The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

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, Dönitz 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 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.