Beneath the hail of bombs, in the mayhem of destruction of towns and cities as the Reich collapsed to immensely superior force in east and west, a semblance of ‘normality’ in the mounting chaos was sustained as bureaucracy strained every sinew to continue functioning. Of course, the Reich was shrinking by the day, channels of communication were collapsing, the transport network was as good as at an end, basic utilities like gas, electricity and water were no longer available to millions of homes, and bureaucratic administration faced any number of huge practical problems. But where Germany had not yet fallen under occupied rule, there was no descent into anarchy. Civil administration continued, however ineffectively in the face of extreme adversity and immense dislocation. Military as well as civilian courts continued to hand out ever more severe sentences. Wages and salaries were still being paid in April 1945.3 Grants awarded by a leading academic body in Berlin were made down to the last weeks of the war to foreign students, even now regarded as an investment for continued German influence in the ‘new Europe’.4
Despite mounting handicaps, distribution of the ever more restricted food rations was maintained with difficulty and, increasingly by improvised means, post continued after a fashion to struggle through. Limited forms of entertainment still somehow functioned as a conscious device to sustain morale and distract attention for a short while from the unfolding disaster. A last concert by the Berlin Philharmonic took place on 12 April, four days before the Soviet assault on the Reich capital was launched. The finale from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung was, of course, on the programme.5 Some cinemas remained open. Only a week before Stuttgart capitulated on 22 April its citizens could find momentary distraction from their trauma through a visit to the cinema to see The Woman of my Dreams.6 Even football matches were still played. The last game of the war took place as late as 23 April 1945, when FC Bayern Munich, ‘Gaumeister’ of 1945, beat their local rivals TSV 1860 Munich 3–2.7 Truncated newspapers still appeared. The main Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was published in the unoccupied part of southern Germany to the very end. Its last edition, on 28 April 1945, two days before Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker, carried the headline: ‘Fortress Bavaria’.
The reasons for Germany’s collapse are evident, and well known. Why and how Hitler’s Reich kept on functioning till the bitter end is less obvious. That is what this book seeks to explain.
The fact that the regime did hold out to the end—and that the war ended only when Germany was militarily battered into submission, its economy destroyed, its cities in ruins, the country occupied by foreign powers—is historically an extreme rarity. Wars between states in the modern era have usually ended in some kind of negotiated settlement. The ruling elites of a state facing military defeat have generally sued for peace at some point, and eventually, under some duress, reached a territorial agreement, however disadvantageous. The end of the First World War fitted this pattern. The end of the Second was completely different. The rulers of Germany in 1945, knowing the war was lost and complete destruction beckoned, were nevertheless prepared to fight on until their country was practically obliterated.
Authoritarian regimes facing defeat in unpopular wars and seen to be heading for disaster do not usually survive to preside over outright catastrophe. Some in the past have been overthrown by revolution from below, as in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918 (in the latter case after the military elite had already taken steps to end a lost war). Others—a more usual development—are toppled by a coup from within, by elites unwilling to be taken down with the failing regime and wanting to salvage something. The deposition of Mussolini by his own Fascist Grand Council in 1943 is a prime example. In Germany, by contrast, the regime, though universally recognized, not just by ordinary people but by those in positions of power, civilian and military, to be heading for the buffers, fought on until it was completely destroyed and, unlike 1918, under foreign occupation.8 Approximate parallels come to mind only in the cases of Japan in 1945 (which, however, surrendered while the country was still unoccupied) and more recently—and in this case very faintly (given the very short-lived and militarily one-sided war)—in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The contrast between 1918 and 1945 in Germany again raises the question: how and why was Hitler’s Germany able to fight on to the bitter end? Was no other conclusion to the terrible conflict possible? And if not, why not? ‘The real puzzle’, it has been aptly remarked, ‘is why people who wanted to survive fought and killed so desperately and so ferociously almost to the last moments of the war.’9
Of course, in the First World War there had been no Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’. The formula produced by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and agreed by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was the first time that a sovereign state had been formally offered no terms short of total and unconditional capitulation.10 This was often seized upon in the early post-war years, particularly by German generals, as the sole and adequate explanation for Germany’s prolonged fight, since, it was claimed, the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ ruled out any alternative.11 Some former soldiers long after the war ended still insisted that it had helped to motivate them to keep on fighting.12 It is certainly possible to argue that the demand was counter-productive, and that it simply played into the hands of Nazi propaganda. As such, it contributed, at least initially, to strengthening the will to hold out, but it is doubtful whether attributing blame to the Allies for a mistaken policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ amounts to any more than what one scholar has called a ‘flimsy excuse’.13 According to General Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of Operations in the OKW, ‘hardly any notice was taken of it’ in the High Command of the Wehrmacht and ‘there was no examination by the OKW Operations Staff of its military consequences’.14 In other words, it made no difference to the strategy—or lack of one—adopted by the German military leadership in the last phase of the war. Answers to the question of why Germany fought on have consequently to be sought less in the Allied demand, whatever its merits or failings, than in the structures of the German regime in its dying phase and the mentalities that shaped its actions.
Why, unlike in 1918, did the German people not rise up against a regime so obviously taking them to perdition? In the early post-war era, for the German people just starting to pick up their lives again after the trauma of such death and destruction, and not anxious to dwell upon any deeper causes of the catastrophe that had beset their country, it seemed unnecessary to look much further for explanation than the terroristic nature of the Nazi regime. It was easy, and in some ways reassuring, for Germans to see themselves as the hapless victims of ruthless oppression by their brutal rulers, stifled in any scope for action by a totalitarian police state. The feelings were understandable and, as subsequent chapters will show, certainly not without justification. Of course, there was an undeniably apologetic strain to the way such an explanation could be, and was, used in post-war Germany to exculpate almost the whole society from the crimes placed at the door of Hitler, the all-powerful Dictator, and a clique of criminally ruthless Nazi leaders. But scholarly interpretation, too, in the post-war era placed the overwhelming emphasis upon terror and repression in the ‘totalitarianism’ theorem that dominated so much historical and political science literature at that time (though without direct focus on the last phase of the war).15 A society coerced into acquiescence, unable to act because of the comprehensive coercion of the highly repressive ‘totalitarian state’, provided, it seemed, sufficient explanation.