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
Alongside critical letters back home from the front (which ran the danger of being picked up by the censors, with drastic consequences) were letters with a strongly pro-Nazi tone.42 Around a third of the Wehrmacht’s soldiers had experienced some ‘socialization’ in the Nazi Party or its affiliates (often greatly enhanced by wartime experience itself). Anyone born after 1913 and serving in the armed forces had been exposed to a degree of Nazified ‘education’, if only in the Reich Labour Service or compulsory military service (introduced in 1935).43 It was not surprising, therefore, to find that Nazi mentalities still found expression.
An Allied report from 4 September on morale, based on the questioning of captured soldiers, painted a varied picture of attitudes. It found unmistakable signs of low morale among infantrymen. It nevertheless pointed to high morale among paratroopers, junior officers and SS men. Some representative comments were cited. ‘Victory must be ours…. One does one’s duty and it would be cowardice not to fight to the end.’ ‘We don’t give up hope. It is all up to the leaders. Something quite different will happen from what everybody expects.’ ‘If we don’t win, Germany ceases. Therefore we shall win.’ ‘Spirit against material. It has never yet happened that mere technology has conquered spirit.’ ‘I have done my part and have given my Führer, Adolf Hitler, that which can only be given once,’ ran one soldier’s last letter to his wife. ‘The Führer will do it, that I know…. I have fallen as a soldier of Adolf Hitler.’ Faith in German victory, the report concluded, was most strongly correlated with ‘devotion to Hitler personally, identification with National Socialist doctrine, [and] exoneration of Germany from war guilt’.44
Another report, a week later, drew conclusions on the ideological sources of continued Wehrmacht fighting morale from observations during about a thousand interrogations carried out during August. Most prominent were: fear of return to a Germany dominated by Russia; conviction in the rightness of the German cause and belief that the Allies had attacked Germany rather than grant her just and necessary concessions; devotion to Hitler, who had only the welfare of Germany at heart; and feeling that the ‘unconditional surrender’ policy of the Allies meant that the German people could not expect the western powers to help in post-war reconstruction. About 15 per cent of captured soldiers, it was said, held such beliefs ‘with fanatical conviction’, and had an influence on doubters, while up to 50 per cent were ‘still devoted to Hitler’. There was a good deal of admiration among combat soldiers for the fighting capacity of the Waffen-SS.45
As with soldiers at the front, the stance of ordinary citizens towards the war and the regime varied widely. Germany, despite more than a decade of Nazi rule, had remained, beneath the veneer of uniformity, in some senses a pluralistic society. Beliefs that were a deeply ingrained product of earlier socialist and communist subcultures could find no expression. But they were suppressed, not eradicated. Fervent Christian beliefs and traditions, institutionally underpinned within the Protestant and, especially, the Catholic Church, persisted despite relentless Nazi ideological pressure. On the other hand, the years of indoctrination and compulsion to conform had not failed to leave a mark. And the ever more pressing external threat to the country affected, in one way or another, all Germans and provided its own impulse to conformity. The panic at the approach of the Americans had been confined to the regions in the vicinity of the front. Even there, some had endeavoured, Canute-like, to hold back the rising tide of alienation from the regime. Away from the border provinces, there was no indication of collapse. Nothing suggested that the widespread pessimism about the war was likely to result in a popular uprising. Despite the gathering gloom it had described, the weekly propaganda report on 4 September concluded that the people were ready for any sacrifice to avoid destruction or enslavement. They would not ‘throw in the towel’.46 The Nazi leadership itself distinguished between ‘mood’ and ‘attitude’, accepting that people were hardly likely to be of sunny disposition if their houses were being blown to bits and their lives upturned by the war, but praising the forbearance and readiness to fight which marked their underlying determination to overcome the hardships and attain victory.47 This was, of course, a useful internal rationalization of the population’s reaction to incessant bad news, and a way of shaping the propaganda of total war. But it was not altogether misleading. For among the pessimists were still many, if a minority impossible to estimate in size with anything approaching precision and certainly diminishing sharply, who—outwardly at least—upheld the positive lines of propaganda, were loyally supportive of the regime, and expressed sentiments redolent of years of exposure to Nazi doctrine.