Hans Mommsen's rich and complex paper draws our attention to an important but often neglected topic: the last year and a half of World War II. Discussion of the final phase of the war tends to be precluded by assumptions about inevitability after Stalingrad or obscured by melodramatic, Wagnerian images of the "twilight of the gods." Neither approach explains much. Mommsen's careful, structural analysis is a welcome alternative.
Mommsen's paper on the dissolution and collapse of the Third Reich makes another crucial contribution. It demonstrates the multiple links between domestic and military developments, or what might be called internal and external factors. Examining events of these two kinds together is key to grasping the dynamics of Nazism and World War II. Conversely, the widespread tendency to separate the Holocaust from the war works against understanding either of those interrelated phenomena. Mommsen offers an effective counter to all such isolating trends; indeed, his work has always considered the domestic and military fronts, the Holocaust and the war as integrated parts of a broader whole.
According to Mommsen, from late 1943 to May 1945, the Nazi-German government and state underwent an accelerating process of internal dissolution. It was a dialectical process, Mommsen maintains: as the Nazi state and government lost control, the Nazi Party and its most radical members assumed new tasks. Mommsen borrows Dietrich Orlow's term - "partification" - to describe the growth of party power and its implications.1
In the last year of the war, Mommsen tells us, the Nazi Party returned to the revolutionary ambitions of its Kampfzeit (time of struggle). According to Mommsen, after 1933, realization of those goals had been postponed for tactical, opportunistic reasons. But a decade later, the breakdown of the state opened a space for revival of notions such as purity of the will, total mobilization, and mass terror against the German population. According to Mommsen, the Nazi elite returned to its origins and its predominantly visionary concept of politics. For the Nazi Party, Mommsen indicates, that reversion to youthful radicalism was no aberration. Instead the final phase of the war reveals a terrible continuity within Nazism. Mommsen argues that, in its eclipse, the Nazi regime exposed its very nature in a rather condensed form, thereby disclosing its "true character."
It is not completely clear whether Mommsen intends primarily to account for the totality of the fall of Nazi Germany or to explain how Hitler's regime survived as long as it did despite military disasters. On the one hand, Mommsen suggests that processes of internal disintegration hastened military defeat and made the final collapse more devastating than it might have been. For example, Mommsen's conclusion refers to the complete atrophy of the political system and the total paralysis of German society, which was not able to resist the suicidal course of the Nazi leadership. The result, Mommsen indicates, was an accelerating process of self-destruction that made the system incapable of ending a war that was already lost.
On the other hand, Mommsen contends that the persistence of Nazism against the odds was in fact bolstered by the "hold-on" propaganda and the fanaticism of party elites. The Nazi Party boosted its prestige quite effectively, Mommsen suggests, by usurping "the competences of private and public relief organizations." At the same time, the party presented itself as the "true bearer of the mobilization 'of the remaining strength'" of the German people. Most significant, the leadership's emphasis on "purity of will" increased the terror against anyone considered dissident or half-hearted. As a result, Mommsen points out that almost nobody dared to raise objections to the hold-on propaganda, even after it became clear that there was no chance of victory.
Both of Mommsen's arguments - on the totality of defeat and on its timing - are important and convincing. In my view, however, it is the second of the two that raises the more urgent issues. Scholars of the Nazi period and World War II need to explain how Hitler's regime lasted as long as it did; even more, we need to ask what made people not only tolerate it but fight and kill for it until the bitter end. Reflecting on the last year of the war from that perspective elicits a different set of images from those Mommsen invokes, images that nonetheless can also be understood to reveal the true character of the Nazi regime.
Consider the summer of 1944, when German killers and accomplices from all over Europe murdered thousands of Roma/Gypsies in Auschwitz in a single night. That slaughter helped clear space in the killing center for several hundred thousand Jews from Hungary, most of whom were also murdered. The last year of the war witnessed the total destruction of the city of Warsaw; it saw death marches that left thousands upon thousands dead by the roads; the brutal and often fatal exploitation of millions of slave laborers from all over Europe; and the shooting of thousands of German soldiers accused of desertion, self-mutilation, or defeatism. All of these and many other events remind us that the final phase of the war was characterized by stupendous, unprecedented carnage.
