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

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 Dönitz 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’état. 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.