The End

Commissar was to confirm the verdict and determine place, time and manner of an execution. ‘The Fuhrer expects’, Bormann added in his covering ordinance to the Gauleiter, ‘that the Gauleiter will implement the task placed before them with the necessary severity and consistency and ruthlessly suppress every sign of disintegration, cowardice and defeatism with the death sentences of the summary courts martial. Anyone not prepared to fight for his people but who stabs it in the back in its gravest hour does not deserve to live and must fall to the executioner.’⁶⁶ Some days earlier, Bormann had informed the Gauleiter that this now gave them ‘the weapon to destroy all those pests of the people’ and declared his expectation ‘that this instrument will be used as the Fuhrer would wish, ruthlessly and without respect to the standing or position of the person concerned’.⁶⁷

Bormann’s guidelines, indicating Hitler’s wishes, give clear enough indication that the new courts had little to do with conventional justice. They were, in fact, no more than a facade for increasingly arbitrary and wild terror, ‘instruments of destruction in legal drapery’.⁶⁸ Death sentences were scarcely more than a formality, all the more so since the judges were themselves under pressure to show their loyalty.⁶⁹ Around 6,000–7,000 death sentences are known to have been handed out by the summary courts martial, though in countless other cases the executioners did not even wait for the farce of a quasi-judicial sentence.⁷⁰ The summary justice became even more arbitrary and unconstrained after 9 March, when their reach was extended by Hitler’s decree creating the ‘flying court martial’ (fliegendes Standgericht).⁷¹ The courts travelled around Germany dealing with those accused of undermining the war effort in whatever way, and wasting no time before reaching their verdict—usually sentence of death, meted out by the senior officer presiding over the court, and without any appeal.⁷² By then, all semblance of centralized control over judicial action was visibly disintegrating, and authorized lawlessness and criminality in the name of upholding the struggle of the German people were becoming rampant as the last phase of the regime was entered.

IV

In lashing out wildly at anyone seen to impair in the slightest the imperative of fighting to the last in an obviously lost war, the regime was like a wounded animal in its death-throes. Any action that smacked of nonconformity could spell disaster for ordinary German citizens. For the designated internal enemies of the regime, the terror by now knew no bounds. Armies of foreign workers (many of them from the Soviet Union and other parts of eastern Europe) and vast numbers of prisoners in jails and concentration camps were now exposed, within Germany itself, to the untrammelled brutality of the regime’s desperate henchmen. The terror, greatly escalating since the autumn, was hugely magnified by the impact of the collapse of the eastern front.

The closer Germany’s enemies approached the borders of the Reich, and the more imminent defeat became, the more the representatives of the regime saw cause to worry about the security threat from the millions of foreign workers labouring under conditions of near slavery to keep the armaments industry going and to keep the country fed (since almost half of those employed in agriculture were foreigners). The precise number of foreign workers by February 1945 is unknown. The previous summer, there had been not far short of 6 million, all forced labourers, and almost 2 million prisoners of war registered within Germany—in all comprising over a quarter of the total workforce. Of these, some 4.5 million—probably, in fact, an underestimate—were from the east, predominantly Poland and the Soviet Union, and were regarded both as racial inferiors and as a particular danger.⁷³ The threat of internal unrest, not in terms of a revolution by the German population but as a possible rising by internal enemies, not least foreign workers, was taken seriously by the regime. Instructions were laid down, for example, at the beginning of February for the defence of the government district in Berlin in the event of internal unrest.⁷⁴

The feeling that foreign workers could pose a serious problem as military defeat loomed was not confined to Nazi paranoiacs. Even the previous August, one general in British captivity had mused that 10 million foreign workers would rise up at the approach of enemy armies.⁷⁵ Women—their husbands and sons away at the front, or dead—left to run farms with the aid of foreign workers, were worried about their personal safety (though as it turned out they seldom had actual cause to fear).⁷⁶ In the big cities, the anxieties were palpable. In Berlin the previous autumn Friedrichstra?e station had housed, according to Ursula von Kardorff, a young journalist, an ‘underworld’ almost excusively inhabited by foreigners, including ‘Poles with glances of hatred’, and a ‘mix of peoples such as was probably never to be seen in a German city’. Any outsider was looked at with suspicion, she wrote. The foreign workers were reputedly ‘excellently organized’, with their own agents, weapons and radio equipment. ‘There are 12 million foreign workers in Germany,’ she said in a telling exaggeration perhaps reflecting her own inner concern, ‘an army in itself. Some are calling it the Trojan Horse of the current war.’⁷⁷