Why did some Germans and accomplices around Europe continue to kill for the Nazi regime - and on such a staggering scale - even after its impending defeat had become practically impossible to ignore? In the face of this question, Hans Mommsen's theme of partification, although important, seems to me to be only one of an interconnected set of explanations. In the rest of my response, I would like to suggest five additional factors that shaped the final year of the war: cowardice, confusion, quest for agency, sense of guilt, and opportunism. In order to complement and augment Mommsen's "top-down" analysis, I have chosen illustrations from my own research that draw primarily on the approach commonly known as "history from below."
Viewed from the ground up, events in 1944-5 are at least partly explained by simple cowardice. Under the pressures of war, fear and the drive for self-preservation produced an acceleration of brutality against innocent people. As Gerhard L. Weinberg has pointed out, each year of a war tends to be worse than the year that preceded it.2 The passage of time adds further material deprivation, new wounded, and more killing to the accumulated misery of the people involved. One might expect such worsening agony to lead those who propagate war to abandon their efforts. Instead, in the Nazi case, we see the opposite - an escalation of viciousness on many fronts.
For example, John C. Fout has observed that during the last year of the war in Hamburg, the number of police raids on men suspected of homosexual activity increased markedly.3 I have found a similar pattern in my work on the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans in eastern Europe, and their role in World War II. German authorities responsible for identifying ethnic Germans seem to have redoubled their efforts even as the Red Army overtook their clientele.4 Similarly, Daniel J. Goldhagen presents the death marches of Jews and others in the last months of the war as evidence of heightened terror in the face of German defeat. He attributes the deadliness of those forced treks to the fanatical "eliminationist antisemitism" of "ordinary Germans."5
Gerhard Weinberg offers a more psychologically simple explanation that revolves around the perpetrators' efforts to protect themselves - a trait far from uniquely German. For German and ethnic German guards in 1944 and 1945, the columns of feeble, starving prisoners they drove from place to place were their ticket away from the front. Guards did not have to be hardcore antisemites or even Nazis to realize that they were much safer moving with their charges into territories still in German hands rather than facing the alternative: a trip in the opposite direction where the enemies - partisans, Red Army or American soldiers - were armed and on the offensive. What can appear to be fanatical adherence to radical principles might, at least in some cases, be nothing more than a calculated bid to outlive the war.
An incident from my research on Nazi policy toward ethnic Germans illustrates how cowardice and self-protective urges could produce results that looked like undying commitment to the cause. Files of the SS Race and Settlement Office's Wiesbaden branch reveal the difficulties that one inspector faced carrying out his duties in early 1945. Charged with traveling across southwestern Germany to assess the claims to Germanness of people from Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Europe, he saw his schedule disrupted by air raids, damaged railroad tracks, and failure of those in question to appear for their appointments. Undaunted, he continued to submit detailed reports. One such account from January 1945 praised the "cleanliness and diligence" of a young female candidate for "Germanization" from the Banat, and welcomed a family from Poland with three sons eager to join the SS as soon as their ethnic German status was approved. In the same report, the inspector evaluated the racial potential of several fetuses and stipulated whether the pregnant women who carried them were to abort or bring their pregnancies to term. He based those decisions on assessments of both the father and mother in question, including details about their appearance, health, political reliability, and usefulness to the war effort.6 Colleagues in Prague, Berlin, Lodz, and elsewhere continued similar work for as long as possible, evacuating their offices and moving their files as necessary.7
Were the Wiesbaden inspector and his counterparts single-minded proponents of Nazism, totally devoted to realizing the goals spelled out in Hitler's Mein Kampf? It is possible but highly unlikely. Much more probable is that they all hoped to prove to their superiors just how urgent their work was for the German cause - and just how much they were needed - not at the front fighting the Americans or the Soviets, but at home. By the last twelve months of the war there may have been more cowards than fanatics among the Nazis.
A second and essential explanation for the nature of the last year of the war is confusion. Poorly understood by historians and by definition difficult to analyze, confusion nevertheless played an enormous role in the final phase of the war. Hans Mommsen begins the challenging task of assessing the role of confusion, which he describes in terms of chaos and Nazi in-fighting. But like German-speakers in general, Mommsen uses the word "chaos" much more freely than native speakers of English tend to do. At some level the processes of disintegration he describes were still decipherable to the contemporaries who observed them - and can be comprehended by the scholars who analyze them. The same cannot be said for the profound uncertainty that faced many Europeans in the last year of the war. Unable to determine where their best interests lay, or if they even had such a thing any more, many people responded with desperate combinations of frenetic action and paralyzing inertia.
