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

In the Soviet Union, as with the Americans and British, the scale of Germany’s defeats raised expectations that the war might be almost over. It could have been, too, had Stalin and his military advisers, like the western Allies, not made strategic errors in their operational planning. Mighty though ‘Bagration’ was, the attack on four fronts was less decisive than the attack that the Germans had feared most: a huge, concentrated surge through southern Poland to Warsaw and from there to the Baltic coast, east of Danzig, cutting off two entire Army Groups (Centre and North) and opening the route to Berlin.¹⁵ The colossal battering the Wehrmacht had taken in the summer fell short, crippling though the losses were, of the decisive death blow that such a manoeuvre could have inflicted. The armies of the east, as in the west, could be patched up to fight on. Rapidly dwindling reserves of manpower and weaponry were dredged up. It was a mere plaster on a gaping wound. But it allowed the war to continue for several more months of mounting horror and bloodshed.

II

Behind the capacity to keep on fighting lay, as in the west, attitudes in the Wehrmacht which were not uniform in nature, but essentially resilient, and structures of government and administration, crisis-ridden but still intact. For the civilian population there was little choice but to grit their teeth and carry on. In conditions of perpetual emergency, the regime put people under extreme pressure to conform and collaborate. Private space to avoid such pressure dwindled almost to zero point. Ad hoc, piecemeal measures to attempt to hold off the inroads of the Red Army could, therefore, be implemented by a workforce now embracing almost the entire adult (and youthful) population, seldom (other than within parts of the Hitler Youth) enthusiastic, sometimes willing, often grudging, but scarcely ever rebellious. At the root of the readiness to comply, however reluctantly, a sentiment prevailed that was far more searing and penetrating than in the west: fear.

In East Prussia, the most exposed of Germany’s eastern provinces, the fear was palpable. Older citizens still had memories of the incursion of the Russians in the opening phase of the First World War before the Germans finally beat them back in February 1915. Some 350,000 people had fled in hasty evacuations as the Russians approached in August and September 1914. By the time the Russian troops had been forced out of East Prussia, according to German reports (though there is no reason to doubt their essential veracity), towns and villages had been ransacked, more than 40,000 buildings destroyed, several thousand inhabitants deported to Russia, and around 1,500 civilians killed.¹⁶ Thirty years later, the fear rested not just on old memories. The anti-Bolshevik propaganda, relentlessly pumped into the population by the Nazis, had seemed less abstract in this region than in western outposts of Germany. And for three years, soldiers had been passing through East Prussia backwards and forwards to the eastern front. Those with ears to hear had heard stories—not just vague rumours, but often concrete detail—of disturbing happenings in the east. Not only tales of the intense bitterness of the fighting, but news of atrocities perpetrated against the civilian Russian population and massacres of Jews had filtered back. The war against the partisans, it was well known, had been brutal. It had been no holds barred. As long as the war had been going well, what German soldiers had been doing to Russians and Jews had been of little concern. Many, influenced by propaganda, had no doubt approved. But now the tables had been turned: the Soviets were in the ascendancy, crushing German forces, pressing on the borders and threatening to break into East Prussia.