The failure of the conspiracy in July 1944 to overthrow Hitler removed the last realistic hope within Germany of a negotiated end to a war which was by now inexorably leading to the eventual destruction of the German Reich. Thereafter, there was no possibility of altering the structures of power from within. Despite signs that they were starting to disintegrate, these structures — at their centre the undisputed authority of Hitler — remained intact until the final stages of the regime’s death-agony. As a consequence, Hitler’s power remained absolute and undiminished even as the regime staggered towards oblivion. And as long as Hitler survived, and until Germany was totally crushed, the war would continue.
This meant in turn that there was no possibility of an alternative to the calamitous escalation of death and destruction as Germany fell in ruins. It was not that alternatives were left uncontemplated. At one point or another, almost all the Nazi leaders below Hitler — Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop, and Himmler among them — entertained notions of exploring avenues for a separate peace with either the Russians or with the western Allies. Hitler dismissed all such ideas out of hand. He would only negotiate from a position of strength, following a military success, he repeatedly stated. The chances of such an option being open to him were, however, as good as non-existent. So, instead, he spoke tirelessly and incessantly of will overcoming adversity; of refusal to capitulate, of holding out until ‘five minutes past midnight’. Meanwhile, Germany burned.
Time and again, his generals exhorted him to make tactical retreats, or to shore up key sectors of the fronts by giving up other areas for former conquest and withdrawing much-needed troops. Again, Hitler was invariably uncompromising in his refusal. The clashes with his military commanders — most of all with Chief of the General Staff Heinz Guderian — became ever more bitter. His stubborn unreasonableness appeared to confound all military logic. He seemed to have lost his grip on reality. It was as if he had a death-wish — not just for himself, but for Germany and its people; an invitation to nemesis.
That, indeed, was central to Hitler’s own warped brand of logic. From his bitter experience of the last years of the First World War — encountering defeatism, sensing subversion at home, traumatized as he lay in the military hospital at Pasewalk by the news of unexpected defeat and revolution perpetrated by the hated Social Democrats, when all that had meaning for him had been shattered — he had been obsessed by treachery and betrayal. He had made it his life’s mission to upturn the effects of that perceived ‘stab-in-the-back’ in 1918 and the national humiliation inflicted on the German nation by those he insisted on calling ‘November criminals’. And he had staked his political existence on eliminating, whatever might come, any potential for a repeat of 1918, a recurrence of what he saw as a cowardly capitulation and consequent impotent exposure to the dictates of foreign powers. To this end, and based on a crude philosophy that will would overcome any obstacle, he felt justified in demanding total sacrifice from the German people under his rule. Again, according to his own view of the world, defeat would this time bring not another ‘Diktat of Versailles’ — however repulsive that had been — but the total destruction of Germany. There was, therefore, from this optic, no point in surrender. If victory could not be attained, then struggle to the last was all that was left. A place in history, to be recognized by future generations if not by the present for its heroic, epic qualities, was its imagined virtue.
