lasting almost six years is thereby over.’ The ‘unique achievement of front and homeland’ would, it stated, ‘find its final appreciation in a later, just verdict of history’.129 The war, caused primarily by Germany’s expansionist aims and ultimately spreading to most parts of the globe, had left over 40 million people dead in the European conflict alone (leaving aside those killed in the Far East)—more than four times the mortalities of the First World War, once seen as the war to end all wars.
V
Oddly, the capitulation was not quite the end for the Third Reich. The Donitz administration, an ever more pointless curiosity, was allowed to continue for a further fifteen days in office, its sovereignty confined to a tiny enclave in Flensburg. SS-uniforms were swiftly discarded and civilian dress adopted. A couple of ministers, Backe and Dorpmuller, were ordered to fly to Eisenhower’s headquarters to provide advice on the first steps of reconstruction.130 Keitel, still Chief of the OKW, was arrested on 13 May and Jodl, who three days after he had signed the capitulation in Rheims was belatedly and by now somewhat pointlessly awarded the Oak Leaves to go with his Knight’s Cross, took over the running of a largely redundant OKW. Government business went on—if in a surreal way. It was little more than the pretence of government. Donitz and his remaining colleagues discussed the issue of the national flag, because the swastika was banned by the enemy powers. Another emblem of Hitler’s Reich was at stake. Since pictures of the Fuhrer had been removed or defaced by members of the Allied forces the question arose as to whether as a preventive measure they should all be taken down. Donitz was opposed since, until now, the incidents had all been localized. Three days later he relented in part, conceding their removal in rooms where there were meetings with members of the occupying forces.131
Deprived of all effectiveness, the cabinet still felt it had ‘a responsibility to help the German people where it could’.132 This was hardly at all. A cabinet meeting took place every morning at 10 a.m. in an old schoolroom. It seemed to Speer as if Krosigk, the acting head of government, was making up for all the years under Hitler in which there had not been a single cabinet meeting. Members of the government had to bring their own glasses and cups from their rooms. They discussed, among other things, how to re-form the cabinet and whether to include a Church minister. Donitz, still addressed as ‘Grand-Admiral’, was driven backwards and forwards from his apartment 500 metres away in one of Hitler’s big Mercedes that had somehow found its way to Flensburg.133 This was not the only element of continuity with Hitler’s regime that the Grand-Admiral held to. At a meeting with Admiral-General von Friedeburg on 15 May, Donitz stipulated that ‘defamatory orders’ to remove medals were to be refused, that the soldier should be proud of his service for the Wehrmacht and people during the war, and that ‘the true people’s community created by National Socialism must be maintained’. The ‘madness of the parties as before 1933 must never again arise’.134
On 15 May Speer wrote to Krosigk asking to be released from his duties as Acting Minister of Economics and Production, stating that a new Reich government was needed, untainted by any connection with the Hitler regime. He still cherished hopes that he might be seen as useful to the Americans.135 He received no reply, and two days later, described as ‘Minister Speer’, was still involved in the administration.136 The entire cabinet considered resigning, but did not do so. The prime consideration was the ‘Reich idea’ and the question of sovereignty. State Secretary Stuckart, now heading the Ministry of the Interior, produced a memorandum stipulating that unconditional surrender did not affect the further existence of the Reich as a state under international law. Germany had not ceased to exist as a state. Moreover, Donitz had been legally appointed by the Fuhrer as head of state and therefore Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, whose oath to Hitler had passed to him automatically. Donitz could only resign by appointing a successor. As regards legal theory, the Reich continued in existence.137
The pantomime of the rump Donitz regime did not last long. On 23 May, Donitz, Friedeburg and Jodl were suddenly summoned to the temporary headquarters of the Allied Control Commission, located on the steamship
The Third Reich was over. The bankrupt concern was liquidated. The long process of reckoning was about to begin. But the debts for crimes against humanity of such magnitude would not, and could not, ever be repaid.
VI
For Germany itself—leaving aside the untold misery and suffering and vast numbers of war casualties suffered by the citizens of other countries—a colossal price was paid for continuing the war to the bitter end. In the ten months between July 1944 and May 1945 far more German civilians died than in the previous years of the war, mostly through air raids and in the calamitous conditions in the eastern regions after January 1945. In all, more than 400,000 were killed and 800,000 injured by Allied bombing, which had destroyed more than 1.8 million homes and forced the evacuation of almost 5 million people, the vast majority of the devastation being inflicted in the last months of the war.139 The Soviet invasion then occupation of the eastern regions of Germany after January 1945 resulted in the deaths—apart from the immeasurable suffering caused and the deportation of many German citizens to an uncertain fate in the Soviet Union—of around half a million civilians.140
German military losses in the last phase of the war were immense, as high in the last ten months of the war as in the four years to July 1944. Had the attack on Hitler’s life in July succeeded and the war then been promptly brought to an end, the lives of around 50 per cent of the German soldiers who died would have been saved. A total of 5.3 million servicemen out of the 18.2 million who served in the army, Luftwaffe, navy and Waffen-SS lost their lives during the entire course of the conflict. Of these, 2.7 million died down to the end of July 1944. As many as 49 per cent of deaths, or 2.6 million (more than 1.5 million of them on the eastern front), were killed in the last ten months. Towards the very end 300,000–400,000 were dying each month.141
In the ruins of their country, people could look only dimly and with great foreboding into an uncertain future. Enormous relief that the war was finally over mingled with dismay at the catastrophe that had engulfed Germany and anxiety about life under enemy control. For the vast majority, the victory of the Allies was not seen as liberation. And for those in central and eastern Germany, Soviet rule was a fearful prospect. Passivity and compliance marked the behaviour of the subdued German population as the victors took over. After the ferocious pounding the country and its people had taken over previous months, there was no appetite for the sort of insurrectionist guerrilla activity that so often meets an occupying force.142 Probably, too, a conditioned readiness to comply with authority played its part. Most importantly, the existential demands of daily life did not alter with the capitulation. The drain on energies through doing no more than surviving in the ruins, getting by in chaotic circumstances, finding lost loved ones, mourning personal losses and trying to pick up the pieces of broken families and homes, was enormous.
As the heavy hand of occupation started to be felt, deep recriminations began to be voiced and the arrests of tens of thousands of Nazi functionaries and others implicated in the Hitler regime gathered pace.143 Germans in high places and low were meanwhile already laying the foundations of their apologia, attempting to establish distance between themselves and the crimes of Nazism. Claims for the exoneration of the Wehrmacht were under way in Flensburg. Keitel, just prior to his arrest, had asserted that the Wehrmacht had had nothing to do with the SS (apart from the Waffen-SS) or SD, and bore no responsibility for them. And as news and what was described as ‘mounting enemy propaganda about conditions in German concentration camps’ spread, Donitz and Jodl were among those who saw the need of a public statement ‘that neither the German Wehrmacht nor the German people had knowledge of these things’.144 The myth of the ‘good’ Wehrmacht, which had
