The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

Despite mounting handicaps, distribution of the ever more restricted food rations was maintained with difficulty and, increasingly by improvised means, post continued after a fashion to struggle through. Limited forms of entertainment still somehow functioned as a conscious device to sustain morale and distract attention for a short while from the unfolding disaster. A last concert by the Berlin Philharmonic took place on 12 April, four days before the Soviet assault on the Reich capital was launched. The finale from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung was, of course, on the programme.⁵

Some cinemas remained open. Only a week before Stuttgart capitulated on 22 April its citizens could find momentary distraction from their trauma through a visit to the cinema to see The Woman of my Dreams.⁶

Even football matches were still played. The last game of the war took place as late as 23 April 1945, when FC Bayern Munich, ‘Gaumeister’ of 1945, beat their local rivals TSV 1860 Munich 3–2.⁷ Truncated newspapers still appeared. The main Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter

, was published in the unoccupied part of southern Germany to the very end. Its last edition, on 28 April 1945, two days before Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker, carried the headline: ‘Fortress Bavaria’.

The reasons for Germany’s collapse are evident, and well known. Why and how Hitler’s Reich kept on functioning till the bitter end is less obvious. That is what this book seeks to explain.

The fact that the regime did

hold out to the end—and that the war ended only when Germany was militarily battered into submission, its economy destroyed, its cities in ruins, the country occupied by foreign powers—is historically an extreme rarity. Wars between states in the modern era have usually ended in some kind of negotiated settlement. The ruling elites of a state facing military defeat have generally sued for peace at some point, and eventually, under some duress, reached a territorial agreement, however disadvantageous. The end of the First World War fitted this pattern. The end of the Second was completely different. The rulers of Germany in 1945, knowing the war was lost and complete destruction beckoned, were nevertheless prepared to fight on until their country was practically obliterated.

Authoritarian regimes facing defeat in unpopular wars and seen to be heading for disaster do not usually survive to preside over outright catastrophe. Some in the past have been overthrown by revolution from below, as in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918 (in the latter case after the military elite had already taken steps to end a lost war). Others—a more usual development—are toppled by a coup from within, by elites unwilling to be taken down with the failing regime and wanting to salvage something. The deposition of Mussolini by his own Fascist Grand Council in 1943 is a prime example. In Germany, by contrast, the regime, though universally recognized, not just by ordinary people but by those in positions of power, civilian and military, to be heading for the buffers, fought on until it was completely destroyed and, unlike 1918, under foreign occupation.⁸ Approximate parallels come to mind only in the cases of Japan in 1945 (which, however, surrendered while the country was still unoccupied) and more recently—and in this case very faintly (given the very short-lived and militarily one-sided war)—in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The contrast between 1918 and 1945 in Germany again raises the question: how and why was Hitler’s Germany able to fight on to the bitter end? Was no other conclusion to the terrible conflict possible? And if not, why not? ‘The real puzzle’, it has been aptly remarked, ‘is why people who wanted to survive fought and killed so desperately and so ferociously almost to the last moments of the war.’⁹