New York: The Penguin Press, 2011 ISBN 9781594203145
"German military losses in the last phase of the war were immense, as high in the last ten months of the war as in the four years to July 1944. Had the attack on Hitler's life in July succeeded and the war then promptly brought to an end, the lives of around 50 per cent of the German soldiers who died [in the war as a whole] would have been saved."
This startling and sobering statement appears toward the end of Kershaw's book, which is an attempt, by one of the current era's great war historians, to understand why Germany did fight on until almost total destruction, far beyond any hope of victory or indeed ability to influence the victor's activities in any way. It is a question that hangs bloodily over the last, most destructive months of the European war, and one to which there is no simple answer, as Kershaw shows us.
What he does show is a complex interaction of events, personalities, military and governmental structures that precluded any one person from driving events toward surrender. Of course there was one person who could have done it, but Hitler was the one person who could never consider surrender, even after he understood that all was lost. He could never countenance a Germany defeated, so if Germany was to be overrun, it was better in his mind that it was totally destroyed. There was no-one in the hierarchy, either military or civil, who could stand up to him. The structure of Hitler's Germany was such that there was no power-base available to anyone other than Hitler, no other structure that could compete with his charismatic hold on power. Those high up in the Nazi system all owed their legitimacy to him, so if he went, so did their power. Many of them also realised that they were so compromised by their crimes that they had no future in a non-Nazi Germany, and therefore tied themselves more tightly to Hitler in the last days.
The military was bound to fight on for different reasons. Certainly for some the oath of loyalty to Hitler held sway, but even for those who were indifferent to the Nazis, once the war came to German soil they felt a duty to fight for their country, if not for the political rulers of it. Generals become Generals because they obey orders, and by-and-large this is what they did, sometimes questioning tactics, but never the overall decision to fight on.
As for the rank-and-file, and the civilians, no rebellion came from them either. They were more concerned with survival through the maelstrom, and as Kershaw points out, terror from their own. In the last few months of the war the Party used brutal means of suppression to ensure compliance with the decision to fight on, with flying courts-martial executing straggling soldiers, and Nazi courts sentencing to death those civilians that dared to question or disobey.
The Nazi regime - the "thousand year Reich" - in reality was a personality cult around one man, a man who, if he couldn't be victorious, wanted to take everything down with him. As Kershaw writes, "Hitler's mass charismatic appeal had long since dissolved, but the structures and mentalities of his charismatic rule lasted until his death in the bunker. The dominant elites, divided as they were, possess neither the collective will nor the mechanisms of power to prevent Hitler taking Germany to total destruction. That was decisive."
Kershaw as always presents his arguments with aplomb, and this dense book (with over 100 pages of notes and a comprehensive bibliography) is well thought-out and highly readable.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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