It’s 1945, the war with Germany is winding down as the Russians press on Berlin. The city is in ruins from relentless bombing and the high command, along with most of Berlin’s population, is now living underground. The remaining troops, consisting of primarily young boys and older men, continues to fight. Hitler is safe in his underground bunker, as are his most trusted generals.
As the Russians advance from the east, and the other allies advance from the west, it’s certainly clear Germany is defeated, yet they continue to fight on. Propaganda is broadcast telling the population that Germany is winning, but that’s clearly not the case, and only the most deluded believe that things will turn around.
So Hitler is insane, I get that, but certainly his high command must be looking for some kind of exit strategy. Many, but not all, commit suicide rather than face the Russians, but presumably there are some pragmatists that realize the end is near, yet Germany continues to fight on, until Hitler commits suicide. At that point there’s really no point continuing to fight.
It seems the war could have ended weeks if not months sooner had the high command been able to convince Hitler they could surrender and save themselves and their families, but instead they continued to fight on in vain. What is the main reason for this seeming illogical behavior?
They truly believed that Hitler was right and that Germany couldn’t possibly be defeated.
They realized the end was coming, but figured they were doomed no matter what.
They thought there was a chance there might be a negotiated end to the war that would have somehow spared them.
The couldn’t kill Hitler (for some reason), and they couldn’t surrender to the Russians, so there really was no way out.
I can see Hitler’s motive to fight on since he was doomed no matter what, but his generals must have wanted to end the war before Berlin was completely destroyed. Did they try and surrender to the Allies or was it really every man for himself at the end?
They tried to kill Hitler. Hitler had no less that 15 attempts on his life after gaining power. the generals were very loyal and those that weren’t disappeared. The chances of neogotiation for the Germans weren’t good because of the USSR and for Stalin it was pride. They believed up until the end that Germany might win. This only applies for some though
-many of the higher-ups have been involved in war crimes, holocaust and/or other atrocities.
many believed that the end of war would mean complete destruction of Germany as a state and a nation.
many hoped for a negotiated peace with the Western Allies that would allow them to fight together against the Soviets, supposedly the greatest threat to Western Civilization.
Linked with the above: fear of Soviets. Towards the end of war, many units fought desperately so they could surrender to Americans/British/etc. instead of Russians, or to save their home area Communist occupation.
Any attempt to convince Hitler that the war was lost would result in the immediate execution of the general and his family. That type of response by the Gestapo tended to make generals keep their mouths shut and make personal plans for escape to the West instead.
Could you provide a cite for that? I don’t think that happened to the families of most of the thousands of officers executed after the July 20th coup. AFAIK even Stauffenberg’s wife was imprisoned, and his children were placed in orphanages, but they were not executed.
Not this weekend I can’t. All my relevant textbooks are at school. But I seem to recall that was one of the threats used to get Rommel to take his own life. Wiki agrees.
Here’s the relevant wiki article. It’s unclear from the article whether any families of traitors or defeatists were actually executed. I don’t see how the Rommel wiki article supports your claim; here’s the relevant section:
“…his family would suffer…” didn’t just mean that they would have a few ration coupons revoked. While I can’t put my hands on any case where a German high officer’s family were executed, the threat was definitely there. Family members of other Gestapo victims faced various punishments. Robert Scholl, father of White Rose members Hans and Sophie Scholl, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for “listening to enemy radio broadcasts.”
The People’s Court wasn’t big on due process or the rights of the accused, remember.
Hitler told people that if Germany lost the war it was because the German people had lacked sufficient will to win. And if so, they didn’t deserve to survive the war. So as far as Hitler was concerned, every German should die fighting.
The top tier of the Nazis knew they could expect no mercy. They would either be shot when captured or executed shortly thereafter. So they had no reason to stop fighting. Every day Germany kept fighting was another day of life for them.
And from there on down, it was people who would be severely punished if they attempted to surrender or even discussed the idea of surrender. Even if they made it, their families might be punished in their stead. So they kept fighting and hoped to be lucky enough to live through the war.
This is pretty much it. There was a great and totally justified fear of what the Soviets would do with Germany and German soldiers. The seige of Stalingrad created a vicious and implacable enemy in the form of the Soviet Army, whose generals and soldiers were bent on revenge. German units were terrified that they might have to surrender to Soviet troops and either be butchered or shipped off to gulags.
almost all military men in germany by then knew defeat was coming. some still hoped that if victory was impossible, then perhaps complete defeat can be averted or delayed (generals were already daydreaming of historical bases, when seeming defeat was somehow reveresed.)
but most of the concrete steps taken were mainly to slow the russian advance (since they would get to berlin first.) from there, it’s fuzzy. options ranged from fighting to the finish to immediate surrender to the western allies, to no plan and just wing it from there. definite moves:
army group vistula (heinrici) was to bottle the russians at the oder.
if the russians were within stiking distance of berlin, wenks’s 12th army was to cut through the russian flank to give hitler time to escape (westwards?)
if berlin was invaded, group steiner would make a motorized dash to extricate hitler.
hannah reitsch (sp?) was standing by in a light plane on a berlin avenue ready to fly out hitler.
otto skorzeny was supposed to have a plan to spirit hitler out of berlin (so the allies thought.) his plan, and that of other officers, was to organize wolfshanze (sp?) a resistance movement to continue the nazi cause in a defeated and occupied germany.
So why didn’t Hitler try to escape Berlin while he had the chance. Surely he could have hid out in some “friendly” county for a few years before he was caught and brought to trial.
Assuming that Hitler was no longer too convinced of his own mythology to try to escape, he was certainly too hated for any other country to take him. Given that any other country’s leaders could easily see what was happening to Germany, which do you think they would have said to a request for asylum:
A: “Yeah, we’ll allow Hitler in. If the Allies want him, they’ll have to go through us, first!”
B: “F*** yourself, Adolf!”
It is hard to imagine that the Argentines, however sympathetic they may have been to Nazi Germany, would agree to take him openly and officially. That would be to court war with all their neighbors, funded by the fledgling UN (mostly from the US). Far better to snub Hitler, declare war on Germany and gain the advantages of joining the Allies/United Nations.
Unofficially Argentina did accept the immigration of a number of former Nazis. And there is an open question about how much they knew (or wanted to know) about the real identities of their German immigrants in the late 40s and 5os. But sneaking Hitler into the country would have been a completely different degree of difficulty compared to mid-level officials. Hitler was a lot more recognizable than someone like Eichmann.
My opinion: He wasn’t the type to go on the run. He had a flair for the dramatic. The way it all ended there in the bunker is still morbidly fascinating and makes for great cinema. Contrast that with a Saddam Hussein found hiding in a hole. Hitler never had any intention of leaving Berlin.
Hitler genuinely believed in his messianaic image. There was no pretense there; he truly thought he was the chosen one who would lead the German race to the promised land. So until the very end he was the biggest Nazi zealot in Germany, incapable of accepting reality; when it finally crashed through his cognitive dissonance that was pretty much it for him. He could no more have fled somewhere and built a new life than he could have sprouted wings and flown out of Berlin himself.
With regards to why everyone else kept fighting, millions of German soldiers across hundreds for formations did in fact surrender as their situation became hopeless. The surrender, in other words, came mostly from the bottom up. It couldn’t come from the top down because Hitler wasn’t psychologically capable of a rational response to the situation and he was immediately surrounded by terrified sycophants. Most of the German generals who had the moral courage to accept the truth and end the war had either been fired (Guderian was seeking new employment as of March 28) dead (Rommel) or in the field, not in the bunker.
