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

Yet there were important partial affinities that went beyond support for the regime but still objectively underpinned it. Crucially, the regime’s existence was intertwined with defence of country and homeland—a cause upheld by most Germans, even when they despised Hitler and the Nazis. The overwhelming proportion of the population, as numerous internal reports acknowledged, yearned for the end of the war. But there was an obvious ambivalence. Few wanted foreign occupation, least of all by the feared Russians. But as long as they fought to their utmost to avoid being overrun by the enemy, Germans were, whatever their motives and desires, helping the regime to continue functioning. And however demoralized, for the vast majority of Germans there was in any case simply no alternative to carrying on.

The role played by terror in this can scarcely be overstated. Without it there may well have been a popular uprising. But the regime was a grave danger to its own citizens, increasingly so after the sharp intensification of terror in February 1945. Very justifiably, people felt greatly intimidated. In the death-throes of the regime the terror, earlier exported, rebounded back onto the population of Germany itself, and not just its persecuted minorities. Among ordinary soldiers, the numbers of deserters, intermingled with ‘stragglers’, soared. Military courts, as we noted, reacted with harsh exemplary punishment. The summary courts martial introduced in mid-February were no more than kangaroo courts meting out little other than death sentences, and in early March, when such courts were made itinerant, the ‘flying court martial’ could turn up in any frontline area, and within minutes have sentenced to death those denounced as shirkers, defeatists or subversives, carrying out the sentence instantly. Remarkably, military courts were still passing death sentences even after the capitulation. Among civilians, too, anyone stepping out of line, even in desperation, could to the very end meet brutal retribution. Largely owing to the intimidatory effect of such terror, the popular mood was resigned, war-weary and pessimistic, but not rebellious. Those who dared raise their voices, let alone take any action, against the regime were viciously struck down. Most, sensibly, took the view that they could do nothing—except wait for the end and hope that the Americans and British got there before the Russians.

Yet terror does not explain all. It works as an explanation mainly at the grass-roots level. Tens of thousands of soldiers deserted, and many faced summary execution as a consequence. But even here, and bearing in mind the wider intimidatory effect of the drastic punishment awaiting those refusing to fight, the vast majority did not desert—or even contemplate deserting. They fought on, often fatalistically, even reluctantly, but frequently even in the last desperate weeks with high commitment, even enthusiasm. That cannot be accounted for by terror.⁶ And at the higher level of the Wehrmacht, among those senior officers with power of decision and command, terror played little role. Apart from those involved in the bomb plot, generals were not terrorized. Some were dismissed. But they were not executed.

For the German people, and even more for the racial and political victims of Nazism, the intensified terror alongside the terrible suffering could not end until the regime itself was destroyed by military might. This was in no small part because many of those wielding power, in particular those in high places, but also functionaries and representatives of the Party and its affiliates at regional and local level, realized that they had burnt their boats and had no future. Party and SS leaders had been involved in the worst atrocities against Jews and others. Goebbels saw this as a positive factor in ensuring their continued fanaticism and backing for the regime (often underpinned by belief in some ferocious ‘Jewish revenge’). Hitler thought exactly the same way. As Nazi rule fragmented, the regime increasingly ran amok as police, SS, regional and local Party officials took matters in the provinces into their own hands. Hundreds of citizens fell victim to uncontrolled violence by Nazi fanatics in the last weeks of the regime, often in the attempt to prevent the senseless destruction of their towns or villages in continued fighting as the enemy approached. Prisoners and foreign workers were now more exposed than ever to the wild and unconstrained violence. And with the enemy on the doorstep, pointless forced marches of thousands of concentration camp prisoners, many of them Jews, left countless numbers dead, the rest terrorized and traumatized.