The End

As we shall see, the level of terroristic repression, which now boomeranged back from the treatment of conquered peoples to be directed at the German people themselves as well as perceived ‘racial enemies’, does indeed go a long way towards explaining why there was no revolution from below, why an organized mass uprising was not possible. Given the level of repression, together with the immense dislocation in the last months, a revolution from below, as at the end of the First World War, was an impossibility. But terror cannot completely explain the regime’s capacity to fight on. It was not terror that drove on the regime’s elites. Terror does not explain the behaviour of the regime’s ‘paladins’—both those who shared Hitler’s Gotterdammerung mentality and were ready to see Germany go down in flames, and the far greater number of those seeking to save their own skins. It does not explain the continued functioning of a government bureaucracy, both at central and local levels. Not least, it does not explain the Wehrmacht’s readiness—at any rate the readiness of the Wehrmacht leadership—to continue the fight. Nor, finally, does terror explain the behaviour of those in the regime at different levels prepared to use terror to the very last, even when it served no further rational purpose.

Although after the end of the Cold War the ‘totalitarianism’ theorem underwent something of a renaissance,¹⁶ its emphasis upon terror and repression in controlling the ‘total society’ has never regained the ground it held in the early post-war era as an interpretation of the behaviour of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich. On the contrary: recent research has increasingly tended to place the emphasis upon the enthusiastic support of the German people for the Nazi regime, and their willing collaboration and complicity in policies that led to war and genocide.¹⁷ ‘One question remains,’ a German writer remarked. ‘What was it actually that drove us to follow [Hitler] into the abyss like the children in the story of the Pied Piper? The puzzle is not Adolf Hitler. We are the puzzle.’¹⁸ Such a comment, leaving aside the suggestion of bamboozlement, presumes an essential unity, down to the end, between leader and led.

Whereas the emphasis used to be placed on society and regime in conflict¹⁹—essentially presuming a tyranny over a mainly reluctant but coerced people—this has shifted to a society in harness with the aims of the regime, largely in tune with and supportive of its racist and expansionist policies, fully behind its war effort. Relentless Nazi propaganda had done its job; it was ‘the war that Hitler won’, according to an interpretation advanced many years ago.²⁰ The Nazis were successful, it is now frequently claimed, in inculcating in people the sense that they were part of an inclusive national-racist ‘people’s community’, integrated by the exclusion of Jews and others deemed inferior and unfit to belong to it, unified by the need to defend the nation against the powerful enemies surrounding it and threatening its very existence.²¹ ‘Notwithstanding the disillusionment and bitterness of large parts of the German population in the last war years, the “people’s community” remained intact to the bitter end’, one scholar has asserted.²² Moreover, Hitler’s regime had ‘bought off’ the German population, securing loyalty through a standard of living sustained by plundering the occupied territories.²³ Though it is usually acknowledged that this ‘people’s community’ was starting to crumble in the face of impending defeat, lasting support for Nazism—bound together through knowledge of terrible German crimes—is still advanced as a significant reason why Hitler’s regime was able to hold out to the end.²⁴ ‘The basic legitimacy of the Third Reich remained intact’, another historian has claimed, ‘because Germans could not envision a desirable alternative to National Socialism’, demonstrating ‘remarkable commitment to National Socialism in the war’. Their subsequent sense of betrayal by Nazism ‘rested on a strong identification with the Third Reich right up to the moment of abandonment’.²⁵ In perhaps the apogee of this approach, it has been suggested that ‘the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945’. ‘Some’, it is acknowledged, hinting at a tiny minority, ‘had had enough’, but the consensus that had underpinned the dictatorship from the outset, the argument runs, held up to the end.²⁶

The chapters which follow will provide a good deal of evidence to cast doubt upon this intepretation. They will question whether either the scale of terror or the extent of support for the regime can provide an adequate explanation for its ability to hold out until Germany was smashed to smithereens. Yet if neither terror nor support fully explains it, what does?

