‘punishments’ specified that those guilty of cowardice and dereliction of duty were to be shot immediately. To reinforce the message, Himmler drew attention to the examples from the town of Bromberg, where Party and state officials had behaved less than heroically on the approach of the Red Army. The police chief had apparently deserted his post. A local army commander had gone against orders in retreating from a defensive position. The Government President (head of the regional administration) and the mayor of Bromberg were subsequently degraded and sent to serve in punishment battalions faced with especially dangerous tasks, as was the Party’s District Leader, having first been expelled from the Party. All had been forced to attend the execution of the Police President, SS-Standartenfuhrer Carl von Salisch, shot by firing squad for cowardice. The army commander was also shot.29 On 11 February, Himmler put out a proclamation to the officers of Army Group Vistula, whose command he had just taken over, expecting of them ‘a model of bravery and steadfastness’ in the decisive phase of the struggle against the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik danger’, and a ‘fanatical will to victory and burning hatred against these Bolshevik sub-animals’, but reminding them that the police chief in Bromberg had been shot for not fulfilling the demands of his office.30
Bormann was by now, on Hitler’s behalf, repeatedly instructing Party leaders on the need for exemplary behaviour (also from their wives, some of whom had left threatened areas before evacuation orders had been issued), again with the threat of severe reprisals for those found lacking.31 He felt it necessary to pass on Hitler’s reminder that all orders were binding, to be implemented ‘if necessary by draconian measures’ and to be carried out by subordinates ‘without contradiction’ and swiftly. The German people had to understand more than ever at this time ‘that it was led by a strong and determined hand’, that ‘signs of disintegration and arbitrary actions would be ruthlessly nipped in the bud’ and that neglect by subordinate organs of the Party would ‘on no account be tolerated’.32 Any Party leader failing in his duties, abandoning his people to find safety for himself and his family or gain some other advantage, distancing himself from the NSDAP, or ‘fleeing as a coward instead of fighting to the last’ was to be evicted from the Party, brought before the courts for judgement and subject to ‘the most severe punishment’.33 In his circular—stated to be not for publication—on 24 February 1945, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Party Programme, Bormann reminded all Party members in unequivocal terms that anyone thinking of himself, of quitting and making off, would be a ‘traitor to the people and murderer of our women and children’. Only steadfastness down to death without concern for one’s own life served as a defence against ‘the elemental storm from the steppes, the methods of the inner-Asiatic hordes’. The Fuhrer demanded, and the people expected, of every Party leader ‘that he holds out to the end and is never concerned for his own salvation’. For the Party rank-and-file, too, the call of the hour meant to follow unconditionally the sense of higher duty. ‘Anyone seeking to save his life is with certainty, also through the verdict of the people, condemned to death. There is only one possibility of staying alive,’ he declared (with some contradiction); ‘the readiness to die fighting and thereby to attain victory.’34 For now, the Party still —just about—held together.
