The End

propaganda statements, comparing them with reality as he saw it, give one impression of feelings as the Americans advanced through the Rhineland. ‘Wherever you go, only one comment: an end to the insanity,’ he observed on 7 March, the day after Cologne had fallen. He did admit, however, that the occasional optimist, such as one of his comrades, a former Hitler Youth leader and ‘a great show-off’, still existed—though such figures could provide no grounds for their optimism. He could barely believe the reports of street-fighting in the ruins of Bonn. ‘Ruins!’ he remarked. ‘That is the legacy for people after the war. How differently Ludendorff acted [at the end of the First World War] when he recognized that all was lost. To some extent still conscious of his responsibility.’ The unspoken criticism of Hitler was obvious. Commenting on what proved to be the last ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ on 11 March, the diarist noted: ‘How the dead are being misused, their memory and their sacrifice…. There should and must now be an end.’¹⁶

Reports reaching the Propaganda Ministry in early March told of many soldiers looking bleakly towards a bitter end to the war.¹⁷ Goebbels himself acknowledged in early March in exhorting Party propagandists to ever greater exertions that troop morale was a problem in parts of the army.¹⁸ On 11 March he noted that ‘the morale of our troops and our population in the west has suffered exceptionally…. Something can only now be achieved in the west through brutal measures, otherwise we’ll no longer be master of the developing situation.’¹⁹ Hitler briefly contemplated scrapping the Geneva Convention, which stipulated good treatment for prisoners of war, to encourage his soldiers to fight as hard on the western as on the eastern front.²⁰ But there were problems in the east, too. Guderian felt forced to provide a vehement denial of a scathing report about defeatist attitudes even among the general staff of Schorner’s Army Group Centre. Though the report was inevitably coloured by the usual Party antagonism towards General Staff officers, the officers’ recorded criticism of the poor quality and wavering resolve among the infantry is unlikely to have been fabricated.²¹

In Danzig, there was talk of ‘a second Stalingrad’, since the army gave the impression of being paralysed and lacking in initiative. Hundreds of soldiers were said to have deserted their posts at Kustrin (described as no more than ‘one single heap of rubble’ at the end of the siege), where there were plain signs of demoralization. They had fled westwards along with Volkssturm men only to be picked up by the Security Police and forced back into their units. Given the reported scale of looting by German troops in Kustrin, people muttered grimly that the Russians could be no worse.²² Looting of houses and other property by retreating soldiers was by now, however, almost everywhere a commonplace occurrence, despite the threat of severe sanctions for those involved.²³ There were other indications of army indiscipline. A Party District Leader in the Halle-Merseburg region reported a minor mutiny of 200 soldiers from a panzer division, and complained about the inability of police checks at stations to pick up deserters. At the fall of Trier, most of the Volkssturm defenders were said to have gone over to the enemy. Others did all they could to avoid military duty.²⁴ German troops on the Mosel, surprised by American tanks, had simply fled in whatever vehicles were to hand, leaving their arms and equipment behind.²⁵

Of course, there were plenty of exceptions to the widespread longing of so many ordinary soldiers for the end of the war. One long letter home from a battalion sergeant-major based in Wiesbaden, just after the Americans had crossed the Rhine at Remagen, reveals an undiluted Nazi mentality and sense of unbroken defiance—though his own comments make plain that he was a rarity among his comrades, and he admitted that ‘we can no longer rely 100 per cent on our soldiers’. He scorned American hopes, as he saw them, that Germans would lay down their weapons, or would fight with them against the Russians, as ‘Jewish tricks’. Though he admitted the situation was extremely grim, he refused, he said, to lose his belief

that we’ll nevertheless win the war. I know that I’m laughed at by many people or thought mad. I know that there are only a few apart from me who have the courage to claim this, but I say it over and again: the Fuhrer is no scoundrel, and not so bad as to lie to an entire people and drive it to death. Up to now the Fuhrer has always given us his love and promised us freedom and carried out all his plans. And if the Fuhrer prays to God that He may pardon him the last six weeks of this war of the nations then we know that there must and will be an awful and terrible end for our enemies.

