Nazi Death Marches

The End: Hitler's Germany, 1944-45 by Ian Kershaw: review

‘Enjoy the war,” went the black joke of Berliners in 1945, “the peace will be much worse.” This book, as its author Ian Kershaw makes very clear, is not a military history. It is instead the best attempt by far to answer the complex question of why Nazi Germany carried on fighting to total self-destruction. Kershaw, the author of the best biography of Hitler, is the finest sort of academic, for he combines impeccable scholarship with an admirable clarity of thought and prose.

The subject is doubly important because so many people in the last doomed months were killed to so little purpose: concentration-camp prisoners on aimless death marches, German civilians under Allied bombing, Red Army soldiers in the last desperate battles from the Vistula to the Spree, German civilians caught up in the Red Army’s rampage in East Prussia, Hungarians in the murderous siege of Budapest, and the old men and teenage boys from the Hitler Youth drafted into the Volkssturm to resist Soviet tank armies with inadequate weapons.

Kershaw begins with a true story which goes straight to the point. As American troops approach the town of Ansbach, a boy who hopes to save his town from further destruction is condemned to death by the Nazi commandant. He is hanged in grotesque circumstances. The town is bound to fall, and the Nazi colonel himself escapes immediately afterwards. So why do none of the police attempt to save the boy by delaying until the Americans arrive? Why do they continue to obey orders not just in the face of common humanity, but also self-interested logic, since they could have portrayed themselves in a better light to their conquerors?

Bismarck once observed that moral courage was a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserted a German completely the moment he put on a uniform. That insight provides just one facet of the conformism in Nazi Germany, which did not really come from national solidarity, as the Party liked to claim. There were so many other aspects, such as the German fear of chaos after the Russian civil war and the German revolution of 1918-1919. Hitler, however, when he harked back to that traumatic period, concentrated more on the “stab-in-the-back” legend of 1918, that Jews and Bolsheviks had defeated the German army, not the Allies.

The July plot of 1944 to kill Hitler produced a new Nazi version of the “stab-in-the-back” theory, only this time it was aristocrats and the general staff who were the traitors, and thus by implication they, not the Führer, were responsible for all the Wehrmacht’s defeats since Stalingrad. Stauffenberg’s bomb created a sudden surge in support for the regime at a desperate time. (Some of the letters of the period raise the question of whether the Nazis’ infantilisation of the German people made the attempt to assassinate the Führer appear almost as a form of parricide.

Nazi Death Marches « Gyrovague's Raves

Book Details German Citizens’ Role in End of War Killings

By Jan Friedmann

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More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches shortly before the end of World War II. Many of them were murdered by German civilians. A new book tries to answer the question why.

The end was in sight, with Allied troops already on the outskirts of the city. Nevertheless, a number of citizens of Celle in north-central Germany became murderers on April 8, 1945.

They participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight cars, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest.

The prisoners were "killed like animals," many of them execution style, according to a British military report. Up to 300 people died in the massacre, with the leader of a Hitler Youth group in Celle killing more than 20 alone. The Allies captured the city four days later.

The outbreak of violence in this part of the state of Lower Saxony is described in detail in a book by Daniel Blatman, "The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide," which comes out in German translation this week. The book addresses the broader issue of the death marches of concentration camp prisoners in 1944 and 1945, during the waning months of the war.

The Death Marches, The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide

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