The End

the time—of a lost war, and of an imminent end that had to follow his own death. Since he could never contemplate surrender, as long as he lived the immense suffering and destruction of the war would continue. And since he would not allow himself to be captured, suicide was the only way out. His monstrous ego had led him long since to conclude that the German people had proved themselves unworthy of him. Their defeat had shown them to be weak. They did not deserve to survive. He could weep no tears for them. But he had yet to decide when and where to end his own life.

For those in his entourage, who saw him on a daily basis, his authority remained utterly unquestioned. Beyond the bunker, deep below the garden of the Reich Chancellery in the centre of Berlin, that he had made his last home since returning from the western front in mid-January, it was a different matter. The Reich itself had drastically shrunk. Goebbels pointed out on 9 April that German possessions were by now reduced to little more than a narrow band running southwards from Norway to the Adriatic coast of northern Italy.⁵ Much of what had been the Reich was by now under enemy occupation and beyond Hitler’s reach. And for most ordinary people in areas still under German rule, Hitler had long been a shadowy presence, someone encountered only through the occasional proclamation or newsreel pictures—though they were aware that as long as he lived there would be no end to their misery. For the Gauleiter, the regional rulers of the Reich, his writ was ceasing to run. It was not that they thought of openly challenging his authority. They had been his loyal viceroys for years, the pivot of his power in the provinces. And even now the consequences of any rebellious acts were to be feared. But huge communications problems and the advances of the western Allies meant that control from Berlin was scarely possible any longer. They had to tackle the situation confronting them directly, not await often unrealistic and impracticable orders from Berlin. In any case, it was obvious that Germany could hold out at best for only a week or two longer. Most of Hitler’s henchmen thought of little beyond saving their skins. Few of them contemplated leaping into the funeral pyre with their Leader.

As Nazi rule disintegrated ever more rapidly and fragmentation took the place of any semblance of centralized governance, the regime increasingly ‘ran amok’.⁶ Police, SS, and regional and local Party officials took matters into their own hands in the ferocious repression of anything hinting at rebellion or attempts to prevent senseless last-minute destruction. ‘Internal enemies’ were at extreme risk as Nazi desperadoes turned on them in the last agony of the regime, determined to exact revenge for their hostility, and to ensure that they would not be able to exult in triumph at the downfall of Nazism. And the fate that had befallen the prisoners of the concentration camps in the east was inflicted upon those in the remainder of the Reich, forced out of the horrendous hellholes and, in one final spurt of intense terror, dragooned onto seemingly aimless death marches. Now, as before, as the regime visibly fell apart its leaders in the Party and in the military lacked both the unity of spirit and will and the organizational capacity—which the Italian Fascist leaders had exercised in toppling Mussolini in July 1943—to confront Hitler and try, even at the final hour, to halt Germany’s descent into the abyss. The last act in the drama remained, therefore, to be played out.

II

With the loss of the Rhine front in March, any lingering logic to continuing the war in the west had evaporated. Nevertheless, the generals fought on. Keitel and Jodl in the High Command of the Wehrmacht and the Commander-in-Chief West, Field-Marshal Kesselring, had believed, so they later claimed, to the end of March that they could prevent the total collapse of the front on the Rhine and stabilize for a while the position in the west.⁷ The only faint rationality was presumably the old one of buying time for the western Allies to recognize that their true enemy lay in the east, bringing the collapse of the ‘unholy’ coalition with the Soviet Union and allowing the remnants of the Wehrmacht to find new purpose by joining with the western powers against the Red Army. If that did represent the thinking at the time, it was by now even more obviously the mere pipe dream it had always been. With victory so close, the last thing on the minds of Roosevelt and Churchill was breaking with the Soviet allies who continued to bear the brunt of the human losses in the fight to crush Hitler’s regime.

