IN 1943, THE SOVIETS forced the German army to make multiple retreats in Russia. Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany and leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), had to decide what to do with territories evacuated by the German military. His answer was clear: the retreating Wehrmacht was to destroy everything in its wake. The enemy would recover only an “unusable, uninhabitable wasteland” in which “mines would continue to explode for months.”1 Vast swathes of Europe and Russia would be left blackened, desolate, and lifeless. Hitler’s original vision of racial domination was replaced by a similarly horrendous one: scorched earth.
As the Wehrmacht staggered backward on all fronts, Hitler transformed these musings into a series of concrete orders: to poison, block, and wreck all ports across Europe; to destroy Paris; to blow up industry, railroads, bridges, utilities supplies, and archives, museums, and other cultural institutions in Germany; and to defend every German city, street by street, house by house, all intended to cause massive destruction and loss of life. From September 1944, Hitler issued a death sentence for Germany. On September 7, he had an editorial published in the Nazi mouthpiece, the Völkischer Beobachter. “Not a German stalk of wheat,” it thundered, “is to feed the enemy, not a German mouth to give him information, not a German hand to offer him help. He is to find every footbridge destroyed, every road blocked—nothing but death, annihilation and hatred will meet him.”2 Hitler, his minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, all agreed that “nothing that could be of any service to the enemy could be allowed to fall into his hands.”3
Most German field marshals, generals, and Nazi Party officials were all too ready to obey Hitler. They sent tens of thousands of young men to their deaths; wilfully destroyed industry, bridges, and buildings; and launched a defence of cities and towns that resulted in their complete destruction. A small but morally and militarily important minority of soldiers and civilians, however, said no. As most other soldiers and party members fought on to the awful end, these officers, soldiers, and—above all—civilians chose to disobey. They sought to spare industry, electrical and gas installations, ports, bridges, and roads. And, as Allied armies pushed deep into the heart of Germany in 1945, they sought to prevent a pointless and wholly destructive military defence of their cities against British, American, French, and Soviet armies. If they failed, the price of disobedience was death.
This book tells their stories. It explores what resistance in Germany meant after the influential figures around Claus von Stauffenberg had been killed or were on the run following the failure on July 20, 1944, of his plot, codenamed “Valkyrie,” to assassinate Hitler. It examines how German officers lower down the chain of command responded to Hitler’s nihilistic orders for the destruction of Germany and Europe. And, above all, it shows how ordinary people—workers, architects, doctors, and priests—possessed the conviction, bravery, and guile necessary to throw themselves into a final act of resistance against the National Socialist regime.
Notes
1. “Räumung des Kuban-Brückenkopf es und Verteidigung der Krim vom 4. 9. 1943,” OKW/Gen St d H/Op. Abt (IS/A), September 4, 1943. Reproduced in Percy Ernst Schramm, ed., Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe Verlag für Wehrwesen, 1961), III(2):1455–6; Karl-Günter Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite: Goebbels—Göring—Himmler—Speer (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 330; Christian Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg—verbrecherische Wehrmacht?” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52, no. 1 (2004): 60–1.
2. Quoted in Albert Speer, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1969), 412. Also see Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 330.
3. Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 330; Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 712.