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

Although after the end of the Cold War the ‘totalitarianism’ theorem underwent something of a renaissance,¹⁶ its emphasis upon terror and repression in controlling the ‘total society’ has never regained the ground it held in the early post-war era as an interpretation of the behaviour of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich. On the contrary: recent research has increasingly tended to place the emphasis upon the enthusiastic support of the German people for the Nazi regime, and their willing collaboration and complicity in policies that led to war and genocide.¹⁷ ‘One question remains,’ a German writer remarked. ‘What was it actually that drove us to follow [Hitler] into the abyss like the children in the story of the Pied Piper? The puzzle is not Adolf Hitler. We are the puzzle.’

¹⁸ Such a comment, leaving aside the suggestion of bamboozlement, presumes an essential unity, down to the end, between leader and led.

Whereas the emphasis used to be placed on society and regime in conflict¹⁹—essentially presuming a tyranny over

a mainly reluctant but coerced people—this has shifted to a society in harness with the aims of the regime, largely in tune with and supportive of its racist and expansionist policies, fully behind its war effort. Relentless Nazi propaganda had done its job; it was ‘the war that Hitler won’, according to an interpretation advanced many years ago.²⁰ The Nazis were successful, it is now frequently claimed, in inculcating in people the sense that they were part of an inclusive national-racist ‘people’s community’, integrated by the exclusion of Jews and others deemed inferior and unfit to belong to it, unified by the need to defend the nation against the powerful enemies surrounding it and threatening its very existence.²¹ ‘Notwithstanding the disillusionment and bitterness of large parts of the German population in the last war years, the “people’s community” remained intact to the bitter end’, one scholar has asserted.

²² Moreover, Hitler’s regime had ‘bought off’ the German population, securing loyalty through a standard of living sustained by plundering the occupied territories.²³ Though it is usually acknowledged that this ‘people’s community’ was starting to crumble in the face of impending defeat, lasting support for Nazism—bound together through knowledge of terrible German crimes—is still advanced as a significant reason why Hitler’s regime was able to hold out to the end.²⁴

‘The basic legitimacy of the Third Reich remained intact’, another historian has claimed, ‘because Germans could not envision a desirable alternative to National Socialism’, demonstrating ‘remarkable commitment to National Socialism in the war’. Their subsequent sense of betrayal by Nazism ‘rested on a strong identification with the Third Reich right up to the moment of abandonment’.²⁵ In perhaps the apogee of this approach, it has been suggested that ‘the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945’. ‘Some’, it is acknowledged, hinting at a tiny minority, ‘had had enough’, but the consensus that had underpinned the dictatorship from the outset, the argument runs, held up to the end.²⁶

The chapters which follow will provide a good deal of evidence to cast doubt upon this intepretation. They will question whether either the scale of terror or the extent of support for the regime can provide an adequate explanation for its ability to hold out until Germany was smashed to smithereens. Yet if neither terror nor support fully explains it, what does?