PART ONE

Political and Social Perspectives

The Genesis of the Nazi Party

For the greatest part of the lifetime of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany. He also became the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht (the German Armed Forces). But above everything else he was, and this he never forgot, the Führer of the Nazi Party. The Party dominated his thoughts, his actions were influenced by, and his decisions made for, party political reasons.

Before the assumption of power by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazis), it was little understood, by the German people or by those outside Germany, that Hitler was a revolutionary leading a revolutionary party. Thus the social, economic and political policies which were introduced during the lifetime of the Reich were the products of a German national and socialist revolution at work. That it was not possible to fulfil all the policies outlined in the Party’s manifesto during the short years of the Reich is understandable, for its creators were working on a period of government of a thousand years. Measured against such a time-scale all the manifesto promises not immediately accomplished would be made good; in due time. It was a question of priorities and the first, most important and urgently pressing of all needs was to build a National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft. That noun can be translated as ‘a people’s or a national commonwealth’, but such a bare translation cannot convey the emotional impact of that word upon the German soul. Nor can a mere translation show the depth, the strength and the longing which it evokes. Upon the basis of that Volksgemeinschaft the revolutionary policies of National Socialism would eventually be constructed, but before the Volksgemeinschaft could be created a unified Germany was necessary. Germany had never been one nation in the sense that Great Britain has been united for centuries. Even when the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, Prussia, whose King was created Emperor, was only primus inter pares, the other equals being the kings of Saxony, Bavaria and Württemberg. The Nazi Party intended first to unify the now republican States and Provinces of Germany into a single nation and then to go on to unite all Germans within one Fatherland. With a Germany unified, and with its people all brought home, the Party could then go on to its long-term policy.

Reduced to a simple proposition, the long-term strategy of the National Socialist government was to gain primacy among the world’s powers and for Germany to retain that eminence for a thousand years. Primacy would bring with it dominion over other races, a dominion whose considerable privileges and advantages would be shared by all those loyal, pure-blooded comrades within the Volksgemeinschaft. The German people could not hope to attain such primacy without sacrifices. It would be naïve to think that the other nations of the world would surrender their own privileged position to give the highest station to Nazi Germany. No, such eminence would have to be fought for and, in this context, Hitler’s words are an illustration of the future he projected for Germany: ‘If anyone would live then let him accordingly fight. And if anyone in this world of perpetual strife is loath to struggle, he does not deserve to live.’

The nation had been warned. The perspective as envisaged by the Führer was a series of wars which the Fatherland must win or else go down in defeat and ruin. The Nazi Party had laid upon the German people a do-or-die situation.

These wars were not, however, immediate policies but lay in the future. What was needed immediately was to establish the Volksgemeinschaft. This would be accomplished by imposing the Nazi Party’s political structure upon the nation and by that close control organizing the nation for eventual war. The Party had prepared for power by appointing Party officials in a ‘shadow’ capacity at provincial, rural district and local council levels. With the assumption of power the ‘shadow’ officials took up post and the Party was in full control of the political life of the country. The structure of the Party, the leadership principle – the Führerprinzip – was then applied to the nation. This system extended from Hitler and filtered through each level of command, down to the most humble Party official. Each stratum of the hierarchy had a leader to whom his subordinates were answerable for their actions, just as that leader had a superior officer to whom he was responsible.

Since every order was issued by the Party of which Hitler was the Führer, each recipient of the order had to see it as if the Führer had issued it direct and in person. There was no room for discussion or argument. ‘It is the Führer’s order’ became the standard method of terminating opposition, for against that qualification there could be no appeal. This dictum was to be used as a defence by the accused in War Crimes Trials. ‘I was only carrying out orders’ was advanced as a valid and incontrovertible defence. The people who used it had been schooled in the belief that the man in authority accepts the responsibility and that Hitler, as the highest authority, accepted the ultimate responsibility and thereby exonerated his subordinates.

The Führerprinzip was the policy and the Nazi Party was the instrument that would create the National Socialist state. At the most senior level was the Party Leader and Chancellor of Germany, Hitler. He ruled through a Party Chancery which also ran a cabinet of government ministers. This, the highest of the hierarchical structure, we shall call the Reichsleitung level throughout this book. The next senior level was that of the Gauleitung, the provincial governor stratum.

Hitler had been well served by his Party comrades and as Chancellor rewarded them by confirming them in the post of Gauleiter (provincial governor). Before 1938 there were 36 Gauleiters, but that number was increased as a consequence of Hitler’s political gains, notably the Anschluss with Austria, the restoration of the Sudetenland and the creation of other Gaus in the territories of the East which were conquered during the war.

The Gauleitung was the most important stratum of the whole Party political system for the Gauleiter was the party’s senior representative in the province or, in some cases, a major city. Within his Gau he had supreme political authority, a situation which some officers abused by interpreting the orders which they received from the Party Chancery as they saw fit. A great many of the Gauleiters saw the Gau to which they had been appointed as a sort of feudal fiefdom. Josef Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, ruled very firmly and demonstrated his control in a case of looting from a bread shop in the last weeks of the war. Two of the three ringleaders were condemned to death and were beheaded.

In peacetime this system of Gauleiters, based upon and backed by a strong foundation of established bodies such as the national or regional civil services and local government, worked well enough. Under the strains of wartime and the need to make fast, binding decisions, the touch of the provincial governor was often less sure. Some, indeed, abdicated their authority and abandoned their people, while we shall come across some who did well. However, few Gauleiters were capable administrators and in most cases these untrained men, who had been original members of the Party or among the first to join, were put into positions of almost unchallenged authority as a reward for Party loyalty rather than for competence and ability. SS Obergruppenführer Wolff, a confidant of Himmler and persona grata in the highest political circles of the Reich, was contemptuous of the unsophisticated roughnecks he encountered among the Gauleiters and found that ‘Hitler surrounded himself with followers … some of whom were definitely inferior’.

Below the Gauleitung level were the Kreise (districts) into which each Gau was divided. A Kreis was ruled by a Kreisleiter. Subordinate to the Kreisleitung level of the hierarchy were the Ortsgruppen (district councils). Below these were the Cells, each of which contained a number of Blocks. A Block was made up of a group of Party comrades and the local leader, the Blockwart, was the lowest stratum of the Nazi political system.

From the perspective of the ordinary German this chain of command reaching downwards from and upwards to the leaders of the Reich gave him a feeling of security and the assurance that he, the humble Party comrade, was of interest to and could have the ear of the highest in the land. Even towards the end of the war, Goebbels’ diaries recorded how members of the public wrote to Reichsleitung officers in the conviction that they would resolve their difficulties or deal with their problems.

The Party which ruled Germany from 1933 onwards had begun in a small way and Hitler had joined it as Member No. 7. It was typical of other parties which had sprung up all over Germany, many of them made up of ex-servicemen who could not accept what had happened to their world. Thirteen years after he joined, Hitler stood in the windows of the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, taking the salute as the brown-shirted army, the SA (Sturm Abteilung or Storm Troops), marched past him, their blazing torches forming a river of light flooding through the Brandenburg Gate.

In the early days, when the Party had been small, its members realized that their policies and dogma would be challenged and would meet physical violence from political opponents. Those parties of the Left, whose sympathies were with the Soviet Union, would seek to destroy a party which believed in Germany; a party that was national in outlook and programme. The Left, they argued, would use its traditional methods of brutality and intimidation to stop the meetings of the infant Nazi Party. To meet violence with violence the Nazis formed the SA. Wearing uniforms and organized along military lines, the task of these early units was to protect the Party’s meetings. As the Nazis grew in power and strength a new task was given to the SA. They were now to go over to the attack and to smash the meetings of their political opponents – Left, Right or Centre. In Goebbels’ opinion, ‘Whoever can conquer the streets will, one day, rule the State, for every type of power politics has its roots in the streets.’

The task which the SA had been given was clear and they swept the streets clear of the other parties. SA man, Horst Wessel, did not write an empty boast in the second verse of the Nazi anthem when he claimed that the streets were free for the brown battalions, for the SA men. They confronted Red violence. Hitler had forecast in Mein Kampf that victory could be won over the Left by using methods as brutal as they used. They were used and power was won, but it was not an easy victory. It was a hard fight and to protect the Nazi Party’s leaders from the trainloads of thugs which the Reds brought in, a new and special unit of the Party was formed, the SS (Schützstaffeln or Defence Squads). The duty of this small group – its first establishment was only 26 men – was to guard the Nazi speakers and each man had sworn to lay down his own life if need be, to defend Hitler.

These years of street fighting were known as the Kampfzeit (the time of struggle) and their memory was deeply impressed upon the psyche of the ‘Old Guard’ warriors, each of whom felt bound by strong bonds of comradeship born out of the Kampfzeit. Each year in November the ‘Old Guard’ met in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of a failed putsch in 1923. Ten years after that failure, Hitler had the political power of Germany in his hands. In that time of triumph Hitler must have reflected that it was the Party’s beliefs, the Party’s will to victory and his own political genius that had brought him out of obscurity to lead a great nation.

The German Führer: Adolf Hitler

‘The Party is Adolf Hitler, but Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler.’ With those extravagant phrases Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s Deputy, closed the Party rally at Nuremberg in September 1934. That hysterical declaration loses its impact when seen in cold print, but delivered as it was, to an audience which had been electrified by Hitler’s powerful oratory, Hess’s words contained an emotion and a fervour which brought them to a frenzy of excitement.

At senior Party level it had been feared that the 1934 rally might be overshadowed by the events of the June of that year. At that time Hitler, fearing a counter-revolution by the SA, had had its leaders shot. During the Nuremberg Rally the Nazi leaders had by skilful and emotional oratory restored harmony to the Party, had rebuilt the confidence of the SA and had set the Party the goal of forming a National Socialist State whose finest comrades from the mass of the people (the Volksgenossen) would be, so the Führer claimed, his Party comrades (Partei Genossen). They would lead the State; they would set the example to be followed.

A great many books have been written about Hitler and it is not my intention to repeat the details of his life except to say that he was a skilful politician who had a flair for detecting and exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses. A good poker player has the same capabilities. Hitler was a ‘chancer’, a gambler whose chips were the lives of his soldiers, the civilian population and the Reich itself.

The Third Reich was directed and swayed by him and it was his ideas, his concepts, his philosophies and his hatreds which formed the dogma that was followed. His word was law; his fantasies were acted out. At his command divisions of soldiers moved into battle. At his direction fleets of aircraft bombed targets and at his orders millions were put to death. Yet politically Hitler was a pragmatist. As a revolutionary he was prepared to compromise his political beliefs if such a move would gain the Party an advantage, just as he was prepared to sacrifice Party comrades in pursuit of a wider goal. This he demonstrated in the execution of the SA commanders mentioned above. Military leaders had promised assistance to help one Party formation, the SS, crush its rival party formation, the SA. That assistance had not been necessary and Hitler’s way of thanking the Army for its offer of support was to unleash upon it the SS Intelligence Service, the SD, charged with uncovering or inventing scandals involving service leaders. The most senior of the victims of that persecution was General von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army. His retirement was soon followed by that of Field Marshal von Blomberg, the Minister for War. Into the vacant posts were placed the Führer’s compliant tools; officers who would offer no opposition to his demands. Walter von Brauchitsch took over the German Army and Wilhelm Keitel the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Wehrmacht High Command (OKW). This was the first step by which the Party intended to gain political control of the Army, and was to lead to the raising, during 1944–45, of several Party-inspired military bodies in addition to the existing political–military force, the Waffen SS.

Hitler was a paradox. On the one hand he allowed his political appointees, the Gauleiters, almost unlimited power despite proof that many abused that power; on the other his growing suspicion of the generals led to his increased meddling in military affairs. His orders halted the drive on Moscow in the autumn of 1941 and gave the Soviets time to prepare the defences of the Russian capital and to bring up reinforcements. In 1942, the Führer intervened and ordered that the Army Group South offensive should divide and that one thrust should strike eastwards towards Stalingrad while the other drove into the Caucasus. He countered the criticisms which his advisers made of this division of military strength with the dismissive comment, ‘My Generals know nothing of economic warfare.’ By inference – he did.

Towards the end of the war his need to be involved in military matters became an obsession and he was so deeply immersed in pettifogging detail and bureaucratic procedures that the real objective was lost to sight. Examples of this meddling can be seen in the December 1944 offensive in the Ardennes. At that critical stage of the war when he should have been concentrating on strategic problems, Hitler spent hours poring over maps working out the roads along which the spearhead units were to travel. Then, too, in 1945, when the Red Army’s winter offensive was about to strike for Berlin, the Führer’s principal concern was not the defence of the Reich’s capital, but the working out in detail of the routes, flying heights and aircraft escorts for a pointless special Luftwaffe bombing operation against power-stations around Moscow.

A story which circulated during the first months of the Russian campaign may be apocryphal but serves to illustrate the point of the Führer’s interference. At a concert in Berlin the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, von Brauchitsch, was asked by Furtwangler, the world-famous conductor, ‘Why do you allow a man who did not rise above the rank of corporal to tell you how to fight a war?’ Brauchitsch’s reply encapsulates Hitler in Nazi Germany. ‘My dear Furtwangler,’ replied the Field Marshal, ‘if the Führer could play the harmonica you would not be conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.’

As a result of the SD persecution campaign the Army High Command had been purged and it was clear that the eventual objective would be to politicize all three services. For the last years of peace and then throughout the long years of war, Germany was able to produce commanders for all the services and at every level of command; men who must have been aware that a Nazi victory would destroy the traditional role of those services. Yet there was never any shortage of competent commanders. How was that possible?

As the source of supreme authority Hitler had the gift of patronage and any person with that gift will attract those who are ambitious. This is no less true of the military forces of a dictatorship than it is of a religious body in a democratic country. To hold high rank and to exercise power are potent attractions and ones which produced the men who led the military and political forces of the Reich. Together with the natural feelings of ambition there was another, emotional factor. These men were the inheritors of centuries of tradition, of an almost mystic belief in the omnipotence of a Supreme War Lord. Inhibited by that concept, it had not been until the last weeks of the Great War that Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Commander-in-Chief, had had the courage to advise the Kaiser that the Army could no longer be relied upon to support the throne. It was the Army that must be preserved as an instrument of state. It was the Supreme War Lord who must go. Hitler, the new Supreme War Lord, had no Hindenburg, nor would he have accepted any suggestion that the mass of the Army could be disloyal to him. How could it be? Each and every soldier had taken an oath of personal allegiance and a soldier’s sworn word laid upon him a sacred obligation. And, if the inconceivable happened and the soldiers were to break their oath, the dedicated and totally loyal legions of the Party – the SS, the SA, the political leaders and the Gauleiters – would deal with the dissident elements. There would be no spectre of 1918, with its mutinies, to haunt Adolf Hitler and to destroy the Third Reich.

The Party’s dominance of the military and civil services can be traced to the training and upbringing of the officers and officials. Such men and women are, by nature, conservative in their approach, are meticulous, hard-working and impartial in serving the government in power. This latter benefit had been enjoyed by all the German governments from the Imperial to the National Socialist. The bourgeois concepts of loyalty and devotion to duty were two of the pillars which supported the revolutionary Third Reich; both were exploited by the Nazi leaders.

The Army had seen the Nazi rise to power with repugnance and alarm, but was then bolstered against the Party’s wilder elements by Hitler’s growing fear of the SA. In his closing speech at Nuremberg in 1934, Hitler had declared the Army to be the weapon-bearer of the State. Placated by that promise the military accepted Hitler as the new War Lord and swore the oath he had demanded. Soon he had them convinced of his ability. His political flair showed that the fearful attitudes of the generals, born of their military appreciations of political events, were hopelessly at fault. Hitler’s decisions had been shown to be right in the case of the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland and the rump of Czechoslovakia. His support for Manstein’s unconventional plan to strike through the Ardennes in 1940 had led to a campaign which had won the war in the West in six weeks. During the summer and autumn of 1941 his switching of the German point of maximum effort in Russia had produced great tactical victories and had brought in millions of prisoners. His firmness in the face of all conventional opinion had gained victories for Germany, and his iron resolve, his rejection of orthodox military advice and his decision not to retreat during the first terrible winter in Russia had proved to be the correct course to follow. His will had triumphed. He, a corporal in a provincial infantry regiment during the Great War, had shown more ability in military matters than generals with a lifetime of experience. In view of his run of successes, starting as early as 1935, the perspective of the professional military officers, vis-à-vis Hitler, was that he was a leader whose touch was sure and whose genius was undoubted. Deterioration in the Führer’s handling of military affairs was noticed after that first winter campaign in Russia, but the belief that he was infallible was now so deeply ingrained in the thinking of the military that disagreement with his directives was minimal. Those who did disagree were retired and the new commander to a post felt himself capable of carrying out even the most pointless orders, convinced that Hitler saw the complete picture and that the orders he issued must be correct.

There was, in addition to the compulsions of ambition and the natural loyal desire to serve the Fatherland, the factor of Hitler’s ability to sway people at a personal level. That ability has been ascribed to many things. Yet how could this man have achieved control over those of greater intellect than himself? One can accept that his closest Party comrades were in awe of him and that, according to Rudolf Semler, Goebbels’ chief collaborator, even the cynical Propaganda Minister was affected by the Führer. Yet how could skilled, trained and dedicated service officers be influenced? That Hitler could exert charm, could produce or withdraw it at will, is undoubted, but charm alone is not sufficient to cause professional officers to change their minds on fundamental issues, nor can this loss of will-power on the part of service commanders be put down to Hitler’s blue eyes.

To advance the excuse of the hynotic influence of his eyes is to evade responsibility. It is significant that nobody in the doss-houses of Vienna, in which Hitler lived before 1914, seemed to have been influenced by his eyes. His military superiors between 1914 and 1936, including Ludendorff, Hindenburg and a great number of other military commanders, seem not to have noticed this effect and yet it is a recurring theme in the post-war interrogations of German service leaders. One reads of officers determined to lay before the Führer the truth about military operations, to demand solutions to the problems of supplies, to question the direction of his strategy or to point out the senselessness of his plans. They each go in to see him and then leave his room refreshed, invigorated, confident of victory and assured of his genius. Colonel Goettschling, Chief-of-Staff of the Luftwaffe in Italy at the end of the war, declared under interrogation, ‘I have seen the most brilliant and decisive men of my acquaintance go to see Hitler determined not to acquiesce with his whims. Those intellectual and critical men returned fascinated and for weeks remained under the spell of Hitler’s charm…’

These are incredible pictures. The scions of noble houses, with centuries of service to Germany and to the Army, holding firm views on what should be happening, armed with files, statistics, maps and documents to back their arguments, meet and are confounded by an unqualified, Austrian builder’s labourer. Among the ordinary people Hitler aroused almost Messianic devotion and his accessibility in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War played a great part in that phenomenon. He retained the common touch and had been, in the pre-war years, approachable by the ordinary people, particularly when he was in Berchtesgaden, his country retreat. Only in the later years of the war did restrictions upon access to the Führer imposed by Martin Bormann turn Hitler into a recluse who saw only those who had been selected or authorized by Bormann.

An example of the attitude of those pre-war days is shown in this account by a woman who had been only 18 years old when she met Hitler:

 

In the autumn of 1938, I went on a visit with a ladies’ choir group to a festival in Munich. After our Saturday evening performance some of us learned that Hitler was in Berchtesgaden and was in the habit of meeting people, informally, after Sunday lunch. A few of our group decided to go out to see him. It rained quite heavily as we walked up the road but by the time that we reached the Führer’s home the clouds had gone, the sun was shining and the view was breathtaking.

At about 3 in the afternoon a door in the side of the house opened and Hitler came out on to the lawn. He was wearing a grey, chalk-striped civilian suit and a grey felt hat which he took off and waved in response to our cheers. One of his staff approached us and asked who we were. We told him that we were members of a Styrian singing group and after he had reported this he came back and asked if we would like to meet the Führer. As Hitler came towards the road he passed too close to a tree and the left side of his jacket was sprinkled with raindrops from the branches. He talked to us for a few minutes and seeing that I had a camera offered to have his photograph taken with us. The disappointment must have shown in my face that I would not be in the picture and he told one of his adjutants to take the photograph. The raindrops on the Führer’s lapel and shoulder can be clearly seen in that picture. When I see the security which these days surrounds politicians I think back to when the Führer of Germany came out and mixed with ordinary people on that Sunday afternoon.

