Ian Kershaw: The End

The local police report the arrest to the head of the remaining civil administration in Ansbach, who telephones the military commandant, currently out of town. Predictably enraged by what he hears, the commandant hastens to the police station and peremptorily establishes a three-man tribunal consisting of the head of the constabulary, his deputy and the commandant’s own assistant. After a farcical ‘trial’ lasting a mere couple of minutes, in which the accused is not allowed to speak, the commandant pronounces him sentenced to death, the sentence to be carried out immediately.

As a noose is placed round his neck at the town hall gate, Limpert manages to struggle free and make a run for it, but within a hundred metres is caught by police, kicked and pulled by the hair before being hauled back screaming. No one in the assembled crowd stirs to help him. Some in fact also punch and kick him. Even now his misery is not over. The noose is again put round his neck and he is hanged. But the rope breaks, and he falls to the ground. The noose is once more put round his neck, and he is finally hoisted to his death in the town hall square. The commandant orders the body to be left hanging ‘until it stinks’. Shortly afterwards he apparently requisitions a bicycle and immediately flees the town. Four hours later, the Americans enter Ansbach without a shot being fired and cut down the body of Robert Limpert. 1

As this grim episode shows, in its terroristic repression the Nazi regime functioned to the last. But it was not only a matter of the rabid Nazi military commandant, Colonel of the Luftwaffe Dr Meyer, ruthlessly dispatching a perceived traitor and saboteur, an agent of the regime imposing his will through superior force. Even faced with such fanaticism, the policemen, aware that the Americans were on the verge of entering the town, might have acted to save themselves future trouble with the occupying force by dragging out the arrest and interrogation of Limpert. Instead, they chose to follow regulations and carry out their duty as they saw it as expeditiously as possible, continuing to function as minor custodians of a law that, as they later claimed to have seen at the time, was now no more than the expression of the commandant’s arbitrary will.

The same could be said for the head of the local civilian administration. He, too, could have used his experience and awareness of the imminent end of the fighting to procrastinate. Instead, he chose to do what he could to hasten proceedings and cooperate with the commandant. The townsfolk who had found their way into the town hall square and saw Limpert escape could have rallied to his aid at such a juncture. Instead, some of them even helped the police to drag the struggling young man back to his execution place. At every level, then, in these extreme circumstances and in these final moments of the war, as far as Ansbach was concerned, those wielding power continued to work in the interests of the regime—and in doing so were not devoid of public support.

Incidents as harrowing as this case, where local inhabitants attempted to prevent futile destruction at the very end and encountered savage reprisals, while others were still prepared to back the repression of the regime’s functionaries, were no rarity in these final stages of the most terrible war in history. Dozens of other cases could be chosen as illustration of the continued functioning of the regime’s terror—now, in the last months of the conflict, levelled at its own citizens as well as at foreign workers, prisoners, Jews and others long regarded as its enemies. 2

It was not just in the ever wilder displays of terror by fanatics and desperadoes that the regime kept going to the last. Most important of all was the behaviour of the military. If the Wehrmacht had ceased to function, then the regime would have collapsed. The signs of dissolution and disintegration in the Wehrmacht were manifold in the later states of the war, most obviously so in the west. Soldiers deserted, despite the threat of brutal punishment. By early 1945, certainly in the west, most felt that to continue the struggle was senseless, and yearned only to be back with their families. Yet the Wehrmacht continued the fight. Generals and field commanders still issued their orders, even in the most hopeless of circumstances. And the orders were obeyed.

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. 3Grants 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. 5Some 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 . 6Even 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. 7Truncated 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. 8Approximate 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.