The End

perhaps in the Party Chancellery’s Munich office). The troops were worn down by the enemy superiority in materiel. The poor morale of ‘stragglers’ was evident. One group of thirty or so men had approached the enemy with white flags before being shot down by machine-gun fire from their own side. The population simply awaited its fate, cowering in the cellars and bunkers. He proudly reported that he had sent out some of his staff to organize the Werwolf, and that his Gau had managed to assemble within only a few weeks a regiment of tank-destroying troops from the Hitler Youth, who had fought courageously, though with big losses, so that one battalion was already nearly ‘wiped out’. He and the mayor of the city, Willi Liebel, had decided to stay in Nuremberg and fight rather than leave the city.⁷⁵ Next day, Nuremberg was under fire.

Holtz’s report to Hitler declared that ‘in these hours my heart beats more than ever in love and loyalty to you and the wonderful German Reich and people’, and ‘that the National Socialist idea will be victorious’, for which he was rewarded with the Golden Cross of the German Order, the highest honour of Party and state. Just before midnight on 19 April, Holz again wired Hitler—for the last time: ‘Our loyalty, our love, our lives belong to you, my Fuhrer. All our good wishes for your birthday’ (the next day). He refused to contemplate surrender and threatened even now to have anyone showing a white flag shot. On that day, 20 April, the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’ surrendered. Holz had just dispatched the local SA leader to fight his way through to report to Hitler ‘that we have defended Nuremberg to the last man’. His final act was to order the SS men in his company to open fire on some policemen who were trying to cross to the Americans. An absolute fanatic to the end, Holz was among a group that continued the fighting in the ruins of the police headquarters, where he was killed.⁷⁶

Farther east, Gauleiter Karl Hanke was coming to symbolize the genuine Nazi ‘hero’ in the beleaguered city of Breslau. The situation there was worsening daily. From the beginning of April, with the loss of the aerodrome at Gandau, even provisioning of the city from the air was no longer possible. Houses were bulldozed, inflicting further misery on local inhabitants, in order to construct an emergency air-strip. The living conditions of the population, still numbering more than 200,000, were meanwhile indescribable, and became almost impossible when non-stop bombing raids on Easter Monday, 2 April, obliterated practically the entire city centre.⁷⁷ They were paying a terrible price for Hanke’s decision in January to defend ‘Fortress Breslau’ to the last. In Nazi eyes, however, he signified the indomitable spirit that refused to capitulate.

For his personal leadership of the defence of Breslau, and to his great delight, Hitler bestowed upon the Gauleiter the Golden Cross of the German Order.⁷⁸ In mid-April, Albert Speer sent Hanke a personal letter effusively thanking him for his personal friendship, ‘for all that you have done for me’, and praising him for his ‘achievements as defender of Breslau’, through which he had ‘given much to Germany today’. ‘Your example,’ Speer went on, ‘yet to be recognized in its greatness, will later have the inestimable high value for the people of only few heroes of German history.’ He did not pity him, Speer concluded. ‘You are heading for a fine and honourable end to your life.’⁷⁹ The ‘hero’ had, however, no intention of going down with the city he had condemned to near total destruction. Hours before Breslau’s capitulation on 5 May, Hanke would make his escape in a Fieseler Storch, perhaps the only plane ever to leave the improvised air-strip in the city.⁸⁰

V

The brutal message which Bormann dispatched in Hitler’s name to members of the Party on 1 April clearly signalled, in its call to utter ruthlessness in demanding a fight to the last, the gathering desperation of the regime’s leadership:

After the collapse of 1918 we devoted ourselves with life and limb to the struggle for the right of existence of our people. Now the high point of our test has come: the danger of renewed enslavement facing our people demands our last and supreme effort. From now on the following applies: The fight against the enemy who has forced his way into the Reich is to be uncomprisingly conducted everywhere without pity. Gauleiter and Kreisleiter, other political leaders and heads of affiliates are to fight in their Gau and district, to conquer or to fall. Any scumbag who leaves his Gau when under attack without express order of the Fuhrer, anyone not fighting to the last breath, will be proscribed and treated as a deserter. Raise your hearts and overcome all weaknesses! Now there is only one slogan: conquer or fall! Long live Germany. Long live Adolf Hitler.⁸¹

It was a callous attempt at the final hour to turn back the tide. It could do nothing to stave off collapse as the inexorable military defeat grew closer by the day. Even so, in these last weeks it set the tone for the gathering wave of unbridled violence against the regime’s declared enemies as its control crumbled.

