EBERBACH: Yes, but everyone has a different conception of the word “Fatherland.” One man thinks: “The moment has come when we must capitulate regardless of the conditions, in order to preserve the essential being of the German race.” The other man thinks: “Things are now so desperate that the best thing for what remains of the German race is to fight to the bitter end, so that at least some respect may be wrung from the enemy, and so that that German race may at some future date rise again with whatever is left, by virtue of this fight to the death.” Those are the two conceptions. One cannot say
Admittedly, once the Allies succeeded in crossing the Rhine in late March 1945, most soldiers distanced themselves from the idea of fighting with honor down to the final bullet. “I used to think it was wrong to lay down your arms, that it would cause a crack in popular morale that would bode ill for the future,” admitted General Ferdinand Heim in late March 1945. “But now it has to end. It’s simply insanity.”617 Heim reached this conclusion in the relatively idyllic surroundings of Trent Park. Generals at the front may have had similar thoughts, but their subjective perceptions of how much room for maneuver they enjoyed varied, so they did little to resist the apocalyptic fantasies of the military high command. The fact that Germany’s collective military suicide was only partial came down to the reality that fighting to the last man presumed that one was capable of fighting at all. No one, neither the troops nor the officers, wanted to face tanks with only rifles in their hands. If there were no effective means to combat the enemy, German soldiers simply stopped fighting. They did this in Russia in 1941, in Normandy in 1944, and in the Rhineland in 1945.
The only exceptions were a handful of elite units in the Waffen SS, the military wing of the organization, who took their instructions to fight to the final bullet more literally. It is striking how few SS men British and American forces succeeded in capturing either in France or Germany. American and British reluctance to take any SS prisoners cannot, by itself, explain this phenomenon. Another explanation is that many, if not all, SS units continued to fight in the sort of hopeless situations in which regular troops laid down their arms. Wehrmacht soldiers observed this fanaticism with ever greater disbelief. Sacrificing their own lives, observed Lieutenant Colonel von der Heydte, was a manifestation of the “false ethics, that faithful into death complex,” which the SS, like Japanese kamikazes, cultivated among their ranks.618
With the exception of the Waffen SS, German ground forces possessed enough common sense to give up fighting when they were no longer able to put up an organized and effective defense. Soldiers simply refused to sacrifice their lives in such situations. Sacrifice to no military end was not part of their universe of norms. Becoming a casualty had to serve some sort of instrumental value. If there was no purpose in dying, soldiers tended to lay down their arms, especially on the Western Front, since it was not considered dishonorable to surrender to the Allies.