A number of questions immediately arise. Beyond the significance of the Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’, one could ask how far Allied mistakes in strategy and tactics, which certainly occurred, weakened their own efforts to bring the war to an early end and temporarily boosted the confidence of the German defenders. But whatever significance might accrue to such factors, the determining reasons for Germany’s continued fight have surely to be explained internally, from within the Third Reich, rather than externally, through Allied policy. What weight, for instance, should we attach to the feeling of Nazi leaders that they had nothing to lose by fighting on, since they had in any case ‘burnt their boats’? How significant, indeed, was the greatly expanded scope of the Nazi Party’s powers in the final phase, as it sought to revitalize itself by evoking the spirit of the ‘period of struggle’ before 1933? In what ways did a highly qualified and able state bureaucracy contribute, despite increasing and ultimately overwhelming administrative disorder, to the capacity to hold out? How important was the fear of the Red Army in sustaining the fight to the end? Why were German officers, especially the generals in crucial command posts, prepared to fight on even when they recognized the futility of the struggle and the absurdity of the orders they were being given? And what role was played by the leading Nazis beneath Hitler—in particular the crucial quadrumvirate of Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels and Speer—and the provincial viceroys, the Gauleiter, in ensuring that the war effort could be sustained despite mounting, then overwhelming, odds until the regime had destroyed itself in the maelstrom of total military defeat? In particular, how indispensable was the role of Speer in continuing to defy enormous obstacles to provide armaments for the Wehrmacht? Finally, though far from least, there is the part played by Hitler himself and the lasting allegiance to him within the German power elites.

A simple—though self-evidently inadequate—answer to the question of how and why Germany held out to the bitter end is, in fact, that Hitler adamantly and at all times refused to contemplate capitulation, so that there was no alternative to fighting on. Even catacombed in his bunker, the borders of fantasy and reality increasingly blurred, Hitler’s hold on power was not over until his suicide on 30 April 1945. A central tenet of his ‘career’ had been revenge for the national humiliation of 1918; the ‘1918 syndrome’ was deeply embedded in his psyche.²⁷ There would, he frequently and insistently declared, be no repeat of 1918, no new version of the ‘cowardly’ capitulation at the end of the First World War. Destruction with honour intact through fighting to the end, upholding the almost mythical military code of battling till the last bullet, creating a legend of valour for posterity out of the despair of defeat, and above all enshrining in history his own unique, self-perceived heroic legacy, was in his mind infinitely preferable to negotiating a ‘disgraceful’ surrender. Since he personally had no future after defeat, a suicidal approach was not hard to adopt. But it was not just personally self-destructive. It meant also condemning his own people and country to destruction. The German people, in his eyes, had failed him, had not proved worthy of his leadership. They were expendable. Without him, in fact, his monstrous ego told him, everything was expendable. In his crudely dualist way of thinking, it had always been victory or destruction. He unwaveringly followed his own logic.

Hitler’s own central part in Germany’s self-destructive urges as the Reich collapsed is obvious. Above all, his continued power provided a barrier to any possibility, which his paladins were keen to explore, of negotiating a way out of the escalating death and destruction. But this only brings us back to the question: why was he able to do this? Why did his writ continue to run when it was obvious to all around him that he was dragging them down with him and taking his country to perdition? Accepting that Hitler was a self-destructive individual, why did the ruling elites below him—military, Party, government—allow him to block all rational exit routes? Why was no further attempt made, after the failed coup of July 1944, to impede Hitler’s determination to continue the war? Why were subordinate Nazi leaders and military commanders prepared to follow him down to the complete destruction of the Reich? It was not that they wanted to follow him to personal oblivion. As soon as Hitler was dead, they did what they could to avoid the abyss. Almost all Nazi leaders fled, anxious not to follow Hitler’s example of self-immolation. Military commanders were now prepared to offer their partial capitulations in rapid succession, fighting on only to get as many of their men as possible into the western zones and away from the Red Army. Some harboured fantasies of being of future service to the western Allies.

Total capitulation followed in just over a week from the final act of the drama in the bunker. The mopping-up of Nazis on the run, now with nothing left to fight for, swiftly ensued. The occupation began its job of sorting out the mayhem and trying to set up new forms and standards of government. So Hitler was without question crucial to the last. But his lingering power was sustained only because others upheld it, because they were unwilling, or unable, to challenge it.

The issue stretches, therefore, beyond Hitler’s own intractable personality and his unbending adherence to