The overlapping, often competing, bureaucracy of the Party was equally cumbersome and even more oppressive for ordinary citizens. Practically every aspect of civil defence was now orchestrated by the Party. The frequent whine of the sirens produced frenetic attempts to usher people into air-raid shelters, organize the clearance of damage after the devastation, try to provide welfare and accommodation for those without homes (with the help of the hopelessly overstretched NSV) and arrange emergency food distribution (still holding up remarkably well, in contrast to the near famine towards the end of the First World War), among an array of other tasks. In a different society, such efforts might have met with gratitude and approval. By now, however, few beyond the ranks of the diehards could find much else than feelings of anger and bitterness towards the Party functionaries who, even at this stage, combined their attempts at welfare with ceaseless hectoring and haranguing through pointless propaganda and with the surveillance and monitoring that could have dire consequences for any who stepped out of line.
At a higher level of the Party, the Gauleiter, whatever their mounting inner despair at the ever deteriorating situation following the short-lived raising of hopes, had little option but to stick with Hitler. In their own provinces, they were still figures of real power, capable of ferocious repression against any lesser mortals who appeared to pose a threat. Beyond their own domain, however, they were a divided group, and incapable of any unified positive action to avoid the gathering maelstrom of self-destruction, certain only that their own destinies were bound up with the inevitable demise of the regime.
Survival strategies varied, though they usually involved some refusal to accept reality. Göring was probably among the more realistic in recognizing the irredeemable destruction of the Luftwaffe, though he still paid frequent visits to airfields to spur on his demoralized air crews. He retreated as much as he could to the luxury of his palatial country residence at Carinhall, in the Schorfheide 65 kilometres north of Berlin, well away from Hitler’s proximity and the malign influence of Bormann. There he could surround himself with fawning friends and relatives, dress in outlandish garb, pop his codeine pills and bemoan the failings of Luftwaffe generals.128 He had long been a spent force. Ribbentrop was still insisting, a week into January, that the Ardennes offensive had been a success and telling the Japanese ambassador, Oshima Hiroshi, that ‘Germany now holds the initiative everywhere’. He was adamant that the Allied coalition was bound to split if Germany and Japan could hold out until the end of 1945 and harboured illusions that peace could even at this late hour be negotiated.129 Robert Ley, when he was sober, fell into reveries about a coming social revolution, remaining at the same time one of Hitler’s most fanatical lieutenants in advocating an all or nothing showdown with the enemy.130
Bormann was another with flights of fancy, as, evidently, was his wife, Gerda. Writing to her on 26 December, as the Ardennes offensive was petering out and with it Germany’s last military hope of success, he referred to her ‘ideas about things to come’ as ‘by no means extravagant’, and outlined his own future scenario.
There is no doubt that in the future we shall be compelled to build important factories and the like deep beneath the earth’s surface. Wherever towns and villages are built on a slope it will be necessary at once to dig deep shafts into the hill or mountainside, with special cellars—storerooms—for all inhabitants. In the new manor farms which we are going to build in the north, the buildings will have to be constructed with three or four basements, and collective shelters must be built at various points for the whole village community from the start.
Gerda found the plans for post-war construction intriguing, but was ‘boundlessly furious at the thought that we, with our innate longing for light and sunshine, should be compelled by the Jews to make our abodes as if we were beings of the underworld’.131
Himmler, who in mid-December, when he was temporarily based in the Black Forest as Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Army Group Upper Rhine, was rumoured to have fallen into disgrace at Führer Headquarters, cherished the belief that Britain would come to see that its interests lay in joining forces with Germany to combat advancing Soviet power on the Continent. He thought of himself as an essential element of that continued fight.132 Goebbels remained among the more clear-sighted Nazi leaders, cautious from the outset about the chances of a major triumph in the Ardennes. He too, however, ended the year in good spirits, convinced that the offensive had widened the conflict between the Allies, that the Germans had won back the initiative in the west and reduced the pressure on the western front.133 The enigmatic Speer was the least given to fanciful illusions among Nazi leaders. He knew the full extent of Germany’s economic plight. And he had seen at first hand the realities of the Ardennes offensive, the hopelessness, despite the initial successes, of the attempt to break the stranglehold of mightily superior enemy forces. For Speer, so he later claimed, ‘with the Ardennes offensive the war was at an end’, apart from the drawn-out process of enemy occupation of Germany.134 But Speer’s desire for power and influence, as well as ambitions, even now, to play some part in a world after Hitler, kept him going. However resigned he was to Germany’s impending defeat, he saw no way out—and no course of action other than doing all he could to sustain the German war effort.
Among the generals—beyond the leadership of the OKW where, in Hitler’s direct proximity, illusions still held sway—there was widespread recognition that defences were now desperately overstretched, resources as good as at an end, the chances of staving off powerful enemies minimal. General of the Waffen-SS Karl Wolff, formerly chief of Himmler’s personal staff and now ‘Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht’ in Italy, became finally convinced that the war was irretrievably lost through conversations with young SS officers who had been part of the spearhead of the Ardennes offensive.135 Guderian probably spoke for most generals in his frustration with Hitler’s leadership and the crass inflexibility which had worsened Germany’s position. He acknowledged the size of the odds stacked against the Wehrmacht, given the immense disproportion in military might of the enemy. He felt, nevertheless, that it was necessary to continue to strain every sinew in the struggle to fend off the assault on the Reich, and to gain time—perhaps for the Allied coalition to crack, perhaps for some negotiated end to the nightmare, perhaps… who knew for what?