Armageddon - Max Hastings [124]
SOLDIERS
AFTER THE FAILURE of the July bomb plot against Hitler few officers, far less ordinary soldiers, contemplated revolt. “Most Germans realized that it was necessary to end the war—but still they did not want to lose it,” a German historian observes. “The July plot had made Hitler seem immortal. Ironically, it increased his authority rather than weakened it.” Dr. Karl-Ludwig Mahlo, a twenty-nine-year-old Luftwaffe doctor, endorsed this view: “After 20 July,” he said, “we felt that it must be Hitler’s destiny to survive. We really believed in him. Hitler did a lot for me. I had a wonderful youth. We were young, we were so much indoctrinated by propaganda, by the years of victory reports. Afterwards, people said: ‘How could you have believed in this man?’ Yet we did—totally.” Mahlo was disturbed, however, when some Luftwaffe comrades returned from a 1944 Berlin medal presentation by Hitler to report tersely: “He looks terrible.”
In the smart Grossdeutschland Division, officers and men reflected a wide political spectrum. “There were some serious Nazis—especially those who had attended the Adolf Hitler schools,” said Lieutenant Tony Saurma. But most thought little about politics, only about the survival of Germany—and of themselves. After the July plot, the commanding officer warned Saurma, son of a Silesian aristocratic family: “You blue-blooded types had better be careful now, or you’ll find yourself in trouble.” Saurma’s uncle had already been imprisoned for his alleged role in the anti-Nazi Resistance. “I think you’d better write a letter to Dr. Goebbels,” Colonel Willi Lankeit told Saurma thoughtfully. The young officer indeed wrote to the propaganda minister, who was known slightly to the Grossdeutschland’s commander, assuring him of his loyalty to Germany’s rulers.
“We retained some illusions,” said Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder of the 18th Volksgrenadiers. “We thought it impossible that the Americans would allow the Russians to sweep Europe. We thought that, when the Americans had defeated us, they would turn on the Russians. And we believed that we must do everything possible to prevent Russia from overrunning our country.” Schröder was the son of a prominent anti-Nazi retired officer, who had died in 1935. Yet he argued that even the Waffen SS were motivated by patriotism rather than ideology: “12th SS Panzer’s men were always said to have been ‘fanatical young Nazis,’ but this was not so. I knew those people. They were fighting for Germany, not for Hitler.” Luftwaffe ace Heinz Knoke was appalled by the July bomb plot: “The ordinary German fighting soldiers regard the unsuccessful revolt as treason of the most infamous kind.” Major Karl-Günther von Hase was a scion of an old Pomeranian military family. He joined the army in 1936, “believing that I could pursue a military career without thinking of politics.” He learned differently after the July plot. The Nazis hanged his father, military commandant of Berlin, as a leading participant. Yet, even after this horror, von Hase considered that it was his own duty to fight in defence of Germany to the end. He retained a deep professional respect for the Waffen SS: “We always liked to have them on our flanks, because we knew how good they were.”
The condition of the nation’s soldiers was worse than that of the civilians in one important sense. They knew more. From personal experience, the men fighting along almost 2,000 miles of front in the east,