serving in the Volkssturm of 25 and 31.1.45 and 21.2.45.
90. DRZW, 9/1 (Blank), p. 384.
91. Bernhard Gotto, Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik: Administrative Normalitat und Systemstabilisierung durch die Augsburger Stadtverwaltung 1933–1945, Munich, 2006, p. 373, surmises, most likely correctly, that Party representatives in Augsburg operated more through ‘actionism’ than idealism in the very last phase of the war.
92. For the organizational and controlling functions of the Party’s Block Leaders (who in the mid-1930s had numbered around 200,000), see Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, ‘Der “Blockwart”: Die unteren Parteifunktionare im nationalsozialistischen Terror- und Uberwachungsapparat’, Vf Z, 48 (2000), pp. 594– 6.
93. Patzold and Wei?becker, p. 375. See also Herwart Vorlander, Die NSV: Darstellung und Dokumentation einer NS-Organisation, Boppard, 1988, p. 183 for the NSV’s mobilizing and control function. Unpaid workers for the NSV and the German Red Cross numbered more than a million. Although the NSV welfare activity was always underpinned by Nazi racial objectives, the work that it carried out in the crisis conditions of the last months of the war made it popular, even among many Germans who were negatively disposed towards the regime.—Vorlander, Die NSV, pp. 173–6, 186; Herwart Vorlander, ‘NS- Volkswohlfahrt und Winterhilfswerk des deutschen Volkes’, Vf Z, 34 (1986), pp. 376–80; Armin Nolzen, ‘Die NSDAP und die deutsche Gesellschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Kriegsende in Deutschland, Hamburg, 2005, pp. 192–3.
94. See DRZW, 9/1 (Nolzen), p. 191; and Armin Nolzen, ‘Von der geistigen Assimilation zur institutionellen Kooperation: Das Verhaltnis zwischen NSDAP und Wehrmacht, 1943–1945’, in Hillmann and Zimmermann, pp. 90–92.
95. IWM, EDS, F.3, M.I. 14/369, Krosigk to Speer, 13.2.45.
96. IWM, EDS, F.3, M.I. 14/369, Krosigk to Goebbels, 22.3.45.
97. This paragraph, when not otherwise referenced, is based on Dieter Rebentisch, Fuhrerstaat und Verwaltung im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989, pp. 529–30.
98. Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Wurttemberg under the Nazis, London, 2006, p. 324.
99. Gotto, p. 363.
100. StAA, Gauleitung Schwaben, 1/30, fos. 328904–6, Wahl to Bormann, 17.3.45; also Gotto, pp. 374– 5.
101. StAA, Kreisleitung Augsburg-Stadt, 1/8, fos. 300554–5, Rundspruch an alle Kreisleiter, 30.3.45. Every Gau was to produce 100 ‘volunteers’, and Wahl laid down—on what criteria it is not clear—the contingents from each district in his region. He criticized the Kreisleiter in mid-April for doing too little to gain recruits.—Gotto, p. 375.
102. Perry Biddiscombe, Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946, Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 1998, pp. 12–14 (where the derivation of the name is discussed).
103. Biddiscombe, pp. 38, 128, 134–9.
104. TBJG, II/15, pp. 630 (30.3.45), 647 (31.3.45). For Ley’s extreme radicalism in advocating a fight to the last, see Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley: Hitler’s Labor Front Leader, Oxford, New York and Hamburg, 1988, pp. 291–2.
105. Biddiscombe, pp. 266–8; Henke, pp. 837–45.
106. Biddiscombe, p. 276, and ch. 5 for many instances of minor, uncoordinated and sporadic resistance to the Allied occupiers by former Hitler Youth members, former SS men and other Nazi diehards that punctuated the late spring and summer of 1945 and beyond, though they were only tangentially related to the Werwolf groups that had been established in the last weeks of the war.
107. Biddiscombe, p. 282, uses Allied assessments to suggest that 10–15 per cent of Germans supported the partisan movement, though this probably conflates general backing for continued resistance to the Allies and support for the regime with specific support for Werwolf activities. See Henke, pp. 948–9, for a more dismissive appraisal of support.
