CONCLUSION

ON MAY 9, 1945, the most destructive war in Europe’s history—indeed, when measured in total deaths, in any history—was finally over. A staggering sixty million people had been killed and millions more displaced. The Jews of Central and Eastern Europe had been obliterated. Hundreds of cities had been levelled, and two thousand years of cultural history—palaces, museums, opera houses, and monuments, as well as commercial and residential buildings—were gone. In over a millennium of warfare, Europe’s cities, which count among them some of the most beautiful in the world, had never suffered such a degree of devastation.1 They would never fully recover from it.

It is profoundly depressing to recognize that there was nothing inevitable about old Europe’s awful final act. Had the stock market not crashed in 1929, the Nazis would have been a footnote. Had Hitler lingered longer in a Munich pub in 1939, the war would have been over that year. And had the weather in East Prussia been cool rather than hot on July 20, 1944, which resulted in the conference’s move from an airtight bunker to an open-windowed hut, Stauffenberg’s bomb would have killed Hitler, Keitel, and all others in the room.2 As late as the July 20 attempt was, it might have spared millions of lives and prevented the Soviets from colonizing Eastern Europe.

After the last attempt on Hitler’s life—on July 20, 1944—German generals and field marshals were given the opportunity to participate in what Gerhard Weinberg has playfully called united Germany’s last election before 1990.3 They were asked to choose between one “ticket” made up of Stauffenberg, Goerdeler, Witzleben, and Beck and another made up of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler. The vast majority opted for the latter, and over the next nine and a half months, they fought a brutal defensive war that led to the deaths of more Germans and the destruction of more German cities than had the previous five years of war combined.4 Such was the “colossal price,” writes Ian Kershaw, that was paid by Germany for its leaders’ willingness to continue the war “to its bitter end.”5

The German army fought on until the end, invariably at the army group, army, and corps levels and with almost as great consistency at the divisional level. But there were important exceptions further down the chain of command. That disobedience was the exception rather than the rule makes it particularly intriguing. Why, given that the vast majority of commanders followed orders, did a few actors—Choltitz in Paris, Wolz in Hamburg, Gadolla in Gotha, Petershagen in Greifswald, and to a degree Schäfer and Ruhfus in southern France—refuse to do the same?

As so often in history, generalization is difficult. Common structural factors link some or all these cases: all these commanders thought the defence of their positions was impossible and ultimately futile. In addition, all three French cities examined here constituted isolated positions abandoned by armies that had retreated. Yet in many other instances—the Colmar pocket, Breslau, Cherbourg, and Brest—commanders defended similarly isolated positions brutally and with great loss of life. Personality, that great black box, especially for social scientists, played a basic role: had Ramcke (who destroyed the French city of Brest) been the commandant of Paris, Florian (who tried to destroy Düsseldorf) the Gauleiter in Augsburg, or Karl Holz (who launched the final battle-to-the-death in Nuremburg) the commander in Greifswald, the outcome in these cities would have been markedly different. In the last months of the war, the German army was composed of fanatics and realists. Whatever their protestations after the war, most fell into the former camp, but a significant minority was to be found among the latter.

Timing was also determinative. From March 1945, the chain of command within the Wehrmacht began to break down. Communications were unreliable, and commanders could credibly claim not to have received orders. Desertion rates increased, units crumbled, and calls for reinforcements went unanswered. As military control weakened, individual discretion increased, and opportunities opened for commanders to ignore or reinterpret orders. Doing so was not without risk, as the example of Gotha makes clear. Plenty of army and, above all, SS officers were prepared to set up flying courts martial that inevitably led to death sentences.

Timing was as crucial in the civilian sphere as it was in the military one. Much has been made of the great upsurge in support for Hitler after the July 20, 1944, attempt on his life. Surge it did, but this is not particularly surprising.6 Assassination attempts invariably bolster a leader’s support, whether in a dictatorship or a democracy. US president Ronald Reagan’s public support surged after the failed 1981 attempt on his life, and that support drew on a much broader base than registered Republicans. Reagan and many others also explained his survival with reference to providence. In Hitler’s case, however, the post-assassination bounce in the (figuratively speaking) polls did not last. As Ian Kershaw notes, “Apart from [a] brief resurgence [after Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt], Hitler’s popularity had been on the wane since winter 1941 and by 1944–5 was in free fall.”7

Opposition is not the same thing as action, but the latter also became ever more common as the war drew to a close. It did so for two closely related reasons: the costs of action fell as the Nazi regime crumbled, and the costs of inaction rose—civilians faced the destruction of their homes, villages, towns, or cities, and the death of their loved ones. Under these circumstances, two different types of civilians responded: civilians in positions of power, such as mayors, and civilians without any particular political position. The latter included both working-class and middle-class circles associated with separate and often unconnected organizations. There was, quite simply, much more active opposition to the National Socialist regime in the last year of the war than much of the literature, transfixed by the horrifying and enchanting image of a Wehrmacht in its death throes, allows.