ÊAgain ethnic Germans provide telling examples. In 1944-5, Volksdeutsche across eastern Europe faced increasing threats to German rule and by extension to their own positions. Their investment in the Nazi system, rapidly narrowing options, and utter disorientation meant that even those who sensed the impossibility of German victory were unable to deal with the implications of defeat in a rational way. In his memoirs, Charles Kotkowsky, a Polish Jew, illustrates the confused and self-defeating behavior of some ethnic Germans in the final phases of the war. Kotkowsky lived through 1944 as a slave laborer in a glassworks near Warsaw. The factory, presumably stolen from its former owners, was directed by a Pole of German origin; his son and three other ethnic Germans provided abusive supervision of their Polish Jewish and gentile work force.
By the summer of 1944, everyone in the factory anticipated a Soviet offensive at the Vistula River. The Volksdeutsche, Kotkowsky recounts, feared for their lives. But they stayed put. With the exception of one particularly brutal boss named Herford, they tried to gain the confidence of the Jews, in the hope of winning some protection against the Polish gentiles around them. They chose only Jewish watchmen to guard the fence at night and to sound the alarm in case of trouble. Members of the Jewish underground acquired some of those positions and from them performed acts of sabotage. Blinded by their own racial assumptions, the Volksdeutsche attributed such attacks to "Polish bandits" and responded by strengthening the Jewish guard contingent. The ethnic Germans, Kotkowsky recalls, "ran around in a frenzy." In particular, "Herford showed his cowardly behavior by barricading his room and putting up a machine-gun on his first floor window-sill." Such confusion allowed Jewish slave workers to get guns and training in handling them, and to use those skills in the Warsaw Uprising.8
As Kotkowsky's account demonstrates, the Volksdeutsche in Poland formed part of the Nazi machinery of destruction. As such, they had a stake in its continuation as well as cause to refuse to admit its imminent demise. At the same time, Nazi policies toward the ethnic Germans as well as the behavior of many people in that category had created a situation where their neighbors would not tolerate their presence. In short, the all-or-nothing mentality of the German Nazis had produced an environment in which ethnic Germans had few if any options for promoting their self-interest. If they fled to secure territories before they were ordered to do so, they risked punishment as deserters and defeatists. If they stayed put too long, they faced the wrath of the ethnic majorities around them.
In that hopelessly confused situation, some Volksdeutsche tried to undo their designations as Germans and to blend back into the populations around them. Others remained in place as long as possible and hoped for a reversal of German fortunes, or at least something to improve their own lot. At least some continued the practices of theft, exploitation, and violence against target populations for which their mentors from the Reich had trained them well. Not necessarily believers in the Endsieg (final victory), they nevertheless found the realities of defeat too unfathomable - and too awful - to contemplate. The fruits of confusion could be deadly for people on all sides.
A third and closely related factor in shaping behavior toward the end of the war was the attempt to muster some degree of agency in the midst of uncertainty. Often ideology had little bearing on choices that turned out to have enormous implications for the people who made them. Considering the end of the war in this light throws into sharp relief the juxtaposition of the everyday and the world-historical in the lives of "ordinary people."
Ethnic Germans throughout eastern Europe tried in various ways to manipulate the Nazi system to their own ends. The confusion of the last stage of the war increased all such efforts. At times Volksdeutsche could take advantage of the Nazi regime's fear that the homefront would collapse and effect a new "stab in the back." Ethnic German men could assert some control through their involvement in or potential for armed service; their female counterparts wielded more limited power through their reproductive capabilities. With such methods, ethnic Germans could sometimes exert influence on their world, in the short term at least and usually in negative ways. That is, they could contribute to the destruction and polarization that characterized Nazi racial policy. But they could not create lasting security for themselves nor stave off the devastating effects of the war on their communities.
