In Upper Bavaria, where in the absence of the promised new weapons people were said to have little hope of the Soviets being repelled from Reich territory, the mood was apparently more dominated by concern about transport and postal difficulties, and the likely food shortages that would result from the loss of territory in the east.64 In Franconia, events in the east were overshadowed by the complete destruction of the lovely old centre of Nuremberg through a severe bombing raid on 2 January, which had killed 1,800 people and demolished 29,500 buildings, leaving much of the city’s population without homes.65 Ursula von Kardorff, a Berlin journalist, admitted that her senses were so deadened that she could scarcely imagine the horrifying scenes reported to her at first hand of what happened at the railway station in Breslau after the order had been given to leave the city—of refugees trampling on each other in their desperation, corpses being thrown out of unheated goods-wagons, trekkers stuck on the roads, delirious mothers unable or unwilling to see that the babies they were carrying in their arms were dead. A few days later, she remarked on the gruesome atrocity reports that reached her desk day after day. ‘Goebbels’ propaganda brain is evidently again working feverishly,’ she commented, before asking: ‘Or is it all true? I don’t believe anything any longer before I have seen it myself.’66
By this time, there was a chance to do so. The first trains bursting with refugees were already arriving in Berlin from Silesia. An open lorry reached the city packed with children, many of them dead after ninety-six hours exposed to the extreme cold.67 ‘Columns of lorries crowded with refugees and luggage in bags and sacks roll through the Berlin streets,’ wrote the Berlin correspondent of a Swedish newspaper on 24 January in a dispatch that came into Allied hands. ‘The invasion of Berlin by the refugees is now so striking that the population of the Reich capital has fully realised how the eastern danger is tempestuously approaching the frontiers and Berlin itself.’68
In a city preoccupied with its own problems—a transport system near collapse, food and coal shortages, electricity cuts, constant worries about air raids—the refugees were not universally welcomed. Few wanted to share their often already overcrowded apartments or meagre food rations.69 Porters at the main stations were apparently reluctant to help those leaving the trains; some people complained, probably unfairly, that National Socialist ‘sisters’ preferred their warm rooms to helping the new arrivals (though their aid and that of other Party organizations was often acknowledged by the refugees); there were worries about the lack of food, especially milk for infants, and complaints that ‘we have so little, and now there are all these refugees’. By the end of the month, the city was teeming with the incomers, who poured out their anger and bitterness regardless of the consequences. There was enormous resentment at Party functionaries who had saved themselves first, shown little interest in others, not given warnings in time, and managed to find places in trains leaving for the Reich.70 ‘Those who have lost everything also lose their fear,’ an observer remarked. The police temporarily refrained from intervening.71
The stories of the refugees had, unsurprisingly, a depressing effect on Berliners. There was a widespread fear that once the Red Army seized the Upper Silesian industrial region the war was as good as lost. People asked repeatedly where the long-awaited ‘wonder weapons’ meant to turn the tide of war were, and why they were not being used against the Russians after they had been so much talked and written about. There was frank disbelief that they existed; they were seen as no more than a figment of propaganda. Even if the Red Army could be halted, there was scepticism that Germany would be in a position to go on the offensive again. And people regarded as mere propaganda the claim that the Soviets had expended their last forces and were incapable of a new offensive of their own.72 When, on the morning of 3 February, some 1,500 American planes dropped over 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin in the heaviest raid of the war on the Reich capital, leaving 5,000 dead, injured or missing, the fate of the stricken population in the east took a back seat as panic temporarily gripped the city. However, reports of the continued Soviet advance in the east prompted great anxiety and talk about an evacuation of Berlin—worries sharpened by the erection of roadblocks. Sarcastic wits asked with black humour how long it would take the Red Army to pass through the roadblocks. The answer to the joke was an hour and five minutes: an hour to laugh at the barricades and five minutes to demolish them.73
The population was said to be under no illusions about the consequences of a lost war ‘and what those can expect who fall into the hands of the Russians. People basically agree, therefore, that it’s better to fight on to the last drop of blood and accept all deprivations rather than lose the war or surrender prematurely.’74 The sense of fighting to the last was certainly not shared by all. For many, perhaps most, a fatalistic mood prevailed. ‘Don’t think too much, do your duty and have faith. The German will master this Huns’ storm,’ wrote one woman to a friend based with the Luftwaffe in East Prussia.75 According to the recollections of a foreign journalist who experienced life in the German capital at the time, intensified restrictions and controls, transport difficulties and worsening food supplies, constant fear of the bombs and worries about the future, prompted many to look to escapism, often in drink.76 But the reported determination to hold out did signify an important strain of opinion which had been underpinned by the reports of the atrocities in the east. Unlike the situation in the west, where there was no great fear of British or American occupation, the justified dread of what defeat at the hands of the Soviets would bring was a significant component in support for continuing the fight in the east, especially among those most directly threatened.
By this time, belief in Hitler had waned so strongly that it had little to do with any continued readiness to fight on among the civilian population. A eulogistic article on New Year’s Eve by Goebbels in Das Reich, the prominent Berlin weekly, lauding Hitler’s ‘genius’, had been strongly criticized, according to the SD in Stuttgart. In the light of what had happened, people were saying, ‘the Führer is either not that genius depicted by Goebbels, or he had intentionally unleashed this world conflagration.’ Some were looking back at what Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, where ‘twenty years ago he had pointed out his aims. There are people who are prepared to claim that there lies the origin of the war’. The conclusion was drawn by many that ‘the Führer had worked for war from the very beginning’.77
A spark of lingering faith in his powers had, nevertheless, not been totally extinguished. Some refugees in Berlin apparently said ‘that the Führer would soon lead them back again into their homeland’, and it was claimed, in standard propaganda fashion, that ‘faith in the Führer is so great that even a small success quickly improves the mood of very many again’.78 A German Red Cross sister, writing home from the relative quiet of a naval hospital in La Rochelle in dismay ‘that the Bolsheviks are now in our beautiful Germany’, evidently wanted to trust Hitler’s promise of final victory in his New Year address, but added: ‘it’s damned hard to believe it.’79 Another woman brushed away such doubts. Despite her horror at events in the east and bombs raining down on German cities, and her anxiety about the future, she still felt confidence in a leadership ‘that only wants the best and greatness for the people’, regretted that Party members ‘did not uphold the Führer’s idea better’, and was certain that the war ‘must simply end in victory for us’ since a Jewish ‘diabolical state leadership’ could not hold out in the long run.80