the absurdly polarized dogma of total victory or total downfall. It goes to the very nature of Hitler’s rule, and to the structures and mentalities that upheld it, most of all within the power elite.
The character of Hitler’s dictatorship is most appropriately depicted as a form of ‘charismatic rule’.28 Structurally, it resembled in some ways a modern form of absolutist monarchy. Like an absolute monarch, Hitler was surrounded by fawning courtiers (even if his ‘court’ lacked the splendour of Versailles or Sanssouci); he depended upon satraps and provincial grandees, bound to him through personal loyalty, to implement directives and see that his writ ran; and he relied upon trusted field-marshals (handsomely rewarded with large donations of money and property) to run his wars. The analogy rapidly fades, however, when crucial components of the modern state—an elaborate bureaucracy and mechanisms (here chiefly in the hands of a monopoly Party) to orchestrate popular support and control—are included. For an important part of the edifice, crucially bolstering Hitler’s authority and creating for him untouchable, almost deified status, towering above all the institutions of the Nazi state, was the mass plebiscitary backing that a combination of propaganda and repression helped to produce. However manufactured the image was, there can be no doubt of Hitler’s genuine and immense popularity among the great mass of the German people down to the middle of the war. From the first Russian winter of 1941, nevertheless, everything points to the fact that this popularity was sagging. From the following winter—the winter of the Stalingrad debacle, for which he was directly held responsible—it was in steep decline. In terms of mass appeal, therefore, Hitler’s ‘charisma’ was terminally undermined as the war turned sour and the defeats mounted.
Structurally, however, his ‘charismatic rule’ was far from at an end. Even compared with other authoritarian regimes, Hitler’s was personalized in the extreme, and had been from the outset, back in 1933. No politburo, war council, cabinet (since 1938), military junta, senate or gathering of ministers existed to mediate or check his rule. Nothing approximated, for instance, to the Fascist Grand Council which triggered Mussolini’s deposition in 1943. A vital hallmark of this personalized ‘charismatic rule’ had been, from the start, the erosion and fragmentation of government. By mid-1944, when this book begins—at a point of intense shock and internal restructuring in the immediate aftermath of the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944—the process of fragmentation had become greatly expanded and magnified. No unified body posed a challenge to Hitler. Put another way, the structures and mentalities of ‘charismatic rule’ continued even when Hitler’s popular appeal was collapsing. They were sustained in the main not by blind faith in Hitler. More important, for arch-Nazis, was the feeling that they had no future without Hitler. This provided a powerful negative bond: their fates were inextricably linked. It was the loyalty of those who had burnt their boats together and now had no way out. For many of those who by this time were lukewarm if not outrightly hostile to Nazism, it was often as good as impossible to separate support for Hitler and his regime from the patriotic determination to avoid defeat and foreign occupation. Hitler represented, after all, the fanatical defence of the Reich. Removing Hitler (as was attempted in July 1944) could be, and was, seen by many, in a rehashing of the 1918 myth, as a ‘stab in the back’. Not least, as everyone was aware, the Dictator still had a ruthless apparatus of enforcement and repression at his disposal. Fear (or at least extreme caution) played an obvious part in the behaviour of most. Even the highest in the land knew they needed to tread warily. Whatever the range of motives, the effect was the same: Hitler’s power was sustained to the very end.
As the end neared, and central government fragmented almost completely, life-and-death decisions passed ever further down the hierarchy to the regional, district and local levels to the point that individuals like the military commandant in Ansbach acquired arbitrary and lethal executive power. But this radicalization at the grass roots, crucial though it was to the mounting irrationality of the final phase, would have been impossible without the encouragement, authorization and ‘legitimation’ provided from above, from the leadership of a regime in its death- throes facing no internal challenge.
Perhaps the most fundamental element in trying to find answers to the question of how and why the regime held out to the point of total destruction revolves, therefore, around the structures and mentalities of ‘charismatic rule’. Linking such an approach to a differentiated assessment of the ways in which ordinary Germans responded to the rapidly gathering Armageddon offers the potential to reach a nuanced assessment of why Nazi rule could continue to function to the end.
The chapters that follow proceed chronologically, beginning with the aftermath of the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944—a caesura in the governmental structures of the Third Reich—and extending to the capitulation on 8 May 1945. By combining structural history and the history of mentalities, and dealing with German society from above and below, the narrative approach has the virtue of being able to depict in precise fashion the dramatic stages of the regime’s collapse, but at the same time its astonishing resilience and desperate defiance in sustaining an increasingly obvious lost cause. The focus throughout is exclusively on Germany: what the Allies, often puzzled themselves by the German willingness to carry on fighting under hopeless circumstances, were thinking, planning and doing forms no part of the analysis. Of course, this was scarcely unimportant for the course of the war, and what happened on the battlefield in the various theatres of war was ultimately decisive. But this is no military history, and the relevant stages of the Allied advance on Germany, east and west, are tersely summarized, primarily in order to provide a framework for the subsequent assessment.
Since we know the end of the story, it is hard not to ask why contemporaries did not see as obviously as we do in retrospective: that the war was plainly lost, at the absolute latest by the time the western Allies had consolidated their landings in France and the Red Army had advanced deep into Poland in the summer of 1944. But, until surprisingly late, that was not how they did see it. Certainly, they knew that the great vistas of 1941–2 could not be realized. But the German leadership, not just Hitler, thought there was still something to be gained from the war. Strength of will and radical mobilization, they thought, could prolong the conflict until new ‘miracle weapons’ came along. The war effort would be sustained so far that the Allies would look for a negotiated way out of mounting losses as advances were blocked or reversed. A split between east and west would materialize, and Germany would still be able to hold on to some territorial gains and, eventually with western aid, turn against the common enemy of Soviet Communism. Such hopes and illusions, if harboured by a rapidly dwindling number of Germans (especially once the Red Army reached the Oder in late January 1945), lingered almost to the end. So even in the final, terrible phase of death and devastation, faced with insuperable odds, the fight went on amid a mounting series of regional collapses, driven by increasingly irrational but self-sustaining destructive energy.
Trying to explain how this could be so—how the regime, torn apart on all sides, could continue to operate until the Red Army was at the portals of the Reich Chancellery—is the purpose of this book.
1. Shock to the System
It takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason.
I
It was the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. By late July 1944, the D-Day landings of the western Allies that had taken place in Normandy on 6 June 1944 had been consolidated. Troops and arms were being shipped over to the Continent in ever greater numbers. Direct ground attack on the Reich itself was now in prospect. On the eastern front, the Red Army, in its massive offensive ‘Operation Bagration’, launched just over a fortnight after D-Day, had smashed through the defences of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre (an immense formation of 48 divisions, in four armies, and pivotally placed over a 700-kilometre stretch of the enormous front), inflicting huge losses, and had advanced more than 300 kilometres. To the south, Rome had fallen to the Allies and German troops were engaged in fierce rearguard fighting near Florence. Meanwhile, ever more German towns and cities were exposed to relentless devastation from the air. With resources and manpower stretched to the limit and hugely inferior to the combined might of the enemy, now forcing back the Wehrmacht from the east, west and south, the writing was on the wall for the Hitler regime.
At least, that was how the western Allies saw it. They were confident that the war would be over by