Even the regime’s high representatives were not immune from its venom. Gauleiter Fritz Wachtler—a prominent functionary in Thuringia almost since the time he joined the NSDAP in 1926, appointed Thuringian Minister of the Interior in 1933, and since 1935 Gauleiter of the Bayerische Ostmark with honorary status as an SS-Obergruppenfuhrer—had, as we saw, been unresponsive to missives from the Party Chancellery towards the end of the first week of April. This may have contributed to the readiness of Bormann and Hitler to believe the malicious report of his deputy that Wachtler had deserted his Gau. Whether communications difficulties prevented Wachtler from letting Fuhrer Headquarters know his position is unclear. He certainly did face major problems at the time. Bayreuth, the seat of his Gau headquarters, had been heavily bombed three times in early April, and by the middle of the month looked like a ghost-town. Most of the Volkssturm men, who had been mobilized to defend the city, fled, followed by the Kreisleiter and his staff, before American tanks reached the outskirts in the night of 13 April. The Party had by then effectively abdicated its power in the city, which was defended by no more than 200 or so soldiers under a ‘combat commandant’ (Kampfkommandant).

Wachtler also secretly left Bayreuth about the same time with his Gau staff to head south and take up residence in a hotel in Herzogau, a district of the small town of Waldmunchen, in the Upper Palatinate, close to the Czech border. It seems probable that Wachtler was transferring his command post rather than deserting. But his deputy and long-standing rival, Ludwig Ruckdeschel, who had himself transferred his base to Regensburg, chose not to see it like that. It appears that Ruckdeschel contacted Fuhrer Headquarters in Berlin, accusing Wachtler of desertion. In the early morning of 19 April, Ruckdeschel and a squad of 35 SS-men arrived at Wachtler’s hotel. Ruckdeschel ignored Wachtler’s plea that he had removed his staff to organize resistance from Waldmunchen, and without hesitation pronounced the death sentence. Screaming ‘dirty treason’, Wachtler was taken away, stood up against a nearby tree and immediately shot dead by a firing-squad. Ruckdeschel proclaimed that Wachtler had been thrown out of the Nazi Party and executed for cowardice in the face of the enemy, threatening any ‘scoundrel and traitor’ acting similarly with the same fate.⁸²

For ordinary citizens, compliance through fear of instant and arbitrary reprisals was a rational form of behaviour. Anyone showing the least sign of opposing the regime’s own death wish of senseless ‘holding out’ against impossible odds faced great peril. Himmler decreed on 3 April that ‘in a house in which a white flag appears, all males are to be shot’. He was responding to an initiative from the Party, referred to him by the OKW, which had recommended the burning down of any house showing a white flag.⁸³ On 12 April, the High Command of the Wehrmacht issued an order, signed by Keitel, Himmler and Bormann, that every town was to be defended to the last. Any offer or promise by the enemy should the town surrender was to be rejected out of hand. The assigned ‘combat commandant’ was personally responsible for ensuring that the defence of the town was carried out. Anyone acting against this order, or any official seeking to hinder the commandant in fulfilling his duty, would be sentenced to death. Publishing this order in Nuremberg, the Gauleiter and Reich Defence Commissar for Franconia, Karl Holz, added his own rider: ‘Every traitor hoisting a white flag will without fail be hanged. Every house where a white flag is hanging will be blown up or burnt down. Villages that raise white flags communally will be burnt down.’⁸⁴

Despite such uncompromising orders, backed by ruthless terror (even if the threat to burn down entire German villages does not appear to have been carried out), there were numerous cases of localized opposition. Few people wanted to end their lives in a futile show of ‘heroism’ or to see their homes and workplaces blown up senselessly. Whether they were able to avoid the worst of the destruction varied from place to place, depending on local conditions and the actions of those still holding the reins of power in their hands. Representatives of the dying regime in threatened areas—local government officials, Party functionaries, town commandants who were handed military control over a locality—did not behave uniformly. In western regions, localized power-struggles often decided whether a town was surrendered without a fight or went down in a hail of destruction.⁸⁵