 

Although he seldom visited his soldiers in the field and not once went round a bombed city to talk to the survivors of a raid, Hitler commanded the loyalty of the great mass of the German people. Even at the eleventh hour they trusted him to produce some wonder weapon, some political miracle which would win the war and justify the losses which had been endured and the sufferings which they had had to undergo. He had been so successful since 1933 and so he would be successful and win the war. He could not fail. The Führer would achieve victory.

Hitler, like every other dictator, would not delegate authority to those whose loyalty he doubted. He trusted the Gauleiters because they were Party comrades. He trusted Speer, because he was an architect and the Führer had always wanted to be accepted as an equal by a successful architect. The generals he did not trust, considering them to be a pack of traitors, particularly after the bomb plot of July 1944. Refusing to trust his senior commanders and determined to take military control from their hands, he then appointed Party leaders to positions for which they had had no training. Himmler became Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula and, despite his poor showing while in command, was then promoted to become Head of Replacement Armies. Sepp Dietrich, the first commander of Hitler’s Leibstandarte SS (his SS bodyguard formation), rose to lead the Sixth SS Panzer Army, although his military contemporaries judged him as about adequate to command a regiment. As the war drew to its close Hitler had fewer and fewer direct personal contacts with his field commanders, usually limiting this to a series of operational directives from which no deviation was permitted. No unit could be moved without his knowledge or approval, a situation which led to Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s bitter comment, ‘I cannot even have the guard changed outside my room without referring the matter to the Führer.’

Those generals who were in the Führerbunker with him at the end had as little idea as Hitler of the true military situation. Buoyed up by the confidence he exuded, they believed that the divisions and corps marked on the wall maps in the bunker were at full fighting strength and not, as they in fact were, the shattered remnants of front-line formations. When, late in April, Hitler ordered General Wenck’s Twelfth Army to join Busse’s Ninth Army and relieve Berlin, those in the Führerbunker could not understand why the relief force had not broken through the Red Army ring around the Reichskanzlei area of Berlin within a matter of days. It was all so easy, seen from their viewpoint. Two massive armies needing only to join up and then advance. The reality was different. Those armies, exhausted and bled white by battle, were fighting against an enemy superior in numbers and equipment. In an effort to spur what was obviously considered to be the laggard approach of the relief force, General Burgdorff and Martin Bormann signed a dispatch and ordered it to be carried to Wenck’s headquarters near Potsdam. The text of the message read, ‘Wenck, it is about time.’ The grasp of those in the bunker on the true situation of the battle for Berlin was so wrong that they were prepared to hazard the lives of two dispatch-riders to deliver a message which had no purpose.

Hitler, according to many who met him, lacked humility. He knew that he was a genius, that he had always been a genius. It had been arrogant stupidity on the part of the Vienna Establishment to deny him the chance to study at the Academy when he was a young and poor artist. From this awareness of his own genius as an artist it was only a short step to arrogate to himself the title of the greatest military genius of all time. This tied in very neatly with his own awareness that he was a statesman of unusual powers and unique gifts. The line is a fine one across which one passes from self-confidence to self-delusion and, eventually, into the engulfing swamp of megalomania. Most dictators cross it at some point in their career. The Führer was no exception.

There was the inability of the megalomaniac to see the logic of any point of view other than his own. Hitler’s demand for large numbers of short-range, light bombers when Germany’s need was for long-range heavy machines, and the insistence that German women should be denied the opportunity of serving the Fatherland, are evidences of a mind which grasps the immediate, obvious and most attractive solution to a problem without considering the long-term, less obvious and unattractive alternative. A strategic bomber, the direction of labour, a national policy rigidly enforced by central government in place of the rule of Gauleiters intent only upon personal interest – these should have been, but were not, Hitler’s main considerations.

There must be times even in the life of the most severe megalomaniac when sanity emerges and for that brief interval the sufferer is aware of his tragic condition. There must have been times in the last months of Adolf Hitler’s life when a knowledge of the burden he was carrying broke through. At those times, deeply aware of the fact of defeat, no longer the possibility, or even the probability, but now the certainty of defeat, he must have realized that his own attitudes had alienated all those who might and could have helped him. He was alone because he chose to rule alone. When that awareness of his own bitter isolation struck him Hitler retreated into a dream world of architectural design. Speer reported how Hitler had the most grandiose ideas for the post-war development and rebuilding of many of the major cities of the Reich. According to Speer Hitler would spend hours doing little more than play with models of buildings which he intended to erect at the end of abnormally long processional routes.

It is the world’s good fortune that Hitler’s forward planning capabilities were limited to short-term objectives, to tactical targets which were instantly realizable. With his attention drawn to minor preoccupations, his strategic vision extended only as far as plans for post-war development of cities, the construction of buildings in those cities and the design of memorials to the fallen. Those buildings, that rebuilding; all the components of his glorious dreams would have to wait until the end of the war, which Hitler, in his moments of rationality, must have realized he would never live to see.

The Development of the Party 1933–39

In the years of the Third Reich the reasons which swayed great numbers of the German people to vote for the Nazis were widely debated, but chiefly by foreigners outside Germany who condemned the Party for what they saw as its repressive policies. Against that viewpoint most Germans had been attracted by the positive aspects of the National Socialist manifesto and were prepared to give the new men a chance. It was only after May 1945, and the defeat of their Fatherland, that the German people as a whole considered the sequence of events which had brought about the Nazi rise to power and asked themselves why their perception of the Party had been so faulty.

The great mass of the German people during the years of National Socialist government had certainly not seen Hitler as a tyrant or as a murderer. He was believed in, obeyed and adored, and thousands fell in battle believing to the end that he was the salvation of Germany. The charisma of the man who rose to become dictator of one of Europe’s great nations was a subject which intrigued the minds of many Germans after 1945. The interrogation of German commanders by Allied officers, and discussions with those commanders on the subject of the Hitler phenomenon, released in them a critical faculty which had not been exercised, in public, since 1933. Aware as they were that they had been accessories to the acts of the Nazi Party, many senior commanders sought a justification by concentrating on the positive political and economic achievements which had been gained during the era of the Third Reich. Among those who had time to reflect on the past was General Leyer, Commissioner for German War Production in Italy. During his interrogation by American officers at the end of the war, he reflected that, ‘Commencing with just seven men, derided, insulted and at one time imprisoned, this unknown immigrant [Hitler], this son of the lower orders, was able through his oratory to conquer a nation of seventy million…’

It could not have been oratory alone that inspired a whole nation to death or glory. Nor could a political manifesto have been the spark that ignited and inflamed a nation’s soul. What caused the masses to follow their leader was the belief that in some mystic way he was the embodiment of the national spirit and that he could fulfil the promises he had made and in which the masses believed wholeheartedly. Hitler’s manifesto was nationalist and socialist and it attracted supporters who believed in either or both of those tenets. Hundreds of thousands of men had joined the Nazi Party in support of its policy of German socialism. They had fought as political soldiers in the ranks of the SA so that, when the Party came to power, the vast estates owned by a minority would be distributed among the landless who formed the majority. Their belief was that the Army, a reactionary force, would be replaced by a People’s Army – the SA. They believed that Hitler’s policies would solve the unemployment problem. Other Germans had joined the National Socialist Party because they saw it as the only one that would break the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and lead the German Fatherland towards freedom: freedom from foreign interference, from foreign domination of German industry, commerce and capital.

Hitler’s manifesto promised each German family its own home and its own car, the Volkswagen, made to run on the splendid autobahns which he would create. For many Germans the promises made in the first years of government were redeemed. Hitler’s road building and his programme of slum clearance did fulfil some of his promises and through them the numbers of unemployed were reduced. Later when he reintroduced conscription for the armed forces and expanded the arms industry, the evil of unemployment was wiped out completely. There was in fact, from 1937 onwards, a shortage of labour. There was food for all, better social welfare and higher benefits for the old, the sick and the poor. It is no wonder that when Goebbels heard of Britain’s Beveridge Plan he remarked sarcastically that Britain was at last approaching the level of social welfare that Germany had attained under Bismarck, some 60 years earlier. By inference, Britain was still decades behind the Third Reich in such matters.

The Third Reich strove towards social equality, too. ‘No one’, Hitler promised men of the RAD (Reichs Arbeits Dienst, the Labour Corps) when he addressed them in Nuremberg in 1934, ‘will rise to power or achieve influence in Germany except that he has served in your ranks.’ What was implied in the Führer’s promise was that the days when advancement came as a result of class or social position were over. Every German man would know from personal experience what it meant to have blisters brought about by working with a shovel in his hand or to have a back aching from hard, physical labour. Youth in Hitler’s Germany would not be gilded and painted but would be as hard as Krupp steel.

There were many socialist policies which the Nazis were able to initiate and to complete – housing, equal pay for women, marriage loans, increased family allowances and the construction of roads, other than autobahns. Planning for the Volkswagen was begun. Thinking along the lines that self-help produces the finest results and that a sacrifice by the Volksgemeinschaft had the power to ennoble it, the Party made great efforts in the German version of British flag-days, the various street and house-to-house collections which were organized. This was practical socialism, a common effort to help the less fortunate. Seen from another perspective the charity drives were a form of indirect taxation. The Party’s ambitions could not all be realized from the national exchequer but were met as a result of voluntary work carried out by the people. The masses had the desire to help and the Party had the organization that was needed to put men, women and children into the streets with their boxes or on house-to-house collections. The foremost of all these charitable works was the WHW (Winter Hilfs Werk, winter help undertaking) organized to provide extra food and clothes for the poor and elderly. The WHW, in pre-war years, was used by the Nazi leadership as a barometer of public opinion. If the masses approved a particular action which the government had carried out, the donations were lavish; if there was a general disapproval the offerings were scanty. The WHW was as good as a referendum. These collections were not soup-kitchen charity. The whole of the Volksgemeinschaft worked together either on behalf of the poorer members of the community or else to cope with a crisis, as in the case of the appeal in the winter of 1941 for clothing for the troops on the Russian front. That drive brought in 67 million items of winter clothing. Nor were the street collections just token displays of comradeship. Every Gauleiter, every minister, was out on the streets with a collection box – people actually queued to put money into Goering’s box, much to the chagrin of less popular government officials.

Looking at their national or regional leaders as they moved among them on charity days, the masses were comforted. These high officials were true sons of the people. They were not drawn from the traditional ruling classes, nor were they professional politicians, but were men born out of the masses. Hitler had once laboured on building sites in Vienna and the father of Josef Goebbels had been a railway clerk. The leaders of the Nazi Party, as seen by the German people, were quite ordinary and fairly young men who, with very few exceptions, had been hardened in the front-line trenches of the Great War, who had fought in the skies or on the seas for the Fatherland. Thus, the German people saw that Hitler’s party was not made up of woolly-minded liberals, rigid-minded conservatives, parlour socialists or Communists dedicated to an alien regime, but was one composed of patriotic young working men, with the passion of young men, and with the strength of young men fiercely determined to restore their Fatherland’s prestige.

Hitler and Goebbels both lived simple lives. Neither was a gourmet, neither was a wine connoisseur. Indeed, the frugality of the meals and drinks served at the Goebbels’ table was notorious. Shortly before the war a campaign was introduced to save fuel and food. On one day of the week, usually Sunday, lunch was to be a one-course meal, a stew, cooked in a single pot (Eintopfgericht). It was a sacrifice which the German people made gladly because Eintopfgericht was a meal which both Hitler and Goebbels were said to enjoy immensely.

The view of the masses was that their leaders were honest, decent men, very much as the people thought they themselves were. ‘Michel’ is the German equivalent of John Bull or Uncle Sam, he is the national image. Michel is thought of as a simple, rural character, anxious only to be respected, to get on with his work, to smoke his pipe and to drink his beer. That is the view which the great mass of the German people had of themselves: decent people who only wanted to live their simple, patriotic lives in an atmosphere of beer steins and sausage. All they wanted was to be respected by their neighbours and to have self-respect. That was their view of themselves and of their country.

Although the National Socialist government had a programme of social reform, no government can please all its people, nor indeed all the Party comrades, all the time. Within the SA, which had always contained the most radical, revolutionary Nazis, there was discontent at the failure to introduce and to implement the truly socialist policies for which they had fought. Hitler, in the view of the SA leaders, spent far too much time with the capitalists and the aristocratic leaders of the nation. He had forgotten, or perhaps even worse, he had betrayed the revolution. The men of the SA found that the expected distribution of the great estates and the socializing of industry had not happened. Nor had they been entrusted with the task of being the first defenders of the new Reich. The conservative army still held that post. Discontent from the SA leadership down to the rank and file became so evident that the other Nazi leaders feared it might amount to a counter-revolution and overthrow the Reich. That discontent needed to be stilled. And so it was stilled. In June 1934, the senior SA officers were arrested and shot to death by the Party’s new élite – the SS. Within the Nazi hierarchy the influence of the SA then diminished as that of Himmler’s black-and-silver uniformed SS increased. Soon the influence of the SS had penetrated into every sector of German society and extended from the Führer’s bodyguard down to the guards in the concentration camps.

While no government can please all its people, during the early years of the government of Adolf Hitler most Germans were pleased. Huge ocean-going liners, of the sort in which capitalists and their doxies had once travelled, were now filled with German factory workers enjoying sea cruises. These German workers were travelling with the KDF (Kraft durch Freude, the Strength through Joy organization) of the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront – the German Labour Front trade union). The Party had decreed that there was no need for a great number of separate trades unions. The squabbling and rivalries of those bodies had once nearly ruined German industry. It must not be allowed to happen again. All unions were amalgamated and grouped in the DAF, which alone controlled the hours and conditions of work, pay, promotion and pensions for the workers.

There were of course opponents to the Nazis: those who scoffed, those who in the intimate revue bars of the big cities openly mocked the social advances which Germany had made. But their arguments could be refuted by the very obvious economic and social growth which was occurring in the Reich. Germans asked those who doubted, what other government had ever built cars for its people? Were things really better in the capitalist West? In London and in Paris, for example, tens of thousands of homeless people slept on benches along the Thames or the Seine. There were no such unfortunates in the streets of German cities. Slum housing was a feature of the great cities of the Western democracies. In the Third Reich slums had been cleared away.

Germans displayed themselves and their country with pride when the Olympic Games of 1936 were held in Berlin. The cleanness, the orderly crowds, the smart uniforms of the new German Army, the shops filled with consumer goods, all were a mirror of the Germany of Adolf Hitler. Seen from the German viewpoint the Fatherland was prosperous, strong and influential. Within Germany anyone who doubted the evidence of their own eyes was a fool, no, more than that, he was a traitor and deserved to be confined within one of the concentration camps, which had been set up at Dachau, Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen. In these camps the misguided traitors would be held, together with other social, moral or political misfits. Professional criminals, sexual perverts of all sorts, bible-thumpers and Reds of every shade. They and people like them had once nearly brought Germany down. Now they were confined and must be punished. It was the duty of every German to work for the Volksgemeinschaft and if they would not work for that splendid ideal they too would be committed to hard labour in the concentration camps.

Of course, there cannot be 100 per cent success in any enterprise. Within a few years of coming to power, the Party was proclaiming that the world outside the Reich was jealous of her progress and had begun to form coalitions against her. The Fatherland must be strong enough to break the ring of threatening enemies. To build a strong nation would mean great personal sacrifices. Goering had said that what Germany needed was guns not butter. ‘Guns’, he had declared, ‘will make us strong. Butter only makes us fat.’ The Reichs Dietician, as he was called in the satirical cabarets of Berlin and Munich, may not have been the ideal politician to make that demand, for he had a reputation as a gourmand, but his words were accepted. The masses prepared themselves for a reduced standard of living in order that they might be well armed against the enemies of the Fatherland. The overweight Goering’s call for sacrifices was underlined by the press and the Propaganda Ministry. Goebbels wrote: ‘We must be prepared to suffer poverty if we wish one day to be rich. A policy of self-denial does pay dividends.’

The Fatherland, from the viewpoint of the German people, had progressed and even if the pace had slowed down to meet the challenges of the Reich’s enemies, it was still progress towards a finer life. The most obvious advances had been in the areas of social matters and economics. The labour shortage in German factories after 1937 meant that foreign labour had to be brought in and these immigrant workers were astonished to find such amenities as factory baths, higher pay and a legally enforced safety code.

At the political level, too, the people of Germany witnessed a great many examples of the Nazi government’s political ability. The results of an election in 1935 reunited the Saar with the Reich. The industrial Saar, which had been torn away from Germany at the end of the First World War, voted overwhelmingly to be returned to the Fatherland. Then, too, there were areas along the Rhine which had been demilitarized on the orders of the victorious Allies and which had been occupied since the end of the war by soldiers of those nations. When, at long last, those enemy armies moved out, German troops had still not been allowed to reoccupy the Rhineland. This national humiliation was one which Hitler intended to rectify by marching the Army into the Rhineland. He gambled that the governments of the West would not oppose his move and that those in the East could not. The General Staff of the Army expressed fears that such a precipitate move would lead to a military confrontation with France. The Führer knew better. The German Army marched in, and soon in the world’s tabloids there were pictures of sentries of that army standing on the battlements of Ehrenbreitstein castle, over-looking Koblenz. Once again the garrison towns in which the Imperial Army had been quartered echoed to German voices singing German soldiers’ songs. The Watch on the Rhine had been re-created. The Third Reich, under the control of Adolf Hitler, had begun its march. He had gambled with the peace of Europe and won.

One of the great emotional themes of National Socialist philosophy had been the demand for all Germans to be united within one Fatherland. To the south and east of Germany lay the rump of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Within that rump lived eight million German Austrians whose military skills, industry and ability had once carved out a vast Central European empire. That empire had been destroyed and fragmented in 1918, leaving German Austria in a world where she could not survive economically. For Austria to join Germany was the obvious answer, but the union had been forbidden by the victorious powers. Hitler gambled, once again, that the West would not now oppose this reunion of German blood. He opened a political offensive aimed at destroying the opposition of Austrian statesmen to the Anschluss. By 1938, worn down by an increasingly strident campaign, the Austrian government acceded to Hitler’s threats. The German Army marched in. A plebiscite was held and confirmed, as the plebiscites in dictatorships invariably do, the will of the people. In this case the people had voted overwhelmingly for the Anschluss with Germany. German Austria was back in the Reich.

There followed a new demand from the Führer. In the Sudetenland, the border areas of the republic of Czechoslovakia, lived Germans who had settled in the region during the 13th and 14th centuries. Under Habsburg rule they had been Austrian citizens. When Czechoslovakia was created, the Sudeten Germans became part of a Slav land and thus an ethnic minority. They suffered persecution and discrimination – what ethnic minority does not? – and cried out to be united with the Reich. The diplomatic crises of 1938 and the political compromises during the autumn of that year had the result that the Sudetenland and its German population were detached from Czechoslovakia and ceded to the Reich. During those months of crisis, when a European war threatened, the hearts of the German people swelled with pride at the realization that it was upon their Chancellor and Führer that the decision depended as to whether there would be war or peace in Europe. The prime ministers of France and Great Britain had flown to discuss with the German leader those vital questions, just as other politicians had had to come to Germany to learn the Führer’s will and pleasure. Germany had, once again, the influential voice in Europe that she had under a former powerful Imperial Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

German troops entered the Sudetenland in the autumn of 1938, passing through the modern defensive systems which the Czechs had constructed and which they now had to surrender. More than that; the most efficient armaments industry in Central Europe had passed under Nazi control and the new Reichs frontier with Czechoslovakia now lay just west of Prague. The commanders of the German Army had been fearful during the Sudetenland crisis. They had argued that if the invasion resulted in war, the Western democracies and the small but powerful Czech Army might defeat Germany in a war for which she was not yet prepared. The Führer knew better. The Munich Agreement ensured that the march of the German Army was unimpeded, and its occupation of the Sudetenland bloodless.

