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

Among the remnants of the population, housed in improvised barracks or surviving in cellars in the ruined shell of the city, groups of dissident youths, foreign workers, deserted soldiers and former Communist Party members took to despairing kinds of partisan-like active resistance, which reached its climax in December. With hand grenades and machine guns that they had managed to steal from Wehrmacht depots, they waged their own war against the Cologne police, killing the head of the Gestapo in the city and, in one incident, engaging in a twelve-hour armed battle with police before being overwhelmed. Only with difficulty did the Gestapo attain the upper hand before taking savage vengeance on the 200 or so members of the resistance groups whom they arrested.⁷⁰

No similar action materialized in the other cities of the Rhine–Ruhr industrial belt. But hundreds of thousands experienced similar misery to that of the population of Cologne following the devastating raids on Bochum, Duisburg, Oberhausen and other major cities of the region over the autumn. The mood in the Ruhr was bad.⁷¹ The air war was creating ‘a downright despairing mood’, Goebbels noted from the reports reaching him.⁷² There was only a single topic of conversation: ‘the war-weariness of all people’.⁷³

Still, there was no collapse of discipline either in the workplace or in the army. People carried out to the best of their ability what they took to be their duty.⁷⁴ There were no signs of sabotage, strikes or—beyond the events in Cologne—other prominent forms of resistance.⁷⁵ Dr Walther Rohland thought shortly after the end of the war that the reason for what he saw as the extraordinary effort made by workers who had little enthusiasm for the war (or the regime) was that ‘each single person felt clearly that on the one hand there was no opportunity for the individual to take action against the war’. ‘However, if the war was lost, then, in contrast to 1914–18, Germany also, and with her the possibilities of existence for the individual, would be lost’.⁷⁶ Such fears were given sustenance by the propaganda gift of the ‘Morgenthau Plan’—as the programme prepared by the US Secretary to the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to split up post-war Germany into a powerless, dismembered country with a pre-industrial economy swiftly became known to the German public.⁷⁷

On 12 December Goebbels went to the Ruhr district to assess the situation for himself, and while he was there witnessed a heavy air raid on Witten, turning much of the town into a raging inferno. He also saw the misery of the 100,000-strong population of Bochum, deprived of all amenities, existing in primitive conditions in cellars and little more than holes in the ground. His speech in the Krupp factory in Essen failed to rouse the grim-faced workers who had been dragooned into hearing him, collars turned up against the bitter cold, hands deep in their pockets. The applause was meagre and had scarcely died down when the sirens began to wail. The Propaganda Minister and his entourage had swiftly to take cover in the vaulted cellars deep underground, where they encountered ‘grey, disconsolate faces’. Little was said, but the glances on the men’s faces were ‘not friendly’.⁷⁸ Goebbels was made fully aware of the strength of feeling among the Party and industrial leaders of the Rhine and Ruhr about the failings of Göring (blamed for the inability to protect German cities against the ‘gangsters of the air’), and also Ribbentrop (held generally in contempt, and seen as inept in his conduct of foreign policy), but came away convinced of their continued ‘blind, unshakeable faith’ in Hitler.⁷⁹ In early December, Goebbels was still persuading himself that ‘faith in the Führer is largely unshaken and many’—after seeing the troop build-up near the western front and sensing a coming offensive—‘are again beginning to believe in a German victory’.⁸⁰