The End

was clear both to the leadership and to the ordinary soldier. As long as German forces could hold the Rhine, the defence of the Oder did not seem hopeless, and was certainly worth fighting for. Once the enemy was over the Rhine and pressing on towards the Elbe, however, ordinary soldiers inevitably asked themselves whether there was any point to carrying on. What made them do so he attributed primarily to their sense of ‘patriotic duty to halt the advance of the Russians’. It was clear to every soldier what could be expected from the Russians. And it was seen as imperative to protect the civilian population as far as possible from the sort of horror that had occurred east of the Oder. Beyond that, he said, the military leadership believed that it could not undermine any possible bargaining position in negotiations through premature collapse. When hopes that the Oder could be held proved vain and German defences were smashed, disintegration swiftly followed. ‘If the soldier decided to fight on, then this was no longer to halt the enemy but to save his own life or not to fall into Soviet captivity.’ Terror, he stated, was no longer sufficient to compel soldiers to fight. Survival alone was now the driving force.⁶⁰

After the war, Donitz argued—attributing much responsibility to the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender—that ‘no one in authority could have signed an instrument of capitulation without knowing full well that its terms would be broken’ by soldiers in the east refusing to accept orders to stay and enter Soviet captivity and instead, like the civilian population, choosing to flee westwards.⁶¹ Whatever his self-justificatory motivation in such remarks (which clash with his contemporary demands for a fanatical fight to the last), Donitz did have a point in the implication that the millions still serving on the eastern front would have felt betrayed and might well have taken matters into their own hands in trying to get to the west. Whether this would have been worse for them than what did actually happen is a moot point.

In the east especially, a passionate desire for an end to the war, detestation of the Party, criticism of the regime, and even loss of faith in Hitler were perfectly compatible with soldiers’ continued determination to repel the Russian invaders on Reich soil who posed such a threat to families and homes. And ultimately, as Heinrici points out, when all idealism had vanished and pure desperation took hold, soldiers fought on for self-survival.

In the west, the situation was different. Certainly, on the western front, despite the attempts of propaganda, equivalent anxieties about falling into the hands of the Americans or the British rarely existed beyond the ranks of Party functionaries. Once the enemy had reached German soil and then crossed the Rhine, there was, even so, still much determination to repel the invader. Unable to see beyond the immediate battlegrounds, many soldiers were compelled to believe, beyond what their senses were telling them, that they were still fighting to gain time—for the leadership to fend off the Soviets, seek a worthwhile peace settlement, see the breakup of the enemy coalition. Who knew exactly? Moreover, units on the western front also included many soldiers whose homes and families were in eastern or central regions of Germany and who saw fighting on as necessary as long as the British, Americans and French remained in alliance with the Soviets. Some unquestionably thought the western Allies would eventually see sense and realize that the real war was against Russia. ‘Germany is saving Europe and England and America from being gobbled up by Bolshevik Russia,’ claimed officers captured in the west. ‘The British and Americans will one day … awaken to the real situation and will join the Germans in holding off Russia.’⁶² Beyond such motives were more immediate, unpolitical feelings: the unwillingness, as in most armies, to leave close friends and comrades in the lurch. The sense of comradeship often provided its own motivation for fighting on when idealism was lacking.

And ultimately there was the sense that there was nothing to be done about it. There was no potential for mutiny or rising to overthrow the regime. The scale of harsh repression was simply too great. Stepping out of line was little less than suicidal. And when it happened, desertion was usually an individual act, not mass mutiny. It reflected a desperate attempt at personal survival, not a collapse of the military order.⁶³ Apart from the savagery of reprisals and fears for one’s family, the capacity to organize any mutiny was as good as absent, in part because the sheer intensity of the fighting and scale of losses at the front left no chance to organize political action, partly too because constant losses left little continuity in the manpower of troop units. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to struggle on.

