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

The most crucial step was to shore up the crumbling western front. Model had to do the best he could to regroup a broken army in the immediate aftermath of Falaise. The size of the field army in the west had dropped from 892,000 men at the beginning of July to 543,000 on 1 September. The command structures had, however, been left intact. They now served as the basis for the organization of new units. Supply lines were shortened, fortifications strengthened (particularly along the Westwall) and minefields laid. Most importantly, desperately needed reinforcements were rushed to the west. The new divisions created were, to be sure, improvised units, lacking the best equipment and weaponry.³⁴ They were strengthened, however, in September when hundreds of tanks and other armoured vehicles were sent west from the hard-pressed eastern front. New levels of uncompromising enforcement were also introduced on the western front, including rigorous measures to round up ‘stragglers’ and assign them to new units. At the same time, some two hundred NSFOs were dispatched into the western defence districts to prop up faltering morale. The NSFOs, military police and Party agencies provided backing for the army in imposing a network of controls along the front to stiffen the shaky discipline.

On 10 September Field-Marshal Keitel, head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, advocated ‘extreme ruthlessness’ to stamp out any signs of subversion of morale. Less than a fortnight later, citing Hitler’s express instructions, he issued directives to counter the ‘signs of dissolution in the troops’ through ‘extreme severity’, including the use of summary courts with immediate executions in view of the troops to serve as a deterrent.³⁵ More than a hundred soldiers were shot by SS units while fleeing from the front during the following weeks. On 14 September, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, newly reinstated as Commander-in-Chief West, ordered the Westwall to be held ‘down to the last bullet and complete destruction’. Two days later, Hitler amplified the command. The war in the west, he declared, had reached German soil. The war effort had to be ‘fanaticized’ and prosecuted with maximum severity. ‘Every bunker, every block of houses in a German town, every German village, must become a fortification in which the enemy bleeds to death or the occupiers are entombed in man-to-man fighting,’ he ordered.³⁶

The combination of emergency means—through organization, supplies, recruitment and enforcement—succeeded for the time being in bolstering a desperate situation. Towards the end of September, the outlook was, if not rosy, at least much better than it had been a month earlier.

Just how effective the orders by Hitler and Rundstedt for a ‘do or die’ spirit of last-ditch resistance were in practice is not easy to judge. Feelings of helplessness in face of the might of the enemy, resignation, pessimism, defeatism, and blind fear as battle approached, were not easily dispelled, however urgent the appeals to fight to the last, however remorseless the control mechanisms to ‘encourage’ total commitment, however ferocious the threats for attitudes less than fanatical, however severe the punishment for perceived failure of duty. War-weariness was widespread, as it was among the civilian population. Most soldiers on the western front were preoccupied with survival rather than fighting to the last bullet. Colonel Gerhard Wilck, the commander at Aachen, forcefully reminded by Rundstedt ‘to hold this ancient German town to the last man and if necessary to be buried in its ruins’, repeatedly professed his intention of fighting to the final grenade. His actions did not follow his words. Instead, he made preparations to surrender.³⁷ Soon after the city’s capitulation on 21 October, Wilck found himself in British captivity. Speaking to his fellow officers, unaware that his conversation was bugged by his captors, he criticized the last-ditch mentality of the Wehrmacht High Command. Among his troops, the feeling was that the sacrifice of the 3,000 men forced to surrender at Aachen ‘merely to defend a heap of rubble for two or three days longer’ was ‘a useless waste’.³⁸

Attitudes were, nevertheless, not uniform. The forces on the western front in mid-September included armoured and infantry divisions of the Waffen-SS, known for their fanatical fighting and imbued with Nazi values.³⁹ Towards the end of 1944, the Waffen-SS overall comprised 910,000 men, and had some of the best-equipped panzer divisions.⁴⁰ But fervent Nazis were by no means confined to the Waffen-SS. They were also found in the branches of the much larger conventional armed forces. Some SS men even served there, and not in the Waffen-SS.⁴¹