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

11. A number of leading German generals were adamant after the war that the Allied demand had been a mistake and had lengthened the conflict.—Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War Two, New Brunswick, NJ, 1961, pp. 137–47. General Westphal remarked in his memoirs that the demand for unconditional surrender ‘had welded us to a certain extent on to the Nazi regime’, and that it was impossible to have laid down weapons and opened up the western front to the Allies without being given some sort of security for Germany. He claimed that news of the Morgenthau Plan to break up Germany and turn it into a pre-industrial country, then the result of the Yalta Conference, ‘left every initiative by us completely without prospect’ and that there was, therefore, no other way than to fight on.—Siegfried Westphal, Erinnerungen, Mainz, 1975, pp. 326, 341. Grand-Admiral Dönitz’s adjutant, Walter Lüdde-Neurath, also claimed that it had been decisive for the readiness to fight on at any price.—Walter Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz: Die letzten Tage des Dritten Reiches, 5th edn., Leoni am Starnberger See, 1981, p. 22.

12. Reiner Pommerin, ‘The Wehrmacht: Eastern Front’, in David Wingeate Pike (ed.), The Closing of the Second World War: Twilight of a Totalitarianism, New York, 2001, p. 46. See also the comment of Klaus-Jürgen Müller, ‘The Wehrmacht: Western Front’, in the same volume, p. 56, that ‘unconditional surrender’ added to the fear of senior military leaders of being accused of perpetrating another ‘stab in the back’.

13. Bodo Scheurig, Alfred Jodl: Gehorsam und Verhängnis, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1991, p. 286, remarks that for General Jodl (and unquestionably for other military leaders) the demand for unconditional surrender provided a ‘flimsy excuse’ (‘fadenscheiniger Vorwand’).

14. Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939–45, pb. edn., Novato, Calif., n.d. (original Eng. language edn., London, 1964), p. 316.

15. The classics were Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1951, and Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.

16. See Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert, Bonn, 1999, for a collection of later evaluations and applications of the concept.

17. See, as representative of the new research trend, Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2009.

18. Heinrich Jaenecke, ‘Mythos Hitler: Ein Nachruf’, in Kriegsende in Deutschland, Hamburg, 2005, p. 223.

19. This notion underpinned the path-breaking ‘Bavaria Project’ in the 1970s. The volumes of essays arising from the project and published in the series Bayern in der NS-Zeit, ed. Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich et al., Munich, 1977–83, carried the subtitle ‘Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt’ (‘system of rule and society in conflict’).

20. Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won, London, 1979.

21. See especially, Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, Hamburg, 2007 (though the work deals only with the pre-war period) and Peter Fritsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2008.

22. DRZW, 9/2 (Herf), p. 202.

23. Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2005.

24. See Fritsche, pp. 266–96.

25. Quotations from Fritsche, pp. 269–71.

26. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford, 2001, pp. 1, 3, 226.

27. For a thoughtful analysis of the importance of the legacy of 1918, not just for Hitler but for the entire Nazi regime, see Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich: Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft, Opladen, 1977, ch. 1.