Numerous reports pointed out that foreign workers were becoming increasingly assertive as they sensed the end of their torment approaching. They were also a very visible presence in big cities. The perception that they were an internal danger mirrored in good measure the appalling living and working conditions to which they had been reduced. Bombing had left hundred of thousands of them homeless, with no alternative but to frequent air-raid shelters, station waiting-rooms, or other public places, or find the floor of a ruined office or apartment block to lay their heads down. Food shortages meant they were often forced to steal or loot bombed-out buildings to survive. As any semblance of an ordered society broke down—the fabled ‘peace and quiet’ beloved of the German middle classes was long a thing of the past—the foreign workers offered an obvious scapegoat for the upsurge in criminality and lawlessness. Their image had come to resemble the caricature portrayed by the increasingly worried authorities, who reacted with characteristic harshness. Minor offences were dealt with savagely. Foreign workers were regarded not just as brigands, but also as saboteurs, though in fact there was little action that amounted to political resistance; for the most part it was simply a daily struggle for survival.⁷⁸

Already in November 1944 Himmler had issued a decree empowering regional offices of the Gestapo to implement ‘measures of atonement’ as ‘reprisal for grave acts of terror and sabotage’. The measures were to be directed ‘usually against persons from foreign peoples who don’t come into question as perpetrators but belong to the entourage of the perpetrator’.⁷⁹ The terror was plainly aimed to serve as a deterrent, opening up thereby a freeway to arbitrary killings, decided at the local level. Gestapo execution squads were recruited in numerous cities and equipped with a general remit to shoot ‘looters, deserters and other rabble’.⁸⁰ The decentralization of any control over executions effectively became complete by February 1945 when the head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, authorized local police chiefs to use their own discretion on when they saw fit to execute foreign workers, especially Russians.⁸¹ The heads of the Gestapo stations in Dusseldorf, Munster, Dortmund and Cologne had been warned on 24 January that ‘elements among the foreign workers and also former German Communists’ would take advantage of the current situation to engage in ‘subversive’ action. In all reported cases, the response should be ‘immediate and brutal’. Those involved were to ‘be destroyed, without requesting special treatment beforehand from Reich Security Head Office’.⁸²

Arbitrary executions of foreign workers now became commonplace. At least 14 Russians were executed by a shot in the back of the head, then tumbled into a ready-made pit, in a labour camp near Dortmund on 4 February; 24 members of a presumed subversive group, the ‘Kowalenko Gang’, were hanged or shot in Duisburg between 7 and 10 February; 74 persons were murdered in Cologne⁸³ (where, as we noted in an earlier chapter, something approaching a local war between dissidents and the police had been going on since the autumn) on 27 February and another 50 hanged in Gestapo headquarters on the day before the Americans occupied the city at the beginning of March. In the north of Germany, the Kiel Gestapo regularly carried out mass executions from January onwards, totalling around 200 prisoners by the end of April. One such was the shooting of 20–25 persons in late January or early February, and 17 Russian prisoners on 1 March. In the east of the country, in the penitentiary of Sonnenburg, near Frankfurt an der Oder, as many as 753 Gestapo prisoners, among them around 200 foreigners, were massacred on 30–31 January.⁸⁴ Even this was only the beginning of an orgy of killings of foreign workers in big cities across Germany in the final weeks of the war.

For the legions languishing in Germany’s prisons and concentration camps, the situation was even worse. The concentration camp population at the beginning of 1945 numbered around 700,000 prisoners from all over Europe, just under a third of them women, an estimated 200,000–250,000 of them Jews, the rest mainly political