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Frederick II of Prussia had been saved from certain defeat in the Seven Years War when Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia suddenly died in 1762 and the overwhelming Franco-Austro-Russian coalition had miraculously disintegrated.
Anticipating the clash of the capitalist West with the communist East was not entirely baseless, as decades of Cold War would later demonstrate. But in their desperation to find an exit strategy from the cul-de-sac of their own making, the Nazi leaders forgot that they themselves were the threat which had forged this ‘unholy alliance’ in the first place.
After going through a final flowering during the autumn of 1944, national solidarity disintegrated under the force of the Allied invasion.
Moreover, the conquest of Germany, region by region, completed the elevation of family and Heimat above Reich and Volk.
The German nation state was destroyed not only by the four-power occupation which was to come, but by its own disintegration in the final months of the war.
During those five years and three and a half months, 350,000 Jews had been killed, most of the city destroyed and its overall population had fallen from 1.3 million to 153,000.
Cracow fell on 19 January, the Germans for once simply pulling out, surrendering their defensive positions and the capital of Hans Frank’s General Government without destroying it.
Fifteen-year-old Thomas Gève had survived the selection for the gas chambers thanks to the protection of German Communist prisoners in the camp, who assigned the tall German Jewish boy to work alongside them on their building brigade. As their open goods wagons pulled through the crowded Silesian stations, Gève was struck by something unprecedented. German civilians were looking at the freezing prisoners in their striped concentration camp clothing with envy and resentment: for they had places on a train.6
On 13, 14 and 15 February 1945, Dresden was attacked. Twenty-five thousand people died in the inferno.
Demand for cinema tickets remained as high as ever, despite the air raids.
This quest to influence international opinion, especially the public in Britain and the United States, was remarkably successful.
On 2 March, the Americans reached the western bank of the Rhine south and north of Düsseldorf, and occupied Krefeld. Three days later, they broke through the weak defences around Cologne and took the city in a day, the Wehrmacht hurriedly detonating the main Hohenzollern bridge as soon as they had crossed to the eastern bank.34
Immediately after the Dresden raids, Hitler and Goebbels wanted to abrogate the Geneva Convention in the west and execute British and American prisoners of war in retaliation for German civilian dead. By inciting the Allies to execute German prisoners in turn, Hitler hoped to replicate in the west the mix of terror and dogged self-sacrifice which imbued German soldiers on the eastern front. The draft order ran into the united opposition of Jodl, Dönitz and Keitel, however, who succeeded in talking their Führer out of it: they might countenance the lynching of Allied pilots – by now commonplace
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German officers in British captivity told each other that ‘the British and Americans will one day . . . awaken to the real situation and will join the Germans in holding off Russia’.
In 1943 and 1944, Goebbels had repeatedly proposed that Hitler open negotiations with either the Soviets or the British and Americans in order to secure a separate peace. He was perhaps the only Nazi leader who could risk making such a suggestion so frequently in their private meetings: although Hitler had never accepted that the time was right, he had not banned the topic.
Albert Speer was steeling himself to warn Hitler that the German economy would unwind in just four weeks; but he too joined in the optimistic talk and suggested rushing back the divisions in Italy and Norway to defend the Rhine and Oder fronts.
In 1945 there were still 7.7 million forced workers in the Reich.
The better-organised ones included former Red Army soldiers and inflicted heavy casualties on the Gestapo squads sent to arrest them.
So many German men and women played active roles in the mass organisations of the Party that no sharp line can be drawn between regime and society. Even after the Gestapo withdrew from the Ruhr to the schoolrooms at Hemer, their murderous role was filled by others.
Marianne Strauss had become so used to the constant threat of being caught that it took her ten days to realise she was finally safe.64
On 9 April 1945 Goebbels described the Reich as a narrow band running from Norway to the Adriatic coast of northern Italy. Along the Oder front, Heinrici’s armies waited for the Soviets to renew their offensive.
When news came that the British and Americans had crossed the Rhine and trapped the strongest German armies in the Ruhr, the strategic value of defending the Reich at the Oder also evaporated: with no clear front line in the west, holding the Red Army at the Oder could no longer protect what was left of the Third Reich.
Above all, it was clear that the temptation to repeat the cowardly capitulation of November 1918 had to be resisted at all costs.
The months of fighting on German soil had already created divisions between those civilians engulfed by combat in the borderlands and those sheltering behind them in the hinterland.
She was outraged when the polite English officers and an aggressive American ‘half-nigger’ came to the farm later that afternoon to arrest the German officers, including two 17-year-old SS men.
After years of being marked out, Klemperer could finally blend in as a ‘national comrade’, a participant-observer of how ‘ordinary Germans’ talked amongst themselves.