The situation in 1945 contrasted sharply with the revolutionary conditions of 1918.⁶⁴ ‘In 1918 we experienced more open revolutionary tendencies,’ commented one cavalry general in British captivity in March 1945. ‘As the end drew near, the men were already behaving in a very insolent fashion. They don’t do that now.’⁶⁵ In the last months of the First World War, there had been a gathering collapse of authority in the military command. Perhaps as many as a million soldiers in the final weeks, encouraged by the stirring revolutionary mood at home, among workers and soldiers in home-based garrisons, and aware of peace demands in the Reichstag, voted with their feet against continuing to fight. In 1918 military discipline had been much in line with that of the other belligerent powers, losses were smaller, German cities had not been reduced to rubble, civil society was largely intact, pluralist politics continued to exist; most crucially, there had been no brutal Russian occupation of eastern Germany and threat to the Reich capital itself, and there had been no western invasion of the Reich. German troops could return home seemingly undefeated in the field.

There had also been the Workers’ Councils in factories, bodies to give voice to the simmering unrest and to organize mass strikes and protest meetings. There had been no equivalent of the Nazi Party ensuring through its ruthless hold over the population that ‘organizational space’ to engender a popular uprising was totally unavailable. Not least, there was no equivalent to the terroristic police apparatus of 1945. In 1918, rejection of the Kaiser and Germany’s ruling class, extensive within the army and within the population, could be openly expressed and ultimately transformed into revolutionary action. In 1945, detestation of Hitler and the regime or heated criticism of policies that had produced the misery of a lost war were sentiments best swallowed. The faintest whiff of insurrectionary sentiment could spell instant brutal retaliation.

Paradoxically, therefore, increasing defeatism among ordinary soldiers not only failed to prompt them to lay down their arms or rise in mutiny against their superior officers but was compatible with continued readiness to fight on. Exhausted, demoralized troops provided no basis for insurrection. If one sentiment could sum up the myriad views of soldiers, it was probably fatalism—hoping for the best because that was all anyone could do. They saw no alternative but to carry on. Change could only come from above, but there were no indications that it ever would.

IV

For the civilian population, the sense of helplessness as the maelstrom gathered force was almost totally embracing. In bomb-ravaged big cities, conditions by March 1945 were intolerable, though the countryside, for all its privations, fared better. The misery was near universal as people simply awaited the end of the war, unable to do anything to hasten it, left to their fate to face the continued bombing and the inroads of the enemy, with all the uncertainty, anxiety and—in the east—downright fear that entailed. The only hope was that the war would soon end and that the British and Americans would arrive before the Russians.⁶⁶ A graphic display of feeling in one Alpine village, said to mirror ‘the true attitude of the people’, was the refusal of the soldiers, Volkssturm men and civilians assembled for Heroes’ Memorial Day on 11 March to return the ‘Sieg Heil’ to the Fuhrer at the end of the Wehrmacht commander’s speech.⁶⁷ The SD summed up attitudes at the end of March: no one wanted to lose the war, but no one believed Germany could now win it; the leadership was to blame (confidence in it had collapsed ‘like an avalanche’ in recent days), there was much criticism of the Party, ‘certain leaders’ and propaganda; the Fuhrer was still ‘the last hope’ of millions—a necessary ritualistic concession in such reports—but was more vehemently ‘by the day included in the question of confidence and the criticism’; finally, the feeling that fighting on was pointless was by now eating at the readiness to continue, at self-belief and at belief in other people.⁶⁸

Shortage of food was becoming a big issue in the cities. Owing to lack of transport, acute shortages— exacerbated by hoarding, especially by military personnel—had existed in Rhineland cities before the Allies arrived.⁶⁹ ‘Hunger, terror from the air and the military situation’ determined the popular mood, according to a report from Stuttgart in late March. ‘A large section of the population is already completely at an end as regards bread, fats and foodstuffs.’⁷⁰ There were serious worries about food supplies in Berlin, too, as rations were reduced again.⁷¹ Many claimed they already had nothing to eat—though ‘painted and powdered ladies wearing expensive furs and afternoon dresses’ were said still to frequent the few remaining restaurants.⁷² Anxieties were said to be mounting over likely future acute shortages. The Allies, it is