‘Trust in the leadership shrinks ever more,’ ran a summary, compiled in early March, of letters monitored by officials of the Propaganda Ministry, ‘because the proclaimed counter-blow to liberate our occupied eastern provinces did not take place and because the manifold promises of an imminent shift in fortunes have proven incapable of fulfilment… Criticism of the upper leadership ranks of the Party and of the military leadership is especially bitter.’59 Shortly afterwards, a report from the Propaganda Office in Halle-Merseburg — the sort of report usually keen to refrain from any hint of negativity — summed up the mood in that area in language which, however coded, could not disguise the extent of anti-Hitler feeling: ‘Those who still unwaveringly and unshakeably trusted the words of the Führer that the historic shift in our favour would still take place in this year were said to have a very hard time in face of the doubters and miseries. Whatever the unshakeable faith in the Führer, people are not refraining from remarking that, for certain, the Führer could not be informed by the military authorities about the true situation, otherwise it would not have come to the present serious crisis.’60
A graphic illustration of feeling towards the man who had so recently been the focus of such unprecedented adulation arose in a remembrance ceremony on 11 March 1945 for the dead of the war around the memorial in Markt Schellenberg, a small alpine town lying within a few minutes’ drive of Hitler’s residence on the Berghof: ‘When the leader of the Wehrmacht unit at the end of his speech for the remembrance called for a “Sieg Heil” for the Führer, it was returned neither by the Wehrmacht present, nor by the Volkssturm, nor by the spectators of the civilian population who had turned up. This silence of the masses,’ commented an observer from the local police, ‘had a depressing effect, and probably reflects better than anything the attitudes of the population.’61
In most people’s eyes, Hitler, the leader so many of them had come close to adoring, was now hindering an end to their suffering. The perception was correct. He was also prolonging even now the end of the far greater suffering of Nazism’s victims.
The torment of these victims — in prime place among them, as ever, the Jews — continued unabated. In contrast to the general ‘mood of catastrophe’, the few Jews remaining within Germany could at least begin cautiously to hope that the end of the regime would not be long delayed once the Soviet offensive had begun in mid-January. But the hopes were still hedged with anxiety that the mortally wounded regime could turn upon them at any moment, or that even at this late hour they would be deported.62 When most of the small number of Jews still existing in Dresden and deemed fit for work were rounded up in mid-February for ‘evacuation’, they knew they had to interpret what lay before them as a ‘march into death’.63 One of those left behind remarked to Victor Klemperer, the former specialist in French literature at Dresden’s technical university: ‘We’ve only got a stay of execution of about eight days. Then they’ll fetch us from our beds at six in the morning. It’ll be no different for us than for the others.’64 It was, as the remarks indicate, still a life ruled by the most acute fear. But the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews and others in the clutches of the SS in the camps in the east was infinitely more dreadful. Their lives continued to hang by a thread on the arbitrary whim of their persecutors as the rapid breakthrough of Soviet troops brought a final and terrible phase of their agony.