As discipline slackened worryingly in the Wehrmacht, too, there was a similar resort to threats of drastic sanctions. Hitler let it be known through Keitel, at the time that the eastern front was collapsing and his own orders were being challenged by his generals in East Prussia, that if military leaders failed to carry out commands unconditionally or transmit absolutely reliable dispatches he would demand ‘the most ruthless punishment of those guilty’ and would expect the courts to be severe enough to pass the death sentence.35
One plain indicator of the collapsing front was the enormously swollen number of ‘stragglers’ heading back to Germany. Though many had genuinely become separated from their units, others were feigning detachment from their units in the hope of avoiding further front service. The distinction between those who had deserted and those who, genuinely or not, had ‘lost’ their units was increasingly blurred. Intensified efforts were now made to pick up ‘stragglers’ and return them to the front, sometimes using special military police detachments.36 Even on the wildly overcrowded station in Breslau in late January, as desperate evacuees fought to get on the last trains west, military police were searching for anyone in uniform to send them back to fight the Russians.37 At the end of the month, Himmler appealed to the German people to adopt a hard line towards ‘shirkers’, ‘cowards’ and ‘weaklings’ who were failing in their duty. He urged women, especially, to show no sympathy for ‘shirkers’ who tagged onto evacuation treks travelling westwards. ‘Men who take themselves from the front are not deserving of bread from the homeland,’ he declared. They had instead to be reminded of their honour and duty, be treated with contempt and be sent back to the front.38 The Wehrmacht laid down detailed regulations for seizing ‘stragglers’ and returning them to frontline duty, ominously adding ‘in so far as in individual cases judgement by a military court is not necessary’.39
The commandant of Schneidemuhl, a designated fortress, was commended by Himmler in late January for shooting down retreating soldiers with a pistol then hanging a notice round their necks saying ‘this is what happens to all cowards’.40 The ‘bitter experiences in the east’, Bormann noted, showed that in the face of enemy inroads ‘there is no longer an absolute reliance on the steadfastness of the front troops’. Consequently, in early February, in preparation for the expected enemy offensive in the west, he asked Himmler to provide an increased number of ‘interception squads’ of the kind that had been successful in the collapse in France the previous summer to pick up retreating soldiers ‘through rigorous intervention’ and return them to ‘joyful fulfilment of their duty’. The squads were to be backed up, he told the western Gauleiter, by all the force at the disposal of the police and
A few days later, Himmler transmitted an order to the Higher SS and Police Leaders in the western regions advocating use of maximum severity, in tandem with the military authorities, in rounding up ‘stragglers’ and ‘shooting looters and deserters on the spot’, in order to remove any obstacles from the western front in the forthcoming ‘heavy attacks’. Bormann had the order passed on in 130 copies to all Party leaders at central and regional level.43 ‘Should anyone intervene too harshly’, Himmler stated, in ‘combing out towns and barracks for so-called stragglers or soldiers journeying about with pretended march and travel orders’, it was better than not intervening at all.44 He had by then, on 12 February, announced the implementation in Army Group Vistula of an order, which he found ‘so excellent’, put out for Army Group Centre by the inimitable Colonel- General Schorner. Among the exhortations, in classical Nazi diction, to fanatical hatred against the enemy and the need for iron resolve with ‘our homeland at stake’, was the threat that ‘stragglers who don’t immediately register for redeployment or follow orders’ would be placed before a court martial and charged with cowardice.45 The result in such an event was invariably a foregone conclusion. Schorner’s way of dealing with ‘trained stragglers’, as he dubbed them, was even in Goebbels’ eyes ‘fairly brutal’. ‘He lets them be hanged from the next tree with a notice attached saying: “I’m a deserter and have refused to protect German women and children.” That, naturally, has a good deterrent effect on other deserters or those who think of deserting,’ the Propaganda Minister observed.46
At the end of February, Bormann reckoned there were up to 600,000 soldiers in the Reich avoiding front service. A priority throughout the Reich was to track them down and round them up. The public had to be made aware of the problem and a tough approach adopted, in contrast to 1917–18. Drastic measures were necessary if ducking out of duty was not to spread. ‘Every shirker has to be aware that he will with great probability be caught in the homeland and then without doubt will lose his life.’ At the front, there was the mere possibility that he would die. At home, avoiding his duty, he would certainly do so, and in dishonour. Only when this message sank in ‘shall we master this cowardice disease’, he concluded.47
Some estimates put the number of deserters down to the end of 1944 at more than a quarter of a million. This can be no more than informed guesswork, and may well include honest ‘stragglers’ as well as those who, for whatever reason, could take no more and took enormous risks to lay down their arms. The figure relates, however, to the period before the collapse of the eastern front in January sent the numbers of ‘stragglers’ (and those actually deserting) spiralling—perhaps doubling—in the last four months of the war.48 If the overall scale of the phenomenon must remain no more than an approximation, at least the figures for those punished for desertion by military courts—though not arbitrarily shot or otherwise ‘executed’ in arbitrary action—are known. Compared with 18 cases in the German army in the First World War, those in the Wehrmacht sentenced for desertion during the Second World War numbered, in a sharply rising trend, some 35,000. Around 15,000 of these received the death penalty.49
Apart from desertion, any perceived undermining of the war effort brought rapid and harsh retribution. The
