The End

go to the kitchen with their plate, so that all waiters and male kitchen staff can dig. The newspapers no longer publish regional editions but only one standard edition. Thus editors, compositors and printers are released for digging. Every business which is not of importance to the war has been closed. Every East Prussian fit for military service has been called up. The large gates of Konigsberg University have been closed. The students and all men employed at the University are digging.

Even harvest workers were taken away at the most crucial point of the agricultural year to dig, though in separate waves so that the garnering of the harvest was not impaired.³¹

Anxiety probably underpinned an early readiness to help in the digging operations, notably in East Prussia, closest to the front line. Certainly, there was a positive initial response to appeals to take part as the local population, most readily members of the Hitler Youth, rallied round in an emergency, though propaganda about the enthusiasm of the diggers should be taken with a sizeable pinch of salt.³² The Party itself, though claiming there was a good deal of understanding for the necessity of the digging action, was aware of the extensive criticism of its poor organization of the entrenchment work and lack of conviction that the fortifications had any military value.³³ Practical difficulties—poor accommodation and food, transport difficulties, even a shortage of spades—and the very nature of such cripplingly hard toil, digging the baked ground hour on hour in the heat of summer, soon withered whatever good spirits had prevailed at the outset. Women in Pomerania wrote to Goebbels complaining that they had received no medical inspection before deployment, that they had to sleep on straw mats in primitive communal quarters, and that food and sanitary arrangements were lamentable. For foreign workers and prisoners of war, needless to say, the conditions were far worse.³⁴

The behaviour of Party officials and overseers often did not help. There were reports of Party officials drinking, skiving, siphoning off food and drink meant for diggers, of their high-handed behaviour and dereliction of duty setting the worst example to the conscript workers. Driving up to the columns of diggers in a car, inspecting the ranks without picking up a shovel, and bawling at elderly men and women actually doing the work was not guaranteed to encourage enthusiastic commitment to the task or endear the Party to the conscripts. Unsurprisingly, there were attempts to evade the work. Even veterans of the First World War, it was reported in East Prussia, had absconded, less than enamoured by the work they were being compelled to carry out, and worried that the front was so close. They had to be hauled back by the police.³⁵

The weeks of grinding toil by hundreds of thousands of men and women were militarily as good as worthless. Even Goebbels saw that the East Prussian fortifications erected by Koch were pointless unless troops and weaponry were poured in to hold them.³⁶ On paper, the achievements looked considerable: 400 kilometres of defences erected in Pomerania, for instance, and a 120-kilometre ring to hold five armed divisions around the newly designated fortress of Breslau.³⁷ Much was made by propaganda once the Russians had been forced back about the value of the entrenchments, eulogizing about the usefulness of all the hard work that had gone into them. But in reality, the kilometres of earthworks, entrenchments and hastily constructed, inadequately manned, fortifications were never going to stop, or even hold up, the Red Army for long. Their worth had been severely limited. And of the designated ‘fortresses’, Konigsberg, it is true, only fell in April 1945, and Breslau held out until 6 May. All this meant was that the futile loss of life of civilians, let alone of front soldiers, was magnified.

If the digging marathon in the east served any purpose, it was in large part as a propaganda exercise, demonstrating the continued will to hold out. How effective the propaganda function was is difficult to assess. It has been claimed that the endeavour shown in the fortification work bolstered the patriotism of the east German population and their resolve to defend the homeland; that the communal work served as an inspiration elsewhere in Germany, underpinned faith in the Party, and boosted military morale through showing the troops that, in contrast to 1918, they had the undiluted backing of the ‘home front’. Such claims are impossible to test accurately, but almost certainly greatly exaggerated.³⁸

