Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich

Chapter 3

DEATH THROES 61

3 DEATH THROES Pursued relentlessly through the Odenwald, where legend had it that the heroic Siegfried perished at the hands of a traitor, the weakened and demoralized remnants of a once formidable army straggled toward the Tauber River. Hoping for reinforcements from the last mustering of local Franconians, German commanders sought to establish a new defensive line at Königshofen that would enable them to fight a last, decisive battle. Able to summon only half the strength of their opponents, however, and unnerved by the unexpectedly rapid approach of enemy forces, leaders of the ragtag collection of German troops quickly jettisoned all plans for a resolute defense, aiming now only to delay the enemy advance as long as possible in hopes of a final reprieve that might save their cause from total defeat. Although the season of rebirth and resurrection, no such miracle awaited the beleaguered defenders. Unwilling to risk a frontal assault across the Tauber despite its superiority in numbers and weapons, the enemy took advantage of greater mobility to cross the river both north and south of the city with the intent of outflanking and encircling the defenders. Lacking any ability to launch a counterattack, the Germans gathered in Königshofen could only fight a bitter delaying action, one certain to end in defeat. Pressed toward the Turmberg, an ancient fortress ENDKAMPF 62 on the eastern side of the city atop a hill rising some 1,100 feet above the valley floor, the defenders fought furiously. Their positions finally broken by the sheer weight of their foe’s material superiority, large numbers of defenders fled that evening into the woods a mile farther to the east. There a desperate denouement played out, as the assailants crushed the remnants of the German army. In all, perhaps seven thousand defenders lay dead, the last hope of a successful resistance vanished, and the key city of Würzburg fell just a few days later.1 This frightful battle,which marked the end of the Bauernkrieg(Peasants War), took place on the Friday before Pentecost, June 2, 1525. Almost exactly 420 years later, on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, an eerily similar series of events would unfold at precisely the same place. For the historian, the symbolism is beguiling: the Peasants War, touched off by the explosive actions of Martin Luther in challenging the established religious and social order,could beseen as a populist challenge by the“havenots ,” a struggle for freedom of the oppressed in the here and now, and not in eternity. A similar populist theme was exploited four centuries later by Adolf Hitler in his rise to power and in his justification for war: following World War I, the Versailles Treaty, according to Hitler, imposed unjust and onerous demands on the German people, with the object of permanently subjecting them to the oppressive will of Great Britain and France. In the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels, World War II therefore became a self-defined war of liberationfor the GermanVolk as it struggled to break the alleged bondage of the “plutocrats.” Urged by their leaders to regard the war as a contest for the new National Socialist Germany’s very existence, it thus represented a fight for freedom both in the here and now and for eternity. For Hitler and the Nazis, at least, the battle lines were clear: the forces of the old order, whether the established aristocracy or the victors of Versailles, sought once again to crush the populist ,revolutionary,social,andpoliticalchallengeof thepeople,asexpressed this time in the form of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, or national community . And as four hundred years earlier, extinguishing the revolutionary fervor of the forces of the populist new order would result in mountains of corpses and torrents of blood,as the Nazi leadership,driven by malignant hatred and a venomous ideology, remained determined to stand up for German “rights,” even to the extent of pointless bloodshed at the end of a lost war. DEATH THROES 63 NIBELUNGENTREUE: LOYALTY TILL DEATH This utter ruthlessness and uncompromising emphasis on resistance, so bewildering to the average GI, in fact owed much to the power of an even earlier and more resonant myth, one that Hitler and Goebbels looked to in order to sustain the fighting spirit of the German army—the heroic saga of Siegfried as told in the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). Designated by the writers of the Romantic movement...