All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [347]
Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr explained the continuing support of a sufficiency of Germans for Hitler in a secret letter written in English to his former Oxford tutor, and dispatched from Stockholm in March 1943: ‘There are a great many people who have profited from the Third [Reich] and who know that their time will be up with the Third [Reich]’s end. This category does not only comprise some few hundred people, no it runs into hundreds of thousands. Further there are those who supported the Nazis as a counterbalance against foreign pressure and who cannot now easily find their way out of the tangle; even where they believe the Nazis to be in the wrong they say that this wrong is counterbalanced by a wrong done to us before … There are those who … say: if we lose this war we will be eaten up by our enemies and therefore we have to stand this through with Hitler.’ Moltke observed that Germany’s soldiers were ‘continuously led into positions where there is no choice but to fight. Their mind is occupied with the enemy as fully as the housewife’s with her requirements.’ He repeated a remark made by Hitler to Manstein: ‘The German general and soldier must never feel secure, otherwise he wants to rest; he must always know there are enemies in front and at his back, and that there is only one thing to be done and that is to fight.’ Von Moltke’s analysis remained valid until 1945.
The soldiers abandoned the civilians to their despair. In Hamburg, old Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote on 25 June 1944: ‘No one ever laughs any more, no one is light-hearted or happy … We are waiting for the final act.’ She added a few weeks later: ‘For days we have had no water; everything is chipped and broken and frayed; travelling is out of the question; nothing can be bought; one simply vegetates. Life would have no purpose at all if there weren’t books and human beings one loves, whose fate one worries about day and night.’
Germany’s military leaders earned the contempt of posterity for indulging the mass-murderers who led their country, while claiming to absolve themselves of complicity in the Nazis’ crimes. To contemplate revolt in the last phase of a struggle for national survival demanded a moral courage such as few German officers had. They knew the carnage they had wreaked in Russia: they could expect no mercy from Stalin’s people, and fear of impending Soviet vengeance became a dominant motivation for millions of German soldiers. It provided a perverse and spurious justification for the generals’ refusal to turn on Hitler. Their reasoning was vacuous, because sustained resistance merely delayed the inevitable. Yet even the more intelligent clung to fantastic hopes that the Western Allies would deliver them from the Russians. Career officer Captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder believed that once the Americans had defeated Germany, they would confront the Soviet Union: ‘We thought it impossible the Americans would accept that the Russians should overrun Germany.’
The war retained its stubborn, murderous, futile momentum. In the last months of the European struggle, while some German soldiers were visibly grateful to be taken prisoner, many maintained a stubborn defence. They showed a much greater will for sacrifice than had the French in similar circumstances in 1940, or most British troops thereafter. The Wehrmacht’s performance can partly be explained by compulsion – deserters and alleged cowards were ruthlessly shot, in their thousands during the last months. Between 1914 and 1918, 150 death sentences were passed on members of the Kaiser’s army, of which just forty-eight were carried out. By contrast, between 1939 and 1945 more than 15,000 military executions were officially listed, and the real total was substantially higher. Beyond mortal sanctions, the immediate realities of the battlefield – the presence of the enemy in the next field or street – imposed their own logic. Even in its death throes, the Third Reich proved able to persuade many Germans to display extremes of futile stubbornness.
After a month of fighting