- Kershaw, Ian.
The End.
New York: Penguin Press, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-59420-314-5.
-
Ian Kershaw is the author of the definitive two-volume
biography of Hitler:
Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris
and
Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis
(both of which I read before I began keeping this list).
In the present volume he tackles one of the greatest puzzles
of World War II: why did Germany continue fighting to the
bitter end, when the Red Army was only blocks from Hitler's
bunker, and long after it was apparent to those in the
Nazi hierarchy, senior military commanders, industrialists,
and the general populace that the war was lost and
continuing the conflict would only prolong the suffering,
inflict further casualties, and further devastate the
infrastructure upon which survival in a postwar world would
depend? It is, as the author notes, quite rare in the history
of human conflict that the battle has to be taken all the way
to the leader of an opponent in his capital city: Mussolini
was deposed by his own Grand Council of Fascism and the
king of Italy, and Japan surrendered before a single Allied
soldier set foot upon the Home Islands (albeit after the
imposition of a total blockade, the entry of the Soviet Union
into the war against Japan, and the destruction of two
cities by atomic bombs).
In addressing this question, the author recounts the last year of
the war in great detail, starting with the
Stauffenberg plot,
which attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler on
July 20th, 1944. In the aftermath of this plot, a ruthless
purge of those considered unreliable in the military and
party ensued (in the Wehrmacht alone, around 700 officers were
arrested and 110 executed), those who survived were forced to
swear personal allegiance to Hitler, and additional informants
and internal repression were unleashed to identify and mete out
summary punishment for any perceived disloyalty or defeatist
sentiment. This, in effect, aligned those
who might have opposed Hitler with his own personal destiny
and made any overt expression of dissent from his will to
hold out to the end tantamount to suicide.
But the story does not end there. Letters from soldiers at the
front, meticulously catalogued by the censors of the
SD
and summarised in reports to Goebbels's propaganda ministry,
indicate that while morale deteriorated in the last year of the
war, fear of the consequences of a defeat, particularly at the
hands of the Red Army, motivated many to keep on fighting.
Propaganda highlighted the atrocities committed by the
“Asian Bolshevik hordes” but, if exaggerated, was
grounded in fact, as the Red Army was largely given a free hand
if not encouraged to exact revenge for German war crimes on
Soviet territory.
As the
dénouement
approached, those in Hitler's inner circle, who might
have otherwise moved against him under other circumstances, were
paralysed by the knowledge that their own authority flowed
entirely from him, and that any hint of disloyalty would cause
them to be dismissed or worse (as had already happened to several).
With the Party and its informants and enforcers having thoroughly
infiltrated the military and civilian population, there was simply
no chance for an opposition movement to establish itself. Certainly
there were those, particularly on the Western front, who did as
little as possible and waited for the British and Americans to
arrive (the French—not so much: reprisals under the zones
they occupied had already inspired fear among those in their
path). But finally, as long as Hitler was determined to
resist to the very last and willing to accept the total
destruction of the German people who he deemed to have
“failed him”, there was simply no counterpoise
which could oppose him and put an end to the conflict.
Tellingly, only a week after Hitler's death, his successor,
Karl Dönitz,
ordered the surrender of Germany.
This is a superb, thoughtful, and thoroughly documented (indeed,
almost 40% of the book is source citations and notes) account of
the final days of the Third Reich and an enlightening and
persuasive argument as to why things ended as they did.
As with all insightful works of history, the reader may be prompted to
see parallels in other epochs and current events. Personally, I
gained a great deal of insight into the ongoing
financial crisis
and the increasingly futile efforts of those who
brought it about to (as the tired phrase, endlessly repeated)
“kick the can down the road” rather than make
the structural changes which might address the actual causes
of the problem. Now, I'm not calling the central bankers,
politicians, or multinational bank syndicates Nazis—I'm
simply observing that as the financial apocalypse approaches
they're behaving in much the same way as the Hitler regime did
in its own final days: trying increasingly desperate measures to
buy first months, then weeks, then days, and ultimately hours
before “The End”. Much as was the case with
Hitler's inner circle, those calling the shots in the
international financial system simply cannot imagine a world
in which it no longer exists, or their place in such a world,
so they continue to buy time, whatever the cost or how small
the interval, to preserve the reference frame in which they
exist. The shudder of artillery can already be felt in
the bunker.
February 2012 