the offensive and accepted by 29 December that the advance could go no further, that the Germans would be happy to hold on to their territorial gains. But there was a time lag in popular recognition. As the end of the year approached, with the offensive stalled, many people, noted Goebbels, still had high hopes, nourished by soldiers returning from the west and talking of getting to Paris before New Year. It was ‘naturally absolute rubbish’, he remarked, but added: ‘Large parts of the German people are convinced that the war in the west could be ended in the forseeable future.’121 Yet only two days later, on the very last day of 1944, he offered a contradictory assessment, on the basis of reports from the regional propaganda offices. ‘The German people attaches no exaggerated illusions to the western offensive,’ he now stated, and had in mind only ‘smaller aims, though naturally everyone earnestly wishes that we will come to a decisive blow in the west’.122 The bubble had burst. It was a sobering return to realities. One officer, based in the west, drew his own conclusion from Field-Marshal Model’s New Year proclamation to his soldiers, in which he had declared: ‘You have withstood the tests of the year 1944. You have held watch on the Rhine.’ This meant, the officer concluded, that after being forced to give up ‘fortress Europe’, holding on to ‘fortress Germany’ would indeed prove a success.123
VI
After the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it was as good as impossible—apart from the incorrigible optimists who insisted on the coming ‘wonder weapons’ or a split among the Allies—to hold out any further realistic hope of a positive end to the war for Germany. The regime, almost all Germans could see, was utterly doomed. No one beneath Hitler, who as always ruled out any alternative to fighting on, was, however, either able or willing to do anything about it. So nothing changed internally.
The sixth war Christmas was a muted affair, with much talk of striving further for the yearned-for peace and even more of holding out against mighty enemies. At the most miserable New Year celebrations in memory, Hitler’s exhortations offered few hopes of major change in 1945. Amid the routinely effusive outpourings of the propaganda offices about the revitalizing effect of the ‘Fuhrer speech’, it was impossible to conceal the widespread disappointment that Hitler had no reassurance to offer on the deployment of new weapons, the status of the offensive in the west (which he did not even mention), and, most crucially, the breaking of the terror from the air. Many people, it was said (without a trace of irony) were left with tears in their eyes at the end of the speech. Some, in fact, were unable to hear it because they were without electricity.124 For all its bombast and the usual bile poured out on the ‘Jewish-international world conspiracy’ that was bent on destroying Germany, Hitler’s speech could promise no more than further hardship, suffering and bloodshed without an end in sight.125 Whatever the miserable prospects, for ordinary people at the base of society, civilian and military, there was little to be done other than struggle on with their daily existence.
The Nazi regime remained an immensely strong dictatorship, holding together in the mounting adversity and prepared to use increasingly brutal force in controlling and regimenting German society at more or less every point. It left little room for opposition—recognizably as suicidal as it was futile. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from the hundred-percenter hold-out-to-the-last contingent down to the majority simply going through the motions, officialdom—high and low—continued to do its duty. Here, too, most civil servants could not see any alternative. So the bureaucratic wheels kept turning, and with them the attritional grind of controls was sustained. No matter, however trivial, was beneath their attention. Amid the myriad concerns of local civil servants, as they tried to cope with huge social dislocation after air raids, refugee problems, housing shortages, food rationing and many other issues, they never lost sight of the need to complete forms and have them officially stamped for approval. Officials in the Munich police department spent time and energy (as well as using reams of precious paper) in December 1944 making sure that five cleaning-buckets were ordered to replace those lost in the recent air raid, deciding how to obtain copies of official periodicals that regulations said had to come from post offices (even though these were now destroyed), or obtaining permission for a usable iron heater to be taken to police headquarters, left without heating after the last bombing.126 At the top of the bureaucratic tree, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, his powers meanwhile largely usurped by Bormann, had little more to do than remind Reich authorities of the Fuhrer’s wish that the sending of Christmas and New Year greetings should be greatly restricted to minimize the burden on transport and postal services.127
The overlapping, often competing, bureaucracy of the Party was equally cumbersome and even more oppressive for ordinary citizens. Practically every aspect of civil defence was now orchestrated by the Party. The frequent whine of the sirens produced frenetic attempts to usher people into air-raid shelters, organize the clearance of damage after the devastation, try to provide welfare and accommodation for those without homes (with the help of the hopelessly overstretched NSV) and arrange emergency food distribution (still holding up remarkably well, in contrast to the near famine towards the end of the First World War), among an array of other tasks. In a different society, such efforts might have met with gratitude and approval. By now, however, few beyond the ranks of the diehards could find much else than feelings of anger and bitterness towards the Party functionaries who, even at this stage, combined their attempts at welfare with ceaseless hectoring and haranguing through pointless propaganda and with the surveillance and monitoring that could have dire consequences for any who stepped out of line.
At a higher level of the Party, the Gauleiter, whatever their mounting inner despair at the ever deteriorating situation following the short-lived raising of hopes, had little option but to stick with Hitler. In their own provinces, they were still figures of real power, capable of ferocious repression against any lesser mortals who appeared to pose a threat. Beyond their own domain, however, they were a divided group, and incapable of any unified positive action to avoid the gathering maelstrom of self-destruction, certain only that their own destinies were bound up with the inevitable demise of the regime.
Survival strategies varied, though they usually involved some refusal to accept reality. Goring was probably among the more realistic in recognizing the irredeemable destruction of the Luftwaffe, though he still paid frequent visits to airfields to spur on his demoralized air crews. He retreated as much as he could to the luxury of his palatial country residence at Carinhall, in the Schorfheide 65 kilometres north of Berlin, well away from Hitler’s proximity and the malign influence of Bormann. There he could surround himself with fawning friends and relatives, dress in outlandish garb, pop his codeine pills and bemoan the failings of Luftwaffe generals.128 He had long been a spent force. Ribbentrop was still insisting, a week into January, that the Ardennes offensive had been a success and telling the Japanese ambassador, Oshima Hiroshi, that ‘Germany now holds the initiative everywhere’. He was adamant that the Allied coalition was bound to split if Germany and Japan could hold out until the end of 1945 and harboured illusions that peace could even at this late hour be negotiated.129 Robert Ley, when he was sober, fell into reveries about a coming social revolution, remaining at the same time one of Hitler’s most fanatical lieutenants in advocating an all or nothing showdown with the enemy.130
Bormann was another with flights of fancy, as, evidently, was his wife, Gerda. Writing to her on 26 December, as the Ardennes offensive was petering out and with it Germany’s last military hope of success, he referred to her ‘ideas about things to come’ as ‘by no means extravagant’, and outlined his own future scenario.
There is no doubt that in the future we shall be compelled to build important factories and the like deep beneath the earth’s surface. Wherever towns and villages are built on a slope it will be necessary at once to dig deep shafts into the hill or mountainside, with special cellars—storerooms—for all inhabitants. In the new manor farms which we are going to build in the north, the buildings will have to be constructed with three or four basements, and collective shelters must be built at various points for the whole village community from the start.
Gerda found the plans for post-war construction intriguing, but was ‘boundlessly furious at the thought that we, with our innate longing for light and sunshine, should be compelled by the Jews to make our abodes as if we were beings of the underworld’.131
Himmler, who in mid-December, when he was temporarily based in the Black Forest as Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Army Group Upper Rhine, was rumoured to have fallen into disgrace at Fuhrer Headquarters, cherished the belief that Britain would come to see that its interests lay in joining forces with Germany to combat advancing Soviet power on the Continent. He thought of himself as an essential element of that continued