Power and gender relations being what they were, men led the informal organizations that launched resistance efforts as Allied armies approached, but women played a fundamental role across the country in the last months of the war. They urged commanders to refrain from defending their cities, and in a few cases they verbally and physically abused commanders who did not; they hid weapons and soldiers; and they persuaded their sons and husbands to refrain from reporting for Volkssturm duty.8

The extent of civilian opposition and its success is remarkable: likely one half of German cities surrendered without a fight, often following very brave action on the part of civilian resistance groups who used the power of persuasion and, when that did not work, the power of force: they organized local coups against army, police, and SS leadership. Many other civilians assisted by removing barricades, putting out white (or, more accurately, grey) sheets of surrender, and pleading with soldiers to move on. All of these lesser acts were punishable by death. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that German civilians throughout the Reich were in open revolt against the regime in March and April of 1945. They were also in revolt against the prevailing majority of the German army leaders that continued to pursue the war. By April 1945, the army had, as Blumentritt himself admitted, utterly lost the support of the German people, who in large portions of the western part of the country positively looked forward to the Allies’ arrival.9 In at least one case, army commanders reported that civilians had fired on German soldiers.10

There was some debate during the 1990s about whether 1945 was for Germany a defeat or a liberation; for the civilians discussed in this book, there was no question. For them, the German army (to say nothing of the SS) signified conscription, violence, and murder; the Western Allies brought an end to all three. In more than a few cases, American and British soldiers met cheers, whistles, and white flags of both surrender and joy as they occupied German cities. Despite the complete absence of a free press (to say nothing of social media), German civilians were able to come to a reasonable judgment about the various armies descending upon them. They viewed the British and the Americans with relatively little fear and in many cases with anticipation. They expected the Soviets to avenge themselves on the civilian population.

Civilian disobedience was the more common variant, followed, at some distance, by military disobedience. The rarest form, however, occurred among committed National Socialists, and the most famous case of such disobedience was centred on Albert Speer. As the documents presented in chapters 15 and 17 attest, Speer threw himself into a determined and, it must be said, brave effort to subvert scorched-earth decrees. There were two elements to his strategy. The first and most obvious was issuing counterorders. The second, and more interesting, involved the institution of a decision-making process designed to buy time. By involving numerous actors—himself, the army, and the Armaments Commissioners—in decision making leading up to scorched earth, Speer removed crucial powers from the Gauleiter, introduced what political scientists call multiple veto points, and at all stages built more time into the process. In the context of rapidly moving Allied troops, this layered decision process would often mean that bridges, railroads, or factories fell into Allied hands before either paralysis or destructive measures could be implemented. Speer, true to form, shamelessly exaggerated his effect while trivializing the role of others, above all the silent army of civilians who joined in the effort. But there is no doubt that he, in the end, acted to save what was left of Germany from Hitler.

The question is why he did so. Some have concluded that Speer sought to save his own life.11 This is doubtful, and not only because Speer could have chosen the objects of his concern more wisely. Speer did not seek to save his life because he did not think it was in danger. His comportment as a minister in Germany’s absurd post-Hitler, pre-capitulation government led by Dönitz, as a polite and helpful subject during Allied interrogations, and even as a contrite and self-critical defendant at Nuremberg all paint a picture of a man convinced that he would at the very least live to see a postwar Europe. Speer’s charm and (social) class had served him immensely well in the past; he had no doubt that they would do so again.

His efforts to block scorched-earth policies were rooted not in concerns for his Leben (life) but, rather, for his Lebenslauf—his curriculum vitae. Germany’s industrial complex and its impressive output (famously on the rise up until September 1944) was in large measure his empire: in addition to the Ministry for Armament and War Production at large, he also controlled the Organization Todt, the construction and engineering body supported by an army of forced labourers under his command. It was German industry and industrial output, Speer’s creation, that Hitler wished to destroy. Speer was determined that his work would have a life after the Nazis because he would have a life after them too. From early 1945, he looked toward a Germany after Hitler, and he was convinced that he, as the most cultured and sympathetic of the senior Nazis, would play a role in it. In preparation, Speer began organizing from late 1944 his workers from the Germania project (the planned rebuilding of Berlin) for postwar work and in February suggested setting up three architectural firms in the future British zone so that they could start rebuilding the country immediately after the war.12 Such a motivation is fully consistent with what we know of Speer: more than anything, he wanted power.13