Here a case from the files of the Gestapo in Lodz serves to illustrate. In June 1943, SS race and settlement officials arrested a twenty-year old ethnic German woman for having illegal sexual relations with a Pole. The woman had recently given birth to the man's child, although she claimed to have had intercourse with him only once, and under duress. She had told no one but him about her pregnancy, and continued to work in the fields until the last day. She had known that sex between Germans and Poles was forbidden, she said, but assumed that because the man was willing to apply for Germanization, there would be no problem.9
German judges had a different opinion. They sentenced the woman to three weeks in prison but allowed her to postpone the sentence because she was nursing the child, who, according to racial experts, was a member of the German Volk. One month later, Gestapo in Hohensalza (Inowroclaw) ordered that the woman be turned over to them to serve her sentence as soon as her child was weaned. In late 1943, the public health nurse reported that the woman was still nursing the child and could not serve her term. By May 1944, the woman still had not done her time. One can only speculate that like everyone else, she watched the course of the war very carefully - and she nursed her baby as long as she possibly could. German authorities finally imprisoned the woman sometime in November 1944, then released her with a warning before the end of the month.10 Perhaps the prison term later stood her in good stead as an ethnic German in postwar Poland.
That stubbornly nursing woman could hardly have foreseen the repercussions of her actions. Like so many other people, she simply seized whatever means she could to exercise some control over her life. Under normal conditions, individuals acting on their informed self-interest produce a kind of "spontaneous order." With the complete breakdown of all institutions in a context of total unpredictability, however, individual quests for agency can add to the general confusion.
A fourth motivation for certain patterns of behavior during the last year of the war is related to issues of conscience. In his insightful analysis of May 8, 1945, Bernd Weisbrod describes a widespread "sense of guilt" among Germans at the end of the war. As the first U.S. troops advanced into the area around Aachen, they heard many inhabitants said things to the effect that the Germans deserved punishment because of "wrongs" done to Jews and "in the East." Weisbrod suggests there existed a kind of shared bad conscience that complicated the experience of war's end - and shaped the ways Germans subsequently remembered it.11
If Weisbrod is right, that collective bad conscience may have had the paradoxical effect of adding to support for the regime in its final stages. Some Germans no doubt believed Goebbels and others who threatened them with the terrible revenge of the United States and the Soviet Union. But perhaps a sense of guilt also functioned in a more perverse ways to inspire certain kinds of conscience-numbing actions. If one has a sinking feeling one is engaged in something deeply wrong, it can be easier to persist than to cease. To stop means to face oneself, one's past, and one's loved ones, not to mention the witnesses to one's misdeeds. In some circumstances, the most obvious way to avoid admitting one's crimes is to continue committing them.
It can seem counterintuitive to discuss issues of conscience and Nazi crimes in the same breath. Some scholars have even suggested that Nazism constituted an inversion of normal morality, a kind of transformation of wrong into right. But the evidence points in a different direction. One need only consider Heinrich Himmler's well-known injunction to SS leaders in 1943 to take pride in their ability to remain "decent," not to steal a single watch, even as they slaughtered thousands of people.12 The uneasy conscience evident in Himmler's convoluted reasoning finds echoes in other wartime records. For example, German Catholic military chaplains responded to the needs of the troops in their care by offering general absolution.13 By 1944, the practice had become so frequent that the Catholic military bishop, himself an enthusiastic supporter of the war effort, cautioned chaplains against its overuse.14
The sense of guilt Weisbrod describes might also help account for a phenomenon Daniel J. Goldhagen calls "excess cruelty." What he means by that phrase is the kind of torture so painfully evident in Nazi sources, torture that would be unnecessary and even counterproductive in some cold, industrial form of killing. Why so much viciousness toward victims slated in any case for destruction? Goldhagen's answer is simple: that excess brutality, he tells his readers, proves the intensity of German antisemitism. Germans tortured, humiliated, and degraded Jews before they killed them, he concludes, because Germans hated Jews and enjoyed making them suffer.15
Reflecting on the last year of the war suggests another, more subtle interpretation of "excess cruelty." For killers, atrocities can provide a kind of rationalization of their own. It might be hard to shoot pointblank a man of one's own age, a father of small children, like oneself, someone who eats the same food, lives in the same kind of house, speaks the same language. But if he has been forced to urinate on his own child, if he has been reduced to pleading desperately for his life, if his testicles have been cut off and put in a bucket with those of his friends and family, perhaps he seems like something less than a fellow human being. Once one has participated in such frenzies of torture and degradation, one has a stake in continuing the process. To stop would be to confront crimes already committed; to continue is to find more and more evidence of the contemptibility of the enemy, to silence any stirrings of one's own conscience in orgies of violence. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then rationalization, denial, and even "excess brutality" are terrible tributes that genocidal perpetrators pay to that universal morality that gave Immanuel Kant such cause to marvel.16
The final factor I would like to add to Mommsen's analysis is something we might call, for lack of a better word, opportunism. Not surprisingly, opportunism existed at every level in the Nazi system throughout the years of National Socialist rule. In the final stages of the war, however, fear, despair, and the drive for self-preservation transformed opportunism from the kind of arrogant search for material advantage typical of the days of German conquest to frantic efforts to stave off disaster in whatever ways possible.