Beneš, the Czech President, resigned and went into exile. Hácha, his successor, was a frail old man, quite incapable of withstanding Hitler’s next territorial demand that the remainder of the Czech state be ceded or Prague would be razed by German bombers. On 14 March 1939, German troops drove into the golden city of Prague, into Bohemia and Moravia. Czechoslovakia, in Hitler’s words, no longer existed. Along the Baltic, in Lithuania, there was a city, Memel, which had once been an East Prussian port. To Germans that name had an emotional appeal as the words of their national anthem spoke of a Fatherland extending west to east, from the Maas to Memel. Under the peace treaties it had become a free city; but the Germans did not see that it was free, only that it had been torn from the nation, that it was no longer part of the Reich. Hitler’s demands that Memel be reunited with Germany were met during March 1939. German ‘Michel’ saw the developments which had restored his country with a deepening sense of pride. Germany had become a powerful nation and its successes had all been achieved without war – merely by being firm with the Fatherland’s enemies and pointing out to them the correctness of Germany’s demands. All this the Führer had achieved and in only a few years.

As foreigners saw it, German manoeuvring and posturing had been a direct threat to the peace of Europe. The tactics applied against the politicians of countries which resisted Nazi pressure had been nothing but bullying on the international stage and typical of the Nazis whose Party anthem proclaimed the need to dominate the streets by crushing all opposition. Germany was a power whose Führer and whose armies threatened the peace of Europe.

To ‘Michel’ there was one little piece of territory which had been stolen from the Fatherland as a result of dictated treaties and which needed to be restored. This was the artificially created Polish ‘corridor’ at whose exit stood the port of Danzig. The corridor, once part of Prussia, had been cut from that province and bestowed upon the Poles in order that they might have access to the sea. It was a simple matter for the Nazi propagandists to whip up demands from Danzig’s German citizens for reunion with the Reich, but the resolute Poles were not minded to surrender either the city or the corridor. Polish resolution was stiffened when a guarantee was given by a British government determined to maintain the republic’s independence. The British guarantee was seen by the Germans as closing a ring of aggressive nations around the Fatherland. That ring must be broken if Germany were to survive. In order to break that ring it would be necessary to smash its eastern link – Poland. On 23 August 1939, in a complete reversal of their respective Party policies, the Nazi and Soviet governments signed a pact. Poland, which lay between them, was isolated. More than that, she was now under a direct and imminent threat. An outbreak of war could not be long delayed.

The Führer, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich, had already prepared his military commanders by telling them that this political crisis was not one that could be resolved like that of Czechoslovakia. The Western powers could not back down this time. War was inevitable. In 1937, at the conclusion of a Führer conference attended by the German political and military leadership, Major Hossbach of the General Staff produced a memorandum. This document, which was later used as a principal indictment at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, demonstrated that Hitler was determined to use armed conflict as an instrument of policy. His resolve to lead the German people in a war before he became too old to fight it effectively was a theme which he frequently expressed, on one occasion to the British Ambassador. There can be no doubt that Hitler was convinced war was the only way by which Germany could attain a dominant position in the world. He was soon to achieve his ambition.

On Friday, 1 September, Adolf Hitler declared in the Reichstag that Polish aggression against the Reich could no longer be tolerated. Polish Regular Army units had been attacking the Reich since the early hours. He had ordered the German forces to retaliate. The Second World War had begun. The Party’s propaganda line was that Germany had not started the war. A coalition of nations hostile to Germany had urged Poland to attack her. The Fatherland had retaliated and its just defence of sovereign territory against unprovoked aggression had caused Britain and France to declare war on Germany. It was not Germany that had declared war against the Western Allies. They, not she, were the aggressors. Goebbels admitted, an admission underlined by reports produced by the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the Intelligence Section of the SS), that war had not been welcomed when it came in 1939, but had been accepted with fateful resignation as having been forced on Germany. Paradoxically, during the war, each new victory gained produced, along with the general rejoicing, a fresh longing for peace and the hope that this new success would be the final victory.

For a nation to prosecute a war and to bring it to a successful conclusion demands an interplay of a great many factors, chief among which are wise and farseeing leadership, the efficient use of human, industrial and economic potential, a united Home Front and well-equipped armed forces. Accepting that these factors are decisive ones, the thesis is valid that the major war upon which Nazi Germany embarked in 1939 was one that she was unlikely to win.

The Party’s Perspective of the Masses

In earlier pages we have seen the German people’s perspective of the Führer and the Nazi Party and how the Nazis made great efforts to win popular approval. Several times in the pre-war years the masses were also asked to take part in referenda to vote whether they approved a particular action which the Party had taken. Referenda were considered by the Party as practical demonstrations of its closeness to the masses and its concern for the opinions of the people.

Let us now see how the Party and its leaders viewed those over whom they ruled. The people as a whole were, in those pre-war days, ready to make sacrifices of any sort in order to maintain the stability which the National Socialist government had brought about. The masses were prepared to support any move that would make Germany strong again. For that reason they welcomed the re-introduction of military conscription which had been a feature of German life for more than 100 years. Much of the Party’s condemnation of Weimar had been that Germany’s young men lacked direction; that they had no discipline, because under Weimar there had been no compulsion to join the services.

The Party’s pilot schemes for the introduction of food rationing, the guns before butter policy, the Eintopfgericht eaten on Sundays, had all demonstrated to the Party leaders that if the people thought certain measures to be necessary, the masses would accept and support them. As Hitler had claimed in the 1934 Party Rally, ‘Before us lies Germany, behind us comes Germany. With us marches Germany.’ It was an intoxicating thought for the Party: nearly 80 million skilled and disciplined citizens dedicated to the Protestant ethic of hard work. It was an intoxicating thought, but contained within that sentence lay the obstacle which, in the viewpoint of the Nazi leaders, needed to be overcome. This was the influence of religion, the hold of the churches upon the ordinary citizen. The Party’s radical and revolutionary leaders realized that Germany had a Christian tradition nearly 2,000 years old which taught humility and equality in the eyes of God. That God was, as the Nazis saw it, a Jew. The Catholics in the population also gave obedience to an alien creed, to the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders were becoming increasingly critical of the actions of the Reich. All this superstition, this disloyalty must be overcome and replaced by new Nordic beliefs.

If it were just religion, this might be easy enough to eradicate, but there were other liberal traditions which it would be harder to wipe out so quickly. There was a belief in the freedom of the press to criticize. Accepting, albeit reluctantly, that need but determined to destroy it eventually, the German press under the Nazis was by no means the docile beast that the Western world believed it to be. This belief in freedom of expression applied equally to radio, and the government’s several campaigns to stop the public listening to foreign broadcasts were generally unsuccessful. For one thing many citizens thought that it was not wrong to listen to foreign stations that were playing music and, in addition, many Party members considered that the ban did not apply to them because they were politically reliable and, therefore, proof against enemy propaganda. The German nation, was, as the Nazi leadership saw it, a large, powerful, disciplined nation. On the other hand, it was religious, freedom-loving and expected a certain degree of independence in the matter of conscience.

For the Party’s long-term strategy to succeed it would be necessary to destroy the negative, Christian influences and replace them by more dynamic concepts, chief among which were those of blood and race. The conviction that the Aryan race and German blood were superior to all others formed the cornerstone of the Nazi creed. Those of the Volksgemeinschaft who accepted these beliefs were, in Nazi eyes, full members of a nation which was racially, and by inference morally, superior to all others. To eradicate weak Christian beliefs of equality from the German soul might take time, but the Third Reich had time. It had a projected life of ten centuries. The Hitler regime would rule a Reich whose life would be longer than the life spans of former empires. Any mistakes which Germany might make in the first years of the Thousand-Year Reich would be excusable. Within ten centuries the system would be made to run so smoothly that similar errors would not occur again and during that time the weaknesses in the German soul could be bred out. The Nazis’ belief in racial superiority was neither peculiar to them nor had it first begun with them. For thousands of years the Brahmins have believed that they are twice born and that this makes them superior to everyone else in the world. For thousands of years the Jews have called themselves the Chosen Race. Many nations have had feelings of superiority, racial, political or religious. Germany, that is Nazi Germany, came late to the belief in superiority and it was a creed not accepted by the masses as a whole.

Let us, in the last year of peace, 1938, analyse what had been achieved. The Party had planned to unify Germany politically. That programme had already been achieved. It had planned to unite all Germans in one Fatherland. That part of the programme was in progress. It had planned to reinforce the Volksgemeinschaft through repetition of the creed of racial superiority. This was a long-term ambition, but indoctrination was already in progress. The fourth phase of the plan was to fight a series of lightning wars at the end of which Germany would be the supreme power in Europe. That part of the programme would soon be in train.

At the conclusion of the fourth stage the Party would establish its control over the lands which the Wehrmacht had conquered. The industries and agricultures of those conquered lands would then be integrated with those of the Fatherland. Now enlarged industrially, with food supplies guaranteed and having a reservoir of human material to exploit, the Reich would take time to digest its conquests. Then, made powerful by that increase in strength, Germany would go on to achieve the Party’s ambition – a Germany superior to all other nations. Having once gained that place she could then ensure by vigilant policing that there would never be a challenge to her authority, from either external or internal enemies. By the elimination of the weak and the congenitally disabled a Master Race would be created to rule over the subordinate races whom genetic engineering would have bred to work docilely for their German masters.

The people of the Volksgemeinschaft would rule over the lesser breeds and the more important a person’s position within the Nazi hierarchy that much greater would be his wealth and eminence in the administration of these latter-day colonists. The Sicherheitsdienst of the SS, those guardians of National Socialist ethics, would ensure that no member of the hierarchy, at whatever level, set himself up in opposition to the central government. The Fatherland would be secure for the duration of its forecasted existence.

Even within the concept of a Master Race there are some who are especially gifted. Among comrades of any enterprise, even a Nordic Volksgemeinschaft, there are some who are better comrades, who are more ambitious, dynamic, aggressively thrusting – the natural leaders in a society, an élite within an élite. Thus it was foreseen that there would come a time in the life of the Thousand-Year Reich when these aristocrats – that élite within an élite – would need to be grouped into a sort of Teutonic knighthood, a select brotherhood. They would form the very cream of the nation and they would be sound – physically, morally and psychologically. They would be the physical, moral and social élite of the German race, and to strengthen them intellectually the finest minds in Germany would be recruited to instruct them. One day such a proper knightly organization would either have evolved or have been created, but until that time came the best representatives of the Nazi Germany of the 1930s would be grouped within the SS. Himmler’s SS were the very best examples of 20th-century German manhood.

So high was the standard of physical excellence in the SS of Hitler’s Germany that in pre-war days it was claimed that a single filled tooth debarred a man. Physically perfect, they were then subjected to an intense programme of Nordic indoctrination to make them racially and politically aware of their special role in the new Reich. Chief among the duties inherent in the role of defenders of the Fatherland was to ensure that Germany’s enemies were neutralized. This process would be accomplished in the camps that had been set up to imprison the enemies of the State. These concentration camps would need to be staffed by guards who were doctrinally sound against the evil, perverted arguments of the politically criminal inmates. Theirs would be a terrible responsibility.

It might be necessary to administer punishment, even capital punishment, but this would have to be carried out with neither remorse nor hesitation, for this well-deserved punishment was being carried out only upon the enemies of the Reich. The concentration camp prisoners were undesirables, enemies of the Fatherland, and would be treated for what they were, traitors to their race; Germans unworthy of being part of the Volksgemeinschaft. SS training and indoctrination was a hard and testing process and produced men not so much ruthless as pitiless in their determination to rid the world of the vermin over whom they were placed in authority. Why should they have compassion for vermin? They, the SS, were prepared to fight and die for Hitler. If they, the élite, were prepared to sacrifice everything for Germany, to be so contemptuous of their own lives that they would gladly lay them down for Hitler, how little consideration need be given to the lives of those prisoners who rejected the concepts of the nobility of their race and who were, therefore, unworthy of the distinction of being German? To be hard, rock-hard, against Germany’s native enemies meant that the SS had to treat these other Germans – the pre-war concentration camp inmates – very badly. This was not always easy, for the prisoners were still Germans. How much easier did the task become, in later years, when it was only alien, sub-humans who had to be guarded – or dealt with. The destruction of racial enemies, like the Jews, that race which Nazi propaganda had claimed had sought to destroy the Fatherland, was an honourable duty. In the war situation and against the racially inferior Slavs, the feeling that one was ‘cleansing’ Europe made the task so much more bearable. Seen against a time-frame of 1,000 years, the decade of racial murder in the concentration camps and the prisoner-of-war camps of Europe can be seen as a short but brutal introduction to what would have been the policing of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Photographs of the wooden barracks of Dachau and Buchenwald might have given the impression that concentration camps were intended to be a temporary feature of the Nazi social fabric. It is necessary to see the stone wall of Mauthausen, metres thick and built to endure for ten centuries, to be made aware that the concentration camps were no passing phenomenon but would be an essential, vital component of the New Order.

Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsührer SS, was anxious that his men should not be seen by the Volksgemeinschaft solely as concentration camp guards. No, his were all-round men belonging to an élite body, a fusion of physical and intellectual perfection. To add lustre to the élite organization, to make the nation aware that this was the cream of Germany, he gave high, honorary rank to the very best representatives of German culture. Richard Strauss, for example, was an honorary general in the SS.

Administration of the Reich’s future colonial empire would require fully competent officers and these future SS administrators learned their craft in Germany during the pre-war-years. So proficient, so powerful was the penetration of German society by the SS that, in time, its officers controlled every aspect of German social and political life. During the war that penetration extended to the military field and, starting in 1939, Waffen SS Divisions were raised. General Lemelsen, commander of the Fourteenth Army in Italy during the last months of the war, was only one of the senior officers who expressed the belief that, ‘There was absolutely no necessity for the creation of the Waffen SS.’ It was clear that Lemelsen had not seen that force from the viewpoint of the Party; that is, that with final victory, the honour of being the weapon-bearers of the state would be taken from the Army and bestowed upon the SS.

Within the hierarchy which the Party intended to set up in the new colonies there would be located above the lowest stratum of German managers other strata whose officers would administer estates. Then there would be those governing regional districts or areas the size of provinces, right up to the final level of men who would be uncrowned monarchs ruling a whole country. During the war years and particularly in the first years of victory and expansion, senior Party men were put into viceregal positions for which they were untrained and for which they were temperamentally and morally unsuited. These men, with their creed of racial superiority, were aware that, so long as tribute flowed from their kingdoms, any brutality on their part would be neither questioned nor criticized by central government.

From the perspective of these men and of the Party which had appointed them, the occupation policies in Poland, in Russia and in the Balkans were a pilot scheme for the administration of a Thousand-Year Empire. Who were these pro-consuls, the torch-bearers of Teuton civilization? They included Hans Frank, once an undistinguished lawyer in the days of the Kampfzeit, who was made Governor-General of Poland and lived in viceregal style in Cracow. In November 1941, Hitler ordered the setting up of an administration for the occupied eastern territories of Russia. Alfred Rosenberg, an academic and a Party intellectual, was empowered to run that administration and was given one Reichskommissar for the Ukraine and another to administer Belorussia together with the former Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, was created Reichskommissar for the Ukraine and his rule was an indictment of the Nazi Party’s treatment of subject peoples. The Ukraine had fought for years to gain independence from Russia and it had been the region in which the Soviets had committed genocide from 1936 to 1937; a time of repression and murder. The Ukraine was the bread-basket of Russia and the Soviet authorities ordered its peasants to amalgamate their smallholdings into collective farms. The fiercely independent Ukrainians refused and to force them to comply with Party orders Nikita Khrushchev, acting for Stalin, starved them to death. More than 12 million Ukrainians died in that Soviet-inspired famine. It is not surprising that those who survived welcomed the German Army into their country as liberators. The Ukrainians, a hard-working, willing nation, farming a fertile land, could have provided the Reich with the grain which it needed to make the whole continent self-sufficient. It was not to be. The sufferings of the people of the Ukraine under the rule of Reichskommissar Koch were of so terrible a nature and so wide-ranging that these potential allies for Germany turned away and went back to the tyranny of Moscow where the gaolers were at least Slavs like themselves. The despair felt by those in authority in Germany at the activities of people like Koch was expressed with great clarity by Goebbels who realized that the fierce resistance put up by the Russian people was due to the fact that they could see no future for themselves in a German victory.

It would have been in Germany’s interest to win over the great mass of the subject nations of the Soviet Union. Such a policy could only have been achieved by a lenient occupation policy which, accepting the cynical attitude of the Party, would have needed only to be maintained until final victory had been won. Then would come the time to introduce the measures which would reduce the Slavs to the status of unprivileged serfs in the Greater German Empire. But for as long as the Red Army remained in the field and the Soviet Union was undefeated, the attempt should have been made, as Goebbels appreciated, to win the confidence of the Ukrainians, of the White Russians, of the Balts and of the non-White peoples of the Caucasus. Goebbels realized it but his protests availed him nothing and he lacked the authority to call a halt to the worst excesses of Koch and those criminals like him. They destroyed any chance of the Nazis’ gaining support from the peoples of the Soviet Union. More than that, their activities produced the tide of partisan warfare which destroyed German military operations and the activities of the Party’s occupation policies led to the terrible revenge taken upon the peoples of the eastern Gaus by the Red Army. Not a little of the blame for the defeat of Germany can be apportioned to the arrogance of the Party ‘Bonzen’ and to the complacency of the Party in seeing the war in the East as won when, as a later chapter of this book will show, the Army’s Supreme Command had admitted in the autumn of 1941 that Operation Barbarossa had failed.

The Party’s View of Women

If the perspective we have of the Third Reich as a totalitarian regime, rigid and inflexible but certain of its goals and how these were to be achieved, is distorted, so too is our understanding about the position of women in Nazi Germany. Whereas the men were under conscription for pre-military training and then for service in the armed forces, the same compulsions were not applied to women. Legislation did exist to compel women but this was not enforced until the last stages of the war. This unsure touch was particularly evident in the Party’s approach to those women who made up 37 per cent of the pre-war labour force. The problem was that initially women had been encouraged to leave industry, but by 1937 a shortage of labour existed which only a return of women workers could overcome. The Nazi view of women was that they were the domestic partner in a marriage. They should not have to work, but if they did it should not be in heavy industry. As such, National Socialist policy had always been that women should be encouraged to leave industry and return to domesticity. In the first days of Nazi government the principal incentive for that attitude had been the need to give work to men – the natural bread-winners – while they, the women, fulfilled their natural role as homemakers. National Socialist attitudes to the employment of women were thus governed by an economic as well as by a social consideration. Governments before the Nazis had been unable to conquer the curse of unemployment and, indeed, under Weimar the numbers of those without work had risen to more than six million. On 1 June 1933, within six months of achieving power, the Nazis passed a law designed to reduce unemployment, and the preamble in that document reinforced the Party line that women were partners with men and were not in competition with them. That concept was underlined in an article in the Party newspaper, Der Völkischer Beobachter, which stated that the task of German women was not to campaign against men but to campaign alongside them. The demand for equality worked both ways. Women did not, in pre-Hitler Germany, receive equal pay for equal work, but gained this right in 1935, in the second year of Nazi government.

Although the Nazi propaganda campaign, which was aimed at taking women out of industry, had stressed the need to give employment to men, there was a deeper, long-term issue which could only be overcome by women returning to their traditional role as mothers. Germany was a land with a declining population and National Socialist policy was aimed at reversing that trend. The production of children was encouraged by every means and to achieve that ambition the Nazi Party needed to eradicate from German society those ideas, trends and attitudes which had been responsible for the low birth rate. Thus the Party opposed, on principle, divorce, birth control, abortion and homosexuality. The Party programme encouraged the sanctity of marriage, a raising of the health standards of the nation and their visible products: healthy children.

So far as the Nazi leaders were concerned the need to produce children was the most important priority of the Thousand-Year Reich and this need could be best, but not exclusively, met within marriage. Analysis of the problem showed that the surplus of women over men had risen from more than 750,000 before the Great War to 2.75 million in 1935. Research showed that a great many of these surplus women were of child-bearing age. Ideally, to raise the population every woman capable of bearing a child should reproduce. But the Germans were a very moral people and if a woman who had no husband bore a child it would bring upon the baby the stigma of bastardy and against the mother the accusation of immorality. How to overcome these petit-bourgeois inhibitions was discussed at the Party’s highest levels. Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s Deputy, and Heinrich Himmler, responsible for the purity of the Race, not only sought ways to overcome the moral objections of the German people but also strove to improve the lot of the unmarried mother in accordance with the Party line that a woman who had given a child to Germany had performed a patriotic duty. Himmler stated, indeed, that to be an unmarried mother did not debase a woman; rather it raised her to her true level. She was neither a married nor an unmarried woman, but a mother. That was the important thing. To help unmarried mothers who had to go out to work there were generous tax reliefs, and to remove the social stigma Hess declared that the Fatherland would be responsible for the rearing of their children. The leaders of the Third Reich had their own ideas of what constituted morality and the Party’s attitude was that the need for the population to increase was more important than old-fashioned morals which had no place in the revolutionary, National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft.

