Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East

10. Death Throes

439 10 Death Throes By January 1945, the point had long been passed where a continuation of the war made any sense since Hitler had no hope of achieving Lebensraum or the envisioned racial reordering of Eastern Europe. Certainly, the unconditional surrender doctrine of the Western allies as well as fear of Soviet revenge played a role in stiffening both the regime and the population, weary as most were of the war. Hitler, however, had an additional reason. For him, as for many of his generation, the collapse of imperial Germany in November 1918 had been a searing trauma. Indeed, the burning desire to redeem this humiliation as well as ensure that it never happened again formed the core of his ideology. His unyielding hatred of the Jewish conspiracy, his determination to break the bonds of Jewish plutocracy as evidenced in the emasculation of Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, his vision of an empire in the east that would cement German hegemony in Europe, and his notion of a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft all stemmed from his understanding of the causes of the collapse in 1918. On the very day Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, he had stressed to the Reichstag that “a November 1918 shall never occur again in Germany,” a theme that became an obsession as the war turned against him. At the height of the Stalingrad battle in early November 1942, he had again contrasted his determination with that of the Kaiser’s government. “Germany at that time,” he stressed, “laid down its arms at quarter to twelve. In principle, I always stop only at five past twelve.” Nor, in the intervening two years, had his stance softened , his last proclamation to the Old Fighters at Munich on 12 November 1944 again emphasizing the destructiveness and exterminationist intent of Jewry. This time, however, he also provided a glimpse of how he intended to stage his own and his regime’s demise. He would, he vowed, never capitulate and repeat the shame of 1918; he would instead 440  OSTKRIEG give the world a “praiseworthy example” of struggle against the “Bolshevik monster.”1 That this fight to the last, to be staged as a Wagnerian spectacle of epic proportions, would result in the “heroic” destruction of Germany as well as its warlord was self-evident to Hitler, if not welcomed by the mass of Germans. Nonetheless, it resulted in the unparalleled destruction of an advanced industrial society. In the last four months of the war, over 1.4 million German soldiers lost their lives (over 1.5 million through December 1945), Allied bombing reduced the medieval splendor of many German cities to little more than heaps of rubble, and hundreds of thousands of civilians (especially women) felt the brunt of Soviet revenge. Huddled in their ruined cellars beneath mounds of stone, much of the German population at the end of the war resembled nothing more than the cave dwellers of old. True to his racial theories, however , and in accordance with notions of total war developed in the 1930s, Hitler was fully prepared to fight this struggle for the naked existence of Germany to the bitter end, even if it meant the complete destruction of his own people.2 A number of factors reinforced Hitler’s decision to fight on: the spinelessness of his top military advisers, the ideological indoctrination of young Germans, the conviction of those who had committed crimes that they had nothing to lose by fighting on, and Goebbels’s propaganda argument that both the Western allies and the Soviets were determined to destroy Germany. It was also, ironically, given a boost by seemingly objective factors: natural obstacles protected Germany in the west and south, while the German navy still controlled the Baltic Sea to the north. In addition, the last burst of Speer’s armaments economy had resulted in an upsurge of weapons production, and, although there was no prospect for continued high output, the enormous losses of 1944 had largely been made good, although the Soviets still enjoyed a crushing material superiority. The most serious problems were shortages of ammunition, trucks, and fuel as well as the fact that Hitler would squander much of the tank production in the Ardennes and Hungary, but the quality of the weapons was still outstanding. Moreover, the shortening of the front in the east meant that for the first time in years the Germans had troops available to man defensive lines (even though the strength of...