drive of the Party to mobilize all forces for the ‘last stand’, even when any semblance of rationality told them that all was lost. Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr of Wurttemberg, for instance, Party boss in the region since 1928, was determined, in the face of the evident longing of the people of the area for peace, that there would be no surrender in his domain. He threatened instant execution for anyone showing a white flag or obstructing German defences.98 Karl Wahl, the Gauleiter of Swabia, centred on the city of Augsburg in the west of Bavaria, had also run his province without interruption since 1928. He counted as one of the less extreme of the Gauleiter (an image he was keen to burnish after the war), and as a result did not stand high in the esteem of Hitler and Bormann.99 In mid-March, however, after the debacle of Remagen, Wahl recommended to Bormann the use of suicide pilots to fly their planes loaded with bombs into the Americans’ temporary supply bridges over the Rhine. A new heroism, not known in history, was needed, he claimed. ‘There are surely sufficient loyal followers of the Fuhrer who would be prepared to sacrifice themselves if they could save the people through their deed…. Is it not better that a few dozen choose to die than that, by not undertaking this essential emergency measure, tens of thousands must lose their lives …’100 Nothing came of the idea. Perhaps Wahl proposed it cynically, reckoning with its rejection but believing it would uphold his credentials as a fanatical backer of the Fuhrer’s cause. Even so, the proposal illustrates the stance that Germany’s ruling cohorts felt they had to display in the last weeks of the war. It was rapidly coming to be the rule of the desperadoes.
By the end of March Wahl was promoting in his Gau the creation by Goebbels and Labour Front leader Robert Ley of partisan organizations to engage in terroristic guerrilla activity to hinder the enemy advance (and at the same time to combat and deter defeatism), the so-called ‘Werwolf’ and ‘Freikorps “Adolf Hitler”’.101 The idea of a partisan-style movement had been first mooted in 1943, and it took preliminary organizational shape under the aegis of the SS in the autumn of the following year, when the name ‘Werwolf’—resonating in German tradition with connotations of ferocious defiance as well as shadowy lupine terror—was attached to it.102 Some guerrilla activity was carried out on the eastern front and to a lesser extent in the west in the winter months of 1944–5, though it could inflict no more than pinpricks on the advancing enemy. Its most notable activities were terroristic in nature. A number of American-appointed mayors in the newly occupied parts of western Germany were assassinated, for instance, most notably the Mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, in March 1945. Once the western front had crumbled and the Allies were pressing deep into Germany, underground resistance movements began to gain more importance in Nazi thinking, particularly when the Party leadership started to show interest in them. Martin Bormann saw their potential for tackling defeatism and possible insurgency within the Reich. But ‘Werwolf’ took shape, however dimly, in public consciousness only when Goebbels turned it into a propaganda enterprise, muscling in on the territory both of the Party Chancellery and of the SS, though with Hitler’s backing.
On 1 April, Werwolf Radio began broadcasting its tirades against the Allies, exultant news of real or imaginary acts of sabotage, and dark threats against ‘defeatists’ and ‘traitors’ in the homeland.103 Just before this, Ley, one of the zanier zealots in the last phase, had approached Hitler with the notion of creating an organization similar to that of the Werwolf, aimed at mobilizing young fanatical activists, equipped with little more than bicycles and bazookas, to shoot down approaching enemy tanks. Hitler agreed to the establishment of a Freikorps bearing his own name. Goebbels’ only objection was that it was under the leadership of a man he regarded as little more than a clown. He himself expected much of the partisan activity, chiefly ‘to hunt down every German traitor on the side of the western enemy’, though he prided himself that the Werwolf had caused horror in the enemy camp and aroused fears of a ‘partisan Germany’ that would cause unrest in Europe for years.104 This was an overestimation of Allied fears—though the Allies certainly took seriously the prospect of having to combat guerrilla warfare as they fought their way through Germany, and of the likelihood of a ‘national redoubt’ in the Alps where the Nazis would continue to hold out.105 It also grossly overrated the appetite for partisan activity among the exhausted German people.
