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

The generals were divided among themselves. The bugged conversations of those in British captivity, referred to on several occasions in preceding chapters, reveal sharp divergence in views.¹⁰ It was no different among those generals still holding positions of high command in Germany and on its borders. As fervent nationalists, they saw it as axiomatic to be ready to do their utmost for the defence of the Reich, even where they had inwardly broken with Hitler or despised the Party and its representatives. But some, in fact, remained fanatical backers of Hitler, like the brutal Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, whose ruthlessness in enforcing discipline made him notorious even in the top ranks of the army, or Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, who demanded in April 1945 that every ship and naval base be defended to the last in accordance with the Führer’s orders, offering his men the choice of victory or death. Most high-ranking officers, like Dönitz, held to the fiction that they were ‘unpolitical’, and that political decisions were solely and rightly the concern of the state leadership. But without their support, whatever their motives, it is plain that the state leadership could not have continued, and nor could the war.

Even where they disagreed fundamentally with Hitler’s tactics, the generals did not dispute his right to issue them, and fought on loyally. Faced with increasingly insane orders for the defence of Berlin, Colonel-General Heinrici nonetheless felt that to refuse them was to commit treason. The example of Field-Marshal Kesselring, refusing even at the end of April 1945 to condone surrender in Italy as long as the Führer was alive, is a further graphic case.

Crucial in enabling the regime to fight on was also the radicalization of the structure of power beneath Hitler in the last months. In the wake of Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, the regime was swiftly buttressed. Changes were made that shored it up in the last months and ruled out any internal collapse, with power below Hitler largely divided between the four Nazi grandees. Bormann, as we saw, greatly expanded the mobilizing and controlling role of the Party, extending its hold over almost all facets of daily life. Goebbels now combined the key areas of propaganda and mobilization for the total-war effort. Without the million extra men that he raised by the end of 1944, the Wehrmacht would simply not have been able to replace the extraordinary losses it was suffering. Himmler, with his takeover of the command of the Replacement Army (from whose headquarters Stauffenberg had orchestrated the plot to kill Hitler), extended his terror apparatus into the Wehrmacht itself. Only the Replacement Army had been capable of planning the attempted coup d’état in 1944. In Himmler’s hands, that potential was removed. And Speer achieved miracles of management and organization in producing sufficient armaments, despite the growing crisis of production and transport through Allied bombing and territorial losses, to ensure that the troops still had weapons to fight with. If Speer, who was very late in accepting that the war was irredeemably lost, had worked half as hard, Germany could not have held out for remotely so long.

The quadrumvirate of Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler and Speer—three of them among the most brutal and radical fanatics, the fourth an ambitious, power-hungry organizational genius—was instrumental to the continuation of the war. But the four were divided among themselves and suspicious of each other—a characteristic of the Nazi state. And each of them knew that his power depended on a higher authority—that of Hitler.