To encourage the great mass of German women to marry and to reproduce, the Party undertook a massive propaganda campaign and backed it with financial and other incentives. Women who left full-time employment to marry were eligible for marriage vouchers to the value of 1,000 marks. When it is considered that a woman’s average weekly wage in 1933 was 27 marks, it can be seen what an incentive the grant was. Within three years more than 600,000 marriages had been assisted by such loans, and repayment of the money was spread out over a very long period of time. There were also ways in which the size of the debt could be reduced or cancelled totally: for a first child by 25 per cent and for subsequent children by the same percentage of the outstanding sum.

There were other financial inducements for mothers, such as rent rebates, the reduction of electricity and gas bills by 50 per cent and preferential treatment on transport, in queues and in shops. The award of the Mother’s Cross was a visible sign that the status of the mother in Nazi Germany had been upgraded. The 1935 Party Rally acknowledged the special and indispensable role of women in society through the slogans, ‘Women have their battlefield, too’ and ‘Women are the first educators of the new generation’. Motherhood, so the Party said, gave the chance to display their natural qualities of self-sacrifice and sympathy. Women were different from, but the equals of, men. Men were productive; women were reproductive – partners in a perfect whole.

To help the German woman fulfil her natural function of motherhood, all influences which might harm the unborn child were to be avoided. Women were advised not to smoke or drink alcohol during their pregnancies and to keep themselves fit through exercise and healthy diet. Ante-natal clinics monitored the health of the expectant mother and her baby. Post-natal clinics ensured the health and well-being of mother and child. Everything that could be done to help was done. In its demand for children the State rejected absolutely and totally birth control and abortion. Both were considered to be crimes against the Volksgemeinschaft and the slogan that abortion was little less than child murder had a dramatic effect. The numbers of girls seeking to terminate pregnancies fell dramatically from nearly a million in 1928 to only a few thousand in the first years of the Reich, and remained low. Of course, there were permitted cases where not to abort would have endangered the mother’s life, or where the foetus was that of parents with hereditary defects, whose breeding the Party proclaimed to be an infamy. Considering abortion along racial lines produced the ruling that the termination of pregnancies in Jewish mothers should be encouraged.

In the final months of the war the laws forbidding abortion were relaxed so that those German girls and women who had been raped and made pregnant by soldiers of the Red Army could have their pregnancies terminated. In the interests of the health of the Volksgemeinschaft such abortions were necessary to destroy babies whose mothers had been infected with the venereal diseases which were thought to be endemic in the Russian forces.

In the days of the ‘liberal’ Republic, sexual perversions had been tolerated, but in the Third Reich homosexuals were prosecuted and imprisoned in concentration camps. The overt reason for this condemnation was that homosexuality was a sin in the eyes of the Church, but the government was concerned by the low birth rate, and sexual acts between men could not produce children. For that latter reason Jewish homosexuals were encouraged in their perversion. Nor did German lesbians suffer condemnation because it was the Party’s conviction that a lesbian might, one day, come to her senses and take up a heterosexual relationship from which would come offspring.

The overriding demand was for the German people to bring healthy children into the world because throughout the whole lifetime of the Thousand-Year Reich there would be a need for manpower to serve the Fatherland. In the short term, that is in the first few decades, this need would be greatest. Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, warned at a staff meeting in October 1941 that although the outcome of the war in Russia had already been decided in Germany’s favour, fighting might flicker and break out for more than a decade. During those years Germany would face the same sort of tribal revolt in Russia as that which the British were meeting on the North-West Frontier of India. Thus, for one or perhaps even two generations, there would be a continuing need for warriors to guard the frontiers of the Greater German Empire.

Once the Fatherland had digested its conquests, there would be a demand for administrators, planners, overseers and all the hierarchical structure of a ruling Race. The need for children would remain, therefore, for ten centuries to come. This overriding, national demand could be met only by ensuring that German women did not jeopardize their child-bearing faculties. The result of medical surveys showed that hard manual labour in factories could have a damaging effect upon their reproductive capacity. Concern that such work could affect the growth of the German nation served to underline the intention expressed during the first years of Nazi rule to take women out of the labour force. Under the influence of National Socialist propaganda there was a slow but continual reduction of the numbers of women employed in industry from seven million in 1937 to 2.62 million in May 1939, 2.61 million in May 1941 and 2.58 million in May 1942.

To look after the interests of women who did work, the DAF formed a women’s section as early as July 1934. In order that the DAF female shop stewards understood the problems of their members they had to spend a minimum of six months on the factory floor as well as having to graduate in social science. One of the first results of the formation of DAF women’s sections was the reduction of the working day and the abolition of night work. By law no female was allowed to work in a factory after 10pm.

In one of those contradictions peculiar to the nominally socialist and revolutionary Nazi system, a need was still seen to exist for housemaids and, to maintain their numbers, 15-year-old girls could be employed. This move was rationalized on the grounds that such employment would, first, safeguard the puberty of very young girls by keeping them out of factories and, secondly, it would teach them domestic skills. They would also learn the hard fact that before one can command one must have learned to obey – and in service they would learn to be obedient.

From 1936 a financial incentive was offered which helped to reduce even further the number of women still in the labour market. The introduction of conscription for the armed forces had taken men from well-paid jobs in industry and in order that soldiers’ families should not suffer financial loss the Nazi government issued such generous family allowances that wives did not need to work to maintain a good living standard. For families with children the allowances were sufficiently high to remove completely the burden of financial worry. There was yet another incentive, albeit a negative one, which took women from the factories. The earnings of a working woman counted against her allowances and so far as most women were concerned there was little point in working hard for a small wage.

Within a few years there were policy conflicts within the National Socialist system. There was the Party belief that, for very good reasons, German women should not have to toil in factories. On the other hand, by 1937 the labour shortfall could only be overcome by employing women. Factories needed to be filled if Germany’s production was to rise and to meet the demands of a future war. With great reluctance a campaign was launched to encourage women who had left industry to return to it. As the figures given above show, the campaign did not succeed and there was a decline in the numbers of women at work.

Laws enabling the government to conscript women into factories had been on the statute book for years, but had not been implemented, nor would they ever be – in respect of German women. For the great mass of them there was to be no direction of labour. Persuasion rather than coercion was the keynote, for the Party did not wish to offend the people. As late as May 1943, it was accepted that total war must not, in any way, become a war against women, who represented an enormous power in Germany. Women were not to be compelled to do their duty, but they were expected to see the need and to respond to it.

By a strange and, for the German leadership, undesirable paradox, when war did come the Wehrmacht’s military successes served to convince the women of Germany that there was no need for them to enter industry. Each victory had been won after a short campaign, the material losses of which had been made good by the standing labour force. Those military victories had also produced prisoners of war – more than a million of them by the end of 1940 – and these could be put into the mines, into agriculture and into steel production. The number of military prisoners would be added to as a result of the Russian campaign, and from Russia too there came a great mass of women who joined the German work-force either as volunteers or as forced labour. When the German women learned of the enormous reservoir of workers available to the Fatherland it is not surprising that they felt they were not needed at the factory bench.

The middle and final years of the war were to prove this belief false. A nation of finite resources which is engaged in fighting a war for its very survival must ensure that every able citizen is fully used. A nation in such a situation can afford to reject nobody for the war effort must be a sacrifice made by the whole people. A nation, and particularly one which is fighting an ideological war, cannot afford to risk sabotage by employing large numbers of foreign workers some of whom may be enemy agents, nor can it permit the go-slow tactics of a conscript, foreign work-force. There must be no impediment to the flow of weapons and war material from the factories to the armies in the field, but this was the perilous situation the National Socialist leadership was prepared to accept rather than act in a dictatorial way against the women of the nation.

For the campaigns of 1939 and 1940, factories geared to supply the needs of short campaigns had coped. The plan of attack upon the Soviet Union in June 1941 had, likewise, been scheduled to be concluded within five months. Had all gone as planned, the German armed forces and the existing work-force would once again have been sufficient to bring victory. Despite initial huge successes, it was very soon accepted at OKW level that the war in Russia could not be won in 1941. If it could not be won in that year victory was unlikely in any other year, because the length of the battle line in the east, the overwhelming strength of the Red Army and the constant fight against partisans reduced the numbers of German soldiers who were actually embattled.

The long and growing casualty lists soon brought about a severe shortage of fighting men. The war spread. In 1943 came the Allied invasion of Italy, an intensification of the guerrilla campaign in Yugoslavia and then in 1944 the landings in North-West Europe. The German Army was now seriously under-strength, was fighting on several fronts and needed every man for the battle line. What should have happened was that the Party organizations, the inflated staffs at rear headquarters and industry should have been checked to see where men could be spared. Despite this manpower crisis, the work-force in the factories was still predominantly male, and women were neither working in great numbers in industry, nor were they in the armed forces replacing rear echelon male soldiers in vital but non-combatant, basically civilian, clerical duties.

Appeals by the Nazi authorities for women to serve the Fatherland fell upon deaf ears. One government official in the Labour Office complained that those already at work in industry were either women who had always had to work or else the families of service officers who saw factory work as a patriotic duty. That broad stratum of women who did not come forward, the official complained, and whose poor, prewar living standards had been raised by the Nazi Party, had adopted the ‘I’m all right now’ mentality, refusing to see that the Fatherland was in danger and that it was their duty to give up their coffee mornings or hairdresser’s appointments so as to take their place alongside their sisters at the lathes. It was to serve the needs of that type of woman that more than 1.3 million housemaids were still employed, as late as September 1944.

Government threats to enforce the 1935 conscription laws were made in the expectation that such threats would be sufficient to force the women to come forward. It had the opposite effect. The attitude was, ‘If we are to be conscripted, why should we volunteer?’ The feelings of those other women who had been working for years in wartime conditions can be well appreciated. They had, in addition to their long hours of work, to carry out civil defence duties and to care for their families. Their feelings, already bitter, were further aroused by the knowledge that a great number of girls were evading war work by enrolling as full-time students at universities. The National Socialist regime had always laid great stress on higher education for women, but in the opinion of many working women and not a few Nazi officials, the demand by girls for places at university was based on a determination to avoid factory work rather than a thirst for knowledge. The fact that so many middle-class girls were offered places in higher education seemed to emphasize to the socialist elements in the Party that class attitudes were still to be found in Germany.

In the matter of female education Gauleiter Geisler of Munich was a man not known for a subtleness of expression. He suggested that female students should not fill their heads with learning but that their academic achievement should be to produce a child for the Führer. ‘Should any girl’, pro-claimed the Gauleiter, ‘be so unattractive that she cannot find a lover, then I am prepared to assign one of my adjutants to the task of giving her satisfaction’.

In an effort to increase workshop production by a labour force whose numbers remained more or less static, the hours of work in the factories were raised. Despite this there was no corresponding increase in output, rather was there a dramatic rise in the number of women suffering from psychosomatic illnesses. An increase of feminine complaints tended to reduce still further the numbers of those who contributed to the national war effort and also of those who should have contributed. In that context Fritz Sauckel, Reichs Minister responsible for the deployment of the labour force, complained that of the 3.6 million women who had been medically examined during 1943, only 1.6 million were fit for work in industry. A further three quarters of a million were only fit for half-day work and a further 500,000 had been taken out of industry through health problems. It may well be that the women of Germany had absorbed so deeply the political propaganda to take them out of industry that when they entered the factories they rejected the work subconsciously. The Nazis had been hoist with their own petard.

Efforts were made to overcome the labour shortfall through the employment of women working at home on light assembly tasks. This scheme proved impracticable and wasteful. Then, too, those women who did only a half-day’s work in factories soon found that they were required to work 30 hours per week – nearly as many hours as a full-time week in peacetime. Many of these discontented women began to report sick with the usual mysterious, psychosomatic maladies. The man-power shortage was so serious and the problem of recruitment so difficult to resolve that until the middle years of the war only a single shift was worked in many factories.

The situation of the peasant women was even worse than that of urban women. It seems unusual that a political system so closely tied in with the soil, as the Nazis claimed theirs to be, should have been so uncaring of the needs of the workers on the land. Despite the need to produce food, farmers were conscripted into the forces, leaving farms to be worked by their womenfolk. The concern of the Nazi Party for the child-bearing capabilities of urban women seemed not to extend to those in rural areas. It is hardly surprising that the birth rate in such areas, already low before 1933, continued to decline.

The employment of prisoners of war alleviated some of the work problems, but emphasized others which the Nazi leadership had obviously not considered. The sexual desires of German soldiers were met in military-run brothels. Those same desires in the women left at home went unconsidered and when in rural areas the farmers’ wives had young prisoners of war working for them, and these foreigners also had sexual needs, it was obvious that dangerous liaisons could result. Those guilty of such misconduct suffered severe penalties and when a case had racial connotations, that is where the lover was a Russian or a Pole, execution for the male was the standard punishment. The women were usually sent to concentration camps.

When one compares the work undertaken by British and Russian women during the Second World War it becomes abundantly clear that for the greatest number of those years of conflict the majority of German women had no conception of what was implied by the term total war. British women laboured hard and long in factories and in the services. They flew aircraft, served on anti-aircraft batteries and carried out a wide variety of tasks for which they would have been considered unsuitable in pre-war days. In Russia the employment of women on war duties went even further and they served as fighter pilots, in infantry regiments as snipers, in partisan detachments and in the heaviest industries. In both those countries the conscription of women was accepted as a vital part of the national war effort.

In Germany it was not until quite late in the war that women were encouraged to enlist in the services and even then it was chiefly into the signals branches of the Army and of the Luftwaffe. During the last year of the war more and more women entered the services to replace men on searchlight sites and in flak batteries. The great majority of these 50,000 women were not volunteers, but were RAD (Labour Corps) members who had been transferred from duties in agriculture to man the guns.

Towards the very end of hostilities great numbers of women entered military service until they numbered more than half a million. By coincidence this influx of women occurred at a time when stories had begun to circulate in the press of acts of heroism by women in the provinces of the Reich into which the Red Army had thrust. It must be understood that the Russian forces sweeping westwards out of Poland and into eastern Germany were men who had advanced across hundreds of miles of their own country which had been destroyed in the war. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of this time in an article in Red Star, the Soviet Army journal,

 

We forget nothing. As we march through Pomerania we see before our eyes our destroyed and bleeding Belorussia. The stink of burning on our coats is that from Smolensk and Orel. In Königsberg, Breslau and Scheidemuhl we think of Voronezh or Stalingrad. Men of the Red Army, do not forget how in Leningrad mothers took their dead children away on little sledges. For what Leningrad suffered, Berlin has not yet paid.

 

The propaganda machine of the Red Army had inflamed the soldiers’ minds with stories of German atrocities and underlined those stories with demands for revenge upon the fascists. Whether the Red Army men needed to be encouraged to ravish and destroy, or were ordered by STAVKA to open a reign of terror, as Goebbels claimed, is not important.

What did happen was that stories of rape, murder, arson, looting and senseless destruction of property by Soviet units were soon current. Paralleling those stories of horror were others commending the heroism of young girls who sought revenge upon their despoilers and had gained that revenge using close combat methods. So frequent were these reports that the single-shot, anti-tank rocket projectile, Panzerfaust, became known as ‘the woman’s weapon’. These stories had a basic theme. Girls would wait in bushes by roadsides, usually singly, until the Red armour rolled towards them. Once the ‘victim’ tank had been chosen the courageous girl of the BDM (Bund deutscher Maderln; the League of German Maidens) would stand up, aim and fire the Panzerfaust. A stream of flame would mark the rocket’s short flight. A detonation and then, on an isolated road in Prussia, Pomerania or Saxony, a Red Army vehicle would be burning. Sometimes it would be a two-girl team armed with the stovepipe-like Panzerschreck. The team would ‘kill’ a succession of Soviet tanks with a series of rockets fired from the launcher. There was also mention of the tank-destroying technique developed by the Hitler Youth and alleged to have been used by some courageous girls of the BDM. In this the tank-buster would run towards the enemy machine as it rumbled slowly along and would place an explosive charge on the metal armour. A pull on the detonating cord and nine seconds later, time enough to dive into cover, the grenade would destroy the Red vehicle.

Just how many of these stories were true? Whether young girls and women of the BDM, victims of multiple rape or otherwise obscenely maltreated, actually did destroy Soviet armoured fighting vehicles cannot be known or proven. Certainly some accounts of the battle for Berlin reported women fighting in the city. It is a matter of record that they were active in the German partisan organization, Wehrwolf, but they were not able to serve in a women’s battalion ‘Adolf Hitler’, which was proposed on 4 March 1945. The war ended before the planning was completed.

For those girls who served in military units National Socialist concepts of frugality applied. So far as the services were concerned the women were soldiers only during the hours they were on duty. During that time they wore uniform and were paid for the hours they worked. Off duty, they had to wear civilian clothes and were, for the purposes of administration, considered to be camp-followers. This bizarre interpretation had the most shocking effects upon the women soldiers who were captured by the Red Army. Soviet officers pointed out to them that they could not claim the protection of the Hague Convention, because, ‘Even your own army says that you are not service personnel’. The story of one girl is representative of so many who suffered.

 

My family was an old Prussian military one, which can trace its service beyond the time of the Great Elector. Such a tradition does not die and although the National Socialists were only marginally better than the left-wing parties, my family served and fought for Hitler, principally because we saw the Nazis as being an interim regime which would precede a return to the monarchy. We considered that the Party must be acceptable. The Crown Prince and two other sons of the Kaiser were in the SA. Also, it would have been unthinkable for any member of our family not to fight for Germany. Hitler, we considered, was an aberration. Germany would live after he had gone.

At the outbreak of war, I gained employment in the War Office as a shorthand typist and the speeds I had achieved brought me to the notice of those in authority. My father was a serving officer and I was considered ‘politically reliable’. That recommendation brought me to a post in a corps forming part of Army Group South in Russia. My first tour of duty in the Soviet Union was at the end of 1942, and the detachment with which I was serving as a lieutenant was stationed in Kharkov. That was as far east as we women soldiers were allowed to be posted.

At that time the great Stalingrad battle was at its height and at Corps we could follow the tragedy when our offensive halted and that of the Red Army began. I was also involved in the later retreat of the German Army out of Kharkov. I had had no idea of what a retreat actually involved – what it looks like and feels like. The panic that there was among those who thought they were trapped. The despair of being encircled; the fear as our motorized columns passed through a narrow escape corridor which was lined with Russian guns and tanks. I also saw the Party bigwigs, the so-called ‘golden pheasants’, from the amount of bullion lace which decorated their brown uniforms. These Party ‘Bonzen’ demanded that the Army escort them to safety. At a time when every one of our panzers should have been in the line, these politicals were demanding to be escorted to safety by panzer regiments.

When the war ended I was in Schoerner’s Army Group in the Protectorate [Bohemia and Moravia]. We were attacked by Czech partisans on the day the war ended and during the scrimmage I was struck on the head. That blow knocked me unconscious and also split my scalp so badly that my face was covered in blood. That blow and the amount of blood probably saved me from being raped for it must have seemed that I had been killed. In the following days the effect of the blow puffed my face so much that it was completely deformed for nearly a week.

Like many of the Blitzmaderln [the Signals Corps girls] I changed into a man’s uniform seeking to disguise myself as a man and thus to avoid rape. This deception may have stopped the sexual attacks but not the beatings which were hard and frequent. In addition, we women disguised as men had to do a man’s share of work and we also received, of course, a man’s share of beating. When some of the girls collapsed at work and their identity was discovered the Red Army major in charge of our unit told them that their future was to serve as whores for the Red Army. By not being acknowledged by the Reichs government as soldiers we were, therefore, legally outside the protection of the Hague Convention. Our own army, he told them, had described them as ‘mattresses for officers’. The Blitzmaderln would fulfil that function for the Russians. Not for officers, but for the ordinary rank and file. The girls were, after all, common whores and not good enough for the officer heroes of the Red Army. What happened to the girls I do not know and all inquiries in post-war years have been fruitless.

