Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Rummer and his associates successfully managed temporarily to shut down the mine and visited a local concentration camp, where they gained the support of the inmates by promising liberation, before marching on the town hall, where a crowd of socialists and communists, eager finally to be rid of the Nazi dictatorship, had gathered. The Nazi mayor, Herr Vonwerden, was dismissed and told to leave town, leaving Rummer’s men in charge.11

  With the Americans a matter of hours away – the rumble of their artillery could clearly be heard in the town – the takeover might have succeeded but for the fact that a Wehrmacht unit led by one Oberleutnant Ohm happened to be passing through, and stopped in the town square to investigate why such a large crowd had gathered. Discovering the situation, they quickly arrested Rummer and his associates, after which the punctilious Ohm drove to Munich, fifty or so kilometres to the north, for instructions, taking with him the deposed Nazi mayor.

  Almost immediately they arrived, they found themselves in a meeting with none other than the Nazi Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria and ‘Reich Defence Commissar South’, forty-nine-year-old Paul Giesler, notorious for his extravagant pronouncements on the subject of fanatical resistance.12

  Within less than five minutes, Ohm and Vonwerden had their orders: ‘Rummer and his people must be liquidated.’ And they were – seven failed rebels were put up against a wall and shot immediately upon the lieutenant’s return to Penzberg later that afternoon.

  Typically for many Nazi firebrands during these chaotic final days, however, Giesler was not satisfied with proportionate violence, sufficient to restore immediate order. So far as he was concerned, the disease of anti-Nazism must be not merely suppressed but wholly eliminated. Sensing that Ohm, a loyalist but also a stickler for procedure, would be reluctant to do what Giesler considered necessary, the Gauleiter – astonishingly, since his capital, Munich, was also about to fall to the Americans – took the trouble to instruct one of his aides, a Brownshirt leader named Hans Zöberlein, to round up a posse, so to speak, and also head down to Penzberg. The codename for this death squad was ‘Group Hans’.

  The bizarre and cruel farce that followed was, appropriately enough, staged by an artist, for Zöberlein was no ordinary thug but a radical nationalist novelist with a background in the post-First World War Freikorps movement. Zöberlein’s violent non-conformism had caused him to fall out of favour until talent shortages in the last months of the war caused him to be appointed as a regional defence leader and Volkssturm commander. His units called themselves ‘Werwolf Upper Bavaria’ and specialised in brutal reprisals against villages found flying white flags or in any way thought to be interfering with operations against the enemy.

  A hundred or so of these desperadoes accordingly arrived, along with their maverick commander, at Penzberg town hall that evening. Zöberlein announced their intention of completing the purge begun by Ohm and Vonwerden. Local Nazis ‘assisted’ by drawing up a list of political enemies in a noisy discussion that saw more than one personal score settled under the pretext of ‘necessity’.

  The flamboyant arrival of Group Hans and the ensuing debate about who to kill enabled some of the shrewder local anti-Nazis to make good their escapes, but nevertheless, once the death list had been drawn up, the killers were able to snatch three of their victims. Within a short time, all were dead, with two of them hanged from the balcony of a building next to the Penzberg town hall, the third from a tree in the main street. When a fourth eluded them, despite threats to the caretaker of his building, the group extended their operations into a neighbouring working-class suburb. Here they found themselves exchanging fire with armed residents. One of the latter, a miner, was killed, but the gun battle was enough to drive Group Hans out of the area.

  Moreover, the local Wehrmacht commander, when asked to send help, refused to do so. Nonetheless, several more ‘enemies’ were hanged during the course of the night, including a heavily pregnant woman – although as the night wore on, with the ‘enemy’ now forewarned, it became harder to find victims. In one case, when a man was being hanged, the rope broke. He was shot, left for dead, but survived. Another captive bolted while under guard at the town hall, and, despite taking a bullet from his pursuers, managed to make good his escape.

  Zöberlein had left before midnight. The last of his lieutenants, a fanatical former officer by the name of Bauernfeind ( literally ‘countrymen’s enemy’), pulled out of town at around dawn, still issuing bloodcurdling threats to return and finish the job. He left corpses dangling from improvised gallows around the town square in the early morning light.

  So the regime that had always boasted of its success as the bringer of ‘order’, during its last weeks and days finally became what in its black heart it had always been – the agent of violence, random death and chaos.

  An institutionalised sadism that had hitherto been systematically concealed, confined to Gestapo cells and the giant barbed-wire torture cages of the concentration camps, now burst into the open, revealing itself as a licence for every uniformed thug in the country to torture and murder at will. It somehow seems appropriate that on 29 April, the day after ordering the tragicomic and totally unnecessary Penzberg massacre and just hours before being forced to flee Munich ahead of the Americans, Gauleiter Giesler was appointed in Hitler’s Testament to be Reich Interior Minister in place of the disgraced Heinrich Himmler.13

  The Penzberg atrocities showed two things very clearly: first, that by the last weeks of the war, those who had either never supported the Nazis or were gravely disillusioned with them were now prepared openly to rebel; and second, that, in its response, the regime revealed its degeneration into violent, vengeful brigandage.