The total collapse in the west was unstoppable. The swift American advance, once US troops had consolidated positions over the Rhine, had driven wedges between Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr and the Army Groups H to its north and G to the south. By 2 April, Model’s forces, still numerically strong but with weak heavy weaponry, were cut off in the Ruhr and could be supplied only from the air. Two days later, the American 9th Army began its attack to destroy the surrounded German forces. They had to surmount initial fierce resistance, but the outcome was never in doubt. Mayors of some major cities, encouraged by leading industrialists and backed by Social Democrats, Communists and other anti-Nazi groups, emerging from years of suppression, surrendered without a fight. Duisburg, Essen, Solingen, Bochum and Mulheim fell without inflicting further unnecessary suffering on populations deprived of the most basic amenities and forced to dwell in cellars, bunkers and bombed-out buildings. In contrast, fighting continued for four days before Hamm was taken and Dortmund eventually fell only after being encircled then stormed by powerful American forces on 13 April.⁸ By this time, Model had reported that about two-thirds of his army lacked weapons. Troops were now deserting in droves, simply disappearing into the woods or the ruined cities, and a number of commanders surrendered their units.

American forces had in the meantime advanced deep into central Germany. By the middle of April they had pushed into Thuringia, taking Erfurt, Weimar and Jena, from where they pressed south towards Coburg and Bayreuth, as well as advancing into Saxony to the outskirts of Halle, Chemnitz and Leipzig and to the north-west, capturing Hanover and Braunschweig. By 11 April they had reached the Elbe. There was no longer a German front to speak of. Continued fighting was, nevertheless, sporadically fierce and the Americans still encountered pockets of tenacious resistance. As in the Ruhr, the civic officials of numerous towns and cities preferred surrender to senseless destruction. Gotha, Gottingen and Weimar were among those that capitulated without a fight. In Magdeburg, by contrast, the refusal of the city’s military commandant to surrender on 17 April prompted a devastating attack by 350 planes the same afternoon before the last resistance faded the following day.

To the north, the British and Canadians made slower progress against the still relatively strong forces of Blaskowitz’s Army Group H. But by 10 April the British had reached Celle, north-east of Hanover, and, further north, reached the Weser, south of Bremen, while the Canadians had forced their way northwards through the Netherlands almost to the coast. The major North Sea ports and links to Denmark and Norway remained, however, in German hands and the Wehrmacht in the north-west constituted one of the last relatively intact bases of power for the Nazi regime.

In southern Germany, the situation was more ominous. Hitler dismissed Colonel-General of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group G, on 2 April, after he had wanted to retreat to the south and south-east. His replacement, General Friedrich Schulz, tried to implement Hitler’s orders to hold out for two to three weeks to gain vital time, so it was claimed, to introduce jet-planes which would transform the military situation, and pressed all available forces into a display of fanatical resistance in the area of Aschaffenburg, on the Main. Until the middle of the month, he succeeded in blocking the American advance until he was outflanked by the 3rd US Army heading south from Thuringia, at which the retreat of Army Group G turned into flight. American and French troops had meanwhile advanced towards Stuttgart. Heilbronn, an important railway junction on the eastern bank of the river Neckar, was taken only after intense fighting. The town was defended by a relatively heavy concentration of Wehrmacht troops supported by Volkssturm contingents. Its citizens, terrorized by a fanatical Nazi leadership, had been unable, as in many other places, to instigate moves to capitulate without a struggle. The result was that Heilbronn suffered a week’s bitter but futile fighting before the inevitable surrender. That was the exception. Most places were able to engineer a surrender and avoid being blown to smithereens in a senseless attempt to hold out.

The French had easily taken Karlsruhe and other towns in Baden without a struggle, though for reasons still unclear they almost completely destroyed Freudenstadt in the Black Forest. By the middle of the month they were set to attack Freiburg, which fell to them with little fighting on 21 April. Stuttgart, the capital city of Wurttemberg, was surrendered the next day without a struggle, despite the insistence of the Gauleiter on a fight to the last, after the Nazi leaders had fled. Prominent anti-Nazis had managed to persuade the mayor, a long-standing Nazi himself, to spare the city pointless destruction. The French swiftly took control of Stuttgart and the surrounding areas. For local inhabitants, fear of the Nazis—who in most cases skedaddled—turned into anxiety about the French