THE LAST ISSUE TO CONSIDER is the effect these multiple but often unconnected events had during the last year of war. Simply put, how much did disobedience matter? The answer is that it had a modest but nonetheless real effect. The early capture of Toulon and Marseille, which was a function of Allied speed and of the refusal of these cities’ commanders to sacrifice their men, as well as of the isolated actions of officers lower down the chain of command, had the largest measurable effect. The continued armed struggle against the German army was quite literally unthinkable without Allied control of these harbours, which for a time provided more supplies to Western Allied armies than any other port in Europe. There was nothing inevitable about their surrender: in northern France, fully twelve ports and the Channel Islands were defended for months after the Normandy landings, some into the autumn of 1944 and others into 1945.14

Choltitz’s actions in Paris had both immediate and long-term effects. In the former, the general’s refusal to destroy bridges, utilities, railroads, or factories enabled Paris to recover relatively quickly. Indeed, life was harder for longer and the city more scarred in London than it was in the French capital. Over the longer term, the return of an intact capital to the French was a seldom-recognized precondition for Franco-German reconciliation, itself the anchor of a peaceful, prosperous postwar Europe. It would have been impossible to achieve such reconciliation on the ruins of an obliterated or even scarred Paris; the French would never have forgiven the Germans for it. The liberation of an unscathed Paris thus contributed to what one author cheekily referred to as the second, successful collaboration.15

Within Germany itself, the fairly systematic refusal to implement scorched earth had important implications for the rebuilding of the country after the war. Intact industries, railways, bridges, and roads all contributed to making German economic recovery far easier than it would have been had these things been destroyed according to Hitler’s vision. In late April 1945, Japanese diplomats predicted that Germany’s recovery from the ravages of war would take 100 years.16 Economically, if not morally, it took ten, and the speed and completeness of that recovery owe something to the scores of resisters who ignored, neutralized, or disobeyed Hitler’s destructive orders in 1944 and 1945.

Those who disobeyed acted alone or in small groups, but their actions had important collective effects. Although they were working in isolation from each other, they were working toward the same end. But more importantly, their actions had positive feedback effects. The sparing of bridges allowed resisters to cross them and to make contact with Americans. The preservation of telephone lines allowed civilians and soldiers to make contact with the Americans to alert them of their plans. And the first peaceful surrenders of German cities made the Allies sensitive to the possibilities of peaceful surrender in the future; in multiple cases, such as Hamburg, Heidelberg, and Gotha, it made them willing to make additional efforts to help citizens save their cities.

At the municipal level within Germany, the refusal to defend cities meant, quite simply, that those cities emerged from the war intact or in far better shape than those that were defended. Disobedience saved roads, railways, and factories, but also architecture, culture, and beauty. Among the smaller cities spared (or mostly spared) by Allied bombers before the invasion of Germany, there is a close correlation between whether the city emerged from the war as it entered it and whether the Germans defended it. It is no coincidence that some of Germany’s most attractive small and medium-sized cities—Heidelberg in the west, Regensburg in the southeast, Göttingen and Gotha in the centre, and Greifswald in the north—all surrendered to the Allies without a fight.

In Germany’s larger cities, Allied bombing had in all cases destroyed all or most of their centres by early 1945, although the degree of destruction varied according to the intensity and number of raids. Cologne, for example, was bombed far worse than Dresden, as was Hamburg. But as extensive as that destruction was, it would have been far worse had Augsburg, Düsseldorf, or Hamburg been subject to artillery barrages and/or further aerial bombing raids. It is a credit to the citizens of these and other cities that they succeeded in preventing such pointless, eleventh-hour destruction. It is, or should be, to the shame of postwar planners and architects that they in so many cases squandered the heritage bequeathed to them by often less exalted citizens. Much postwar architecture in Germany ranges from the banal to the offensively ugly. The latter dominated from the 1960s, after the excuse that cities needed to be rebuilt quickly had long tired. Dreadful postwar planning in Stuttgart, Hannover, Frankfurt, and West Berlin is referred to by Germans, accurately, as the “second destruction.”17

The surrender of German cities also had a strategic effect, though one that is hard to quantify. Every bloodless surrender of a city or town meant that the Allied division, regiment, or battalion responsible for capturing it was free to move on to another battle. The reverse was also the case: the fact that the Americans had to recapture, for instance, Crailsheim and Soest slowed their advance. It is conceivable that, cumulatively, these actions helped hasten the end of the war, a war in which thousands, often tens of thousands, of people were dying every day. Such a conclusion is, however, only tentative; so many factors were in play on so many fronts, and within Germany itself, that it is almost impossible to attribute direct causal effect. What can be definitively concluded is that surrenders cost the Allies less in terms of life, materiel, and time, all of which enabled the fight to continue elsewhere.

