The Last Months

Throughout the last months of the war Nazi policy continued to demand action on two of its central aims: to kill Jews, and, to use Jewish slave labour. Hitler still held out hope of a German victory if time permitted the development of the super-weapons his scientists were promising. Plans were devised to establish difficult to assault “fortresses” in the mountainous areas of Germany and Austria where the army, the government, and the production of these weapons could be protected against the Allies long enough to permit a devastating counter attack. Aside from the maintenance of roads, rails, and bridges, masses of slave labourers were needed for the Herculean tasks of excavating underground bunkers in the mountains from which these operations could be directed. Despite this crucial necessity for workers, however, the obsession with the outright murder of Jews continued unabated.

The refusal of Hitler and his close associates to accept and acknowledge their ultimate defeat by the Allied forces moving in on all fronts by 1943-4, led to the death and destruction of hundreds of thousands, probably millions more civilians and troops across Europe. The SS and the Gestapo held not just subject nations but Germans themselves in an ever-increasing vice. Terror of instant reprisals by the Gestapo for any hint of “defeatism” kept the now war weary and disenchanted German people in strict obedience. Bombing raids by the Allies laid waste German cities. In February Dresden, though not an industrial target, was destroyed by British and American planes in a fire-bomb attack that killed civilians, prisoners of war, and slave labourers alike. All major German cities were targeted daily in the attempts of the Allies to “lessen the morale” of the people, and, quite arguably, in reprisal for similar bombing and U-boat raids made earlier in the war by the Germans.

The German propaganda machine headed by Goebbels continued to tell a tale of ultimate victory, led by their invincible Fuhrer and accomplished by means of the much vaunted secret weapons soon to be revealed. All, soldiers and civilians alike, were to stand firm and to fight or die at their posts. Hitler, by this point himself both believed and didn’t believe his own propaganda. His physical and mental health had deteriorated considerably; he was addicted to several medications given to him by his personal physician; he had developed early signs of Parkinson’s disease. Orders delivered in the last months of the war from his bunker in Berlin reveal the continued power of his will to dominate his people, troops, and the SS/Gestapo machinery. Resources, including slave labourers, close to the core of territories still held by the army were to be allocated to the preparation of tunnelled bunkers where the army and government could direct the final phases of the struggle against the Allies, ultimately destroying their foes with the "soon to arrive secret weaponry." The front lines of the army, now supplemented by those previously judged unfit for combat troops, -- youths as young as 14 or 15, older men, the infirm, were to hold their positions as long as possible, giving no quarter to the advancing Allies, dying at their posts for “The Fatherland.” At the same time it is clear from conversations that Hitler had with his close associates during this period that he “knew” that the war was lost and that defeat was but a matter of time. His bitterness and entire disregard for the lives, not just of the peoples whom he professed to hate, but of his own people is clear from his behaviour toward the end. He envisioned not just his own demise but that of the German people themselves. He believed that they had failed him in his quest for ultimate European hegemony and that they deserved to be obliterated.

It is estimated that in the last year of the war alone over a million people died. Three thousand V-3 rockets developed by the Germans fell on British cities, primarily London during that time, but far more casualties came from the bombing of German cities. Within the vast “gulag” of SS concentration and death camps murders and massacres continued unabated, given a new urgency by the advancing Allied forces from both east and west. At the village of Ohrdruf in central Germany thousands of camp labourers had been employed in the construction of an underground centre for telephone and radio to be used by the army in the event of a retreat from Berlin. By the time this camp was liberated on April 11, 1945 over 4,000 inmates had died of starvation and disease or had been murdered. Hundreds -- Jews, Poles, and Russian prisoners of war -- were shot on the eve of the Americans’ arrival.

On April 15 British troops entered Bergen-Belsen to find 10,000 unburied corpses, most victims of starvation. Another 5,000 died in the week after liberation, too advanced in illness to be saved. Aware of imminent capture by the British, most guards and all SS had fled. No food or water had been provided for the inmates for five days preceding their liberation. Gilbert quotes a British army review of the situation: “the inmates .... were degraded morally to the level of beasts. Their clothing was in rags, teeming with lice, and both inside and outside the huts was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags and filth.” At Nordhausen Americans found hundreds of slave labourers in conditions “almost unrecognizable as human. All were little more than skeletons: the dead lay beside the sick and dying in the same beds: filth and human excrement covered the floors.”

The soldiers who came upon the camps as they moved further and further into Germany were overcome with the horror of the sights that they encountered. At a distance of close to seventy years any reading or pictures of these conditions to which humans were subjected is horrifying and profoundly disturbing. But they cannot be forgotten. What happened in Germany and throughout the countries overrun by the German army is testament to the potential for destruction wrought by hatred and discrimination. It is not the only example of this potential: Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia come immediately to mind. In its scope both geographically and numerically though, the Holocaust is foremost. Increasingly in countries around the world it is being taught as a cautionary tale of the consequences of intolerance. 

In my next post I will outline the itinerary for our trip.