Overall, the Werwolf and Freikorps ‘Adolf Hitler’ added up to little. Their victims—an estimated 3,000–5,000 killed (including continued post-war activity) were not insignificant in number.106 But for the Allies, they were—beyond the worries they initially aroused—no more than a minor irritant. And among the German population they had little support—though there was undoubtedly some appeal to fanaticized Hitler Youth members.107 Their main capacity was to terrorize, and this they did to the very last days of the war, when they were still engaged in sporadic and horrific murders of those wanting to avoid rather than promote pointless destruction as the Allies marched in. Ultimately, the partisan organizations of these weeks represented the regime’s lasting and massive capability for destructiveness. But just as great in these weeks was its capacity for self-destructiveness.
V
The deepening fissures in the foundations were now starting to show, too, among the regime leadership. One sign was the increasing desperation with which, even at this late hour, efforts were made to prompt a search for a political solution to the end of the war. As war fortunes had plummeted, leading Nazis—among them Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Goring and even Himmler—had pondered seeking a negotiated exit route from the path leading inexorably towards Germany’s doom. But whenever tentative suggestions had been made for exploring an opening, whether with the western powers or even with the arch-enemy, Bolshevik Russia, Hitler had been dismissive. He persisted with his dogmatic stance that negotiations were carried out from a position of strength, so could only follow a major German military success. The Ardennes offensive had been a last attempt to acquire such a bargaining position. Since then, the calamitous cave-in on the eastern front followed by the disastrous collapse in the west as the Allies pushed over the Rhine and Mosel meant that hopes of acquiring any sort of worthwhile negotiating position became more illusory by the day. Even at the beginning of March, Hitler purported to believe— or at least held to the fiction—that the Rhine could be held, the Soviets pushed back, and some sort of deal then done with Stalin.108 He was shrewd enough to know how unrealistic this was, even before the Rhine was crossed. Any negotiated end would, in any case, have inevitably meant Hitler’s own end, as he well knew. Negotiations would now more than ever have amounted to capitulation. This would have upturned everything that had driven his political ‘career’: that there would be no repeat of the ‘shameful’ capitulation of 1918.
Hitler retained at the core an extraordinary inner consistency—a dogmatic inflexibility that had terrible consequences for his country. Refusal to contemplate negotiations was for him both logically consistent and easy since his own life was forfeit anyway whether Germany capitulated or fought on. It was not that he worked out a ‘choreography’ of downfall.109 It was quite simply that there was no way out. With the war lost (as even he, inwardly, by now recognized) there could be no possible alternative in his mind to fighting on to the last. Going down in glory was for him, wedded to the heroic myths of the Germanic past, inconceivably greater than the ‘coward’s’ way out of surrender—and negotiations from weakness amounted to the same thing. The ‘heroism’ would set an example for later generations, as he emphasized to Goebbels.110 To his soldiers, he underlined once again on Heroes’ Memorial Day in mid-March: ‘The year 1918 will… not repeat itself.’111
Of the top-ranking Nazi leadership below Hitler, only Goebbels, still the worshipping acolyte, was prepared to follow the same line to its logical conclusion. He had at numerous points wanted to negotiate. But after the Allies crossed the Rhine, he was clear-sighted enough to see that Germany’s last hope of a political settlement had collapsed.112 His decision, as he told Hitler in early March, that he, his wife Magda and their six children would stay in Berlin come what may was consistent with his view that fighting on with honour was all that was left.113
He was scornful when he heard, early in March, that Ribbentrop—whom he utterly despised (a sentiment that unified the otherwise scarcely harmonious Nazi leadership)—was making overtures to the western powers. He was then irritated when these led to exaggerated stories in the western press, but full of derision when the ‘abortive escapade’ predictably came to nothing. At least it was plain, he remarked, ‘that hopes of an internal revolution in Germany against National Socialism or the person of the Fuhrer are illusory’.114
Even now, however, Ribbentrop had not wholly given up. In mid-March, immediately following this failed attempt, he summoned Dr Werner Dankwort, deputy ambassador in Stockholm, to fly back to Berlin. He told an incredulous Dankwort that it was now a matter of gaining time to unleash the new weapons, long in preparation but
