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

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 Dönitz or Schörner 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.