One day I eavesdropped on what some Red Army guards were discussing. I had graduated in Russian and had used it when on duty in the German Army, but as soon as I became a prisoner of war, I did not dare let it be known that I spoke the language. I was afraid that if I did, firstly it would betray that I was a woman and, secondly, it would mark me out as ‘special’, when the object of a prisoner of war is not to be conspicuous. The guards on whom I was eavesdropping were discussing the instructions they had been given. Our open-air camp was being broken up. We were being moved to a hutted camp. I did not recognize the name of the place and asked an officer from Staff Intelligence who had also disguised himself as a common soldier. He knew that it was a camp set up in western Siberia and that it was near a mine – he thought a mineral mine.

We set out and within a few days our column had passed northwards into Brandenburg. One night I managed to escape from an overnight halting place, a transit camp site, by hiding in a latrine trench. I cleaned myself up in a stream and it took a long time without soap. I used mud to scrub, literally scrub, my skin and hair. Even after repeated rinsing in the stream I still felt that I smelled. Later dressed in army trousers and a civilian jacket, I managed to get home, only to find our family home destroyed and the estate occupied by Poles, who were now the new owners. Early in 1947, still disguised as a man, I managed to escape from eastern Germany via Czechoslovakia and into Austria.

Concentration Camps

Let us, at this point, consider the phenomenon which was first revealed to the world in July 1944, when the Red Army overran the extermination camp at Maidenek in Poland. From the earliest days of the Third Reich it was generally known that concentration camps existed. They had, in fact, been mentioned very frequently in the German press and foreign correspondents had been allowed to visit them – albeit in organized parties – to see for themselves the way in which they were run. It was widely believed in Germany at that time that the camps held enemies of the State, such as criminal elements, murderers, sexual perverts or political enemies; trades union officials, Communists or monarchists. The camps, in those early days, had no Jewish inmates imprisoned purely because they were Jews. Racial laws were passed in 1935, but in the mid 1930s it was not an offence punishable by a term in a concentration camp to be a Jew. Those Jews who were in camps were imprisoned for some other reason.

Those Germans who had been in one of the camps and who had then been released kept quiet about them and the way in which they were run. Not until these former prisoners had left Germany and were in another country did they speak out. They told of the rigorous inspections, the hard work, the lunatic bureaucracy, of the punishments inflicted for the most trivial offences and how those who died in the camps were sent home to their next of kin inside a sealed coffin which was not allowed to be opened. A refinement to this policy was introduced even before the war. The bodies of those who had died in the camps were cremated and the ashes handed over in a small urn. Stories of priests in Dachau being crucified at Easter-time began to circulate around Europe, but reports of such horrors were generally disbelieved both by the German people and those living outside the Reich. Neither the natives nor the foreigners could bring themselves to accept that a nation as civilized as the Germans could behave in so depraved a fashion. Camps for the correction of errors; camps to bring back the erring inmates to the Volksgemeinschaft; these were acceptable. It was also accepted that in handling vicious criminals it might be necessary to use a high degree of firmness – hardness even. After all, those who had to be beaten or punished must have been guilty of breaking some camp law. But that guards and especially SS men, the élite of the Volksgemeinschaft, would be brutal without cause was unthinkable. Goebbels in one of his cynical pronouncements had once said to his colleagues that if the German people had known what the Nazi Party intended to do once it had gained power, they would never have voted for it. In that he never spoke a truer word.

But concentration camps had not only become an expression of German penitentiary techniques. They were also to become a source of special labour. In them prisoners could be worked without pay, without concern for their safety and until they died, for the concept of hard labour for the prisoners had long been accepted. As the Reich spread across pre-war Europe more prisoners came in: Austrian monarchists, men of Dolfuss’ conservative party, Socialists and Communists. To their number were added Czech politicals so that new camps in the Greater German Empire, that is the lands outside the 1937 boundaries of the Reich, needed to be set up and more SS guards had to be recruited. The outbreak of war and its spread brought more and newer categories of prisoner. As early as 1939 the first mass executions of Jews in Polish towns had taken place and by the beginning of the 1940s the first round-up had begun of Polish Jews. The transit camps in which those first deportees were held eventually became permanent sites, stages on the road of suffering that was trod by millions – Jews and Gentiles alike. Once again the first executions and the first deportations were announced in the German press but the outcry that might have been anticipated from the German people did not materialize. There was a war on and to many Germans the fate of some foreigners in Poland was of less importance than the difficulties of their own wartime lives. The round-up of the Polish Jews and their imprisonment did not affect too greatly those Jews still living in Germany. In 1940 they still numbered 743,000, of whom 47,000 were in Berlin and 72,000 in Vienna.

Special arrangements had to be made to accommodate the great numbers of Polish Jews who had been gathered together. Principal camps were established and soon proved to be too small. Satellite camps to the main lager were then set up and this process continued with the satellites having their own satellite camps. Soon even that accommodation was too small because the Jews from Poland had been joined by those from other countries. By 1942, the plan to remove all Jews from Europe was in full swing and eventually even the satellites to the satellites had sub-camps of their own. The number of prisoners ran into millions.

The intention was that the Jews would be put to work and those who were able-bodied would be worked until they died. When the trains bearing the deportees arrived at the camps a selection was made: on one side the fit, the workers; on the other the unfit. Those too old, too young, too weak or too sick were just mouths that would eat but who would be unproductive in the workshops. Dead they had a certain value. Their hair could be sold, some victims might have gold teeth, false teeth, spectacles, little things of value that were theirs as long as they lived. It was, therefore, ensured that they should not live long but should die before they had had a meal or had learned from the other camp inmates how and where to hide their few treasures and little trinkets. How the old were selected from the strong, the ways in which those selected to die were deceived into a false security, the so-called bath halls in which they were gassed and the crematoria in which they vanished have all been described. I do not need in this book to add to that catalogue of horror.

Let us remind ourselves that in this chapter we are seeing things not from the viewpoint of the martyred, but from that of the SS who selected the work-force, who condemned the infirm, who organized the round-up which had brought the prisoners to the camps and who owned the prisoners body and soul. The concentration camp captives were the property of the flourishing SS organization and as property, as things, they may not have had rights, but they did have certain skills. Among the Jews of Europe there were artists, designers and craftsmen. The knowledge and skill of these men and women could be put to special use; a simple, brilliant and profitable scheme had been formulated at senior SS level.

The SS would extract from the labour force the artistic specialists and, using their skilled craftsmanship, would create contemporary works of art for sale. The idea was adopted enthusiastically and put into practice. These prisoners were the cream of the workforce. At their lowest level, those who were first-class tailors were employed in making uniforms for senior officers of the Party, the Services and others able to pay top prices for such quality work. Others, meanwhile, had designed and produced limited editions of porcelain figures, ceramic works of art, Damascene blades and exquisite leather work. As soon as a supply of these treaures had become available other prisoners produced a glossy catalogue printed in six colours, illustrating the gifts that were on sale to the Party bosses. It was a little gold-mine for the SS.

On a less artistic level other unusual skills were explored, among which was the attempt to undermine confidence in the British economy by using skilled forgers to counterfeit British Bank of England £5 notes. Several million of these notes were produced and the Germans used some of these to bribe foreign agents or to pay for their services. The British Ambassador to Turkey had a valet who worked for German Intelligence. This agent, ‘Cicero’, opened the Embassy safe and photographed the documents inside it. ‘Cicero’ was paid by the SS in forged fivers and it is an illustration of the general lack of European confidence in Hitler’s Germany that agents asked to be paid in Sterling, not Reichsmarks.

Below the level of the skilled designers and craftsmen, below the counterfeiters and the tailors was the great mass of other prisoners whose skills could not be exploited for gain. They could be worked to death in quarries or on land reclamation projects, hard and unrelenting toil in all weathers. Under such a regime it is not surprising that many concentration camp inmates chose to throw themselves from the quarry heights on to the boulders below. One SS report enclosed the request form from a quarry owner – a civilian employer – asking the guards to prevent prisoner suicides as the blood, brains and flesh on the boulders were upsetting other workers.

By the middle of the war, in late 1943, the SS Production and Sales organization was in full swing. The personal effects of those who had entered the camp and who had been very quickly killed were being converted to cash. Those who worked in the camp on non-SS projects for civilian employers were, indeed, paid for their labour, but the money did not reach the prisoners but passed straight into the SS bank account. Then there was the money earned from the luxury goods scheme. Each of the systems showed a hundred per cent profit. Not only was the SS organization as a whole making money, but it was also possible for individuals to profit on their own account. Those who were more than usually vicious to the inmates, who could drive them harder or get more work out of their captives, were candidates for promotion. They might even be selected to run a camp of their own and this promotion brought with it definite financial reward. A certain proportion of the personal items of prisoners could be creamed off, leaving the bulk to go to the SS main office. And for as long as there were Jews in Europe the treasure would flow in.

There were other money-raising ventures. In the early months of 1943, the German Foreign Office and an SS committee met at Belsen and considered the case of Jews who were in possession of foreign passports. Technically, these people could not be considered as Germans, but they were none the less in Belsen. A plan was formulated to separate these alien Jews and to hold them as exchange objects for Germans held in Allied internment. Of the 4,000–5,000 Jews involved, only 357 reached freedom. Then there was a fund-raising scheme to sell nearly 2,000 Hungarian Jews at $1,000 a head. Nothing came of that or any of the other SS fund-raising ventures involving the sale of human beings.

By the end of 1944 secret meetings were being held in neutral countries between medium-rank SS officers and Western Jewish leaders on how to save as many as possible from the death camps. These meetings were not a latter-day reversion to humanity on the part of the SS. It was now clear to them that Germany might lose the war and that if she did retribution would follow. The negotiations dragged on and on without result. Meanwhile one concentration camp after another was being overrun in Eastern Europe. At senior Party level the decision was taken to evacuate from the camps those prisoners who could still be physically exploited in the workshops and to leave behind the weak and the sick. These latter were not to be found alive by the Red Army. In a final purge they would be shot and the whole site blown up so expertly that no trace would remain to show that once an extermination camp had been sited there.

The SS guards at Auschwitz in Poland did not carry out the orders they had been given and the 8,000 prisoners who were too weak to march were found by the Russians amid the intact gas chambers and crematoria as well as half-destroyed factories and work halls. The spearheads of the Soviet advance were not able, however, to overtake the prisoner columns of those evacuated from Auschwitz. Nor was that the only camp from which marching groups had set out. As the Allies advanced from the east and from the west the orders from SS HQ were insistent, ‘Destroy the installations, kill those too ill, form the fit into groups and march them to those provinces which have not yet been overrun by the Allies.’ Thousands of prisoners were marched and counter-marched through a shrinking Reich and when they reached journey’s end they found that this was usually one of the camps in Germany which had been set up in the first years of the Reich.

In those early days the fearsome bureaucracy and the exaggerated attention to hygiene had ensured that accurate records had been kept, regular meals provided and serious outbreaks of infection kept to a minimum. Into the orderly, well-run hells of Dachau, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Belsen and their satellites, there then entered in the first months of 1945 hordes of exhausted, starving prisoners who had been footmarched for long distances. Records which had set out with the prisoners seldom reached the destination camp for these lists, indexes, rosters and other paper work were often lost en route. The unnumbered thousands of lousy, bronchitic prisoners were herded into accommodation that had been intended for a fraction of their number. There were too few taps for drinking water. The washing of clothes, even the washing of one’s person, was almost impossible and, inevitably, typhus broke out. This ravaged the weakened prisoners and deaths began to mount. There could be no accurate account kept of those who died and soon there were too many to dispose of. The crematoria could not burn the bodies quickly enough and open-air cremations did not consume totally the bodies of the dead. Nor were the inmates strong enough to dig large pits to hold the bodies. A half-hearted attempt was made at piling up the emaciated dead, but this and other attempts at keeping the camp area clear were unsuccessful.

More and more marching columns came in and a vicious circle soon established itself. Into the overcrowded camps, rife with the most virulent diseases, with inmates starving because food supplies were no longer reaching the camps, there poured in more and more columns of prisoners until the whole administration of the camps collapsed. The SS authorities could do nothing even had they wanted to. In some cases German SS units were withdrawn and were replaced by Hungarian or other foreign SS men upon whom fell the vengeance of both the prisoners and the Allied soldiers when the camps were finally liberated. A final signal from Himmler regarding concentration camps was issued shortly before the liberation of Belsen. This repetition of the order to destroy all evidence of the camps resulted in a bloodbath in which chiefly the German politicals and those of the Resistance were murdered. In several camps the SS commandants stayed on to hand over the festering sites to the liberating forces and obviously expected that the Allies would praise them for their devotion to duty. Those men were horrified to find themselves arrested, tried and convicted as war criminals.

The SS had run the camps and their inmates as a commercial enterprise and it had paid them handsome profits. There can be no doubt that the money obtained from slave labour and from the personal effects of the slaughtered paid not merely for the escape to South American countries of a great number of officers, but also set them up in business once the political climate in Germany changed and those men could return home with new names and fat bank balances. Some remained and gave their services to the Russians. The notorious SS commander, Mohnke, Gauleiter Koch and Muller, Head of the Gestapo, were only three of the many men who removed their swastikas and replaced them with Red stars.

It may be possible to accept that the massive influxes into the permanent concentration camps so overwhelmed the administration that this collapsed and produced the horror which the British found when they liberated Belsen, which the Americans discovered in Dachau and which the Red Army uncovered on its march through Eastern Europe. Nothing can forgive the systematic and deliberate torture and killing of the Christians and Jews alike who suffered and perished.

The terrible story of the concentration camps begs the questions, to what degree did the German people know of the things that were being done by their government, and what could they have done to stop them? In the opening paragraphs of this section of the book it was explained how it was common knowledge that concentration camps existed to hold anti-social elements and opponents of the regime. In pre-war days it was accepted by the general public that people might be punished while imprisoned and that sometimes capital punishment might need to be inflicted. Such things, while being unpleasant, might become necessary when dealing with criminals. The war turned against Germany at about the time that the first stages of the destruction of European Jewry were begun. The ‘Final Solution’ was a state secret and unauthorized knowledge of that secret or disclosure of details of it was an infringement of the law punishable by death. The threat of arrest, of trial and imprisonment – or even execution by beheading – served to preserve the State secret. Then, too, the air raids upon German cities, the everlasting worries about the men at the front, the problems of rationing and the sheer strain of living in wartime gave the ordinary German scant time to reflect upon any sufferings which the enemies of the State might be experiencing.

Had they known about the horrors in the camps the German people might well have been distressed, but what could they have done to either alleviate or stop it? The honest answer must be – nothing. In a dictatorship protests by the population achieve no result. Dictatorships do not allow their policies to be influenced by the great mass of the people and in that respect the Nazi government would not have allowed itself to be deflected from its policy of murdering European Jews.

In the second part of his Political Testament, dated 29 April 1945, Hitler laid upon his successors and their followers the obligation to maintain the racial laws and to offer bitter resistance to ‘the poisoners of the peoples of the world’ – international Jewry. Goebbels wrote in 1940, ‘that we were enemies of the Jews was generally known even before 1933. We have, therefore, reaped the disadvantages of anti-Semitism in world propaganda. Now we can enjoy the advantages and remove the Jews from the theatre, the cinema, from public life and from administration.’ The genocide, which followed those first expulsions, the destruction and the horror were all considered by him and his Führer to be positive achievements in ‘ridding Europe of a race of aliens which had exploited it for centuries’. It was a bitter legacy to leave behind, even for revolutionaries as dedicated to nihilism as were Hitler and his comrades.

The Party’s View of Germany’s Enemies

As the result of her policies and her aggression the Third Reich was eventually at war with three powerful enemies. The resources of a world-wide British Empire, the mighty colossus of the Soviet Union and the industrial might of the United States were all ranged against Germany. She, herself, was a nation of finite resources, lacking many of the basic raw materials vital to maintain a major war. To avoid confrontation by three powerful enemies should have been a major preoccupation of the Nazi government, yet the Reich had chosen to go to war with Russia and to declare war against America. The leaders of the Reich had planned fast and decisive operations that would knock first Russia and then Britain out of the war before America was fully ready to aid her allies. Yet even when it was clear that Operation Barbarossa could not be concluded successfully in 1941, there was still optimism at Reichsleitung level as to the eventual outcome of the war.

The optimism of the Reichs leaders was based upon their misreading the political situation. They deluded themselves into thinking that their view must be a political imperative. They convinced themselves that the forces of Capitalism must clash with those of Communism. The most significant word in that sentence is ‘must’. It was not a hope, not a belief that the capitalist West would fight the Soviet East. No! Such a clash was seen by the leaders of the Nazi government as politically inevitable and as the tide of war turned against Germany more and more, efforts were made by the leaders to ensure that it occurred before the Fatherland was overrun. And when the clash did come about the Reich could capitalize upon it by making peace with either the West or the East and then, as an ally of one or the other of the warring factions, would enter the war in a new partnership. To the pragmatic revolutionaries, Hitler and Goebbels, it mattered little whether the new ally was the Communist East or the Capitalist West. The Party’s propaganda machine would influence the masses towards whichever nation showed itself willing to work with Germany, although at Reichsleitung level an alliance with the West was favoured over one with the East. The first hints of that future co-operation were reinforced in Europe by the spreading of an alleged prophecy by the Swedish clairvoyant, Gruneberg, that the West, allied with Germany, would win the war. Germany must play for time. The war must continue until either the war-weariness of the Allied nations or historic inevitability of a Capitalist/Communist clash would begin to work for Germany.

The Nazi leaders saw it as inconceivable that a die-hard Tory like Churchill could have a rapport with the Bolshevik, proletarian thug, Stalin, or that the latter could reach any sort of understanding with the Yankee patrician, Roosevelt. An alliance between such conflicting personalities must produce strains sufficient to smash the alliance. The Nazi explanation for their own Treaty of Friendship with the Soviets in the autumn of 1939 had been that both the Reds and they were working class and revolutionary ideologies. Churchill, an aristocrat, and Roosevelt, from a distinguished New York family, were neither working class nor revolutionary. They could, therefore, have nothing in common with the Communists and this wartime alliance must inevitably break up when the financial and/or ideological differences between East and West became more important than the military alliance against Germany. In their pursuit of signs of strain and dissolution every complaint, every grumble by one Ally about another was seized upon by Hitler and Goebbels in particular, who inspected and analysed those complaints seeking to find in them the signs of an irreparable rupture.

The wrong conclusions which the National Socialist leaders drew from their perspective shows how much they were prepared to delude themselves. The Casablanca Conference of January 1943 was seen by them as evidence of Allied discord because Stalin was not present. The Generalissimo’s invitation was, in fact, not taken up because he was involved with problems connected with the closing stages of the Stalingrad campaign, but his absence, as the Reichs leaders saw it, was an affront to the West. That action was as much a deliberate insult as was the failure of Soviet newspapers to report in detail Anglo-American military operations. Such affronts, so it was believed at Reichsleitung level, must be resented in the West.

Russian complaints during 1942 and 1943 that the Anglo-Americans had not opened a Second Front were also seen as proof of a rift, and in an effort to divide the Allies it was proposed at the highest level of Reichs government that feelers be put out to the dissatisfied Stalin, offering an arrangement with Germany. Hitler’s view had always been that the Soviets were the one partner in the Alliance that could be the most easily detached. The Anglo-Americans had electorates to consider; the Communist dictatorship had not. Another proposal to take Russia out of the war was that advanced during April 1944. The Soviet Union was offered a free hand in a whole area of Eastern Europe extending from Norway to Greece. It was all a far cry from Operation Barbarossa, when the Reich had gone to war with Russia in order to gain a line running from Archangelsk to the Black Sea.

The San Francisco Conference, early in 1945, was another straw at which the Nazi leadership clutched. They hoped that the Soviet demand for an increase in the number of votes allotted to her in the infant United Nations assembly would create friction which must lead to open hostility between the Allies. When that rift did not develop the Nazi leaders placed their expectations upon the Yalta Conference. Britain had gone to war for the independence of Poland and yet the outcome of Yalta was that the Poles were still not free, but had exchanged, as the Nazis saw it, the benevolent German overlordship for a Russian tyranny worse than that which they had suffered under the Tsars.

When it became clear that despite the disagreements at Yalta no positive break had occurred, the Reichs leaders rationalized their chagrin by declaring that Britain was now militarily impotent to act against the Soviet Union and that America had no interest in Europe generally, or in Poland specifically. The West had abandoned Europe; therefore, it was in Germany’s best interest to seek an accommodation with the more powerful Russians who did have an intense interest in the continent. Were such an alliance to be concluded Germany could turn westwards once again and together with the Soviet Union deal with Britain, the mischief-maker of Europe.