The day that Eva and Victor reached Unterbernbach brought news that President Roosevelt had died on 12 April. Goebbels rushed to cheer Hitler with the news, pointing out the miraculous parallel with the death of Tsarina Elizabeth in 1762 and the collapse of the coalition facing Frederick the Great.
On Sunday 22 April, the shops reopened so that people could stock up between air raids and attacks by dive-bombers. That day the electricity came on again too, allowing them to listen to Mozart’s Magic Flute on the radio. The news reported that the fighting had reached the northern suburb of Berlin-Weissensee. Monday brought rumours of workers fighting the SS in the old ‘red’ districts of the city and the men of the neighbourhood took turns to stand watch.
Hertha and Renate used the lull in the bombing to eat their noodle soup upstairs at their dining-room table, before taking their coffee again at the local bakery. Soon they had a new worry: the soldiers were moving into their neighbourhood, setting up flak guns, building street barricades and establishing a command post at the street corner.
‘The Americans don’t seem to be coming. Unbelievable,’ she noted in her diary, seized with gloom.18
The less there was left to defend, the more draconian the orders. Keitel, Bormann and Himmler instructed the military, Party officials and the SS to defend every town to the last man and reject all offers to surrender. Himmler told the SS to shoot all men ‘in a house where a white flag appears’, dropping his earlier reluctance to impose collective reprisals on Germans.
For Hertha von Gebhardt and the ‘house community’ of 8 Geroldstrasse the war ended that Friday afternoon.25
When Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April, there was little left to defend in Berlin.
Appalled and enraged by what they saw on entering the camp, some of the US soldiers simply gunned down the SS guards or shot them in the legs and let the prisoners finish them off.
Berlin capitulated on the night of 1–2 May.
Another boy felt ashamed when he saw Red Army soldiers taking pictures of the fighting crowds: ‘Germany’s conquerors did not get a good impression,’ he observed.28
Cut off in Flensburg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was as surprised as anyone to learn that he was Hitler’s final choice as heir.
With a gesture to Simonides’ epitaph to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, he concluded, ‘We have done our duty, as the law demanded.’ The next day, the Germans handed over their positions.36
Töpperwien finally acknowledged that Hitler’s ‘terrible miscalculation’ – underlined in red in his diary – was ‘to make war against the Anglo-Americans when his real enemy is Bolshevism!?!’ In his despair at Germany’s impending defeat, the Gymnasium teacher returned once more to his belief that ‘A mankind who wages war like this has become godless. The Russian barbarities in the German east – the terror attacks of the Anglo-Americans – our struggle against the Jews (sterilisation of healthy women, shooting everyone from infants to old women, gassing of Jewish transport trains)!’37
On 6 May, the same day that Breslau fell, Captain August Töpperwien was taken prisoner by the Soviets, abandoning his diary in the attic of a house where it was discovered by Polish schoolchildren fifty years later.38
On 6 May, the Commander-in-Chief in the West, Kesselring, surrendered the so-called ‘alpine redoubt’ at Berchtesgaden, where the Allies had feared that the Nazi leaders would make their last stand.
In the quiet and sunshine of early May, Höcker noted ‘the crassness of the situation: we the musicians, artists, bourgeois . . . are clearing away the barricades as pointless traffic obstacles . . . And Asia triumphs!’
On 18 May, the Klemperers finally left Unterbernbach, armed with Victor’s yellow star, Jewish identity card and a paper from the local American administration attesting that he was a famous and persecuted professor.
Against the grey thundery sky of a Saturday afternoon, the white ruins of the city looked to Victor like a scene from the Last Judgement.
‘Curious conflict within me: I rejoice in God’s vengeance on the Henchmen of the Third Reich . . . and yet I find it dreadful now to see the victors and avengers racing through the city which they have so hellishly wrecked.’45
On 9 May 1945, Germans awoke to defeat. The stillness was remarkable. No shell bursts, no bombs, no blackout. It was neither the peace which had been so longed for, nor the annihilation which had been so dreaded.
The 9th of May will definitely count amongst the blackest days of German history. Capitulation! We youths of today had struck the word from our vocabulary, and now we have had to experience how our German people after an almost six-year encirclement has had to lay down its arms. And how bravely has our people borne all hardships and sacrifices.
The first response was not rebellion so much as a rush of self-pity, with people quoted as saying, ‘We did not deserve to be led into such a catastrophe.’
Listening to conversations on the streets of the eastern suburb of Friedrichshagen in late April, while the battle for the centre of Berlin was still raging, Liselotte Günzel was appalled by the speed with which people changed political allegiance, now ‘cursing Hitler’.
As news of the suicide of Hitler and Goebbels spread, people’s sense of rage at having been abandoned by their leaders rapidly grew; so too did the feeling that having lived under a dictatorship absolved one of personal responsibility for all that had happened.3
