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

‘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