  The Third Reich had clearly forfeited any claim on the respect or loyalty of all but a minority of fanatical adherents. Most Germans shared this realisation. Whether it made them better or worse disposed towards the advancing Allies was another matter entirely. The image of the adolescent Helmut Nassen and his friend, defiantly firing off rounds at the Americans across the river while at the same time hiding from the Wehrmacht field police who would have strung these young men up as deserters provides, perhaps, a suitable illustration of the dualities at the heart of so many Germans’ response to the war’s end.

  With the end of the war, Germany was deemed to have ceased to exist. This had long been agreed among the allies, and was supposedly set out in a proposed instrument of surrender painstakingly negotiated by the European Advisory Commission (EAC) in London during the latter part of the winter. However, owing to procedural errors and some last-minute changes, that detailed and binding document was still not quite ready by the time the actual military surrender occurred.

  The document of surrender signed by German commanders at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Reims on 7 May 1945, then – amidst much bad grace – the next day at Berlin-Karlshorst with the Soviets, was much more basic. It consisted of only six paragraphs, none of them more than two sentences long. This text had been put together mostly by a British G-3 colonel at SHAEF, John Counsell, in civilian life a theatrical actor-manager. He had taken a great deal of it from a report in the US forces’ newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, of the German surrender in northern Italy a few days earlier.14

  A surrender needed to be signed, EAC or no EAC, in order to bring the fighting to an end and save further loss of Allied and German lives. The improvised text achieved that much. The world celebrated VE-Day, but even before the party was over the politicians and the political generals (among whom Eisenhower should be included) had begun to worry that, in fact, only the German armed forces had so far surrendered. Where did this leave the legal status of the German government? In November 1918, at the end of the First World War, only the politicians had signed their country’s surrender, leaving the German generals to cry ‘betrayal’. Now that the reverse was true, who knew whether the survivors of the Nazi political elite might also exploit this technically still incomplete situation for their
own nefarious ends?

  The Allies clearly exercised de facto physical control of Germany. Moreover, the improvised text also contained a reference to the EAC document in preparation, binding the Germans to accept this too once it was presented to them. All the same, this was not an entirely satisfactory situation. Any possible loopholes had to be closed as quickly as possible.

  The situation was all the more pressing because a body calling itself the Reich government still existed. This was headed by Hitler’s designated successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, and included War Production Minister Albert Speer and several other veteran ministers appointed by Hitler. This faintly ridiculous entity hung on for more than two weeks after the formal surrender, housed in a former navy torpedo school at Flensburg, a substantial port on the Baltic just a handful of miles from the Danish border. Stubbornly flying the Reich flag on its meagre collection of government buildings, its troops still patrolled the surrounding streets.

  Dönitz’s government went through the motions. Its ministers and officials held meetings, squabbled over jobs and seniorities, made decisions, issued commands and even attempted to engage in dealings with the forces of General Montgomery’s British 21st Army Group, which now controlled the Flensburg area.

  Perhaps the only useful thing that Dönitz and his entourage did manage to achieve in the final week of the war, after Hitler’s death, was to delay the Wehrmacht’s final surrender until millions of German soldiers and refugees had managed to reach the relative safety of the Western Allied lines – an intentional delay benefiting between 2.5 and 3 million desperate souls.15

  As it happened, the final version of the EAC surrender document, now reframed as the ‘Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by the Allied Powers’ was not accepted by all the Allied governments until 21 May. During this interval, both Churchill and Eisenhower seem to have toyed with the idea of allowing the dubious legal husk of a Reich government to remain in place in some form or another.

  In Churchill’s case, he considered letting the Flensburg government continue ‘for a while’, in the hope that allowing its temporary survival would help bring order to the occupied areas. It would also provide a ‘fallback’ German authority. This could be useful if, as Churchill had begun to fear, war should now suddenly break out between the Western Allies and the Soviets, and the West needed to call on the support of the defeated German armed forces in a new anti-communist crusade.16

  Eisenhower, more realistically, saw the continuance of some kind of all-German authority as potentially a useful aid in organising, disciplining and feeding the unexpectedly vast number – five million or so – of German prisoners of war now in captivity within the areas controlled by the Anglo-American forces, a problem already threatening to turn into a humanitarian disaster. To this end, on 11 May, three days after VE-Day, Eisenhower sent a senior American officer, General Lowell W. Rooks, up to Flensburg to establish a ‘Supreme Headquarters Control Party’. Rooks, accompanied by a British deputy, Brigadier E. J. Foord, and a high-level political adviser, Ambassador Robert Murphy, had particular instructions to liaise with what was left of the Wehrmacht High Command there and ‘impose the SCAEF’s [Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force’s] will’.

