Ian Kershaw: The End

The book mainly relates to what we might call the majority German population. There were, however, others whose experiences, themselves not reducible to easy generalization, were quite separate from those of most Germans since they did not and could not belong to mainstream German society. The fate of the horribly persecuted pariah groups in the clutches of the Nazis forms a further important part of the story of the continued functioning of the Nazi regime, amid the inexorable collapse and gathering doom. For, unenviable in the extreme as the situation was for most Germans, for the regime’s racial and political enemies, ever more exposed to vicious retribution as it imploded, the murderous last months were a time of barely imaginable horror. Even when it was faltering and failing in every other respect, the Nazi regime managed to terrorize, kill and destroy to the last.

The history of the Nazi regime in its final months is a history of disintegration. In trying to tackle the questions I posed to myself, the main problem of method that I faced was the daunting one of trying to blend the varied facets of the fall of the Third Reich into a single history. It amounts to trying to write an integrated history of disintegration.

The only convincing way to attempt this, in my view, had to be through a narrative approach—though thematically structured within each chapter—that covered the last months of the regime. One logical place to begin would have been in June 1944, as Germany was militarily beset in the west by the consolidation of the successful Allied landings in Normandy, and in the east by the devastating breakthrough of the Red Army. However, I chose to start with the aftermath of the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, because this marked a significant internal caesura for the Nazi regime. From there I look in successive chapters at the German reactions to the Wehrmacht’s collapse in the west in September, the first incursion of the Red Army onto German soil the following month, the hopes raised then promptly dashed by the Ardennes offensive in December, the catastrophe in the eastern provinces as they fell to the Soviets in January, the sharp escalation of terror at home in February, the crumbling of the regime in March, the last desperate attempts to hold out—accompanied by uncontrolled violence towards German citizens and, especially, perceived enemies of the regime—in April, and the efforts of the Dönitz regime even in early May to fight on until troops in the east could be brought westwards. The book ends at the German capitulation on 8 May 1945 and the subsequent arrest of members of the Dönitz administration.

Only through a narrative approach, I felt, could the dynamic—and the drama—of the dying phase of the regime be captured, as it inexorably fell apart in the wake of gathering military defeat. Only this way, too, I thought, was it possible to witness the ever despairing, but nevertheless for months partially effective, attempts to stave off the inevitable, the improvisation and scraping of the barrel that allowed the system to continue to function, the escalating brutality that ultimately ran amok, and the imploding self-destructiveness of Nazi actions. Some important elements of the story necessarily recur in more than one chapter. Bombing of cities, desertion of soldiers, death marches of concentration camp prisoners, the evacuation of civilian populations, collapsing morale, the ramping up of internal repression, the increasingly desperate propaganda ploys, are, for example, not confined to a single episode. But the narrative structure is important in showing how devastation and horror, if present throughout, intensified over the passage of time in these months. I have tried, consequently, to pay close attention to chronology and built up the picture essentially through going back to archival sources, including plentiful use of contemporary diaries and letters.

It is important to emphasize what this book is not . It is not a military history, so I don’t describe what took place on the battlefield in any detail and provide only a brief overview of developments on the fronts as a backcloth to the questions that are central to the book. Nor does my book attempt to provide a history of Allied planning, or of the stages of the Allied conquest. 11Rather, it views the war solely through German eyes in the attempt to understand better how and why the Nazi regime could hold out for so long. Finally, the book does not deal with the important question of continuities beyond the capitulation and into the occupation period, or the behaviour of the German population once a territory was occupied before the end of the war. 12

It is impossible to recapture the reality of what it must have been like in those awful months, how ordinary people survived through extraordinary—and horrifying—circumstances. And, though I have worked on the Third Reich for many years, I found it hard, as well, to grasp fully the sheer extent of the suffering and death in this climax of the war. Suffering should not and cannot be reduced to bare numbers of casualties. Even so, simply the thought that the losses (dead, wounded, missing and captured) in the Wehrmacht—not counting those of the western Allies and the Red Army—ran at about 350,000 men per month in the last phase of the war itself gives a sense of the absolute slaughter on the fronts, far in excess of that of the First World War. Within Germany, too, death was omnipresent. Most of the half a million or so civilian victims of Allied bombing were caused by air raids on German cities in the very last months of the war. In these same months, hundreds of thousands of refugees lost their lives fleeing from the path of the Red Army. Not least, the terrible death marches of concentration camp internees, most of them taking place between January and April 1945, and accompanying atrocities left an estimated quarter of a million dead through exposure, malnutrition, exhaustion and random slaughter. The extent to which Germany had become an immense charnel-house in the last months of the Third Reich is barely imaginable.

At least by the end of writing the book, I did think, however, that I had come closer to an answer to the question I had set myself: how and why, given the scale of the mounting calamity, Hitler’s regime could function—if, naturally, with diminishing effectiveness—for so long. If others think that after reading this book they, too, understand that better, I shall be well satisfied.

The following list includes only those German political and military leaders who figure prominently in the text in some way, and is confined to indicating their positions or ranks in the months covered in the book, July 1944–May 1945.

BORMANN, MARTIN (1900–1945): head of the Party Chancellery; Secretary to Hitler.

GOEBBELS, JOSEPH (1897–1945): Reich Minister of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda; Reich Plenipotentary for Total War from July 1944.

GÖRING, HERMANN, Reich Marshal (1893–1946): designated successor to Hitler; head of the Four-Year Plan; Chairman of the Reich Defence Council; Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe.

HIMMLER, HEINRICH (1900–1945): Reichsführer-SS; head of the German Police; Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood; Reich Minister of the Interior and Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration; Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army from July 1944.

HITLER, ADOLF (1889–1945): Leader; head of state; head of the Reich government; head of the Nazi Party; supreme commander of the Wehrmacht; Commander-in-Chief of the Army.

KALTENBRUNNER, ERNST (1903–46): SS-Obergruppenführer; head of the Security Police and the Security Service.