Finally, and most important, these acts of disobedience saved lives. The refusal in Toulon and Marseille to fight on to the end saved thousands of German and French lives. Ruhfus and Schäfer are owed some credit here, but even more is owed to the lower-ranking officers who walked into French captivity and who, rather incredibly, provided the French with intelligence on the location of German defences. In both cities, French forces acted with chivalry and even generosity toward an army that had conquered and occupied their country. Why they did so is unclear. Perhaps it was that, being Europeans, the French were better than the Americans at flattering German commanders’ vanity and need to pay homage to antiquated conceptions of military honour. Elsewhere, the refusal to defend towns and cities saved in each case dozens, hundreds, or even (low) thousands of lives. Over the course of the last year, cumulatively, thousands became tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, though we will likely never know exactly how many.

As ever in studies of resistance, it is important not to exaggerate the extent and effect of disobedience. Many commanders who surrendered their positions, including Choltitz, first launched a pointless token fight. The numbers could have been much higher, but several thousand German and French soldiers nonetheless died in Paris, Toulon, and Marseille. Given the outcome, which should have been obvious to everyone, these deaths were unnecessary. All that can perhaps be said in mitigation is that asking a commander, especially a commander answerable to a fanatical dictator, to surrender before time is difficult in a manner that civilian observers find hard to understand.

Like everything else after July 20, 1944, the events described in this book occurred because of the failure of Stauffenberg’s conspiracy. It does no disservice to the bravery of the July 20 plotters—and even their critics, who are legion, concede their bravery—to recognize that Stauffenberg’s coup did not save a single life. Indeed, it resulted in many people, not least the plotters themselves, being killed. By contrast, the less well-known and less august group of individuals described in this book (few have “von” before their names, and none “Graf”) saved many lives. Although they had no contact, there was a connection between the two groups. The July 20 resisters gave the postwar Federal Republic a normative anchor it desperately needed: a basis for the thinnest sliver of German pride and, more importantly, a moral framework of reference for postwar political life in Germany.18 The post–July 20 disobeyers helped ensure that there was a Germany that could be economically, physically, and morally rebuilt. Collectively, they played a great and largely unrecognized role in the recovery of Germany and, therefore, of Europe.

Notes

1. This takes Charlemagne’s wars as the starting point. Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. Weinberg, World at Arms, 754.

4. Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 238.

5. Kershaw, The End, 379. Also see Kunz, “Die Wehrmacht in der Agonie der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft 1944/1945.”

6. One counterexample, however, shows how difficult it is to generalize. When Generalmajor Bock von Wülfingen passed through Stuttgart immediately after the July 20 coup, civilians, seeing his army uniform, clapped, saluted, and came to shake his hand. UKNA, WO 208/4363, GRGG 199, 5.

7. Kershaw, The End, 389.

8. See Fritz, Endkampf, 120 (on Ochsenfurt) and 139–50 (on the Weibersturm [women’s storm] of Bad Windsheim).

9. “‘Armee Blumentritt,’ 8. 4. 45—Kapitulation,” June 29, 1946, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, III.9, fol. 115 [p. 5].

10. Chemnitz. West Europe, April 18, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3713, TOO.

11. See van der Vat, The Good Nazi.

12. Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 334–5; Sereny, Albert Speer, 503.

13. Thus, although Speer was shocked by and opposed the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life, he would have accepted the resisters’ offer to become armaments minister (Rüstungsminister) in a post-Hitler government of Carl Goerdeler. Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 299. On Speer’s pursuit of power, see Sereny, Albert Speer, 489–90. On another, more psychological interpretation that understands Speer’s actions against scorched earth as an “ultimate expression of his despair and disillusion,” see Karl Hettlage’s comments in Sereny, Albert Speer, 473.

14. Weinberg, World at Arms, 696–7.

15. Mitchell, Nazi Paris, 154–5. Charles de Gaulle made a point of driving in Choltitz’s 1936 Horch 830 BL Cabriolet for ceremonial events such as those commemorating his June 18, 1940, appeal. De Gaulle viewed Choltitz’s refusal to obey Hitler as a moral cornerstone of French-German reconciliation. Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden, section on “1945–Heute.”

16. Report from Japanese Minister Berne to Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tokyo, April 27, 1945, UKNA, HW/1 3744.

17. On this and on the disasters of postwar West German planning, see Wolf Jobst Siedler and Elisabeth Niggemeyer, Die gemordete Stadt: Abgesang auf Putte und Straße, Platz und Baum, rev. ed. (Berlin: Sammlung Siedler, 1993). For an exhaustive survey of architectural loss and postwar reconstructions, see Hartwig Beseler and Niels Gutschow, Kriegsschicksale deutscher Architektur: Verluste, Schäden, Wiederaufbau, 2 vols. (Neumünster: K. Wachholtz, 1988).

18. See, for example, Chancellor Dr. Ludwig Erhard, “Der Aufstand gegen Hitler vor 21 Jahren,” July 19, 1965, BArch N 362–3, fol. 51–2.