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

The ‘desperado-actions’ of many Party activists in the last weeks reflected the readiness of those who were well aware that they had no future to take enemies down with them, to exact revenge against long-standing opponents, to settle personal scores, and to ensure that those who had rejected the regime should not be around to triumph at its downfall. Though these fanatics were a small minority, they were a minority still wielding power over life and death. Their self-destructive urges paralleled those of Hitler and the regime leadership, helping through their own brutality to guarantee that Nazi power continued and that any manifestations of resistance from below were swiftly extinguished.

The Party and its affiliates increasingly occupied all the organizational space beyond the military sphere after July 1944 and gained hugely extended powers over citizens and over civil administration. Martin Bormann used his proximity to Hitler and his command of the Party’s central administration to reinvigorate the Party and push the state administration out of any importance in policy-making. The ‘time of struggle’ before the Party gained power in 1933 was repeatedly evoked as activists were urged to take radical steps to complete the ‘Nazi revolution’.

Below Bormann, a pivotal role was played by the Gauleiter. As Reich Defence Commissars, responsible for civil defence in their areas, they had enormous scope for interference in practically all spheres of daily life (and for imposing summary retribution for non-compliance). They and their subordinates at district and local level controlled, among other things, distribution of welfare, compulsory evacuation of citizens from threatened areas, access to air-raid shelters, clearance of bomb damage, and compulsory recruitment to forced labour on defence installations. And they were key agents for Goebbels’ total-war drive to comb out last reserves of manpower from offices and workplaces to raise men for the Wehrmacht. The increase in the Party’s dominance did nothing to create a streamlined administration. But it did massively strengthen its grip over government and society. In the last months of the war, Germany was as close to a totally mobilized and militarized society as it is possible to get. The mass of Germans were oppressed, browbeaten and marshalled as never before. There was by now scarcely any avenue of life remaining free from the intrusions of the Party and its affiliates.

A big step towards the complete militarization of society was the introduction of the Volkssturm in the autumn of 1944. It was militarily as good as useless. It was lampooned as the awaited ‘miracle weapon’ and generally derided. And it was a sign, recognized by all, of how desperate things had become. Sensible individuals did all they could to avoid having to serve in it, with justification given its high loss rate, especially on the eastern front. But as a control structure for the regime, it was far from devoid of significance. And its leadership was often in the hands of fervent Nazis, increasingly involved in many policing ‘actions’, including atrocities against other Germans viewed as cowards or defeatists.

Despite the drain of actual power away from the state bureaucracy—reduced largely to an instrument of administrative implementation—and increasingly into the hands of the Party at all levels, the regime was also sustained to the end by a sophisticated and experienced bureaucratic machine. This surmounted any number of huge difficulties to keep on functioning, if with sharply decreasing effectiveness, especially in the last months, till there was little or nothing left to administer. Without the organizational capacity that came from educated, well-trained civil servants at different levels, the administration would surely have collapsed much earlier. The judicial system, too, still meting out draconian sentences, continued to function to the end, sustaining the radicalized terror against German citizens and against persecuted minorities. Throughout the civil service, there was an almost unthinking loyalty, not specifically to Hitler but to the abstraction of ‘the state’, and commitment to what was seen as ‘duty’. Even for civil servants scornful of Hitler and disdainful of Nazi bosses, it was enough to provide support for a system in terminal collapse. We saw the near incomprehension of Kritzinger, the State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery, when asked by his post-war interrogators why he had continued to work so hard when all was so obviously lost, replying: ‘As a long-standing civil servant I was duty-bound in loyalty to the state.’ The mentality was replicated at top and bottom of the large civil service.