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

^{Passers-by in Berlin glance at the propaganda placard: ‘Our walls break, but not our hearts’.}

^{Prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp immediately after its liberation by American troops in April 1945.}

^{Prisoners on a death march from Dachau in late April 1945.}

^{Germans in Königsberg surrender to the Red Army on 9 April 1945 at the fall of the beleaguered East Prussian city.}

^{White flags fly from houses in Worms as the Americans take the Palatinate town in late March 1945.}

 

^{General Heinrich von Vietinghoff (left) and General of the Waffen-SS Karl Wolff (right) were instrumental in the German surrender in Italy on 29 April 1945—the only surrender to precede Hitler’s death.}

^{Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs the complete German capitulation at Karlshorst, near Berlin, on 8 May 1945.}

^{The End: an angel high on the spire of the minster in Freiburg surveys the legacy of destruction left by the war.}

Introduction: Going Down in Flames

Wednesday, 18 April 1945: American troops are at the gates of the town of Ansbach, administrative capital of Central Franconia. The Nazi District Leader has fled during the night, most German soldiers have been moved to the south, the citizens have been camped out in air-raid shelters for days. Any rational thinking signals surrender. But the military commandant of the town, Dr Ernst Meyer—a fifty-year-old colonel of the Luftwaffe, with a doctorate in physics—is a fanatical Nazi, insistent on fighting to the end. A nineteen-year-old theology student, unfit for military service, Robert Limpert, decides to act, to prevent his town being destroyed in a senseless last-ditch battle.

Limpert had witnessed the complete devastation through Allied bombs of the beautiful city of Würzburg the previous month. This had prompted him to the dangerous venture of distributing leaflets earlier in April pleading for the surrender of Ansbach, its picturesque baroque and rococo buildings still intact, without a fight. He now takes an even bigger risk. Around 11.00 a.m. on that lovely spring morning he cuts the telephone wires which he thinks connect the commandant’s base with the Wehrmacht unit outside the town—a futile attempt at sabotage, in fact, since unbeknown to him the base had just moved. He is spotted doing so by two boys, members of the Hitler Youth. They report what they have seen, and the matter is urgently taken up by the local constabulary. A policeman is sent to Limpert’s home, who finds the young man in possession of a pistol and incriminating evidence, and arrests him.

The local police report the arrest to the head of the remaining civil administration in Ansbach, who telephones the military commandant, currently out of town. Predictably enraged by what he hears, the commandant hastens to the police station and peremptorily establishes a three-man tribunal consisting of the head of the constabulary, his deputy and the commandant’s own assistant. After a farcical ‘trial’ lasting a mere couple of minutes, in which the accused is not allowed to speak, the commandant pronounces him sentenced to death, the sentence to be carried out immediately.

As a noose is placed round his neck at the town hall gate, Limpert manages to struggle free and make a run for it, but within a hundred metres is caught by police, kicked and pulled by the hair before being hauled back screaming. No one in the assembled crowd stirs to help him. Some in fact also punch and kick him. Even now his misery is not over. The noose is again put round his neck and he is hanged. But the rope breaks, and he falls to the ground. The noose is once more put round his neck, and he is finally hoisted to his death in the town hall square. The commandant orders the body to be left hanging ‘until it stinks’. Shortly afterwards he apparently requisitions a bicycle and immediately flees the town. Four hours later, the Americans enter Ansbach without a shot being fired and cut down the body of Robert Limpert.¹