There would have to be some absolutely compelling reason to force Russia to come to the negotiating table and as the Nazi leaders saw it the German Army on the Eastern Front would need to win several swift victories; battles which would cause the Reds such losses that they would be prepared to negotiate. The time for such devastating blows had come, so they believed. They based their calculations upon reports from the front which showed that large numbers of Red Army troops were still deserting to the Germans. The interrogation of these deserters as well as that of ordinary Russian prisoners showed evidence of a great war-weariness. The Nazi leaders believed that the signs were favourable for a series of quick strikes to produce the victories, after which negotiations between Germany and the Soviets could begin. The question must surely have been asked at some time during the planning, from where, at that stage of the war, would the forces and equipment come to undertake and to achieve these necessary victories? The Supreme Command was clearly so out of touch with reality that it did not consider the procurement of men and materials to be a difficult problem.

In their perspective of the West the Nazi leaders saw two plutocratic nations, Britain and America, whose struggle for supremacy had resulted in the destruction of Britain as a world power. As Goebbels saw it the political blunderings of Churchill had led directly to Russia’s becoming the dominant land power and America the dominant sea power. Britain had lost her paramount position and had no influence on Allied policies which were now, and would be in the future, decided by the two major powers, the Soviet Union and the United States of America.

 

The Nazis viewed Great Britain with a mixture of envy and hatred. Frequent and repeated propaganda campaigns stressed the theme that Britain was the aggressor against Europe. Britain had sought allies; nations whose soldiers she would send to fight her battles. She had found them and then lost them as the German Army won victory after victory during 1940 and 1941. During that period Britain reached a stage where she had no allies she could dominate. Instead her new ally, America, was more powerful than she and Great Britain had been forced to accept the inferior position vis-à-vis the USA. For their part, the Americans were determined to usurp her place. The unequal exchange of British bases in the Caribbean for a handful of old destroyers was evidence of how the Americans were determined to exploit their superior position. In pursuit of their ambition to reduce her it was, therefore, irrelevant to the US leaders whether Britain won or lost the war. Either way she was declining in power and the Reich’s leaders were determined to hasten that decline by supporting any enemy of Britain and any revolt made against British imperialism.

So they came to pay court to Hitler: Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian traitor who preferred the genocide policies of the Reich to the British Raj; Raschid Ali, who fomented a revolt in Iraq during May 1941; the Mufti of Jerusalem, who supported the Nazi solution to the Jewish question; and, finally, the German-dominated government of Vichy France, which began an uprising in Syria. All these attempts to undermine the influence of Britain were supported and the Arab and Indian leaders were received as honoured guests of the Reich. To support these traitors and to foment more trouble, Goebbels set up a number of transmitters broadcasting German propaganda but purporting to be independent ‘pirate’ stations located in Britain. One of these, set up as early as October 1939, put out IRA propaganda.

The National Socialist perspective of America was no less distorted than that which they had of Britain. America was a plutocracy, decadent and disorganized, run by Jews whose only concern was to make money out of wars fought by Christians. Several entries in the Goebbels diaries refer to Allied military victories as having a depressing effect upon Wall Street, as ‘Jewish financiers realized that the war would soon be at an end and with it the huge profits they had made.’

In pre-war years it had been a source of great annoyance to the Nazi leaders that German youth should spend its time viewing American films, that they should prefer American, Negro jazz to German music and that German girls should want to paint their faces, lips and nails in the fashion of Yankee harlots.

Even before Germany declared war on America in December 1941, the Reichsleitung had been well aware of US power and ability, that America was capable of expanding her arms production and that she had an enormous economic growth potential. Nazi experts accepted that American industrial output must eventually exceed that of the Reich, but projected that the Americans would need many years to achieve that position. Before the USA could realize her potential the war against the Soviet Union would have been won and England, too, would have been subdued. By that time, too, Europe, the workshop of the world and now extending from the Channel to the Volga, would be working for Germany. The Greater German Empire would be more than a match for the Americans. Not that the Reich had any aggressive intentions towards the United States. Indeed, from the earliest days Nazi representatives had sought to assure America that the Fatherland had no hostility towards her and no intention of interfering in her sphere of influence in the New World. As a quid pro quo, the Reichsleitung expected America not to interfere in European affairs or politics and was bitter at the partisan attitude of President Roosevelt.

What Hitler had hoped to gain by the lunatic declaration of war upon America is hard to see, but reports from SD sources following that declaration spoke of the pessimism and despair evident in many ordinary Germans who were aware, even if their leaders were not, that with the entry of America the war was as good as lost.

The Nazi view of Russia was principally a racial one: the superior Teuton versus the primitive Slav, although there were certain influences which modified that view. Throughout the history of Germany and Russia there had been interchanges of ideas and customs and this love/hate relationship had continued even when Nazism confronted Bolshevism. The Soviets had brought about the first modern revolution to succeed and the Nazi leaders, who considered themselves to be revolutionaries, had been and continued to be influenced by the Russian experience. Also there were still in German society, in factories, offices and in the services, five million people who had voted for the Communists in the 1933 elections. There were also students who were known to be infected with the disease of Bolshevism and it was a worry that German coal-miners and workers in heavy industry considered those Russians who had been brought into German mines and factories not as racial or ideological enemies but as comrades.

Of what glorious things in the Soviet Union could the Russian workers tell their German counterparts? There could be nothing; an exhibition, ‘The Workers’ Paradise’, showed to German civilians the primitive conditions and way of life suffered by the common people under Communism – those things that the German soldiers had met when they entered Russia: a depressed population living in verminous hovels lit by oil-lamps, with no gas, electricity, running water or proper lavatories. The food they ate was of so inferior a quality as to be a subsistence diet and their lice-infested, tatty clothing was held together with safety-pins. That was the Workers’ Paradise in reality. The fraternal feelings between German and Russian workers brought with them a reminder that the spread of Communism in the Imperial Fleet had led to revolution in Germany and to the overthrow of the Kaiser. The spectre of 1918 haunted the Nazi leaders.

Europe must be united and brought into the war against Russia. To bring that about it would be necessary for Germany to produce an argument, a unifying motif. The Nazi government soon produced it. They had attacked Russia in a pre-emptive strike. Proof existed to show that the Soviets were about to sweep westwards in another attempt to overrun the whole of Europe. If that happened Europe, with its ancient culture, its priceless heritage, its centuries of Christian traditions, would be endangered. If the Red plan succeeded Western values would be perverted by Bolshevik distortions. The heritage of law would vanish and be replaced by the torture chambers of the Soviet Joint State Political Directorate. Bolshevik hatred of culture would take Europe back to the Dark Ages. The Germans had struck the first blows in a war for freedom, but it was a European duty to unite with the Reich and join the crusade against the common enemy – Russian Bolshevism.

The campaign had a certain appeal, not only to native fascist parties and capitalists, but to a great number of ordinary people of the countries of Western Europe who did see civilization and themselves as under threat and, therefore, enlisted in the war against the godless Bolshevik state. Very soon there were battalions, then regiments and finally, divisions of Nordic men, the first to be enlisted, in units of the Army or SS ready to fight on the Eastern Front. The appeal was then widened to take in the non-Nordic peoples who clamoured to join and the German Army’s order of battle then included Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards and Hungarians. As the German Army advanced deeper into Soviet territory the minorities of Russia came forward to fight alongside their European liberators. Cossacks, Ukrainians, Uzbekis and Tartars volunteered and even if they were not at first allowed to serve in the fighting line, they proved their worth on anti-partisan operations and were willing supporters of the German Army. From the German point of view the politically aware peoples of the whole of Europe were marching with the Reich in a cause common to all; a crusade for Western civilization.

The Party’s Perspective of Europe

Nazi policy vis-à-vis the races of Western Europe moved from mildness into furious repression as the war developed. Towards those nations that had been beaten in battle there was, to begin with, the natural pride of a conqueror, but the Germans soon passed out of that stage and into one of paternalism. Towards the middle years of the war when there was a need for workers in German factories, active recruiting campaigns were mounted as a result of which thousands of Europeans went voluntarily to work for the occupation authorities. Whether the attraction was a job, the higher wages which German employers paid, better rations or the increased social benefits given by the Reich, is immaterial. These non-German people volunteered to help Hitler by working in his factories. Then there were those who had come forward as a result of military recruiting campaigns to serve in the German Army or the SS. None of these volunteers to industry or to the services saw themselves as traitors to their countries. Many considered that they were participants in a new, united Europe.

In the belief that German policies vis-à-vis beaten nations should be as mild as possible, Josef Goebbels suggested that acts against the German forces of occupation ought to be met by counter-measures of like nature. Thus if, for example, the people of a city boycotted for one day the local tram service as a gesture of protest, the German authorities should withdraw the tram service for a few weeks. He also suggested that instead of shooting hostages, which was a standard reprisal tactic, all civilian bicycles should be confiscated and turned over to the German Army. If the execution of hostages was unavoidable, it was wrong, as a matter of common sense, to execute their families as well. Instead the Party comrades of the hostages should be shot. They were all criminals together.

It was, of course, in the interests of the Nazi government that Occupied Europe should work harmoniously for the Reich. That Germany had liberated Europe from British hegemony was one of the most frequently stated expressions of the Nazi media. With Britain driven from Europe, that continent could settle down and enter an era of collaboration and co-operation. The more strident expressions of Party dogma were toned down and skilfully blended in with the general hopes of most Europeans for peace. Goebbels was particularly mocking of British attempts to gain French support in highlighting the differences between Bonaparte and Hitler. The armies of Napoleon, the British government had proclaimed, had carried with them the spirit of Freedom and Equality as expressed in the French Revolution. Exactly, scoffed Goebbels, and that is why you British fought him, just as you are fighting contemporary, National Socialist ideas of freedom in Europe.

Of all the nations of Western Europe France was the most important. The size of her fleet, the accessibility of her North African possessions for food supplies, her sophisticated and extensive industries might all have been brought into the German sphere, had the Nazis so wished it. For some reason Hitler rejected the attempts of the Vichy government to gain close collaboration with Germany and permitted only such cosmetic exercises as the return to France of the body of Napoleon’s son. The ‘Eaglet’ was taken from the Habsburg burial vault in the Capuchin church in Vienna and re-interred in France, the cortège and the reburial being accorded the highest military honours. Little more than that was allowed by the Führer. The consequence was that France, a possible supporter of the New European order, was allowed to drift into the Allied camp.

The Nazi attitude towards the Germanic/Nordic nations was fraternal – that of a big brother advising the smaller ones – and it was a source of bitter disappointment to the German authorities when the peoples of those nations, their own Nordic brothers, rose in open revolt. German reprisals were carried out more in sorrow than in anger, but there were reprisals and harsh ones, too.

The Czechs were a special case. The skill of the Czech workers and the importance of the Skoda armaments industry to the Reich required that the nation be governed with a very light hand. The Protectorate was also so far removed in distance from RAF bases in Britain that it was beyond the range of even the Lancaster bomber. Thus, neither Prague, Pilsen nor any other of the principal cities of Czechoslovakia was bombed. That immunity through distance from the air raids which had destroyed the towns of the Reich, a ration scale for the Czechs as good as that which the Germans themselves had, and a light touch of government gave the Czechs little to complain about. Indeed, Heydrich, who was de facto the Vice-Regent of the Protectorate, enjoyed such good relations with the native population that he drove unescorted and in an open car through Prague. That popularity was to kill him. A team of heroic individuals, recruited and trained in Great Britain, was flown to Prague where they attempted to kill him. Heydrich died of his wounds and despite public protests by some Czechs against his death, German retribution was neither delayed nor moderate. The Nazis took the Allied bait and reacted mercilessly, destroying the village of Lidice and its inhabitants. Despite this terrible act the scale of Czech partisan operations remained low until the Red Army drew near. Then it flared. But between the death of Heydrich in June 1942 and April 1945, Czechoslovakia was one country which seemed to be untouched by war. It was, in fact, one of the last to be liberated and Prague itself was not entered by the Red Army until the last days of the war.

This special treatment for the Czechs was unique in the history of the German occupation and was a model of how a moderate approach paid dividends. There was no such mildness in the case of Yugoslavia or Greece, where armed resistance by partisan units was put down with murderous ferocity. In the case of the occupied areas of Russia no attempt was made at Reichsleitung level to win the support of the masses, and yet the minister responsible for the administration of the Eastern Areas must have known that the peoples of the Baltic States, of Belorussia and of the Ukraine were hostile to the Soviet government in Moscow.

It was a firmly held conviction of many senior men in the Reichs government that German occupation policy in Western Europe was benevolent and that foreign workers going home on leave or upon expiry of contract would be the best propagandists for the German way of life. They would tell their compatriots of living conditions in the Reich, of its social habits and manners, which could only have a good effect upon the political strategy of forming Europe into a single political and economic bloc. The strength of such a united Europe, the genius of Europe which had enriched the world, the moral leadership which Europe had always given; all these things united would form a power bloc that could never be overcome. German-arranged sports meetings, football matches, a pan-European Youth congress and travelling exhibitions illustrating the dynamics of Western civilization all served to reinforce the message that the West had a common heritage, a precious gift not shared by the barbarians in the east, nor by the English who were aggressors against Europe, nor by the Americans who were plutocrats living off the blood of Europe.

How far the propaganda viewpoint of a Europe endangered by Bolshevism was accepted is shown by the number of volunteers who served in German industry and in the military forces. That the Germans manipulated the feelings of the people of occupied Europe to produce hostility towards the Anglo-Americans is illustrated by the experience of Jeff Brady of the Queen’s Brigade which served with the 7th Armoured Division in Normandy. His is not an uncommon theme but is one remarked upon by many who served in North-West Europe.

 

One place where we were dug in was a fairly big farm. In peacetime it must have been a gold-mine. There were cows, chickens, geese, apples, wheat – it must have been self-sufficient. The family living there made its own bread, had hams hanging in a smoke house, made cider and a spirit called Calvados from the apples. There was certainly no sign here of the starvation which we had been told to expect in Europe, after so many years of occupation. The people in Normandy were living better than were our own families in the UK. That farmer had been lucky. Only a few of his cows had been killed, but it was enough for him and his family to go on and on about it all the time. ‘Why had we come there? Why hadn’t we landed up the coast a bit, somewhere else? Who wanted to be liberated if it meant dead livestock? The Germans? They had been fair, honest and generous and had paid cash for everything they took.’ There were a lot of people like that, and not only in Normandy in June but even in Belgium in September and October. They really didn’t want us. Not all of them anyway.

 

Of course, for those in the big cities of occupied Europe life was hard and unpleasant. There were the shortages of food that occur in urban areas and any attempts to supplement the poor rations by going out into the country to barter with the farmers were often frustrated by checks carried out by local police and occupation troops. Then, too, in many big cities there were factories working for the Germans and these were targets for Allied bombers. Losses among the local population as a result of air raids were seized upon by the German authorities in an attempt to alienate public opinion against the Anglo-American terror bombers. The natural feelings of the bereaved were exploited by Goebbels’ propaganda machine which worked on the emotions and the instincts – never the intellect. There could be fewer more effective emotional arguments against the Western Allies than a German soldier bandaging up those wounded by Allied bombers and caring for those families who had been bombed out of their houses by the Anglo-American air armadas.

It was not, however, all German salvation and soup-kitchens. There came a time when the infiltration of Allied agents into occupied Europe became a serious problem for the Germans. In 1940 and 1941, the days of Britain’s weakness, the few agents who entered Europe were in danger of betrayal by the Communists who were at that time the allies of Germany; from those workers who collaborated with the Germans; or from the local civil population; as well as from the Germans themselves. When, during the long years from 1943 to the end of the war, the number of infiltrated Allied agents increased dramatically, the scale of attacks against the Germans grew and losses to their troops mounted. Their reprisals became harsh, ruthless and vicious. Thousands of hostages were taken and murdered, whole villages were burned down and entire communities slaughtered. It was a long way removed from the confiscation of bicycles.

It was during those years, as the number of attacks brought about a rise in the frequency and scale of reprisals, that the numbers fell of those volunteering to work in Germany. There was not only the reluctance to work for a nation that was executing citizens of one’s own country. Rather more important was the fact that the resistance movements in the individuals’ countries had warned the volunteer workers that revenge would be taken if they continued to work for Germany, for this was treason. The numbers of volunteer workers to German factories declined but the need was still there. To the Germans the situation was serious but not insoluble. If no volunteers would come forward they would be compelled if necessary and taken as slave labour to the Reich. This was the time of round-ups, of deportations and of young men escaping industrial conscription by slipping away to join the partisan forces. As a consequence the underground units became strong enough to undertake more raids which resulted in more reprisals. These, in turn, engendered more attacks upon the German forces. Yes, it really was a long way from the confiscation of bicycles.

As the Allied blockade began to affect food supplies in Europe there were discussions at senior level in the Nazi Party on how the captive populations were to be fed. The problem was chiefly one of transport. There were enough of the basic foodstuffs to meet the standard ration, but it was difficult to distribute fairly the richnesses of Normandy, of eastern Holland or of Denmark. The fertility of the soil and the more intensive farming methods in Western Europe might have made it possible to supplement the poor official ration scale, but there were other regions in South-Eastern Europe and the Balkans where this was impossible. In those places hunger became the norm and starvation an unpleasant but accepted way of life. Goering had once threatened that whoever starved in Europe it would not be the Germans, and that boast was soon borne out and nowhere more tragically than in Greece and Yugoslavia. In the German view it was hardly their fault if people went hungry in Europe. It was the fault of the British and their blockade.

Despite the hunger that had descended upon much of Europe as a result of occupation policies or, as the Germans claimed, the Allied blockade, it was still held to be true by those in authority that German rule was more beneficial to the people of Europe than that which the Anglo-Americans or the Russians had inflicted. It was a strongly held view that the people of Rumania and Bulgaria, into whose lands the Red Army had advanced during 1944, were pining for a return of the Germans and remembering with sad nostalgia the days when they were protected by the power of the Third Reich.

In Western Europe, too, now occupied by the Anglo-Americans, the food shortages in France and Belgium, and the public demonstrations against the low ration scales, should have convinced the populations of those countries just how benign and well-organized had been German rule. It was clear that Roosevelt would do little to feed Europe if this meant cutting down the lavish American ration scales. Indeed, Roosevelt had so reduced food supplies to the United Kingdom that it was common knowledge that famine and strikes were features of daily life there. Oh, if only the British had known at first hand the blessings of German rule and efficiency, might they not, too, have wanted to exchange the despotism of Churchill for the benefits of occupation by the Reich?

Party Control in the Last Year of the War

The task of the Party in the last year of the war was to unite the masses and so inspire them with the will to resist that the invading Allied armies would be confronted by 80 million Germans who, as Goebbels hoped, would sooner go down to ruin than submit to their country being ruled by the enemy.

There is no doubt that the crassness of American politicians helped the German propaganda machine in its task of stiffening the resolve of the German people. Roosevelt’s blurting out that unconditional surrender was the Allied demand gave Goebbels a trump card. It was, as he repeated to the German nation time and again, a matter of victory or death for them. In an unconditional surrender the loser had no say. Whatever the victors did, forced emigration, slave labour, sterilization … anything, any horror which served the plutocratic, Jewish, Bolshevik interest could be inflicted upon the Germans who would have no choice but to accept their fate. Then there was the lunatic suggestion of Morgenthau, the American Secretary of the Treasury, that Germany should be stripped of all her industries, her cities should be destroyed and that millions of her people should be deported, leaving in Central Europe a nation organized into rural, peasant communities. That new German nation, now of manageable size, would have no army; would need no army, because the occupation of this rural Germany by Allied Forces would be indefinite. Those and other US pronouncements prolonged the war. The Russians, by contrast, disclosed very little of their post-war plans for Germany and the British were, by this time, only an echo of the voice of the Americans whose wilder excesses they sought to control without success.

