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

3. Members of the Munich police constabulary, for instance, were paid continually through to May 1945. Backpay for a cleaner in the department who had not been paid in April was claimed at the end of June.—BHStA, Munich, Minn 72417, Nr. 2415f27, Gehaltszahlung, 28.6.45, 2415f28, Zahlung von Arbeitslöhnen, 28.6.45. At the other end of the spectrum, Himmler’s former chief of his personal staff and in the last phase of the war Wehrmacht plenipotentiary in Italy, General der Waffen-SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, still drew a salary of 2,226.80 Reich Marks (1,551.90 Reich Marks net) in April 1945, at a time when he was in fact secretly plotting the unilateral surrender of German troops in his region.—BAB, BDC, SSO-Karl Wolff, Gehaltsabrechnung, April 1945, 31.3.45. I am grateful to Horst Möller and Michael Buddrus for this information, and to Jonathan Steinberg for the suggestion to look for it.

4. Information kindly provided by Wolfgang Holl, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Bad-Godesberg, and by Holger Impekoven, currently working on a history of the Stiftung between 1925 and 1945, to whom I am indebted for an exposé of his project.

5. Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1969, p. 467; BA/MA, N648/1, NL Dethleffsen, Erinnerungen, fo. 7 (1945–6).

6. Andreas Förschler, Stuttgart 1945: Kriegsende und Neubeginn, Gudensberg-Gleichen, 2004, p. 10.

7. Christian Hartmann and Johannes Hürter, Die letzten 100 Tage des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Munich, 2005, Day 78, 21 Feb. 1945 (and for the following). The football hardly measured up to modern Premiership standards. The teams had to be improvised from what players—often soldiers on leave—were available. The last final for the German championship took place on 16 June 1944 in front of 70,000 spectators in Berlin, when Dresden beat Hamburg 4–0. After that, because of limited transport capacity and the ever worsening war fortunes, matches were restricted to regional ‘Sportgaue’.

8. For an interesting comparison of the potential for a coup d’état in Italy and in Germany, see Jerzy W. Borejsza, ‘Der 25. Juli 1943 in Italien und der 20. Juli 1944 in Deutschland: Zur Technik des Staatsstreichs im totalitären System’, in Jürgen Schmädeke and Peter Steinbach (eds.), Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, Munich and Zurich, 1986, pp. 1079–85.

9. Michael Geyer, ‘Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction’, in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, Göttingen, 2006, p. 40. An almost identical question was posed by Doris L. Bergen, ‘Death Throes and Killing Frenzies: A Response to Hans Mommsen’s “The Dissolution of the Third Reich: Crisis Management and Collapse, 1943–1945”’, German Historical Institute, Washington DC, Bulletin, 27 (2000), pp. 26–7: ‘We need to ask what made people not only tolerate [Hitler’s regime] but fight and kill for it until the bitter end.’

10. Alfred Vagts, ‘Unconditional Surrender—vor und nach 1943’, Vf Z, 7 (1959), p. 300. The demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ had arisen from the perception, especially strong in the USA, that it had been a costly mistake to concede an armistice instead of insisting on German surrender in 1918, thereby opening the way for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend propagated on the German Right that Germany had not been militarily defeated at all in the First World War. This time, the Americans and the British were agreed, there would be no repeat of the mistake and no scope for misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Germany’s unconditional surrender was regarded as the very basis for lasting future peace.—See Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 438–9.