Inferno - Max Hastings [349]
As it was, a perverted sense of duty caused most of the Wehrmacht’s leadership to follow the Nazi regime to the end, to their perpetual dishonour. Among themselves, Germany’s generals often mocked the character and conduct of the gangsters and grotesques by whom their country was led; yet their own slavishness towards Hitler seldom flagged. At a meeting on 27 January 1944, when he called on every officer to display loyal and fanatical support for National Socialism, Manstein called out, “And so it will be, my Führer!” He later claimed that his interjection was intended ironically, but few believed him. He and his kind placed their reputations as members of the soldierly caste, committed to fulfil to the last their military responsibilities and oath to Hitler, ahead of the interests of the society they professed to serve. They made an explicit or implicit choice to fight and die as servants of the Third Reich, rather than as protectors of the nation, whose interests could only credibly be served by securing peace on any terms, or indeed none. The Waffen SS panzer officer Hubert Meyer wrote in outrage about the 20 July plot: “It was incomprehensible that soldiers would attempt a coup against the supreme military leadership while they were themselves involved in bitter defensive fighting against the enemy who demanded ‘unconditional surrender,’ not willing to negotiate a ceasefire or even peace.” Many Wehrmacht officers, even those hostile to the Nazis, shared his sentiments.
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 compromise 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