disastrous year of 1944 neared its close.
IV
The reports reaching Goebbels from the regional propaganda offices left no doubt of the worrying state of morale. News of the success in repelling the Red Army in East Prussia made scarcely a dent in the depressed mood in early November. Feelings ranged from extreme anxiety about the future and anger at being left defenceless as bombs rained down on German cities to wearied resignation (also among Party members, especially in the west) and fatalism. Large parts of the population just wanted ‘peace at any price’.67 In western regions, where the population was most exposed to the nightly horror of devastation from the skies, now being inflicted upon most of Germany’s big industrial cities, the mood was at rock bottom. Amid the jangled nerves and constant worry, Goebbels noted, ‘outright anger towards the Party, held responsible for the war and its consequences’, could be heard.68
It was scarcely surprising. Cologne, for instance, was subjected to another huge attack on the night of 30 October in what one witness described as the city’s ‘death blow’. The quarter of a million people still living there— until the heavy raids started there had been around 800,000—had no gas or electricity. The little water available was only to be had at hydrants in the street. The NSV distributed meagre food rations to people standing in queues. Almost all remaining habitable parts of the city were now destroyed. There was a stampede to leave as masses of refugees gathered with their few possessions at the Rhine bridges. But an immediate organized evacuation was impossible because of lack of transport. The rail crisis meant trains could not be laid on. Any military vehicle going east was stopped and loaded to capacity with those fleeing the city. There was much bitterness directed at the regime and a sense of the futility of the conflict. The exodus lasted for more than a week. Cologne was now ‘virtually a ghost city’. As Goebbels put it, ‘this lovely Rhine metropolis has at least for the time being to be written off’.69
Among the remnants of the population, housed in improvised barracks or surviving in cellars in the ruined shell of the city, groups of dissident youths, foreign workers, deserted soldiers and former Communist Party members took to despairing kinds of partisan-like active resistance, which reached its climax in December. With hand grenades and machine guns that they had managed to steal from Wehrmacht depots, they waged their own war against the Cologne police, killing the head of the Gestapo in the city and, in one incident, engaging in a twelve-hour armed battle with police before being overwhelmed. Only with difficulty did the Gestapo attain the upper hand before taking savage vengeance on the 200 or so members of the resistance groups whom they arrested.70
No similar action materialized in the other cities of the Rhine–Ruhr industrial belt. But hundreds of thousands experienced similar misery to that of the population of Cologne following the devastating raids on Bochum, Duisburg, Oberhausen and other major cities of the region over the autumn. The mood in the Ruhr was bad.71 The air war was creating ‘a downright despairing mood’, Goebbels noted from the reports reaching him.72 There was only a single topic of conversation: ‘the war-weariness of all people’.73
Still, there was no collapse of discipline either in the workplace or in the army. People carried out to the best of their ability what they took to be their duty.74 There were no signs of sabotage, strikes or—beyond the events in Cologne—other prominent forms of resistance.75 Dr Walther Rohland thought shortly after the end of the war that the reason for what he saw as the extraordinary effort made by workers who had little enthusiasm for the war (or the regime) was that ‘each single person felt clearly that on the one hand there was no opportunity for the individual to take action against the war’. ‘However, if the war was lost, then, in contrast to 1914–18, Germany also, and with her the possibilities of existence for the individual, would be lost’.76 Such fears were given sustenance by the propaganda gift of the ‘Morgenthau Plan’—as the programme prepared by the US Secretary to the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to split up post-war Germany into a powerless, dismembered country with a pre-industrial economy swiftly became known to the German public.77
