The population of numerous places on the Mosel acted in similar fashion, exhorting the troops to cease fighting to avoid further destruction.31 A despairing SD agent wrote to Bormann of his bitter disappointment, shared with the many now serving on the western front who had come from the east and had, like himself, lost everything at the hands of the Bolsheviks, when they saw the defeatist attitude of the civilian population in Gau Moselland as Allied troops approached. People showed friendliness towards the Americans, he reported, but hostility towards their own troops. Propaganda attempts to inculcate hatred of the enemy were a complete failure. The Hitler greeting had disappeared from use; no rooms any longer had pictures of the Führer adorning them; white flags had replaced the swastika banner. Weapons were concealed or thrown away. There was, of course, no willingness to serve in the Volkssturm. And the attitude towards the Party was one of total ‘annihilatory’ rejection.32
In the Rhineland, civilians were said to have hurled insults at soldiers, accusing them of prolonging the war and causing additional misery by blowing up bridges and digging tank traps. They cut wires and engaged in minor acts of sabotage, prepared white flags of surrender, burnt Party emblems and uniforms and encouraged soldiers to put on civilian clothes and desert.33 Such acts of localized opposition were, even so, not typical of the majority of the population. The longing for an end to the war was certainly near universal, but doing anything to shorten it was highly risky. Most people were not prepared to risk their lives at the last moment. This, together with an ingrained acceptance of authority, meant that resigned compliance rather than resistance was the norm.34 And however extensive outward expressions of rejection of the continued war effort were on the western front, they were rare if not non-existent in the east, where the civilian population was wholly dependent on the fighting troops to keep the feared enemy from their throats.
Army discipline still held by and large, and not just in the east. Even so, desertion by troops was by now a serious concern for the military and Party leadership. Goebbels noted in early March that ‘the desertion plague has worryingly increased. Tens of thousands of soldiers, allegedly stragglers but in reality wanting to avoid frontline service, are said to be in the big cities of the Reich.’35 Discussions in the Party Chancellery to tackle the problem included the suggestion—found to be impracticable in the circumstances of mounting disorganization—of a nationwide ‘general raid’ on a specific day to round up all detached soldiers. Another was to leave executed deserters hanging for a few days in prominent places, a tactic said to have been effectively deployed in the east as a deterrent. (One woman, describing her flight from Silesia as a young girl, recalled her horror at seeing four corpses left to swing from lamp-posts with notices pinned to their bodies, telling passers-by: ‘I Didn’t Believe in the Führer’, or ‘I am a Coward’.36) Such fearsome reprisals, which probably had much support from those who felt they were doing their utmost for the war effort,37 were to be accompanied by emphasizing the motto of Gauleiter Hanke, holed up in besieged Breslau, that ‘he who fears death in honour will suffer it in dishonour’.38 On 12 March, Field-Marshal Kesselring, the new Commander-in-Chief West, announced as one of his first orders the establishment of a motorized special command unit of military police to round up ‘stragglers’, who, he declared, were threatening to endanger the entire prosecution of the war in the west. Three days earlier, a ‘flying court martial’ (mentioned in the previous chapter) had been set up under the fervent loyalist Lieutenant-General Rudolf Hübner—a dentist in civilian life and cheerful executioner who allegedly said it gave him great satisfaction to shoot a general who had neglected his duty—to counter desertion and defeatism.39 The first victims were five officers found guilty of failing to detonate the bridge at Remagen and peremptorily condemned to death.40 Four were shot that very day. The fifth, luckily for him, had been captured by the Americans.41 Model and Kesselring proclaimed the verdict to all their troops as a deterrent example, adding that the ‘greatest severity’ was expected of the courts martial.42
As the desperation increased, other frontline commanders also threatened, and deployed, harsh enforcement of discipline, even if Colonel-General Schörner stood out, as we have seen, for the scale of his brutality. Rendulic´ ordered unwounded ‘stragglers’ who had left their units to be summarily shot. Himmler, as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula, published orders that after 25 March any ‘straggler’ would be sentenced by drumhead court and shot on the spot.43 Demands for fanatical defence of the Reich accompanied such severity. Unambiguous politicized fanaticism, as Stalin’s troops had displayed, was required by Schörner in the east.44
In the west it was scarcely less savage. Paul Hausser, a Waffen-SS general commanding Army Group G in the south of the front, recommended the imprisonment of family members as a deterrent and ordered his soldiers under pain of punishment immediately to open fire on any soldier seen crossing the lines.45 The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group H, based in the Netherlands, Colonel-General Blaskowitz, was certainly no SS extremist. In fact, he had been castigated by Hitler in 1939 for ‘Salvation Army methods’ for courageously criticizing the barbarity of the SS in Poland. But in the harshness of the treatment of his own troops in the last war months, Blaskowitz was no different to other generals, threatening deserting soldiers on 5 March with being ‘summarily condemned and shot’.46 ‘The enemy must have to fight for every step in German land through the highest possible bloody losses,’ Rundstedt had ordered at the beginning of March.47 His successor in the western command, Kesselring, sought the assistance of the Party’s Gauleiter to impress upon the public the need to fight for German towns and villages, now within the war zone, with absolute fanaticism. ‘This struggle for the existence or non-existence of the German people does not exclude in its cruelty cultural monuments or other objects of cultural value,’ he proclaimed.48 Jodl appealed to commanders in the west to ensure that the enemy encountered a ‘fanatical will to fight’ among troops defending the Reich. Regard for the population, he added, could currently be no consideration.49
Generals were no mere tools of Hitler, much as they claimed to have been such in their post-war apologetics. They acted from conviction, doing all in their power to inspire, and compel, their troops to ever greater efforts. Though they subsequently liked to portray themselves as professional soldiers doing no more than their patriotic duty, they were in fact the most indispensable component of the dying regime. Though few shared Schörner’s undiluted belief in the doctrine of National Socialism, they all accepted some of its articles of faith. The combination of extreme nationalism (meaning belief in German superiority and the unique glory of the Reich) and anti-Communism, together with a passionate resolve to prevent the occupation and—as they mostly believed—the destruction of Germany, sufficed to sustain their undiminished exertions in a lost cause. A distorted sense of duty was a strong additive. Without their extraordinary commitment to continuing the struggle when rational assessment demanded an end to the destruction, the regime would have collapsed.50
Among the military leaders displaying greatest fanaticism in the final weeks of the Reich, counter to the post-war image he cultivated, was Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. His series of short situation reports were seen as so valuable by Bormann for their defiant fighting spirit that he had them sent out to Gauleiter and other leading Party functionaries. The first of Dönitz’s reports, on 4 March, began: