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

Bormann was by this time at the height of his powers. Through his presence at Führer Headquarters, his ability to control access to Hitler to a large extent and to influence his thinking, his exploitation of his position to outmanoeuvre other bigwigs in the Third Reich’s constant power-struggles, his control of the elaborate Party machine, and his capacity for sheer hard work—as his frequent letters to his wife, Gerda, indicate, he was working almost round the clock—Bormann had become perhaps the most pivotal figure after Hitler himself in the top Nazi echelons. And he was still an absolutely committed true believer. Unlike Himmler or Speer, he appears to have had no alternative personal agenda in mind for a world without Hitler. And unlike Himmler, Goebbels, Göring and Ribbentrop, he seems never at any moment to have contemplated any form of negotiation with the enemy as a way of ending the war. He was content to be Hitler’s mouthpiece, with all the power that gave him. Acknowledging to his wife in late August that it was hard to see a silver lining as the fronts closed in on Germany, he nonetheless added: ‘In spite of it all, our faith in the Führer and in victory is completely unshaken, which is truly necessary, for in this situation very many people begin to soften up understandably.’¹²⁵ A few weeks later, he even found it possible to look back upon the catastrophic months of 1944 with some satisfaction because, despite military collapse in east and west, ‘the national community has stood its test, and we are so far able to overcome the thousand difficulties which the enemy’s domination of the air creates for us’.¹²⁶ His optimism probably arose from necessity. Like the other leading Nazis, he knew he had no future after Hitler.

During 1944 the Party Chancellery that Bormann ran—sarcastically dubbed by Goebbels on one occasion the ‘Paper Chancellery’ because of the streams of directives flooding out of it—issued 1,372 circulars, announcements or orders, alongside numerous other instructions and Führer orders.¹²⁷ State bureaucracy still functioned, though increasingly as an administrative organ for directives and intitiatives emanating from the Party. Civil defence in all its ramifications, organization of mass conscription for entrenchment work, mobilizing non-servicemen for the Volkssturm, providing welfare for evacuees, and implementing the myriad orders for total war, were all in the hands of the Party that now controlled Germany as never before.

For ordinary Germans, there was scarcely any avenue of life free from the intrusions of the Party and its affiliates. In the armed forces, too, the scope for escaping Nazification had diminished. The repercussions of the failed bomb plot, the need to demonstrate loyalist credentials, extended deployment of NSFOs, increased surveillance and fear of falling into the clutches of Himmler (who now possessed greater room for intervention in the military sphere) left their mark on both officers and men. Whether at the front or in the civilian population, as the war had come close to home, and the popular base of the regime had shrunk, compliance with ever more invasive controls had come increasingly to dominate daily life.

The regime had appeared during the summer to teeter close to the edge. It had survived an internal uprising, but its armed forces had been pummelled in east and west. As summer had turned into autumn, it had stabilized the military situation and redoubled its energies at home to galvanize an often reluctant or truculent population into action to shore up defences and provide manpower for the front and the armaments industry.

In mid-October, Aachen—by now a ruined shell, its remaining inhabitants cowering in cellars—became the first German city to fall into enemy hands. But by this time, attention had switched to the east. There, in East Prussia, the population was already gaining a horrific foretaste of what Soviet conquest would bring.

3. Foretaste of Horror

Hatred… fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen. There can be no other aim for us than to hold out and to protect our homeland.

Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt to his wife after visiting the scene of Soviet atrocities near Nemmersdorf, in East Prussia, 26 October 1944

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