In view of these threats Goebbels realized he would have to inspire the German people to rise up and fight. The former claim, ‘The German Army is the German people under arms’, he intended to change to ‘The German people under arms has become the German Army’, for now he intended that the whole nation would engage in the conflict. He was aware that it would not be an easy task to produce the blinding rage that would inspire women and children to go into unequal battle against Allied tank armadas. Goebbels knew that this was a difficult task and gave the reasons why in an article for Das Reich, a Party magazine. On 6 September 1942, he wrote of the Germans that ‘This was a people that had not yet learned to hate… We are not well suited to chauvinism and if anyone wants to bring our national soul to the boil he has to set about it carefully… In moments of crisis when our life as a nation is imperilled we should not make objective judgements. A mania for justice as well as German sentimentality could prevent the Germans from fulfilling their mission in the world.’

The horror of the two years of war that passed between that article in September 1942 and the situation in the last six months of the war had still not been drastic enough to rouse the German nation to the boil. In fact, it seemed that the suffering had had an adverse effect, certainly in western Germany. The Anglo-American bombing offensive had destroyed six million of the 1939 total of 23 million dwellings. By the end of December 1944, 353,000 civilians had been killed in air raids and nearly half a million injured. Despite their ordeal, the people of the western regions of Germany had not fought and were not fighting the advancing enemy armies as the Party had hoped they would. In the areas into which the Anglo-Americans had advanced the reception from the local population had fluctuated between coldness towards the foreign invaders of the Fatherland and an enthusiastic welcome to the Allies as liberators. Nowhere had the masses risen, as the Party had hoped they would, with weapons in their hands to confront the imperialistic invaders. The peoples of the western Gaus, through which the American armies were driving, had learned very quickly that resistance to the US forces equalled destruction by the US forces. The military philosophy of the American troops was a simple one. Any house not flying a white flag was deemed to be inhabited by hostile elements and was fired upon. Any resistance near a village – even a single rifle shot or a bazooka being fired – brought down upon that village savage and immediate retribution by US artillery which continued until the place was destroyed completely. Any town whose inhabitants sought to obstruct the US advance was destroyed by aerial bombing and shell fire. Faced with such deterrents it is no wonder that the whole of central Germany was one huge mass of white flags.

Against such expressions of defeatism the Party could do little. The town of Aschaffenburg was recaptured from the Americans and punishment was meted out by the Party upon those traitors who by displaying the emblems of surrender had betrayed the Führer and the Volksgemeinschaft. Acts of retribution in recaptured towns, and isolated cases of revenge by the Wehrwolf, were all that the Party could do.

In the east it should have been a different matter. There the Red Army had initiated an orgy of rape, looting and destruction. Reports of that wave of horror galvanized the eastern Gaus and inspired their populations to desperate resistance. Where German Army counter-attacks recaptured towns and villages, soldiers saw for themselves what bestialities had been committed by the Soviets upon German civilians. Age was no protection against rape. Females from the age of 11 upwards were violated and then mutilated. In one village all the women had been impaled and the men castrated. Reports of such terrible things spread quickly and were seized upon and reported in the German news media. There was little need for a propaganda campaign; the deeds spoke for themselves.

But if the Party expected the masses as a whole to resist, its officials had to set an example to be followed and there had been no sacrifices by the Party élite to match those which the people had had to endure. At a time when under-age youths were being conscripted for the Army and when young children were being expected to stand and defend the Fatherland with bazookas, the Party organizations were still fully manned, absorbing as much manpower in the straitened conditions of 1944–45 as they had at the high noon of German power, Hitler’s year of destiny, 1942. That many of the offices, particularly those concerned with the administration of the conquered regions of the east, were redundant was not seen as a reason for releasing the men in them for active service. The Party officers at Reichsleitung or Gauleitung level did not wish to see their carefully constructed bureaucratic empires dismantled. The Foreign Office, for example, had a propaganda department which, in terms of manpower, was actually larger than that of the official ministry run by Goebbels. Each of the Party bosses had his own Intelligence-gathering service, his own private group of art experts to advise him of what to loot and where to find it. Most of the senior officers at Reichsleitung level had their own private armies. Himmler had his SS military formations while Goering had his Luftwaffe and paratroop divisions. The officers of those private armies had the right of direct approach to the Reichsführer or to Reichsmarschall Goering over the heads of the Army leaders to whom they were nominally subordinate. It was a ludicrous situation.

In the last months of the war, although the Luftwaffe had shrunk to being little more than a small fighter force, the need for bombers and long-range reconnaissance aircraft having long since passed, its strength in March 1945 was still more than 1.5 million men of whom only a fraction were employed operationally. Even when the keenly anticipated Me 262 began to enter service there was an overwhelming number of under-employed men in the German Air Force who could have been released to flesh out the under-strength infantry divisions of the Army. Goering would not release them. The Kriegsmarine, too, needed a thorough comb-out and a posting of redundant men to the Army. It was a time of national crisis but the services seemed unaware of it. But then, in Goebbels’ opinion, the military leaders had constantly betrayed Hitler so badly and had so often acted against the orders he had given that he could place no reliance upon them.

Even quite late in the war there might still have been time to arouse the masses. All that Germany needed was a breathing-space during which her industry could produce the weapons to arm the masses; for there were no more wonderful secret weapons to rely on. Now it was the German people who would have to gain the breathing-space that was needed and while they were holding the advancing Allied armies, Speer would repair the railways so that weapons parts already manufactured could be taken to central workshops for assembly. The production schedule of the new jet, the Me 262, was for more than 1,000 machines per month. Within a few months there would be a strong force in front-line service as well as in reserve. Then the 262s would be launched against the Anglo-American air forces and could claw these from the skies in such numbers that the scale and weight of the terror raids would be broken. With the respite that such a victory would produce more arms could be turned out, new tanks constructed, infra-red sights fitted to those tanks – night sights, which the conservative-minded Army leaders had rejected as unnecessary. These new weapons would halt the flood of Allied armies across Germany. A series of bitter battles fought with revolutionary élan would cause the Western Allies to recoil in horror at the losses that they had sustained while the defeats which would be inflicted upon the Soviet Army would bring the Russians to the negotiating table. All this the Party would do. To further demonstrate the close links between the Party and the masses, the army divisions which would be raised using men of the next age group to be conscripted would be formed into new ‘Volksgrenadier’ Divisions (VG) some of which would bear the name of a past, illustrious German hero: Clausewitz, Schlageter, Schill. With those names to inspire them the Volksgrenadier Divisions must triumph in battle. The combat prowess of the Party’s VG Divisions would stiffen the old, traditional, conservative divisions and inspire them to emulate the National Socialist units.

A new spirit would infuse the German soldier – a revolutionary one. Behind that wall of inflamed Nazi warriors would stand a second line of Party-raised troops, the Volkssturm, and those in that organization who were veterans of former wars would be infected by the revolutionary spirit of their youthful comrades, boys who had not yet reached military age. Together youth and maturity would form a second National Socialist bulwark against which the enemy hordes would fling themselves in vain. Then, too, in those areas of the Fatherland into which the depraved Bolsheviks or the forces of the plutocratic Anglo-Americans had already penetrated, a new, secret Party organization, a partisan force, the Wehrwolf, would rise. It would strike terror into the hearts of the enemy as well as into the hearts of those German traitors who were collaborating with the foe. The most ruthless measures would be employed against those who betrayed the Volksgemeinschaft.

To strengthen the moral fibre of the people, each Gau was to provide a team of first-class speakers who would undertake a fast lecture tour. They would also talk to front-line formations, reinforcing the political lines set out by the National Socialist leadership officers in military units. It is perhaps a comment on how close were the tactics of the dictatorships of Russia and Germany that the Nazis introduced into the German Army leadership officers who were a combination of political agitator and commissar.

How different from the dream perspective was the reality of the situation in Germany in those last months of the Second World War. All the ruthless application of more than 800,000 men could not make the railways run. Allied bombing smashed the systems faster than they could be repaired. Aircraft parts which could not be moved, piled up in factories which had been decentralized to maintain production. The aircraft could not be assembled and the Luftwaffe did not receive the machines which it needed to attack the Allied bomber fleets. Then came a hammer blow to Hitler’s hopes. Speer, his Armaments Minister, advised the Führer on 14 March that Germany’s economic decline was so advanced that within a few weeks the war must end. Speer’s was the voice of doom for he alone, of all the hierarchy, knew the true picture. Desperate not to believe him and confident still that the Fatherland could win at least a compromise peace if it held out long enough, the most fanatical orders were issued from the Party Chancery.

Populations were ordered to be evacuated into those areas of central Germany which had not yet been overrun by the Allies. A large number of civilians had already left the threatened areas of their own accord, because of air raids, making long treks to reach safety. Others had been encouraged to leave the principal cities of the Reich. More than 17,000,000 people had already left their homes. Now that number was to be added to by the forced evacuation ordered by the Party. This move was necessary, the Party claimed, first to deny the manpower resources to the enemy and, secondly, because the Party intended to destroy everything in those areas through which the Allies must advance. The enemy armies would face a depopulated desert, a scorched earth from which everything that might have been of use had been either destroyed or removed.

One of the intentions behind the evacuation of the fit prisoners from the concentration camps of the east may well have been to deny that work-force to the Russians. The Red Army was notorious for its ruthless conscription of all manpower on its line of advance. Anybody could be taken to act as a porter, lugging boxes of ammunition or carrying a couple of artillery shells. In more extreme cases of conscription, every available man, woman and child would be formed up to advance across German minefields. It was Slav reasoning that a tank costs money – human lives are cheap. If some civilians were to be killed when the mines exploded, their sacrifice saved a tank from being knocked out. In the most extreme cases civilians would be used as infantry to thicken an assault wave. Goebbels feared that when the Russians reached Berlin they would conscript the 100,000 foreign workers in the city into Red Army infantry battalions.

Thus, any person capable of working, or of being turned against Germany, was to be brought into the central provinces from where the last stand would be made and from where a revolutionary Germany would arise phoenix-like from the ashes of its ruined cities to sweep away and destroy her enemies. The long columns of Allied prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates and German refugees being herded along the roads and byways of Germany knew nothing of this glorious dream. Most lived on a day-to-day basis; the concentration camp people on a minute-to-minute basis, for which of them knew whether the next halting place might not be the site at which they would all be slaughtered?

The evacuation into the central provinces of Germany from other regions was not a success. However much the Nazi authorities may have preached the benefits of the Volksgemeinschaft, it did not work well in adversity. Millions of refugees and bombed-out people moved into Saxony and Thuringia and swamped the local administration. There were shortages of accommodation, food and medical services, and relations between the locals and the refugees deteriorated from acceptance of a necessary evil to a downright hatred of each other.

In considering the advance of the Allies into the Fatherland, Goebbels displayed the nihilistic side of his revolutionary character and began to revel in destruction. ‘The fewer cities there are left in Germany,’ he declared in the last months of the war, ‘the more free we are to fight.’ It was an attitude unlikely to have been shared by those who still lived in those cities or who, having been evacuated, hoped one day to return home to them. The Party Chancery demanded the most severe punishments for those who failed to meet the revolutionary challenge. The principle that the family of an officer condemned for treason should also be imprisoned and/or executed was activated, and the officers who failed to blow up the Remagen bridge paid for their failure. To halt the surrender of German troops it was proposed at Reichsleitung level that Germany should withdraw from the Geneva Convention and begin killing the Allied prisoners of war. This would bring reprisals of the same nature from the Allies, but it would deter other German troops from surrendering if they knew that what awaited them was not a prison camp but summary execution.

That proposal was not taken up, but a more direct method was introduced. To ensure that troops did not abandon their positions, ‘flying courts martial’ were set up by Hitler on 9 March 1945. Under the control of Lieutenant-General Rudolf Huebner, these mock courts were empowered to try any member of the services or the Waffen SS, without consideration of rank, and to carry out any sentence of execution which the court might pass upon the accused. It was under this law that the officers of the Remagen bridgehead were tried, condemned and executed. Similar terror faced civilians, regardless of sex, who in the opinion of the Party-established court ‘was guilty of endangering German will to resist or German determination to fight on’. Although it is impossible to obtain full and accurate figures of those service personnel murdered by such courts, approximately 500 convictions and executions each month is generally accepted as being correct and compares with the 180 cases monthly of those condemned and executed during the First World War.

Despite the judicial terror and the ruthlessness of the sentences, the authority of the Party began to collapse. By the end of March 1945, the Reich had shrunk to a narrow strip of land running from the Baltic down to Bosnia-Herzegovina in Yugoslavia. Letters received by Party offices at that time – for the post office was still working efficiently – demanded to know why no peace was being sought, now that Germany had all but ceased to exist. Accusations were made against Goering for the impotence of the Luftwaffe, against Gauleiters and Kreisleiters for their failure to look after the people for whom they were responsible and even against the Führer who had not visited the cities which had been destroyed in air raids.

To a great degree the criticisms of the ordinary people were justified. Goering had failed; Hitler had not visited one ruined city; and in a great number of cases the leaders of the Party at Gau level had proved cowardly. The Rhineland city of Cologne had fallen without much fighting. No proper defence plan for the city had been prepared and the Gauleiter had simply abandoned his people. It was chiefly in the western regions that this dereliction of duty was most evident – chiefly, but not completely, for there were in the east certain Gauleiters who had no intention of dying with the masses. Those men evacuated themselves, using the authority that was theirs to commandeer trains to carry personal belongings to ports from which specially chartered ships carried them to safety in the west. The two most notorious of these men were Forster of Danzig, who had helped to foment the Second World War, and Koch, whom we have met formerly as Reichs Commissar for the Ukraine.

By contrast there were Gauleiters who held true to the Party and who defended their city or their Gau with the demanded revolutionary fervour. One such was Hanke of Breslau, whose 72-day-long defence of that city helped to confound the march of the Red Army towards Berlin. Goebbels noted in his diary that no such defence as that of Breslau had been made by any German city in the west and ascribed that failure to treason. Another Gauleiter determined to make a stand for Volk, Führer and Fatherland was Ueberreither of Styria in Austria. His erection of barricades around the Gau offices on the castle hill in Graz was seen by the people of Graz as their Gauleiter’s eccentricity. Since the local Army commanders rejected completely the Gauleiter’s defence stance and since he himself had no troops to back his authority as Reichs Defence Commissar, his dream of holding the Red hordes on the slopes of the Schlossberg remained unfulfilled.

Gauleiter Hofer of Tyrol was another whose attempts at a heroic defence were ignored by the military who were more concerned with the safety of their own units than taking part in the Gauleiter’s pantomime heroics. Those Gauleiters who wanted to continue the struggle saw themselves as heroes defending the Fatherland. We can only see them as pathetic little men trying to hold off what was in March/April 1945 the inevitable – the defeat of Germany.

But while Hofer and Ueberreither are girding their loins for combat, while Hanke is conducting a staunch defence prior to being flown out in the last aircraft to leave Breslau and before Koch and Forster have deserted their peoples, let us look at the Party’s military organizations named in the opening paragraphs of this section of the book – the Volkssturm and the Wehrwolf – and see how they and the other Party militias conducted themselves.

The Political Military Forces

Seen from the perspective of the Party leadership the German Army had failed the Führer. A clique of generals had conspired to confound the plans of the ‘greatest military genius of all time’ and had compounded their conspiracy of disobedience by an assassination attempt. It was clear that all the old-fashioned elements of the nation were in conspiratorial league and only the Party was holding true to the revolutionary doctrines of National Socialism. During the autumn of 1944, certain Party revolutionaries were promoted to senior positions of command and were expected to halt the Allied advances towards and into Germany. To aid the dilettante commanders in their task it was vital that new military forces be found. These would need to be inspired with revolutionary élan if they were to succeed in the task of defending the Reich, where the traditional army had failed. A memorandum written by General Heusinger in 1943 had proposed a Home Defence Force, an idea which had been rejected as unnecessary at that time by Hitler. The proposal was raised again in July 1944, in the light of experience gained by those Gauleiters who had raised civilian labour forces to dig defences along the Reichs frontiers. Out of that successful application of Reichs Defence Commissar powers, which Hitler had given to the Gauleiters, evolved the concept of a military force raised by the Party, and, therefore, free from negative, reactionary influences. The leadership of the organization would be that of the Party at every level – national, regional and unit. The only part that the Regular Army would play would be in arming and equipping the new force. Even at that level the influence of the Party would be strong, because Himmler, in his new role as Commander of Replacement Armies, was responsible for the supply of weapons.

At that period of the war there was no uncommitted manpower source from which a new, full-time military force might be obtained. The wave of soldiers who might have been used had already been called to the colours and posted to their units. The next call-up was months away and time could not wait until the next class of conscripted men came of age. The need for a great mass of men was now urgent. Those who would make up the new force would need to be in reasonably good health, not too old and based locally. The only body which met these requirements and which was not already in the armed forces or registered for military service was the work-force in the factories. It was obvious that among the 13 million men in industry there would be many who met the criteria demanded.

The standard procedure to call up men to the colours was slow and cumbersome. A newer method needed to be found. The solution lay in the Party’s own organization. The Gauleiters could establish from Party records which men in the factories were available for local defence service and under their authority as Reichs Commissars could conscript the factory workers as temporary soldiers to defend the factories and their own homes. That was the original intention; for the Volkssturm to be a local unit defending its own area for a limited period of time.

The tactical unit would be a battalion and this would be activated by the Gauleiter under his Reichs Defence Commissar powers. The men of the battalion, now armed and equipped as soldiers, would occupy the trenches which another directed body of workers would have already dug. The Volkssturm men would hold those field fortifications until the well-armed and better-trained Regular Army arrived to relieve them. The Volkssturm battalion would then be stood down and its men would go back to work in the factories until some new crisis caused them to be reactivated.

In German history there had been many instances of local men being called up to guard or, if necessary, to fight in defence of their own areas. From the earliest days of the Prussian Army the Landsturm, as such a body was named, had formed a part of the military establishment. What was unique was that the new force would be totally outside the control of the Army until the time came for the battalions to go into action. Hitler, acting through the Party Chancery, would advise the Gauleiter to activate the battalions within his Gau. His units would take post and only then would they come under military control.

The proposal made in 1943 by General Heusinger was warmly received in Berlin in 1944, and on 6 September Hitler directed Martin Bormann to undertake the raising of a National Socialist military militia to which he gave the name ‘Volkssturm’. Within three weeks the basic organization had been completed. Hitler’s Decree of 25 September, which formally raised the new body, is interesting reading. It opens with a blazing condemnation of Germany’s allies for having failed her but claims that the situation in September 1944 was similar to that which had faced Germany in 1939, when she had stood alone against her enemies. At that time, by a first ruthless application of the Reich’s potential, difficult military problems had been solved and Germany’s future, as indeed that of the whole of Europe, had been assured. These enemies of the Reich who were now approaching the Reich’s frontiers would be met by a second massive effort of the German people. This would not only fling back the enemy but would hold him at bay until the future of Germany and all Europe could be guaranteed. Against the nihilistic plan of Jewish international interests Germany would set the assault of the whole German people.

The Führer’s Decree ordered that all men between the ages of 16 and 60, who were capable of bearing arms, were to be enlisted into the Volkssturm. Each Gauleiter was made responsible for raising and commanding the Volkssturm battalions within his Gau and he was to use every Party organization to enable him to carry out the task. The Chief of Staff of the SA, Schepmann, was named as the Volkssturm’s Inspector-General, responsible for training, and Kraus, leader of the NSKK (National Sozialistisch Kraftfahr Korps, the Nazi Motorized Corps) was given the post of Inspector-General of Transport and was to ensure the mobility of the Volkssturm.

The future warriors were assured that during the period of their service they would be soldiers as that term was understood in military law. Himmler, in his capacity as Commander of the Replacement Army, was not only responsible for the arming and equipping of the entire organization, but was also the channel through which Hitler’s orders concerning Volkssturm operations were to be passed.

To conclude his proclamation Hitler declared that the National Socialist Party was fulfilling its duty by using its own organization to bear the main burden of the battle. The Volkssturm Decree was made public on 18 October and promulgated in the official Gazette two days later. A special postage stamp was also issued bearing the motto, ‘A people arises’, and a new film, Kolberg, showing the heroism of the citizens of a beleaguered city, was released.

The Party’s plan was for four waves of the Volkssturm to be raised. The men of the first wave could be called up as long as their conscription did not prejudice the national war effort, and only battalions from that wave might, with authority, be used outside their local territorial areas. The second wave would not be activated until the imminent approach of the enemy whereupon they would be mustered and go into action. The men of the second wave were, generally, younger than those in the first wave, and were without military training. The average age of the men of the first wave was 52 and many would have seen service during the First World War. The third and fourth waves were made up of practically every other reasonably fit male person. Fit was a relative term to some dedicated Gauleiters who did not scruple to enrol cripples or amputees and then not only for simple guard duties, but also for active service.