It was, therefore, imperative to stay ‘brave and strong. What use are all our material advantages if we end up later somewhere in Siberia?’ he added. He was confident that Germany would strike back within the next few weeks with new weapons that would ‘end this desolate situation’ and decisively turn the war in Germany’s favour. ‘We must firmly believe in Germany’s future—believe and ever more believe. A people that has so courageously lost so much blood for its greatness cannot perish…. Only our faith makes us strong, and I rely on the words of the Fuhrer that at the end of all the fighting there will be German victory.’²⁶

As the Allies crossed the Rhine and pushed into Germany, such naivety was distinctly a minority taste. By the end of March, only 21 per cent of a sample of soldiers captured by the western Allies still professed faith in the Fuhrer (a drop from 62 per cent at the beginning of January), while 72 per cent had none. A mere 7 per cent still believed in German victory; 89 per cent had no such belief.²⁷ A detailed report to the Propaganda Ministry from Hessen-Nassau in late March, as the Americans were advancing into the Main valley, painted a dismal picture of disintegration, antipathy between the military and Party leadership in the area, organizational disorder, and civilians refusing orders to evacuate, on the grounds that they had nowhere to go and, in any case, ‘it’s all over’. Many people, propaganda offices reported in March, had given up hope and there was a widespread view that the war was lost for Germany—though there remained a readiness, it was claimed, to continue doing their duty since it was recognized that capitulation would mean the ‘complete destruction of the German people’.²⁸

The defeatism was furthered, and much bitterness caused, by troops fleeing eastwards as fast as they could go, leaving badly trained and poorly equipped Volkssturm units behind and displaying a complete lack of ‘comradely’ behaviour towards the wounded and civilian evacuees as they brusquely commandeered vehicles for their retreat.²⁹ The long-serving Gauleiter of the area, Jakob Sprenger (who had already requested permission to set up summary courts martial in his Gau), added that the morale of the troops was influenced by the defeatism of the civilian population. The sense that defeat, at least at the hands of the western Allies, would mean the end of German existence was scarcely apparent. White flags had been shown in various places on the approach of enemy troops and the erection of tank barriers blocked.³⁰

The population of numerous places on the Mosel acted in similar fashion, exhorting the troops to cease fighting to avoid further destruction.³¹ A despairing SD agent wrote to Bormann of his bitter disappointment, shared with the many now serving on the western front who had come from the east and had, like himself, lost everything at the hands of the Bolsheviks, when they saw the defeatist attitude of the civilian population in Gau Moselland as Allied troops approached. People showed friendliness towards the Americans, he reported, but hostility towards their own troops. Propaganda attempts to inculcate hatred of the enemy were a complete failure. The Hitler greeting had disappeared from use; no rooms any longer had pictures of the Fuhrer adorning them; white flags had replaced the swastika banner. Weapons were concealed or thrown away. There was, of course, no willingness to serve in the Volkssturm. And the attitude towards the Party was one of total ‘annihilatory’ rejection.³²

In the Rhineland, civilians were said to have hurled insults at soldiers, accusing them of prolonging the war and causing additional misery by blowing up bridges and digging tank traps. They cut wires and engaged in minor acts of sabotage, prepared white flags of surrender, burnt Party emblems and uniforms and encouraged soldiers to put on civilian clothes and desert.³³ Such acts of localized opposition were, even so, not typical of the majority of the population. The longing for an end to the war was certainly near universal, but doing anything to shorten it was highly risky. Most people were not prepared to risk their lives at the last moment. This, together with an ingrained acceptance of authority, meant that resigned compliance rather than resistance was the norm.³⁴ And however extensive outward expressions of rejection of the continued war effort were on the western front, they were rare if not non-existent in the east, where the civilian population was wholly dependent on the fighting troops to keep the feared enemy from their throats.

Army discipline still held by and large, and not just in the east. Even so, desertion by troops was by now a serious concern for the military and Party leadership. Goebbels noted in early March that ‘the desertion plague has worryingly increased. Tens of thousands of soldiers, allegedly stragglers but in reality wanting to avoid frontline service, are said to be in the big cities of the Reich.’³⁵ Discussions in the Party Chancellery to tackle the problem included the suggestion—found to be impracticable in the circumstances of mounting disorganization —of a nationwide ‘general raid’ on a specific day to round up all detached soldiers. Another was to leave executed