The End

Many mayors of towns and even local Party leaders behaved responsibly in defying demands to fight on. This could, however, bring savage reprisals if local desperadoes—Party fanatics or SS men, usually—gained the upper hand. In other instances, regime zealots still controlled the local levers of power and condemned inhabitants of towns or villages to unnecessary death and destruction in the final hours before occupation—and before, as a rule, they themselves fled at the last minute. There was no clear pattern.

In many eastern areas, the approach of such a feared enemy brought not thoughts of handing over a town or village without a fight, but panic and attempts to flee—usually after Party representatives, knowing what awaited them if they fell into Soviet hands, had abandoned them. Cottbus in Brandenburg was one of many such examples. Almost all the civilians in the town and surrounding area fled westwards in the days before the Soviet assault on Cottbus began on 21 April. By the early hours of the next morning, all the regular troops, including an SS panzer unit, had pulled out, destroying bridges as they went. Only the Volkssturm and a few groups of ‘stragglers’ remained to defend the town. The last 200 soldiers or Volkssturm men fled that day. ‘That was the last of the German Wehrmacht that I saw,’ recalled one eyewitness. The Party Kreisleiter also vanished. The ‘fortress commandant’ in Cottbus accepted that without regular troops the town was indefensible. This decision, and the speed of the Red Army’s advance, meant that the last act in the fall of the town came quickly and without further fighting or additional pointless destruction (though Soviet soldiers set on fire houses in which they found Nazi symbols).⁸⁶

The fate of a village or town depended heavily upon the stance of the combat commandant and the actions of prominent citizens. The lovely university town of Greifswald, close to the Pomeranian coast, was fortunate in avoiding destruction. The rector of the university, a fifteenth-century foundation, and a small group of professors and prominent citizens were able to gain the backing of the combat commandant for the surrender of the town to the Soviets without a fight, despite the insistence of the Kreisleiter that it be defended even if it held up the Red Army for only an hour. Without the support of the combat commandant (who encouraged citizens to put out white flags from their homes), the Party officials in the town were powerless.⁸⁷

In western Germany, probably more than in eastern areas, the collapsing control of the regime offered possibilities, despite the terror, for groups of citizens, women often prominent among them, sometimes led by local ‘worthies’ such as priests or doctors, to take the initiative to prevent the destruction of their townships. They could, if they were fortunate, win support from the mayor or other local government officials and win over the combat commandant.⁸⁸ Much hinged upon the individuals concerned, their readiness to take action, the stance of the local Party officials, and the presence of the SS or Wehrmacht troops insistent upon terrorizing any seen as ‘defeatists’. In Stuttgart, the mayor, Dr Karl Strolin, himself a Nazi, was persuaded by anti-Nazi local notables to ignore the demands of the Gauleiter of Wurttemberg, Wilhelm Murr, who was fanatically determined to fight on and punish any who stood in his way. Strolin, gaining the support of the new combat commandant’s superior and through him the Wehrmacht commander in the area, opened clandestine negotiations with the Allies. On 22 April Stuttgart was surrendered without a struggle.⁸⁹

On occasion, direct action prevented the worst. In the picturesque small town of Bad Windsheim in Lower Franconia, in the most spectacular of a number of demonstrations led by women against the destruction of their towns, 200–300 women, some of them with their children, protested in early April about the decision of the local military commander to hold out against the imminent arrival of strong American forces.⁹⁰ After a tense confrontation, Bad Windsheim eventually fell without being subjected to total destruction and heavy loss of life. Such courageous protests were, however, not always effective. In Lahr, in the south of Baden, a large group of women in rebellious mood, hurling insults at Hitler and the Party, persuaded a delegation of the town’s officials to seek agreement from the local Wehrmacht commandant to surrender without a fight. Waiting for the return of the delegation, the women hoisted white flags throughout the town, and started the bell tolling to signal surrender. Their hopes were premature. The delegation returned empty-handed. The SS commandant insisted on the defence of Lahr, warning the women that if the white flags were not withdrawn that evening his own men would open fire on the town. Instead of surrender, battle raged throughout the night and into the next day before the town fell to the French, who then looted houses and shops, saying that the SS had behaved worse in France.⁹¹