On a small scale, there were individual deserters and Volksdeutsche who quietly undid their designations as "German" when it suited them to do so. In November 1944, for example, the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office), the main SS office in charge of resettlement in the East, reported numerous deserters from the Waffen-SS in Hungary, many of whom had sold their uniforms and were going about in civilian clothes. Most, it seems, had joined the Waffen-SS as a result of the rather loose definition of "ethnic German" (volksdeutsch).17 Other ethnic Germans deserted too, like the twenty-year old Posener Edmund Nabelski, who ran away from a work transport after punching the accompanying policeman in the face,18 or Ludwig Kasberzk, who quit his tank division in September 1944.19 Still others tried to melt back into the populations around them. In his memoirs the Baltic German Hans Eberhard von Cube describes the fate of a fellow ethnic German, a master carpenter named Schmidt. In 1944 Schmidt feld Warsaw for the Wartheland, Polish lands between Lodz and Poznan that had been incorporated into the German Reich in 1939. There he tried to pass himself off as a Pole but eventually failed.20 At least some Volksdeutsche attached themselves to partisan groups, like the two women and two men "of German background" arrested in June 1944 in the Polish village of Sulmice.21
Opportunism also took form on a larger scale, such as when SD and Wehrmacht units supplied arms to Polish partisans to fight the Soviets and the Polish Communists. Suddenly in the last year of the war Germans discovered they could recruit new allies - as long as they showed a degree of ideological flexibility, for example, in using Poles to fight against the Red Army. According to Curt von Gottberg, acting general commissar of Belorussia, at the end of January and the beginning of February 1945, "three sizeable Polish detachments [Banden] came over to our side and initially also fought well." Eyewitnesses say the units probably came from the Polish Home Army.22
One can hardly claim to see here a return to pre-1933 ideals. Fighting Communists, yes, but with the help of Polish nationalists? Using ammunition made by Hungarian Jewish women? Hoping for aid from the Japanese? The war may have provided enhanced spheres of activity, but it also forced new compromises on the Nazi faithful. In the final stages of the war, opportunism and desperation overshadowed any reversion to pre-1933 ideals.
In general there must have been little in 1944-5 that would have been recognizable to loyal Nazis in 1933, let alone 1923. Certainly Hitler and others had announced early on their intentions of expelling Jews from Germany, destroying the Polish state, and purging people deemed handicapped, but without the power that controlling the state, bureaucracy, and military brought, they could hardly have imagined what realizing those goals would mean.23 And without war and the massive brutalization and destruction it unleashed, they could never have engaged in killing frenzies nor experienced death throes on such a scale. War, as Mommsen admits, multiplied the devastating capabilities of particular ideas, including the Nazi ideals of the Kampfzeit. Here the phrase coined by Robert Gellately is instructive in ways far beyond its significance for understanding 1939: "war revolutionizes the revolution."24 Gellately uses that concept to describe how the coming of war in 1939 changed National Socialism within Germany. The transformative force of war is even more obvious when one considers 1945 and the Nazi empire as a whole.
In 1944-5 the Nazi movement showed its true face, but both its appearance and its essence differed from 1923 and even 1933. Murderous potential had hardened into deeds of annihilation. Contempt for human life had developed from a rhetorical mainstay to the central policy of a massive system of domination. Years of unbridled power had made the impossible and inconceivable into reality.25 Meanwhile the dynamics of the war and the all-too human responses of cowardice, confusion, struggle for control, guilt, and opportunism sparked wildly destructive behaviors. No doubt the vocabulary of the so-called Kampfzeit provided a useful rallying cry in the last year of the war and offered a concrete point of reference in a time of massive uncertainty. But 1944 was not 1923, and no slogans from the old days of struggle, no matter how passionately invoked, could conceal the realities of bloodshed and ruin.