It would be a mistake to presume that the brash propaganda trumpeting of the fortification effort had no effect at all. Conceivably, it did help to solidify patriotic feeling in eastern Germany. And it conveyed a sense that the actions of ordinary Germans mattered in the fight to hold off the Red Army. But at most it boosted a readiness—from fear, if nothing else—to defend the homeland that was already present. Outside the eastern regions, and perhaps within them, too, people were as likely to see the frenetic entrenchments less as a heroic achievement than as a panic move, a sign that the situation was indeed extremely grave.³⁹ As for faith in the Party, this was so sharply on the wane in the summer and autumn of 1944—whatever the lingering reserves of hope in Hitler himself—that it was as good as impossible for the fortifications programme to alter the trend, apart, perhaps, from impressing a few gullible waverers in the eastern regions by the energetic actions of Koch and other Gauleiter. Finally, while soldiers were doubtless gratified to hear of solidarity at home, it is questionable whether their fighting morale drew much inspiration from news of a huge digging programme carried out by the young, the old, and female labour on fortifications about whose defensive qualities against the might of the Red Army a level of scepticism was only too understandable.

Whatever the dubious propaganda value of the fortification drive, it was overshadowed by its objective function in providing a further vehicle for control of the population. This is not to say that many of the workers were not idealistic patriots, and not a few of them enthusiastic backers of the Party’s efforts to mobilize all that remained of the population for the task. But after the first, short-lived surge of enthusiasm, not many, it could with some justification be surmised, were true volunteers who would have come forward without being conscripted. The digging programme quite literally wore the population out, ground them down into compliance, showed them again that there was no alternative, that the Party controlled all facets of civilian life. It was a further means of trying to inculcate into the population the spirit of the ‘last stand’—with the classic Hitlerian choice of ‘hold out’ or ‘go under’. Reluctant compliance rather than a readiness to swallow such imperatives was the stance of most ordinary citizens. Few were prepared to go under. But as the threat to the eastern frontiers of the Reich mounted, they had little choice but to fall in line with the diktats of those in power who were determining their fate.

This was the case, too, with service in the Volkssturm, launched in a fanfare of publicity on 18 October by a speech given by Himmler at Bartenstein in East Prussia and broadcast to the nation. Keitel, Guderian and Koch were present as Himmler addressed thirteen assembled companies of Volkssturm men. The date had been carefully chosen as the anniversary of the highly symbolic ‘Battle of the Nations’ in Leipzig in 1813, the clash which had brought Napoleon’s defeat on Prussian soil. The date was a crucial one in propaganda depictions, resonating in German history and evoking the legendary defence of the homeland by the Landsturm, as, faced with slavery at the hands of the French, an entire people rose up to repel the invaders. Reading out Hitler’s proclamation of the Volkssturm and reminding his audience of the significance of the anniversary, Himmler announced that the Fuhrer had called on the people to defend the soil of their homeland. ‘We have heard from their own mouths’, he declared, ‘that we have to expect from our enemies the destruction of our country, the cutting down of our woods, the break-up of our economy, the destruction of our towns, the burning down of our villages and the extirpation of our people.’ Of course, the Jews were as ever portrayed as the root of the intended horror. Men of the Volkssturm, stated Himmler, pointing out that East Prussians had formed its first battalions, must therefore never capitulate.⁴⁰

There was for the most part a sceptical response, to judge from reports on the reception of propaganda. There was a growing feeling that ‘we are being pressed into a hopeless defence’, and the announcement of the Volkssturm was often interpreted as confirmation of the exhaustion of Germany’s forces.⁴¹ Any early enthusiasm swiftly evaporated as doubts were raised about the military value of the Volkssturm and anxieties voiced that those serving would not be covered under the international conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, but would be viewed as partisans.⁴² There were fears that they would be summarily executed on capture, and the enemy would take reprisals against the civilian population—views betraying knowledge of how the Germans had themselves behaved in the occupied territories.⁴³ The regime sought to allay the anxieties and define the duties of the Volkssturm within the Hague Convention of 1907. The fears were not baseless, however, as the treatment of captured Volkssturm men by the Red Army would highlight.⁴⁴ In any case, the frequent reluctance to serve in the Volkssturm was in vain. Over the next weeks, the Party’s organizational tentacles would reach far into German civilian life to drag into service hundreds of thousands of mainly middle-aged men, badly armed and poorly equipped. Few were fired by the fanaticism demanded by the regime’s leaders. However, they could rarely avoid service. Exemptions