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

85. DZW, 6, p. 628; Oron J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich, Princeton, 1973, pp. 306–7.

86. DRZW, 9/1 (Blank), p. 415.

87. For example, instructions were sent out in early March to local authorities in Bavaria to alter arrangements for budgetary plans for 1945, emphasizing that local taxes should be passed on time to the towns and rural districts.—StAM, LRA 31908, unfoliated, Deutscher Gemeindetag, Dienststelle Bayern, Haushaltspläne der Gemeinden und Gemeindeverbände für 1945, 7.3.45. The Landrat in Berchtesgaden was still enquiring on 28 April 1945 when building work on new barracks, commissioned the previous August to extend accommodation for evacuees, would begin.—StAM, LRA 31645, unfoliated, Landrat Berchtesgaden to OT-Sonderbauleitung, 28.4.45.

88. On the policing of air-raid shelters, see DRZW, 9/1 (Blank), pp. 385–8.

89. By late March firemen in small communities of Sachsen-Anhalt were complaining that they were being called away from their work, where they were urgently needed, almost daily and often unnecessarily, at the ‘pre-alarm’ stage by the frequency of air raids.—IWM, EDS, F.3, M.I. 14/369, Krosigk to Goebbels, 26.3.45. Some people registered for voluntary fire service to try to escape recruitment to the Volkssturm.—StAM, LRA 31919, Gauleitung München to HSSPF Mühe on training of Volkssturm and air protection, including attempted regulation by the Regierungspräsident of Oberbayern of air protection service and service of voluntary firemen in the Volkssturm of 30.12.44 and the dispute of firemen serving in the Volkssturm of 25 and 31.1.45 and 21.2.45.

90. DRZW, 9/1 (Blank), p. 384.

91. Bernhard Gotto, Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik: Administrative Normalität und Systemstabilisierung durch die Augsburger Stadtverwaltung 1933–1945, Munich, 2006, p. 373, surmises, most likely correctly, that Party representatives in Augsburg operated more through ‘actionism’ than idealism in the very last phase of the war.

92. For the organizational and controlling functions of the Party’s Block Leaders (who in the mid-1930s had numbered around 200,000), see Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, ‘Der “Blockwart”: Die unteren Parteifunktionäre im nationalsozialistischen Terror- und Überwachungsapparat’, Vf Z, 48 (2000), pp. 594–6.

93. Pätzold and Weißbecker, p. 375. See also Herwart Vorländer, Die NSV: Darstellung und Dokumentation einer NS-Organisation, Boppard, 1988, p. 183 for the NSV’s mobilizing and control function. Unpaid workers for the NSV and the German Red Cross numbered more than a million. Although the NSV welfare activity was always underpinned by Nazi racial objectives, the work that it carried out in the crisis conditions of the last months of the war made it popular, even among many Germans who were negatively disposed towards the regime.—Vorländer, Die NSV, pp. 173–6, 186; Herwart Vorländer, ‘NS-Volkswohlfahrt und Winterhilfswerk des deutschen Volkes’, Vf Z, 34 (1986), pp. 376–80; Armin Nolzen, ‘Die NSDAP und die deutsche Gesellschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Kriegsende in Deutschland, Hamburg, 2005, pp. 192–3.

94. See DRZW, 9/1 (Nolzen), p. 191; and Armin Nolzen, ‘Von der geistigen Assimilation zur institutionellen Kooperation: Das Verhältnis zwischen NSDAP und Wehrmacht, 1943–1945’, in Hillmann and Zimmermann, pp. 90–92.

95. IWM, EDS, F.3, M.I. 14/369, Krosigk to Speer, 13.2.45.

96. IWM, EDS, F.3, M.I. 14/369, Krosigk to Goebbels, 22.3.45.

97. This paragraph, when not otherwise referenced, is based on Dieter Rebentisch, Führerstaat und Verwaltung im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989, pp. 529–30.

98. Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis, London, 2006, p. 324.

99. Gotto, p. 363.

100. StAA, Gauleitung Schwaben, 1/30, fos. 328904–6, Wahl to Bormann, 17.3.45; also Gotto, pp. 374–5.

101. StAA, Kreisleitung Augsburg-Stadt, 1/8, fos. 300554–5, Rundspruch an alle Kreisleiter, 30.3.45. Every Gau was to produce 100 ‘volunteers’, and Wahl laid down—on what criteria it is not clear—the contingents from each district in his region. He criticized the Kreisleiter in mid-April for doing too little to gain recruits.—Gotto, p. 375.

102. Perry Biddiscombe, Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946, Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 1998, pp. 12–14 (where the derivation of the name is discussed).

103. Biddiscombe, pp. 38, 128, 134–9.