The problem of arming the six million men who, theoretically, might be liable for Volkssturm service was not easily resolved. The first wave alone, comprising 30 per cent of the whole, would provide 1.2 million men who would be formed into 1,850 battalions. These first-wave men had to be armed, but there was a crisis in the production of the German Army’s standard infantry rifle. Not only had production declined to 200,000 pieces per month, but the Army had to replace the 3,500,000 rifles which had been lost between April and August 1944. The Army Ordnance Depot designed several types of robust, cheap and easily made Volkssturm weapons, relying upon pressed metal and not precision-machined parts. The weapon finally selected was the VGI-5 of which 10,000 were to be produced each month. It was planned that production would be carried out in decentralized workshops and that final assembly would be made in centralized factories. Raids by the RAF halted the flow of weapons parts and local gunsmiths had to be employed on the task of arming the Party’s Army. To cover deficiencies in machine-guns the Luftwaffe was directed to supply such weapons from its stocks. Two consignments, one of 150,000 and one of 180,000 pieces, were issued for Volkssturm use. The Regular Army intended to stand aloof from the task of arming the Volkssturm, particularly since their own firearms and supplies position was critical. An Army Order dated 12 December made the point on rations very clear. ‘The equipping … of the Volkssturm is a Party matter … only on active service will their units be fed from Army resources.’

Tactically, each battalion of the Volkssturm would have four companies, each of which was divided into four platoons each of four sections. Since the units were locally based there was no need for a staff system or for rear echelon detachments. Such liaison officers as would be needed would be Party members who had had military experience. The Gauleiter chose the battalion commanders who then appointed company commanders. They in turn selected the platoon commanders who nominated the section leaders. This was in some respects an excellent system since the men of the smaller detachments – section and platoon – would have usually served together in a Party ‘block’. To overcome the problem of a Party official expecting to hold rank in the Volkssturm because of his political position, it was ordered that no major Party formation could join the Volkssturm enbloc.

The clothing of the Volkssturm was as simple as its organization. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention it is not necessary for a combatant to wear full uniform. So long as he can be recognized as a soldier, that is sufficient, and in that context an armband provides identification. Certainly, Germany in the desperate situation of 1944 could never have supplied uniforms to the new Volkssturm army. The only items on general issue were identity documents, identity tags and the necessary armbands. These carried the words ‘Deutscher Volkssturm – Wehrmacht’ sometimes, but not always, followed by numbers indicating the Gau, battalion and company. Party members wore their usual uniforms from which the collar patches and shoulder strap insignia consisted of silver stars worn on two black rectangular collar patches; four stars in the case of a battalion commander, three, two and one for ranks from company commander down to section leader respectively. In an effort to clothe men with warm garments a final collection was made by the Party’s charity organizations and was very successful. Some Gauleiters were able to provide from such sources the stout boots, warm clothing and overcoats that each Sturmmann was recommended to wear. Each man supplied his own equipment: a rucksack, blanket, water-bottle, mug and eating utensils.

The weapons establishment for a first-wave battalion was 649 rifles, 31 light and six heavy machine-guns; for a second-wave unit 576 rifles, 30 light and three heavy machine-guns; while no establishment was laid down for the third and fourth waves for whom, it was anticipated, shotguns or hunting rifles would be sufficient. Mortars were on establishment but were seldom used as they were often commandeered by Regular Army units to increase their own establishment of such weapons. The familiar picture of a Volkssturm man is of an elderly gentleman armed with one or other of the newly introduced types of rocket-launcher, either the Panzerfaust or the Panzerschreck. Six of each of these were on issue to each battalion. It must be appreciated that these numbers of men and women were the laid-down establishments. They were seldom met and it was not unusual for the battalion to be issued with fewer weapons than expected or for those weapons to be practically useless. Great numbers of captured enemy guns were issued for which there was little ammunition. The equality of sacrifice demanded by the National Socialist Party was unusually rigid in the matter of the issue of firearms to the Volkssturm. It might have been expected that in those Gaus where there was little immediate danger, few weapons would have been distributed to the battalions and that more lavish supply would have been made to the units in the provinces facing the most immediate danger. This did not happen. The Volkssturm battalions in the eastern provinces which were activated to face the Red Army received only the same number of weapons as those battalions in unthreatened areas of central Germany. Thus, in East Prussia, some battalions went into action with its men armed with foreign rifles and 30 rounds of ammunition and with no prospect of further supplies.

Although the Volkssturm was conceived as an infantry force there were certain anomalies. One Prussian battalion obtained a battery of 75mm field guns from a museum and soon had them in firing condition, using the artillery pieces to support the attacks launched by their own infantry companies. Some units with NSKK leaders converted soft skin vehicles to armoured cars for reconnaissance missions. Gauleiter Koch, always an innovator, formed a night-fighter squadron made up of civilian light aircraft piloted by Volkssturm men who had been trained by the Luftwaffe. Koch’s flying circus never saw action. Lack of petrol grounded the machines.

Although the Volkssturm was conceived as a stop-gap force, whose men would only be called from their factories when the enemy drew near, inevitably there were occasions when the battalions were put into action as front-line troops. One of the Party criticisms concerning Volkssturm was that the battalions in the west, which had had a longer time to train and to prepare for battle, did not perform so well as the units in the east. It says a lot for the morale of the Volkssturm men of the east that they stood firm. Consider how they must have felt as they, armed with a miscellany of firearms and equipped only for a short infantry action, marched towards the front, passing on their march heavily armed panzer units which were withdrawing in front of the Red Army. The panzers were pulling back, yet they, the Volkssturm, under-trained and poorly armed, were expected to hold back the Red hordes. The feelings of the Volkssturmmüanner can also be well imagined when the ‘No retreat!’ orders were issued. The author of one report stated how he rang an army unit to ask for permission to withdraw from a village which he and a handful of men were still holding. The officer at the other end of the telephone line was adamant. ‘There will be no withdrawal. Any man leaving his post will be shot.’ To that tirade the writer of the report asked who would form the firing-squad, for the soldiers had abandoned the place days earlier. The officer hung up.

Inevitably, there were some units which showed incredible bravery and others which broke up leaving the men to return home. Among those units which demonstrated the devotion to duty for which the Party had hoped were the East Prussian battalions in beleaguered Königsberg. The Volkssturm there, organized into 11 battalions, fought alongside army units and one Sturmmann won the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his bravery in destroying enemy tanks at close quarters. In Pomerania the Volkssturm destroyed nearly 400 Russian armoured fighting vehicles using Panzerfaust rocket-launchers. The tank-busting detachments rode around the province on bicycles and one group, having knocked out 15 tanks during one morning, received an alarm call during the afternoon and promptly smashed a further six enemy machines. At Kolberg, on the Baltic coast, the scene of action of Goebbels’ propaganda film, the Volkssturm garrison held out for three weeks to cover the evacuation of 80,000 refugees and wounded. The Berlin Volkssturm was called out during November and was employed in constructing field defences and minelaying along the Oder river line. Some battalions were then put straight into battle during January and March against the attacks launched by the 1st Belorussian Front which had broken through the German defences. In the Reichs capital about 30 battalions of Volkssturm saw service and their arms included 15 different types of rifle and ten types of machine-gun. Most men were issued with only ten rounds and one battalion was disbanded in the Berlin Olympic stadium when the unit ran out of rifle ammunition.

The Volkssturm battalions in Breslau had, perhaps, the most impressive record. The garrison of 35,000 troops, and an SS regiment, together with some miscellaneous German Army units and the Luftwaffe, was backed by 15,000 Volkssturmmänner. This determined garrison held the Silesian city from 14 February until 6 May, obstructing the advance of three Soviet Army Corps and tying down the Red divisions until the war’s end.

An example of the deployment of a Volkssturm battalion outside its own Gau area is that of one from upper Austria which was activated during January 1945. Three days’ training was given, conducted entirely in the open air, and then the unit, 560 men strong, was entrained and sent to the Oder front. During the first week the battalion not only held its sector in the face of Red Army tank assaults but also launched counter-attacks, fighting its way forward through massed artillery barrages. Such courage was costly and within that first week half the battalion had been killed in action. For six weeks the Austrians held the line and their short period out of action was brought to an end when they were put back in to face the Soviet assault on 16 April. The Austrian battalion held and flung back the assaults of the 362nd Red Army Infantry Division, but such an unequal contest could have only one result. The Soviets broke through at last and the remnants of the battalion conducted a fighting retreat towards Berlin. In their withdrawal they destroyed a further 17 Russian tanks. The Austrians were submerged in the fighting to the south-east of Berlin, some of the survivors managing to reach the west and to pass into American prisoner-of-war camps. The others were taken by the Russians but were not shot as partisans, which had been the fate of those who had surrendered in Königsberg, in Breslau and in many other places.

In retrospect the idea of a locally based militia defending home and hearth and the factories in which its men worked was a good one. In practice, however, the concept was seldom met. The fighting capabilities of the battalions depended to a very marked degree upon the Gauleiter. If he was an anxious man and called them out too early, factory production suffered and the aggressive edge of the men was lost in the waiting time. Other Gauleiters waited so long to activate their battalions that when they were formed they were untrained and ill-equipped. It is a fact that the greatest number of men who were eligible for Volkssturm service were not called up or saw little or no active service.

As we have seen the battalions differed in quality. Some fought well, others very bravely indeed. There were battalions that dissolved under fire and not a few that broke up before they ever reached the combat area. In any case, the battalions had only local significance. At a national level the Volkssturm achieved little and the concept of a people’s militia rising spontaneously and battling with National Socialist ferocity proved to be just another of the Nazi Party’s unrealized ambitions.

In each of the lands which it had conquered and occupied the German Army had to deal with the problem of fighting a secret army – the partisans. At command level the actions to counter these guerrilla forces meant that soldiers had to be taken from combat duties, thus weakening the battle line. At a personal level the German troops’ need to be vigilant at all times, coupled with the knowledge that they were nowhere safe from partisan attack, had a serious effect upon their morale. Neither the importance of partisan movements nor the success of their operations was lost upon the Germans and, as the Allied armies closed in on the Reich, plans were laid to create a German guerrilla movement – Wehrwolf. This would operate behind Allied lines and inflict upon their troops the fear and the uncertainty that the Germans had had to suffer.

As in the case of the Volkssturm the raising and direction of Wehrwolf was not entrusted to the Army. In the opinion of the Reichsleitung, the generals, with their bourgeois concepts of warfare, would have no idea of how to use this new, revolutionary force. Nor could the military be trusted after the July bomb plot. Wehrwolf would, therefore, be raised and administered by the Party. The Reichsleitung would select the targets to be attacked and the Wehrwolf activists would carry out the missions. The OKW would be the de jure head of organization in order to give to the underground force the authority of being a military body.

Discussions at the highest level emphasized that the prime consideration for a volunteer to be selected as a Wehrwolf agent was the fervency of his or her belief in National Socialist principles and a staunch adherence to the Führer. Military experience was not, at first, considered essential. Candidates would be trained by SS officers each of whom was expert in anti-partisan operations. In the final weeks of the war when it was no longer possible to give proper training to the Wehrwolves, military experience was the next consideration – after loyalty to Hitler and to the Party.

As the Reichsleitung first envisaged it, Wehrwolf would be a small group of agents whose drive would create a momentum strong enough to inspire the great mass of the people. It was accepted that most civilians would be unsuited to serve on active field operations, but they could feed, hide, supply and support the activists. In addition to operations directed against Allied troops and installations in Germany, the Wehrwolf would also paint slogans and flypost placards to intimidate those Germans who collaborated with the occupying powers, or else to keep the other civilians true to National Socialist principles.

Gruppenführer Prutzmann, who had been given the task of raising and training Wehrwolf, was a skilled and ruthless administrator. Armed with absolute power to commandeer and to direct, he set up in certain eastern and western provinces of Germany isolated training centres. In these the recruits would undergo instruction, which would be given by the most skilled instructors in anti-partisan operations whom Prutzmann withdrew from Army and SS units. Together with those experts he drew up a training programme and tested its efficiency. Next he laid out numerous well-hidden ammunition and supply dumps on whose stocks the Wehrwolf agents would draw. The first candidates arrived; mostly volunteers, but including some who had been approached and asked to join. The courses were rigorous and exhausting for they had been designed to test the candidates to their physical and emotional limits. Those who could not meet the exacting demands of Prutzmann and his staff were dismissed with the solemn warning that Wehrwolf was a state secret; to betray it was high treason.

The candidates passed from a regime designed to break them physically and emotionally, through intense political indoctrination and on to practical training. This included the manufacture and use of explosives, close-quarter combat, camouflage and communications. Intensive training in survival techniques ensured that the activists would remain at liberty and also operational in enemy-occupied territory. At the end of the course the candidates who had now become agents were sent home to await developments. When their own region was overrun and occupied by the enemy they were to slip quietly away and go underground.

To keep the Wehrwolf politically indoctrinated as well as to relay instructions to the scattered agents, Goebbels allotted stations on the Deutschlandsender radio network exclusively for Wehrwolf use. Those stations broadcast slogans from the Kampfzeit years; slogans which increased the fervour of the activists to a fanaticism and inspired them to go out to fight, to suffer and to die for the Führer.

Mention was made in earlier pages that the attitudes of the civil population in the western Gaus was a disappointment to the Party leadership. In that connection Prutzmann reported that the mass of the civil population in the west wanted nothing to do with the Wehrwolf or the Party. So far as the civilians were concerned the arrival of Allied troops would bring an end to the bombing and the fighting. The Nazi Party had brought disaster upon Germany and the civilians had no intention of compounding that disaster by supporting the snotty Hitler Youth brats of the Wehrwolf in their efforts to restore Party discipline. So far as the masses were concerned the war had gone on too long. Too much had been sacrificed. Too many had been lost. It was time for the Nazis to accept defeat and to face up to reality.

The Party, of course, would not tolerate such cowardly attitudes and its activists swore revenge upon those traitors to the Volksgemeinschaft. Prominent German men who had been appointed by the American or British occupation authorities to positions of civil authority were warned by Deutschlandsender that their treachery would be punished. Some were murdered, the most important being the Lord Mayor of Aachen. The news of his assassination was broadcast over the Wehrwolf network and its success boosted Wehrwolf morale By painting slogans and posting placards Wehrwolf warned the German people that they must remain loyal to Hitler. In some towns and villages the slogans were scrubbed out by civilians before the Allies entered, while in other places opponents of the dying Nazi regime painted their own slogans. The most famous of these was a question: ‘Did Hitler need four years to achieve this?’ This question was a bitterly sarcastic comment upon Hitler’s demand in his first years of power. At that time he had stated, ‘Give me four years and you will not recognize Germany.’ The bitter question painted on the walls of bomb-damaged houses illustrated the feelings of many people in western Germany.

Prutzmann may have been dissatisfied with the response of the German civilians in the west, but he could have had no complaints to make about the civilians in the eastern regions. To begin with Wehrwolf activity was better supported in those areas threatened by the Red Army, and the radio broadcast numerous accounts of the courage of the German partisans. There are no post-operation reports on the missions Wehrwolf undertook and thus it is not possible to determine their scope, success rate and effect. What did happen was that such operations were inevitably reduced as the grip of the Red Army tightened on the areas of Germany and Austria that it had occupied. The boasts and threats of the Wehrwolf stations of Deutschlandsender served only to heighten the Red Army’s awareness of the underground army and the Russians took fast and dramatic action following any real or suspected Wehrwolf operation. The NKVD was also able to ‘turn’ those operators whom it caught and through them discover the Wehrwolf cells and destroy them.

There was a variant of Prutzmann’s Wehrwolf underground army of highly trained specialists. This new Wehrwolf was announced in a broadcast made by Goebbels. He called upon the whole German nation to become Wehrwolves, to rise and to take up arms against the invaders. In response to the Reichsminister’s call there were reports received from American troops that they had been fired upon by civilians. Such attacks were few, isolated and swiftly dealt with. Destruction was visited upon those localities from which opposition came. The razing of a village or a town by US ground and air forces served to warn other localities along the lines of the US advance that any opposition would be beaten down without mercy. Along the Red Army’s thrust line there was almost no response to Goebbels’ Wehrwolf cry. The countryside was devoid of people. In many cases they had fled out of fear of the avenging Soviet soldiers. In other cases the civilians, having been despoiled and looted by the Soviet soldiers, were then rounded up to work either as carriers or porters for the Red Army, or else were grouped into road repair gangs.

For a number of reasons neither of the two Wehrwolf organizations had a chance of succeeding. The Goebbels one was naïve in concept. There cannot have been many civilians who would attempt, by themselves and only lightly armed, to stop an Allied tank armada. More particularly was it naïve to expect such heroism from civilians who were well aware that the Allies would exact a fearful retribution for a single act of bravado. The instinct for self-preservation kept the German masses docile as the Allied armies advanced and overran them. Those civilians must have been few in number who, having endured and survived nearly six years of war, would hazard their life in so pointless an operation.

Although excellent in concept, Prutzmann’s Wehrwolf organization was doomed to fail. To be successful any partisan organization must have a home base from which weapons and supplies are received, in which plans can be drawn up and from which instructions are issued. The partisan groups in Western Europe had had the United Kingdom as their base, their source of hope and inspiration. To the Russian partisans operating behind German lines, that home base had been the great, unconquered mass of the Soviet Union. From both those bases went out the support which the guerrillas needed to sustain them in the field. For the Wehrwolf no such base existed in a rapidly shrinking Fatherland, nor could one operate once the Allies had overrun all of Germany. Neither did Wehrwolf have popular support. It lacked those who would be prepared to take risks to help the agents, to feed them and to encourage them. Lacking those things the movement could not succeed. The Party notion that National Socialist fervour and political slogans from the Kampfzeit would be the foundations of military victory was shown to be absurd. Slogans are no substitute for food; nor have they the power to command the support of the war-weary masses.

The Volkssturm, the Party’s attempt to produce a workers’ factory militia similar to that in the Soviet Union, had failed. Attempts to slow down or even to halt the Allied advances through Germany by Wehrwolf, another Party organization, had come to naught. A third Party-inspired effort, produced in the final weeks of the war, was for a Freikorps.

This was an emotive name. Freikorps had been formed from volunteer detachments which had held Germany’s eastern border in the years immediately following the Great War. Once again, a host of volunteers, loyal, true and politically inspired, would be formed and would march to the sound of the guns – towards Berlin where the Führer, Party Comrade Hitler, was besieged. As with most Party-inspired projects the raising of the Freikorps involved a great attention to petty detail, first in who would be eligible to serve in its ranks and, secondly, in how the groups from each Kreis were to meet and amalgamate before the whole host set off to smash the Russian ring around Berlin.

The most important requirement for any Freikorps man was his political reliability and staunchness to the ideals of National Socialism. Gauleiters were requested to forward the names of men on their staff who most fitted the requirements. If the nominees were fit they would join the Freikorps, and would assemble, clad in suitable clothing and with packed lunches, ready to ride their bicycles towards Berlin. No written records remain, if indeed any ever existed, to describe the military service rendered by the 1945 version of Freikorps. If any detachments actually reached the Reichs capital they would, I feel, have been swallowed up in the anonymity of that great battle.

Once the bicycling Freikorps set off, pedalling its way to Berlin, there was no other male source from which soldiers could be gained and which the Party could send into battle for National Socialism. There may have been no more men upon whom the Party could call, but there were women. Great numbers of them had written to Hitler and to Goebbels demanding the right to fight. The inspiration was there; the will to fight was there and the weapons were there. Only the decision by the Party leaders was missing.

The Reichsleitung did not feel itself able, even at that stage of the war, to jeopardize the future mothers of Germany by putting them into battle. The soul-searching went on and on. Then at last, in March 1945, came the decision that, because of the grave crisis facing the state, in those hours of Germany’s danger, women might be permitted to bear arms and become soldiers. A women’s force, ‘Adolf Hitler’, was born – but it was stillborn. The pettifogging, bureaucratic details that were considered so essential by the Party took so long to resolve that the war ended before the units could be formed and activated.

With that last abortive effort the Third Reich died and with it passed also the Party that had created it. The Party organizations, whose fervour and fanaticism it had been hoped would produce victory out of defeat, had failed in their endeavour.