108. TBJG, II/15, pp. 422, 424 (5.3.45). Hitler had also thought the Mosel could be defended.—TBJG, II/15, p. 533 (18.3.45).
109. As suggested by Bernd Wegner, ‘Hitler, der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Choreographie des Untergangs’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), pp. 493–518; also in DRZW, 8, pp. 1192–1209.
110. TBJG, II/15, p. 479 (12.3.45).
111. Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus, Wiesbaden, 1973, p. 2212.
112. TBJG, II/15, pp. 422–3 (5.3.45).
113. TBJG, II/15, p. 425 (5.3.45). For Goebbels’ fantasies of heroism as the end approached and his wife’s reluctant determination to stay in Berlin and accept not only her own death, but that of her children, see Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels, Munich and Zurich, 1990, pp. 587–8. Magda had apparently accepted both the certainty of Germany’s defeat and that death ‘by our own hand, not the enemy’s’ was the only choice left.—David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, London, 1996, p. 506 (though based on recollections, reproduced in an article on Magda in a periodical in 1952 (Irving, p. 564 n. 9), of her sister-in-law Eleanor (Ello) Quandt, whose testimony as Irving acknowledges (p. 564 n. 19) was not always reliable).
114. TBJG, II/15, pp. 426–7 (5.3.45), 525 (17.3.45), 532–3 (18.3.45); and see Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, pb. edn., London, 1994, p. 422; Reimer Hansen, ‘Ribbentrops Friedensfuhler im Fruhjahr 1945’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 18 (1967), pp. 716–30; and Hansjakob Stehle, ‘Deutsche Friedensfuhler bei den Westmachten im Februar/Marz 1945’, VfZ, 30 (1982), pp. 538–55; Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 783–4.
115. IfZ, ZS 1953, ‘Iden des Marz. Ein zeitgeschichtliches Fragment uber den letzten Kontaktversuch Ribbentrops mit Moskau in der Zeit vom 11.–16. Marz 1945’, fos. 1–13 (no date, probably early 1950s). For a description of Mme Kollontay, ‘the grand old lady of Soviet diplomacy’, and for Ribbentrop’s vain attempts to instigate some form of negotiated peace with the Soviet Union in early 1945, see Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Chance des Sonderfriedens: Deutsch-sowjetische Geheimgesprache 1941–1945, Berlin, 1986, pp. 58–61, 268–75.
116. TBJG, II/15, pp. 450–51 (8.3.45).
117. BA/MA, RH21/3/420, fos. 34, 40, post-war account (1950) by Colonel-General Erhard Raus (former Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd Panzer Army in East Prussia, who had taken command in Pomerania of remaining forces of the 11th SS-Panzer Army) of his meetings with Himmler on 13.2.45 and 7.3.45, and his report to Hitler on 8.3.45.
118. Guderian, p. 426.
119. The above paragraph is based on: Folke Bernadotte, The Fall of the Curtain, London, 1945, pp. 19–47; Walter Schellenberg, Schellenberg, pb. edn., London, 1965, pp. 171–5; Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs 1940–1945, London, 1956, pp. 271–83; Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsfuhrer-SS, London, 1990, pp. 565–6, 578–9; and Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: Biographie, Munich, 2008, pp. 742–8, 967–8 nn. 131–2. In a post-war interrogation, Schellenberg—who was keen to assert both his own importance and his attempts to influence a negotiated settlement—claimed that in December 1944, in the Reichfuhrer’s presence, he even touched on the possibility of the elimination of Hitler.—IWM, FO645/161, interrogation 13.11.45, p. 15 (1945–6).
120. DZW, 6, p. 152.
121. John Toland, The Last 100 Days, London, 1965, pp. 73, 238–44, 478–81; Padfield, pp. 573–8; Weinberg, p. 818; Peter R. Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich, Princeton, 1984, pp. 242–5; BA/MA, N574/19, NL Vietinghoff, ‘Kriegsende in Italien’, fos. 41–6.
