The End

A lasting partial affinity with Nazi ideas was not all. As the Third Reich disintegrated, an inevitable ambiguity lingered in most people’s minds.¹⁵⁴ The overwhelming desire to see the war end was almost universal in these last months. It went along with the fervent wish to see the back of the Nazi regime that had inflicted such horror and suffering on the people. But one of Nazism’s great strengths in earlier years had been its ability to usurp and exploit all feelings of patriotism and pride in the nation and turn them into such a dangerous and aggressive form of hypernationalism that could so easily become racial imperialism. The collapsing regime in 1944–5 did not erase, among all those who had come to detest Nazism, the determination still to fight for their country, to defend their homeland against foreign invasion, and especially—years of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, but also the bitter experience of conquest in the eastern regions, had done their job—to protect against what was viewed as an alien, repugnant and inhumane enemy to the east. So people wanted to see an end to Nazism, but not an end to the Reich. Since, however, the fight to preserve Germany was still directed by the very people whose policies had wrecked the country, the Nazi regime could still, if in a negative way, bank on support from both soldiers and civilians to the end. In western parts of Germany, the relatively lenient treatment by the American and British conquerors (if not by the French) inevitably prompted a more rapid erosion of the regime and swifter process of disintegration in civilian society and within the army than was the case in the east. There, despite the by now almost universal feelings of revulsion towards the Nazi Party and its representatives, people had little choice but to place their trust in the Wehrmacht and hope that it could stave off the Red Army.

The ambiguity in attitudes of ordinary Germans, civilians and soldiers, in the last dreadful months of the war was even more prevalent in the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht’s officer corps. We have seen ample evidence, leaving aside fanatics like Donitz or Schorner who associated closely and directly with Hitler, of the belief-systems and mentalities of generals who felt obliged to carry out orders that they thought were senseless, who were contemptuous of the Nazi leadership, but nevertheless saw it as their unswerving duty to do all they could to fend off enemy conquest, above all in the east. Defence of the homeland, not ideological commitment to Nazism, was what counted for the majority of high-ranking officers. But their nationalist and patriotic feelings sufficed to keep them completely bound up in the service of the regime which they had been so ready to serve in better times. After the failure of the bomb plot of July 1944, scarcely a thought to ‘regime change’ was given among the generals, who could see more plainly than anyone that Germany was heading for complete catastrophe. This was ultimately crucial. It meant that Hitler would remain in power, the war would go on, and there would be no putsch from within. Only once Hitler was dead did it seem feasible to move towards surrender. And only then, in conditions of complete collapse and impotence, were the links that bound the military leadership to Hitler and his regime reluctantly broken.

Conclusion: Anatomy of Self-Destruction

This book began by pointing out the extreme rarity of a country being able and prepared to fight on in war to the point of total destruction. It is equally rare that the powerful elites of a country, most obviously the military, are unable or unwilling to remove a leader seen to be taking them down with him to complete disaster. Yet, recognized by all to be taking place and, increasingly, to be inevitable, this drive to all-enveloping national catastrophe— comprehensive military defeat, physical ruination, enemy occupation and, even beyond this, moral bankruptcy—was precisely what happened in Germany in 1945. The preceding chapters have tried to explain how this was possible. They have shown the long process of inexorable collapse of Europe’s most powerful state under external military pressure. They have also tried to bring out the self-destructive dynamic—by no means confined to Hitler—built into the Nazi state. Most of all, they have sought to demonstrate that the reasons why Germany chose to fight to the very end, and was capable of doing so, are complex, not reducible to a single easy generalization.

The Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’, often seen as ruling out any alternative to fighting on to the end, provides no adequate explanation. German propaganda of course exploited the demand in its ceaseless efforts to bolster the will to hold out, claiming that the enemy, west and east, intended to destroy Germany’s very existence as a nation. But ever fewer people in the last months, as we have seen, believed such messages, at least as regards the western powers.

More significant were the implications of the policy for the regime’s elite. Certainly, ‘unconditional surrender’ was grist to Hitler’s mill, insistent as he was that there could be no consideration of capitulation. And ‘unconditional surrender’ did make it impossible to end the war in the west—which most German leaders, though not Hitler, would have been prepared to negotiate—without also ending it in the east. Even the Donitz administration following Hitler’s death rejected this option—since it meant condemning nearly 2 million German soldiers to Soviet captivity —until Eisenhower gave it no choice in the matter, thus ensuring that the war went on for a further eight days of bloodshed and suffering. On the other hand, the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ did not lead to any reconsideration by the Wehrmacht High Command of German strategy from early 1943 onwards—in so far as any overall strategy existed beyond an ideologically framed self-destructive drive to hold out to the point of total perdition.¹ It provided useful justification for fighting on to the end. But it was not the cause of the determination to do so.

The claim that it undermined the possibility of the resistance movement gaining wider support and a greater possibility of toppling Hitler also remains a doubtful proposition.² In any case, ‘unconditional surrender’ did not, of course, prevent an attempted coup d’etat. Stauffenberg and his co- conspirators in the bomb plot of July 1944 acted in full awareness of the Allied demand, and, had they succeeded, would immediately have tried to sue for peace terms. And most of Hitler’s paladins, and numerous generals, would have been willing, as we have noted, at one point or another to parley their way to a settlement, if Hitler had agreed, undeterred by the uncompromising Allied position.

So although ‘unconditional surrender’ was undoubtedly a factor in the equation, it cannot be regarded as the decisive or dominant issue in compelling the Germans to fight on.³ Churchill himself later rejected the claim that ‘unconditional surrender’ had been a mistake which had prolonged the war. In fact, he went so far as to state that an alternative statement on peace terms, which the Allies had several times attempted to draft, would have been more harmful to any German attempts to seek peace since the conditions ‘looked so terrible when set forth on paper, and so far exceeded what was in fact done, that their publication would only have stimulated German resistance’.⁴

Nor can Allied mistakes in strategy and tactics, weakening their own efforts to bring the war to an early end and contributing to the protracted end to the great conflict also by temporarily boosting the confidence of the German defenders, be seen as the key factor. Important errors were certainly made, and contributed to the inability of the Allies, after the Normandy landings in the west and the Red Army’s surge through Poland in the east, to finish off Germany by Christmas, as they had in their early optimism initially thought possible.

As we saw in earlier chapters, in the west, the divergence in strategic aims between Eisenhower and Montgomery, underpinned by their personal differences (owing mainly to the latter’s overbearing personality and some ingrained anti-American prejudice in the British military elite), prevented full exploitation of the breakthrough in France in August 1944, which had left the German western front in great disarray. As a result, compounded by the British failure to secure the port in Antwerp and by the disaster at Arnhem, the Wehrmacht was able to reinforce western defences and bring the Allied attack almost to a standstill for several precious weeks. The Allies never fully regained their momentum—and suffered a further temporary setback in the Ardennes offensive—until March 1945. On the eastern front, the Red Army’s mistakes in operational planning also meant that the massive assault of the summer of 1944, devastating though it was for the Wehrmacht, did not bring an early end to the war. A bold thrust to the Pomeranian coast, which German defence planners had feared, would have cleared the way for a much earlier attack on Berlin than in fact took place and could possibly have brought total collapse long before May 1945.

What might have occurred had the British and Americans in the west and the Soviets in the east taken different strategic decisions can of course only be a matter of speculation. Perhaps the war would have been over much earlier. But just as possibly, other errors or hesitations—war inevitably producing its own frequent surprises and seldom going according to plans laid down on paper—might have played their part and prevented a more rapid conclusion.