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

Of course, in the First World War there had been no Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’. The formula produced by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and agreed by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was the first time that a sovereign state had been formally offered no terms short of total and unconditional capitulation.¹⁰ This was often seized upon in the early post-war years, particularly by German generals, as the sole and adequate explanation for Germany’s prolonged fight, since, it was claimed, the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ ruled out any alternative.

¹¹ Some former soldiers long after the war ended still insisted that it had helped to motivate them to keep on fighting.¹²

It is certainly possible to argue that the demand was counter-productive, and that it simply played into the hands of Nazi propaganda. As such, it contributed, at least initially, to strengthening the will to hold out, but it is doubtful whether attributing blame to the Allies for a mistaken policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ amounts to any more than what one scholar has called a ‘flimsy excuse’.¹³ According to General Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of Operations in the OKW, ‘hardly any notice was taken of it’ in the High Command of the Wehrmacht and ‘there was no examination by the OKW Operations Staff of its military consequences’.

¹⁴ In other words, it made no difference to the strategy—or lack of one—adopted by the German military leadership in the last phase of the war. Answers to the question of why Germany fought on have consequently to be sought less in the Allied demand, whatever its merits or failings, than in the structures of the German regime in its dying phase and the mentalities that shaped its actions.

Why, unlike in 1918, did the German people not rise up against a regime so obviously taking them to perdition? In the early post-war era, for the German people just starting to pick up their lives again after the trauma of such death and destruction, and not anxious to dwell upon any deeper causes of the catastrophe that had beset their country, it seemed unnecessary to look much further for explanation than the terroristic nature of the Nazi regime. It was easy, and in some ways reassuring, for Germans to see themselves as the hapless victims of ruthless oppression by their brutal rulers, stifled in any scope for action by a totalitarian police state. The feelings were understandable and, as subsequent chapters will show, certainly not without justification. Of course, there was an undeniably apologetic strain to the way such an explanation could be, and was, used in post-war Germany to exculpate almost the whole society from the crimes placed at the door of Hitler, the all-powerful Dictator, and a clique of criminally ruthless Nazi leaders. But scholarly interpretation, too, in the post-war era placed the overwhelming emphasis upon terror and repression in the ‘totalitarianism’ theorem that dominated so much historical and political science literature at that time (though without direct focus on the last phase of the war).¹⁵

A society coerced into acquiescence, unable to act because of the comprehensive coercion of the highly repressive ‘totalitarian state’, provided, it seemed, sufficient explanation.

Terror is unquestionably critical to the question of how and why the regime continued to function to the end. As we shall see, the level of terroristic repression, which now boomeranged back from the treatment of conquered peoples to be directed at the German people themselves as well as perceived ‘racial enemies’, does indeed go a long way towards explaining why there was no revolution from below, why an organized mass uprising was not possible. Given the level of repression, together with the immense dislocation in the last months, a revolution from below, as at the end of the First World War, was an impossibility. But terror cannot completely explain the regime’s capacity to fight on. It was not terror that drove on the regime’s elites. Terror does not explain the behaviour of the regime’s ‘paladins’—both those who shared Hitler’s Götterdämmerung mentality and were ready to see Germany go down in flames, and the far greater number of those seeking to save their own skins. It does not explain the continued functioning of a government bureaucracy, both at central and local levels. Not least, it does not explain the Wehrmacht’s readiness—at any rate the readiness of the Wehrmacht leadership—to continue the fight. Nor, finally, does terror explain the behaviour of those in the regime at different levels prepared to use terror to the very last, even when it served no further rational purpose.