Such actions to try to avoid futile destruction when all was obviously lost could provoke a drastic response. Hundreds of German citizens fell victim to uncontrolled violence in the last weeks of the Nazi regime. Examples could be multiplied without difficulty.⁹² Following the women’s demonstration in Bad Windsheim, for instance, one woman, wrongly selected (probably because of her reputation as a critic of the NSDAP) as the ringleader by a hit-squad sent down by the Gestapo in Nuremberg, was cold-bloodedly shot in front of her husband and daughter and a notice pinned to her body announcing that ‘a traitor has been executed’.⁹³ In Schwabisch Gmund, a small town in Wurttemberg not far from Stuttgart, the Kreisleiter and combat commandant had two men executed just before midnight on 19 April, hours before the Americans entered the town without a fight. One of the men was known to have been an opponent of the Nazis since 1933, when he had been arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets and returned from his stay in a concentration camp a changed person, psychiatrically disturbed. The other was a former soldier, no longer fit to fight after a serious injury. In a heated argument about handing over the city or fighting on, with the certainty of the destruction of the lovely town with its beautiful medieval minster, they had been heard to shout, probably under the influence of alcohol, ‘Drop dead Hitler. Long live Stauffenberg. Long live freedom.’ The two were removed from their police cells late at night, taken to a wood at the edge of the town and shot dead. The local Nazi representatives were ensuring, with their last act of power, that long-standing opponents would not live to enjoy their downfall. Even as the executions were taking place, the Kreisleiter and his entourage were preparing to flee from the town.⁹⁴

An extreme case was the arbitrary shooting dead of four civilians, among them a pastor, in a suburb of Heilbronn on 6 April when the local Kreisleiter, Richard Drauz, and a group of fanatics (three of them in the Volkssturm) fleeing by car together with him as the Americans approached came across a street in which white flags hung from several houses. In a rage, he stopped the car, ordering his men ‘out, shoot, shoot everybody’. Drauz’s accomplices arbitrarily shot down their victims, men and women, within a frenzied few minutes, narrowly missing several others, before driving off.⁹⁵

Others fell victim not to random shootings or the actions of hit-squads, but to the brutal summary ‘justice’ of the ‘flying court martial’. One such mobile court travelled through parts of southern Germany in a grey Mercedes under the leadership of Major Erwin Helm, ‘a special kind of berserker’, proud of an earlier head-wound that had left part of his brain protruding through his skull. Passing close to the village of Zellingen in Lower Franconia at the end of March, Helm’s attention was drawn by the commander of the local Volkssturm battalion, a doctor, to a sixty-year-old farmer, Karl Weiglein, who had allegedly made a sarcastic comment during a pep-talk for the battalion, then later remarked that those responsible for blowing up the nearby bridge over the Main should be hanged. Helm’s instant reaction, before hearing any details of the incidents, was that Weiglein should be executed. When the hurriedly constituted court martial—there was no defender—took too long over its deliberations, Helm threatened to proclaim the sentence himself and prepared the place of execution while the ‘court’ was meeting. As soon as the inevitable death sentence was pronounced, he hung a notice round Weiglein’s neck: ‘Sentenced to Death for Sabotage of the Wehrmacht and Mutiny’. In a particularly sadistic move, Weiglein was hanged from a branch of the pear-tree just beneath the window of his farmhouse while insults were hurled at his horror-struck wife.⁹⁶

Walter Fernau, an NSFO and member of Helm’s squad who had prosecuted Weiglein and demanded the death sentence, still justified it many years later. ‘I really cannot say to you’, he told his interviewer decades after the event, ‘that at the time I thought that was too harsh.’ He took the view that Weiglein was guilty even though the case against him was not proven. The situation necessitated harsh measures, he argued. There was also the deterrent effect. Helm said, Fernau claimed to recall, ‘that he has to be hanged and kept on display so that the Zellingen Volkssturm people see, well, if we step out of line we’ll get the same as him’. The court rightly, in his view, did not have powers to give prison sentences. A few months in prison while others were dying would have been unjust. From the first to the last day of belonging to Helm’s battalion, said Fernau, ‘I never had the sense that I had made myself guilty.’⁹⁷

Though anyone seen to stand in the regime’s way now ran the serious risk of summary execution, the main targets of the ‘crimes of the last phase’ were nevertheless not random, but real or imagined opponents of the regime, defeatists, ‘subversives’, supposed ‘shirkers’, presumed deserters or ‘cowards’, or anyone welcoming the end of Nazism or the arrival of the enemy. In this sense, the violence differed from the style of savagely arbitrary