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

The other crucial sector in which the impact of Nemmersdorf and all that it signified was unmistakable was within the army, especially among those soldiers who came from eastern parts of Germany. In the west, the collapse following the Allied breakthrough in France had brought disarray and damaged morale. The recovery there could not conceal the fervent desire among many soldiers for a swift end to the purgatory of continued fighting. It was possible to see falling into enemy hands in the west as a release. The likely death sentence appeared to be to fight on rather than end up a captive. In the east, the feelings were very different. Colonel-General Reinhardt reflected undoubted widespread sentiments when he saw what the Soviet troops had done in East Prussia almost immediately following their expulsion from the area. He wrote to his wife of the ‘rage, the hatred, which 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’, he added, ‘than to hold out and to protect our homeland.’ For soldiers from East Prussia and neighbouring regions, it was no longer a matter of abstract patriotic defence of the homeland, however, let alone fighting for the cause of the Führer. The lives and well-being of their loved ones were at stake. The fury and thirst for revenge at what had been done was palpable. ‘I was there yesterday [25 October 1944] in this area to visit my troops after their successful attack,’ Reinhardt went on, and ‘experienced the blind fury with which they have slain entire regiments’.⁹¹

A glimpse, if at a later date, of the impact of events in East Prussia on the mentalities of ordinary soldiers far from the areas in possession of the Red Army is provided by the diary of a member of the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief’s staff in Norway. The reports of ‘murder, torture, rapes, abduction to bordellos, deportations’ had a devasting effect on the troops, he recalled. It encouraged the ‘mystical belief’ that salvation would come at the last. Those with a clearer view of the likely future kept quiet since maintaining the discipline that, below the surface, had weakened was the imperative, and this seemed feasible only ‘with the aid of false hopes’. Concern for relatives was, however, growing by the hour.⁹²

Of course, soldiers, even those from the directly affected eastern border areas of the Reich, did not all think alike. But sufficient numbers fighting on the eastern front, and also many of those transferred to the west, appear to have been convinced that they were indeed engaged, as Hitler, Goebbels and others kept reminding them, in a struggle for their very existence, and that of their comrades and loved ones back home. The Soviet incursion served as a graphically horrible reinforcement of existing stereotypes about the ‘Bolsheviks’.⁹³ It was not in the first instance a matter of firm ideological belief in Nazi doctrine or the redemptive powers of the Führer.⁹⁴ It was simply a belief that, in the east at least, it was a life-or-death struggle against barbaric enemies. And for those less than wholly convinced, there was the intensified apparatus of repression, control and severe punishment within the Wehrmacht itself. A rising trend in death sentences for desertion, unwillingness to fight, undermining morale and other offences mirrored the decline in Germany’s military fortunes.⁹⁵