The End

such currency for decades in post-war Germany, was being forged.

At the grass roots, a not dissimilar, if differently accentuated, process of dissociation from Nazism was under way. Everywhere, the symbols of Nazism, where they still survived, were rapidly destroyed. No one willingly admitted to having been an enthusiastic follower of the regime. Initially, there were numerous denunciations of those functionaries who, only a year or two earlier, had strutted arrogantly in their Nazi uniforms and acted like ‘little Hitlers’ in their localities.¹⁴⁵ But as the ‘big-shots’ were gradually rounded up, the ‘major war criminals’ put on trial and the attention of the Allies shifted to the process of denazification at lower levels, the impression was increasingly given that hardly anyone had really backed the regime, but had at best under duress gone along with policies dictated by the tyranny of Hitler and his henchmen.

‘Everybody pulls away from Adolf, nobody took part. Everybody was persecuted, and nobody denounced anybody,’ was the cynical assessment of a young Berlin woman in May 1945, listening to voices in the queues for vegetables and water.¹⁴⁶ A report written in June 1946 by the Lutheran pastor in Berchtesgaden, a predominantly Catholic district nestling below the Obersalzberg, Nazi Germany’s ‘holy mountain’ where Hitler had built his Alpine palace, expressed sentiments that were far from uncommon in the months after the demise of the Third Reich. The pastor spoke of ‘all the disappointments under the National Socialist regime and the collapse of the hopes harboured by many idealists’. He also referred to the ‘revelation of all the atrocities of this regime’. Then came the dissociation from Nazism. He regretted that ‘our people as a whole is nevertheless still held responsible for the misdeeds of National Socialism although the vast majority throughout all those years had only the single wish, to be liberated from this violent regime because it saw its most sacred possessions of family, church and personal freedom destroyed or threatened’. His neighbour, the priest of the Catholic parish of St Andreas in Berchtesgaden, emphasized that ‘our truly believing population, good middle-class and farming families, fundamentally rejected Nazism’, that 80 per cent of the local Catholic population was opposed to the Party, horrified by the stories of the ‘brutal manner’ of Party leaders on the Obersalzberg, which had been ‘hermetically sealed’ off from the village below.¹⁴⁷

In a prisoner-of-war camp in the winter of 1945–6, Major-General Erich Dethleffsen, former head of operations in Army High Command, began his memoirs of the last weeks of the war with his own reflections— thoughtful, if emphasizing lack of knowledge of barbarity, and guiltless exploitation by a ruthless regime—on how Germans were facing the trauma that still held them in its grip:

It is still only a few months since the collapse. We haven’t yet gained the distance in time, or in mind, to be able to judge, to some extent objectively, what was error, guilt and crime, or inexorable fate. We Germans are still too taken up by prejudice. Only slowly, in shock, and with reluctance are we awakening from the agony of the last years and recognizing ourselves and our situation. We search for exoneration to escape responsibility for all that which led to the recent war, its terrible sacrifices and dreadful consequences. We believe ourselves to have been fooled, led astray, misused. We plead that we acted according to the best of our knowledge and conscience and knew little or nothing of all the terrible crimes. And millions did know nothing of them; especially those who fought at the front for homeland, house and home, and family and believed they were only doing their duty. But we are also ashamed that we let ourselves be led astray and misused and that we knew nothing. Shame mainly finds expression at first in defiance and undignified self-denigration; only gradually and slowly in regret. That is how it is among the nations. We are experiencing that now in our people…¹⁴⁸

Such words, and many other accounts in similar vein in the early months after Germany’s total defeat, convey—even if they can only faintly express—some sense of the trauma felt by people who had undergone the desperate last phase of the war and were now being fully confronted with the magnitude of the crimes committed by their fellow citizens. For the generation that endured the apocalyptic collapse of the Third Reich, it was a trauma that would never fully pass. It is unsurprising, then, that in German memory of the Third Reich, the final Armageddon of 1944–5 came to overshadow all else. The rise of Hitler amid the almost complete rejection of liberal democracy as Germany’s economy crumbled, the first triumphant years of the regime when so many had rejoiced at national resurgence and economic recovery, and the early phase of the war with German military power laying the base for the conquest and ruthless exploitation of almost the whole of the European continent: these were more distant, less sharp memories. What had accompanied the ‘good times’—the persecution of unloved minorities, first and foremost Jews, and the violent repression of political opponents, the terroristic framework on which the ‘people’s community’ had been built—had been tolerated if not welcomed outright then, and could later be viewed as mere ‘excesses’ of the regime. ‘If only National Socialism hadn’t become so depraved! In itself it was the right thing for the German people,’ the view expressed by a German officer in British captivity just after the capitulation, was not an uncommon one.¹⁴⁹ According to Allied opinion surveys in the immediate post-war years, about 50 per cent of Germans still thought National Socialism had been in essence a good idea that had been badly carried out.¹⁵⁰

