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

As a result of the chaos, there was a good deal of anger directed at the Party. Many people refused to follow the Party’s orders to leave (which were often confused and contradictory); others could not find accommodation and came back. In Aachen, where thousands of citizens had defied the evacuation orders, pictures of the Führer had been taken down and white bedsheets hung from windows in gestures of surrender. The Party had lost face through the flight of its functionaries. Organization was poor; women and children became separated in the evacuation. And there had been little sign of anything resembling a ‘people’s community’. Those with access to cars sped away, unconcerned for anyone else. It was every man for himself.²³

Kaltenbrunner listed some prominent individuals who had left Luxemburg and Trier prematurely to bring their families to safety. The Gauleiter himself and the District Leader (Kreisleiter) of Metz were among those noted as deserting their posts in a separate report to Himmler about the uncontrolled refugee movements in Lorraine, endangering troop movements. The railways had stopped running because the German personnel had fled, and the civilian administration had detonated essential installations before pulling out so there were electricity and water shortages and the telephones did not function. Russian prisoners of war had been left free to roam the countryside, posing a threat to security.²⁴

One officer, Lieutenant Julius Dufner, stationed at Kyllburg, a small spa town in the Eifel, in the Bitburg area just north of Trier, jotted his own first-hand account of the desolate conditions in his diary. ‘The war is lost!’ he stated baldly on 1 September. In Trier itself, he observed a day later, there was nothing more to be had. Fuel was in such short supply that vehicles would soon be unable to move. ‘We want to build a new Europe,’ he wrote, ‘we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted, and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden. No, no, no! It’s not on any more.’ When reproachful citizens asked soldiers why they were retreating, they answered that they, too, wanted to go ‘home to the Reich’. It had all been a bluff, he wrote, alluding to the ‘miracle weapons’. That was what happened when an advertising boss—he meant Hitler—became supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. Files and papers were being destroyed in huge quantities. ‘Everything that seemed at one time indispensable is today valueless and nothing at all.’ Who was to blame for it all, the diarist asked. Not those in lowly places, was his answer, those who simply did not want to fight and die for a lost cause. Everything had become crystal clear. All that talk of the new Europe, of young and decrepit peoples, of Germanic leadership, of revolutionary zeal: it was ‘baloney’, a ‘swindle’. He would not have said such things out loud.

As enemy artillery started firing on Trier on the evening of 13 September, and the evacuation of the inhabitants began next day, hundreds of emergency workers—‘a column of wretched looking, careworn old men and also young lads from the Hitler Youth’—traipsed into the city through the rain to dig fortification ditches. These might have fended off Huns and Mongols, Dufner mused, but it seemed doubtful that they could hold up modern tanks. Few of the workers had anywhere to sleep. But there was no complaining, just resigned acceptance. It looked as if the last reserves were being summoned up. As Bitburg itself came under fire, officers still managed to celebrate the birthday of one of their comrades with fine Saar wine and Sekt.²⁵ It was a case of drink today; there might be no tomorrow.

Such partying with the enemy on the doorstep would have confirmed the widespread prejudice among Nazi functionaries, much of the civilian population and many frontline soldiers about the Etappengeist—the ‘spirit of the rear lines’—the weak and decadent lifestyle of officers still able to enjoy the good things in life while others were dying for their country. This was the alleged cause of the collapse in France.²⁶ Behind the front were the lines of communication, the bases for provisioning, administration, transport, field hospitals and for the planning staffs of the fighting army. This all constituted the Etappe, an essential element in the structure of any military machine, but, as in the First World War, one much derided by the ordinary front soldiers at the dirty end of the fighting, all too ready to spread to their loved ones back home scurrilous rumours of officers enjoying creature comforts and high living away from the bitter warfare.