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

I first thought of writing such a book because, to my surprise, I couldn’t think of another book which had tried to do what I had in mind. There are, of course, libraries of books about the end of the war, written from different perspectives, and widely varying in quality. There are important studies of the top Nazi leaders and, increasingly, of some of the regional chieftains, the Gauleiter.¹ Biographies exist also for many of the leading military figures.² There are literally thousands of accounts of events in the final climactic weeks of the Third Reich, both at the front and, it sometimes seems, for practically every town and village in Germany. Many local studies give graphic—often horrific—descriptions of the fate of individual townships as the unstoppable advance of the Allied and Soviet military juggernauts enveloped them.

³ Memoirs of experiences at the front or in the homeland, in cities pounded by Allied bombs, or facing the ordeals of flight and homelessness, abound. Detailed, often localized, military histories or accounts of specific Wehrmacht units or major battles are also commonplace, while the battle for Berlin, in particular, has naturally been the focus of numerous works.⁴ The sixth volume of the German Democratic Republic’s official history of the war, produced in the 1980s, despite its obvious ideological slant, provides a valuable attempt at a comprehensive military history, not confined to events on the front.⁵

And more recently, the last volumes of the Federal Republic’s own outstanding official military history series offer excellent detailed studies of the Wehrmacht, often stretching far beyond operational history.⁶ Even so, these and other fine works on military history⁷ touch on only some—if important—aspects of what I thought was necessary to answer the questions I wanted to tackle.

My initial intention had been to approach the problem through exploring the structures of rule in Nazi Germany in this last phase. It seemed to me that the major structural histories of the Third Reich tended to peter out largely by late 1944, dealing quite superficially with the final months of the regime.⁸ This applies also to studies of the Nazi Party and its affiliates.⁹ It rapidly became plain to me, however, that a mere structural analysis would not be enough, and that my examination had to be extended to the mentalities—at different levels—that underpinned the continued functioning of the regime. A comprehensive study of German mentalities in the last months has not yet been attempted.¹⁰

Reconstructing them has to be done, therefore, from fragments.

I have tried to take into account the mentalities of rulers and ruled, of Nazi leaders and lowly members of the civilian population, of generals and ordinary soldiers, and on both the eastern and the western fronts. It is a wide canvas and I have to paint with a broad brush. I can, of course, present only selective examples to illustrate the spectrum of attitudes. For not least of the problems in trying to generalize about mentalities is that during its final months, and at a highly accelerated pace in its last weeks, the Nazi regime was splintering as well as shrinking. Germany was a big country and while, obviously, the extreme pressures of war afflicted all of its regions, they did not do so at the same time, or in exactly the same ways. Experiences of the civilian population in the different parts of the country and those of soldiers in different theatres of war naturally varied. I have tried to mirror the differing mentalities rather than resort to superficial generalizations.

The book mainly relates to what we might call the majority German population. There were, however, others whose experiences, themselves not reducible to easy generalization, were quite separate from those of most Germans since they did not and could not belong to mainstream German society. The fate of the horribly persecuted pariah groups in the clutches of the Nazis forms a further important part of the story of the continued functioning of the Nazi regime, amid the inexorable collapse and gathering doom. For, unenviable in the extreme as the situation was for most Germans, for the regime’s racial and political enemies, ever more exposed to vicious retribution as it imploded, the murderous last months were a time of barely imaginable horror. Even when it was faltering and failing in every other respect, the Nazi regime managed to terrorize, kill and destroy to the last.

The history of the Nazi regime in its final months is a history of disintegration. In trying to tackle the questions I posed to myself, the main problem of method that I faced was the daunting one of trying to blend the varied facets of the fall of the Third Reich into a single history. It amounts to trying to write an integrated history of disintegration.