What really lasted in memory was the experience, devastating for so many Germans, of those last terrible months. It was perhaps not surprising, then, that the Germans thought of themselves as the helpless victims of a war they had not wanted, foisted on them by a tyrannical regime that had brought only misery to the land and produced catastrophe.¹⁵¹ One man from a town in the east, whose mother had killed herself out of fear of the Russians, complained many years later: ‘There were memorials for everybody: concentration camp prisoners, Jewish victims, Russians who had fallen. But nobody bothered about the other side.’¹⁵² In the generation that experienced it, this sense of being the victims—exploited, misled, misused—of the uncontrollable tyranny of Hitler and his henchmen that in their name perpetrated terrible crimes (though, it was often averred, less heinous than those of Stalin) has remained, scarcely diluted.

Of course, it was not wholly incorrect. Germans themselves were in this final phase of the war indisputably also victims of events far beyond their control. The bombed-out homeless were evidently victims—of a ruthless bombing campaign, but also of the expansionist policies of their government that had prompted the horror. The women, children and elderly people forced to flee their homes and farmsteads in eastern Germany and join the millions trekking through ice and snow were also victims—of the Red Army juggernaut and of the self-serving Nazi leaders in their areas, but also of the war of aggression waged by their government against the Soviet Union that had invited such terrible reprisals. The soldiers dying in their thousands at the fronts in those horrific last months were themselves in a sense victims—of a military leadership using draconian methods to coerce compliance in the ranks, but also of an inculcated sense of duty that they were fighting in a good cause, and of a political leadership prepared for its own selfish ends to take the country into oblivion rather than surrender when all was evidently lost.

Yet, considering themselves victims, few stopped to consider why they had allowed themselves to be misled and exploited. Few of those bombed in the Ruhr had given much thought to the arsenal of weapons they were producing for the regime and enabling it to attack other countries and bomb the citizens of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, Belgrade and many other cities, inviting the obliteration of their own cities in return. As long as the bombs were falling elsewhere, on others, they had no complaints. Few of those expelled from East Prussia in such horrific circumstances in early 1945 were willing to recall that the province had been the most Nazified in Germany, that its support for Hitler had been far above average before 1933, or that they had cheered to the rafters during the 1930s as their area benefited from Nazi policies. Most people throughout Germany were unwilling to recollect their earlier enthusiasm for Hitler, their jubilation at his ‘successes’ and the hopes they invested in a brave new world for themselves and their children to be constructed on German conquest and despoliation of Europe. None wanted to dwell on what horror their own fathers, sons or brothers had inflicted on the peoples of eastern Europe, let alone ponder the reports (or rumours bordering on hard fact) they had heard of the slaughter of the Jews. The gross inhumanity for which Germany had been responsible was suppressed, forced out of mind. What remained, seared in memory, was how the Third Reich had gone so tragically wrong.

And even in those terrible last months of the war, few, it seems, preoccupied as they were by their own pressing existential needs, were prepared to give much thought to the real victims of what was taking place—the armies of foreigners who had been taken to Germany and forced to work against their will, the hundreds of thousands of inmates of concentration camps and prisons, more dead than alive, and the bedraggled and grossly maltreated prisoners, most of them Jews, on the death marches of the final weeks. The racial prejudice that Nazism could so easily exploit was something that few later wanted to admit to. But the old ideas died hard. According to American opinion surveys in October 1945, 20 per cent of those questioned ‘went along with Hitler on his treatment of the Jews’ and a further 19 per cent remained generally in favour but thought he had gone too far.¹⁵³