On 12 December Goebbels went to the Ruhr district to assess the situation for himself, and while he was there witnessed a heavy air raid on Witten, turning much of the town into a raging inferno. He also saw the misery of the 100,000-strong population of Bochum, deprived of all amenities, existing in primitive conditions in cellars and little more than holes in the ground. His speech in the Krupp factory in Essen failed to rouse the grim-faced workers who had been dragooned into hearing him, collars turned up against the bitter cold, hands deep in their pockets. The applause was meagre and had scarcely died down when the sirens began to wail. The Propaganda Minister and his entourage had swiftly to take cover in the vaulted cellars deep underground, where they encountered ‘grey, disconsolate faces’. Little was said, but the glances on the men’s faces were ‘not friendly’.78 Goebbels was made fully aware of the strength of feeling among the Party and industrial leaders of the Rhine and Ruhr about the failings of Goring (blamed for the inability to protect German cities against the ‘gangsters of the air’), and also Ribbentrop (held generally in contempt, and seen as inept in his conduct of foreign policy), but came away convinced of their continued ‘blind, unshakeable faith’ in Hitler.79 In early December, Goebbels was still persuading himself that ‘faith in the Fuhrer is largely unshaken and many’—after seeing the troop build-up near the western front and sensing a coming offensive—‘are again beginning to believe in a German victory’.80
It was in the main a delusion. It is true that among the Party elite, those wielding power in the regions as well as at the centre of the regime, there were no signs that loyalty towards Hitler was starting to flake.81 And in enabling the regime to continue to function, this is what mattered. Among the civilian population, however, beyond Party diehards and sections of youth, it was in the main a different matter. By the end of November, propaganda reports were indicating ‘the danger of a crisis in confidence in the leadership’ which ‘can no longer be ignored’. The concern was seen as important and urgent.82 For the first time, Hitler had failed to speak in person—Himmler read out his proclamation—at the annual gathering in Munich of the Party ‘Old Guard’ for the Putsch commemoration on 8 November. Immediately, rumours flared up (mostly arising from foreign speculation) that he was dead, or seriously ill, had suffered a nervous breakdown, or had fled and that Himmler or Goebbels had taken over.83 Still, popular belief in Hitler had not altogether vanished. And indeed, even at this late hour there were those who clung as a drowning man clings to a piece of wood to their long-held faith in the Fuhrer, and in his ability to save Germany. But such people were in a dwindling minority. Hitler’s charisma, in the sense of its popular appeal, was by now fast fading.
On the eve of the Ardennes offensive, Goebbels recorded in his diary a somewhat sobering assessment of popular feeling on the basis of the reports—themselves inevitably tending to emphasize the positive wherever they could—sent in by the regional propaganda offices. ‘The scepticism in the German public continues,’ he noted. ‘There’s no proper faith in German powers of resistance… There have been too many military disappointments recently for the people to be easily able to build up hopes.’84
Generalizations about attitudes among soldiers are hazardous. Rank, temperament and earlier approaches towards Nazism affected their mindset. There were reports, for instance, of poor morale among the new recruits of the People’s Grenadier divisions.85 Among battle-hardened veterans, however, it was often a different story. Confidence instilled by generals such as Model was a further factor affecting morale. The situation on the different fronts—and parts of the fronts—produced widely varying experiences and perspectives.
In the late autumn of 1944, away from the continuing bitter fighting in Hungary, the eastern front was relatively quiet. A naval officer who had been based in Memel, then Gotenhafen (now Gdynia), on the Baltic near Danzig, was shocked in the autumn when he travelled through southern Germany. He felt as if he had been until now living on an isolated island as he encountered repeated bombing attacks from low-flying aircraft and constant controls by the military police in the overcrowded compartments of slow-moving, greatly delayed trains. The experience made him and his fellow officers ‘deeply pessimistic, in part even despairing’. During the return journey, when almost all in the train were en route to fight the Soviets, he was struck by the unequivocal criticism of the Party and its functionaries. These were blamed for the unstoppable partisan warfare in the east, seen to have been caused by their brutal treatment of the population.86
Another officer, based in south-west Germany, was also deeply affected by what he saw while on leave in late November. Though he did not have far to travel, even short rail journeys were difficult. His heavily delayed train
