Ian Kershaw - The End

The chapters which follow will provide a good deal of evidence to cast doubt upon this intepretation. They will question whether either the scale of terror or the extent of support for the regime can provide an adequate explanation for its ability to hold out until Germany was smashed to smithereens. Yet if neither terror nor support fully explains it, what does?

A number of questions immediately arise. Beyond the significance of the Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’, one could ask how far Allied mistakes in strategy and tactics, which certainly occurred, weakened their own efforts to bring the war to an early end and temporarily boosted the confidence of the German defenders. But whatever significance might accrue to such factors, the determining reasons for Germany’s continued fight have surely to be explained internally, from within the Third Reich, rather than externally, through Allied policy. What weight, for instance, should we attach to the feeling of Nazi leaders that they had nothing to lose by fighting on, since they had in any case ‘burnt their boats’? How significant, indeed, was the greatly expanded scope of the Nazi Party’s powers in the final phase, as it sought to revitalize itself by evoking the spirit of the ‘period of struggle’ before 1933? In what ways did a highly qualified and able state bureaucracy contribute, despite increasing and ultimately overwhelming administrative disorder, to the capacity to hold out? How important was the fear of the Red Army in sustaining the fight to the end? Why were German officers, especially the generals in crucial command posts, prepared to fight on even when they recognized the futility of the struggle and the absurdity of the orders they were being given? And what role was played by the leading Nazis beneath Hitler—in particular the crucial quadrumvirate of Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels and Speer—and the provincial viceroys, the Gauleiter, in ensuring that the war effort could be sustained despite mounting, then overwhelming, odds until the regime had destroyed itself in the maelstrom of total military defeat? In particular, how indispensable was the role of Speer in continuing to defy enormous obstacles to provide armaments for the Wehrmacht? Finally, though far from least, there is the part played by Hitler himself and the lasting allegiance to him within the German power elites.

A simple—though self-evidently inadequate—answer to the question of how and why Germany held out to the bitter end is, in fact, that Hitler adamantly and at all times refused to contemplate capitulation, so that there was no alternative to fighting on. Even catacombed in his bunker, the borders of fantasy and reality increasingly blurred, Hitler’s hold on power was not over until his suicide on 30 April 1945. A central tenet of his ‘career’ had been revenge for the national humiliation of 1918; the ‘1918 syndrome’ was deeply embedded in his psyche. 27There would, he frequently and insistently declared, be no repeat of 1918, no new version of the ‘cowardly’ capitulation at the end of the First World War. Destruction with honour intact through fighting to the end, upholding the almost mythical military code of battling till the last bullet, creating a legend of valour for posterity out of the despair of defeat, and above all enshrining in history his own unique, self-perceived heroic legacy, was in his mind infinitely preferable to negotiating a ‘disgraceful’ surrender. Since he personally had no future after defeat, a suicidal approach was not hard to adopt. But it was not just personally self-destructive. It meant also condemning his own people and country to destruction. The German people, in his eyes, had failed him, had not proved worthy of his leadership. They were expendable. Without him, in fact, his monstrous ego told him, everything was expendable. In his crudely dualist way of thinking, it had always been victory or destruction. He unwaveringly followed his own logic.

Hitler’s own central part in Germany’s self-destructive urges as the Reich collapsed is obvious. Above all, his continued power provided a barrier to any possibility, which his paladins were keen to explore, of negotiating a way out of the escalating death and destruction. But this only brings us back to the question: why was he able to do this? Why did his writ continue to run when it was obvious to all around him that he was dragging them down with him and taking his country to perdition? Accepting that Hitler was a self-destructive individual, why did the ruling elites below him—military, Party, government—allow him to block all rational exit routes? Why was no further attempt made, after the failed coup of July 1944, to impede Hitler’s determination to continue the war? Why were subordinate Nazi leaders and military commanders prepared to follow him down to the complete destruction of the Reich? It was not that they wanted to follow him to personal oblivion. As soon as Hitler was dead, they did what they could to avoid the abyss. Almost all Nazi leaders fled, anxious not to follow Hitler’s example of self-immolation. Military commanders were now prepared to offer their partial capitulations in rapid succession, fighting on only to get as many of their men as possible into the western zones and away from the Red Army. Some harboured fantasies of being of future service to the western Allies.

