2006, p. 285.

77. Von Kardorff, pp. 208–9 (30.11.44).

78. Herbert, pp. 327–35; Andreas Heusler, ‘Die Eskalation des Terrors: Gewalt gegen auslandische Zwangsarbeiter in der Endphase des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, in Arendes, Wolfrum and Zedler, pp. 172–82.

79. Quoted Gerhard Paul and Alexander Primavesi, ‘Die Verfolgung der “Fremdvolkischen”: Das Beispiel der Staatspolizeistelle Dortmund’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), Die Gestapo: Mythos und Realitat, Darmstadt, 1995, p. 398.

80. Gerhard Paul, ‘ “Diese Erschie?ungen haben mich innerlich gar nicht mehr beruhrt”: Die Kriegsendphasenverbrechen der Gestapo 1944/45’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: ‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa, Darmstadt, 2000, p. 548.

81. Paul and Primavesi, p. 399; also Paul, p. 549; Bessel, p. 55.

82. Cited Paul, p. 550.

83. For the special circumstances in Cologne, see Bernd-A. Rusinek, ‘ “Wat denkste, wat mir objerumt han”: Massenmord und Spurenbeseitigung am Beispiel der Staatspolizeistelle Koln 1944/45’, in Paul and Mallmann, Die Gestapo: Mythos und Realitat, pp. 402–16.

84. Paul, pp. 553–7; Herbert, pp. 336–7; Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, New Haven and London, 2004, pp. 332–3.

85. IWM, F.2, AL 1753, statistics from SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, totalling 511,537 men and 202,674 women, 714,211 in all on 15 January 1945, guarded by 37,674 men and 3,508 women; Martin Broszat, ‘Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager 1933–1945’, in Hans Buchheim et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau, 1965, vol. 2, p. 159; Wachsmann, p. 395; Daniel Blatman, ‘Die Todesmarsche—Entscheidungstrager, Morder und Opfer’, in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 2, Gottingen, 1998, p. 1067; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, Sphere Books edn., London, 1971, pp. 501, 639 n. 30; Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford, 2010, p. 418.

86. Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940–1945, London, 1956, p. 277 (12.3.45), and also p. 275 (2.3.45); and DZW, 6, p. 643 (where Himmler’s reference to a Fuhrer order is dated 5.3.45). Himmler saw Kersten at the sanitorium in Hohenlychen every morning from 4 to 13 March (BAB, NS19/1793, Termine des Reichsfuhrer-SS, fos. 5–15). No specific written order from Hitler for the murder of camp prisoners has come to light, though a general—almost certainly verbal—directive that prisoners were not to be left behind on approach of the enemy seems to have been known to high-ranking SS officers, and may well have been used as an implicit order to kill those in their charge if there was a danger of the camp falling into enemy hands. In practice, however, there were only a few cases of the murder of all prisoners before evacuation. The actual decisions over life and death for the prisoners were taken lower down the leadership ladder, at the local level.—Daniel Blatman, ‘Ruckzug, Evakuierung und Todesmarsche 1944–1945’, in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen