Christmas.2 Viewed from Germany, it was a different matter. Here, attitudes about the state of the war and Germany’s prospects varied widely, whether at the elite level, among the civilian and military Reich leadership, or among the public on the ‘home front’ and the millions of men under arms. Defeatism, reluctant acceptance that the war was lost, realistic acknowledgement of overwhelming enemy strength, waning belief in Hitler, and fears for the future were more evident by the day. On the other hand, support for the regime, not just among Nazi fanatics, was still widespread. And many in high places and low still refused to contemplate the prospect of defeat. Their thinking ran along the following lines. The enemy—the unholy coalition of the western democracies and the Communist Soviet Union—could still be repulsed if the war effort could be revitalized; in the event of a serious reverse, the enemy could split apart; new, devastating weapons were on the way and would bring a sharp turn in war fortunes; and, if subjected to significant military setbacks, the Allies would be forced to entertain a settlement, leaving Germany some of her territorial gains and peace with honour. Such thoughts were by no means moribund in the summer of 1944.
Among the mass of the population, however, the predominant feeling in mid-July 1944 was one of mounting worry and anxiety. Whatever their carefully couched criticisms of the regime’s leaders (including Hitler himself) and, in particular, of the Nazi Party and its representatives, the great majority of ordinary citizens were still unhesitatingly loyal in their support for the war effort. The mood was anxious, not rebellious. There was no trace of anything similar to the growing unrest that eventually burst into open revolution in 1918, despite Hitler’s pathological fixation with the internal collapse of that year. There were contingency plans to cope with the possibility of an uprising by foreign workers (numbering by this time, together with prisoners of war, more than 7 million). But there was no serious expectation of revolution by the German population.
Regional reports of the SD (
Though overshadowed by events in the east, attitudes towards the western front were also gloomy, with widespread acknowledgement of the enemy’s overwhelming superiority in men and resources. There were still hopes of the promised ‘miracle weapons’, though earlier exaggerated expectations of the impact of the V1 missile in air raids on London had left disappointment and scepticism about propaganda claims. And the inability of the Luftwaffe to offer protection against the ‘terror raids’ which were taking place in broad daylight offered a constant source of anger, as well as constant and mounting anxiety. The collapse of the Wehrmacht in the east left many searching for both explanations and scapegoats. Reports from soldiers on leave of the morale of the troops, alleging their lack of belief in victory, and of the inability of their officers, used to material comfort in their rear positions, to provide proper defence, also had a negative impact on mood. And more and more families were receiving the dreaded visit from the local Party leader with the news that their loved one had fallen at the front. ‘How long can we still hold out?’ was a question frequently asked.3
At the other end of the opinion spectrum, among the regime’s elite, such views were unspoken, whether tacitly entertained or not. Leading Nazis continued to give their full support and loyalty to Hitler, not least since their own power was solely dependent upon his. But there were frustrations, as well as the continuous jockeying for position that was endemic to the Third Reich. Hermann Goring was still Hitler’s designated successor. His earlier popularity had, however, vanished, and, within the Nazi elite, his star had been waning for months in the light of the Luftwaffe’s failings. Hitler fell into repeated paroxysms of rage at the impotence of the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe to prevent the destruction of Germany’s cities. Characteristically, however, he was unwilling to dismiss Goring, conscious as usual of the loss of prestige this would constitute and the gift it would provide to enemy propaganda. Another who had lost his earlier prominence was the once influential Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose every prediction and initiative had proved catastrophically mistaken. He, too, was now little called upon—not least since there was, in effect, no longer any foreign policy to conduct.
As some Nazi paladins lost face, others profited from the adversity. Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, could exploit more than ever his constant proximity to Hitler, controlling the portals to the Dictator’s presence and serving as his master’s mouthpiece. Bormann, born in 1900, an unpretentious figure in his ill-fitting Party uniform, short, squat, bull-necked, with thin, receding hair, was hated and feared in equal measure by leading Nazis, well aware of his ruthlessness, capacity for intrigue, and his opportunities to influence Hitler. He had long been Hitler’s indispensable man behind the scenes, for years managing his private financial affairs and in the mid- 1930s organizing the building of the Berghof, the Dictator’s palatial retreat on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. His absolute trustworthiness in Hitler’s eyes was his prize asset. Bormann had risen almost unnoticed in the Party’s central office in Munich, where, through tireless energy and efficiency, along with the necessary ‘elbow power’, he attained mastery of the Party’s bureaucratic apparatus. He was, however, no simple functionary. He had been involved in anti-Semitic and paramilitary organizations in the 1920s before he found his way to Hitler, and had served time in prison for his involvement in a political murder. His ideological fanaticism never wavered to the end.
In 1929 he had married Gerda, herself a fanatical Nazi and daughter of the head of the Party Court (which adjudicated on matters of Party discipline), Walter Buch. Together they had ten children (nine of whom survived, all but one of them after the war becoming Catholics, one even a priest, despite—or because of—their parents’ radical detestation of the Church). The Bormanns appear, from their surviving letters, to have been devoted to each other. Yet the marriage was far from conventional. Gerda positively welcomed Martin’s news in January 1944 that he had succeeded in seducing the actress Manja Behrens, hoped that she would bear him a child, and even went so far as to draft a proposed law to legalize bigamy.
By this time Bormann was one of the most powerful men in Germany. In the immediate aftermath of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941, he had been the obvious choice to take over the running of the Party and, once Hitler made him head of the Party Chancellery, rapidly consolidated his control over its bureaucracy. His role as Hitler’s trusted factotum finally gained its formal recognition when in April 1943 he was granted the title of ‘Secretary of the Fuhrer’. As Germany’s fortunes declined, Bormann used his command of the Party’s central administration, backed by the fanatical Robert Ley, the Reich Organization Leader (and head of the German Labour Front), to reinvigorate the Party and extend its reach, underpinning his second source of power and making him a figure of crucial importance.4
There were limits, nevertheless, to Bormann’s power. He could not prevent other leading figures in the regime having direct access to Hitler and exerting their own influence on him. And even within the Party organization, he faced constraints. He was not wholly successful in extending his power over the forty or so regional Party bosses, the Gauleiter. Though nominally his subordinates, some of the Gauleiter, trusted ‘old fighters’ who had proved their worth since the early days of the Party, in many cases had a direct line to Hitler which limited Bormann’s control. One Gauleiter who epitomized the difficulties in imposing any centralized control—or any control at all, for that matter, even from the Wehrmacht authorities in his region—was Erich Koch, who ran his domain in East Prussia as if it were his personal fiefdom.5 Like most other Gauleiter, Koch had been appointed a Reich Defence Commissar, giving him extensive powers in the organization of civil defence and the possibility, therefore, which he readily exploited, to interfere in non-Party matters in his province. Already in mid-July 1944 Koch was using his direct access to Hitler to block a proposal by Goebbels, which the Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin had negotiated with the railway authorities, to evacuate from the endangered East Prussia around 170,000 Berliners who had taken refuge there from the bombing in the capital city. Koch gained Hitler’s approval to restrict the evacuation to 55,000 women and children from a small number of districts most threatened by Soviet air raids. It was the first of a number of interventions by Koch to prevent evacuation from his region, causing administrative confusion and, more importantly, with fateful consequences for East Prussians.6
The massive accretion of power by Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS, Chief of the German Police, Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, and Reich Minister of the Interior) had given him mastery of the regime’s entire elaborate repressive apparatus throughout occupied Europe. The sinister figure wielding such immense power was still only in his early forties, a strange, cranky individual—but also a fanatical ideologue. He