Total capitulation followed in just over a week from the final act of the drama in the bunker. The mopping-up of Nazis on the run, now with nothing left to fight for, swiftly ensued. The occupation began its job of sorting out the mayhem and trying to set up new forms and standards of government. So Hitler was without question crucial to the last. But his lingering power was sustained only because others upheld it, because they were unwilling, or unable, to challenge it.

The issue stretches, therefore, beyond Hitler’s own intractable personality and his unbending adherence to the absurdly polarized dogma of total victory or total downfall. It goes to the very nature of Hitler’s rule, and to the structures and mentalities that upheld it, most of all within the power elite.

The character of Hitler’s dictatorship is most appropriately depicted as a form of ‘charismatic rule’. 28Structurally, it resembled in some ways a modern form of absolutist monarchy. Like an absolute monarch, Hitler was surrounded by fawning courtiers (even if his ‘court’ lacked the splendour of Versailles or Sanssouci); he depended upon satraps and provincial grandees, bound to him through personal loyalty, to implement directives and see that his writ ran; and he relied upon trusted field-marshals (handsomely rewarded with large donations of money and property) to run his wars. The analogy rapidly fades, however, when crucial components of the modern state—an elaborate bureaucracy and mechanisms (here chiefly in the hands of a monopoly Party) to orchestrate popular support and control—are included. For an important part of the edifice, crucially bolstering Hitler’s authority and creating for him untouchable, almost deified status, towering above all the institutions of the Nazi state, was the mass plebiscitary backing that a combination of propaganda and repression helped to produce. However manufactured the image was, there can be no doubt of Hitler’s genuine and immense popularity among the great mass of the German people down to the middle of the war. From the first Russian winter of 1941, nevertheless, everything points to the fact that this popularity was sagging. From the following winter—the winter of the Stalingrad debacle, for which he was directly held responsible—it was in steep decline. In terms of mass appeal, therefore, Hitler’s ‘charisma’ was terminally undermined as the war turned sour and the defeats mounted.

Structurally, however, his ‘charismatic rule’ was far from at an end. Even compared with other authoritarian regimes, Hitler’s was personalized in the extreme, and had been from the outset, back in 1933. No politburo, war council, cabinet (since 1938), military junta, senate or gathering of ministers existed to mediate or check his rule. Nothing approximated, for instance, to the Fascist Grand Council which triggered Mussolini’s deposition in 1943. A vital hallmark of this personalized ‘charismatic rule’ had been, from the start, the erosion and fragmentation of government. By mid-1944, when this book begins—at a point of intense shock and internal restructuring in the immediate aftermath of the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944—the process of fragmentation had become greatly expanded and magnified. No unified body posed a challenge to Hitler. Put another way, the structures and mentalities of ‘charismatic rule’ continued even when Hitler’s popular appeal was collapsing. They were sustained in the main not by blind faith in Hitler. More important, for arch-Nazis, was the feeling that they had no future without Hitler. This provided a powerful negative bond: their fates were inextricably linked. It was the loyalty of those who had burnt their boats together and now had no way out. For many of those who by this time were lukewarm if not outrightly hostile to Nazism, it was often as good as impossible to separate support for Hitler and his regime from the patriotic determination to avoid defeat and foreign occupation. Hitler represented, after all, the fanatical defence of the Reich. Removing Hitler (as was attempted in July 1944) could be, and was, seen by many, in a rehashing of the 1918 myth, as a ‘stab in the back’. Not least, as everyone was aware, the Dictator still had a ruthless apparatus of enforcement and repression at his disposal. Fear (or at least extreme caution) played an obvious part in the behaviour of most. Even the highest in the land knew they needed to tread warily. Whatever the range of motives, the effect was the same: Hitler’s power was sustained to the very end.