  For their part, Dönitz and company harboured somewhat pathetic hopes that this visit represented some kind of recognition of their authority. During their visits to his quarters aboard the Patria, a requisitioned German passenger ship moored in the Flensburger Fjord, they made desperate attempts to impress General Rooks with their indispensability. However, after their first encounters with this ‘strange politico-military ménage’, the American general and his advisers rapidly came to the conclusion that it was ‘a rapidly decaying concern with little knowledge of present events and practically no work to do’ and therefore pretty much useless for any of the anticipated purposes.17

  With the press in Allied countries attacking this embarrassing anomaly, and now, on 21 May, the EAC declaration accepted as policy by all the Allies, an end to the Flensburg ‘government’ was inevitable. On 22 May, having formally consulted the British and the Russians, the American War Department ordered the arrest of Dönitz, his government and the surviving members of the Wehrmacht High Command. This took place punctually the next day.

  At a meeting with General Rooks around a long table set up in the bar aboard the Patria, the German officers were given the bad news, then were marched ashore and into their cars, and driven back to their quarters to collect their belongings. Army photographers were present to record the scene. É finita la commedia.

  One of the Reich’s chief negotiators, who had been on board the Patria with Dönitz, General Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, shot himself before he could be formally taken into custody. Most former Reich ministers and senior military officers were quickly flown to the American detention centre for high-ranking Nazis near SHAEF at Reims, in France, known as ‘the Ashcan’. Many of those who had played leading roles in the regime’s final pantomime would face trial as war criminals at Nuremberg.

  The EAC’s victory declaration now became the crucial document determining the status of surrendered Germany. ‘There is,’ it proclaimed, ‘no central Government or authority in Germany capable of accepting responsibility for the maintenance of order, the administration of the country, and compliance with the requirements of the victorious powers.’ The declaration continued: ‘The Governments of the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom, and the Provisional Government of the French Republic, hereby assume supreme authority with respect to Germany, including all the powers possessed by the German Government, the High Command and any state, municipal or local government or authority. The assumption, for the purposes stated above, of the said authority and powers does not effect the annexation of Germany.’

  So, Germany was deemed to have surrendered unconditionally, as planned since the Casablanca Conference in 1943. Its government was declared to have been abolished, and the Allies to have assumed absolute power in the country – although the second sentence allowed that the German state had not been permanently extinguished and might therefore be re-established if the victors so decided at some future point.

  For all practical purposes, however, Germany had ceased to exist, and the powers of the occupiers over its population and institutions were unlimited.

  Many Germans, like those in Göttingen, exploited the temporary vacuum, after the collapse of their own government institutions but before the occupiers settled into the task of ruling, to steal, loot, settle old scores or make arrangements to secure their futures. Most did not turn from obedient citizens into criminals, but equally, most realised that in the new post-war world the old rules did not apply.

  Three of the four occupying powers were representative democracies, but nevertheless exercised total and far from liberal power over the areas of Germany that they had assigned themselves. The final power, the Soviet Union, claimed to be a democracy but was nothing of the kind. It was, however, paradoxically also the only one of the powers to immediately introduce its ‘own’ German officials, to allow political activity and to set up something resembling a ‘normal’ administrative network in its zone.

  The advantage that the Soviets possessed over the Western Allies during the early days after victory was quite simple. They had their own German communists, many of whom had spent the war years in exile in Russia, and some of whom had survived in Nazi-ruled Germany and therefore could be realistically presented as ‘resistance’ activists.

  When the Red Army appeared in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1945, these German party members, wherever they came from, were biddable, used to discipline, accustomed to conspiratorial political practice, and, overwhelmingly, quite clear that their aim was the same as it had been before 1933: to assist in the construction of a communist-dominated political structure, at first in the Soviet Zone and then, if possible, in the whole
of occupied Germany. This gave the Russians a head start.

  The situation in the zones assigned to the Western Allies was quite different. It was true that many non-communist anti-Nazis had gone into exile after 1933, and had eventually ended up in America or Britain, but unlike the communist exiles they were not a homogenous, disciplined group. The same went for those who had either survived imprisonment during the Nazi era or somehow managed to lie low. In 1945, they could re-emerge, but they did not form a group with a clearly defined aim. In fact, unlike the German communists, who were from the first favoured by the Soviet occupiers, they were not even given preferential treatment by the Western Allies, who in that same crucial period tended to treat Germans of any kind – Nazi or not – with uniform distrust.

  Within weeks of the German surrender, a group of pre-war German communists under the command – this is not too strong a term – of the former (1929–33) Party Secretary for Berlin and Brandenburg, Walter Ulbricht, had established itself in the Soviet Zone. Ulbricht, born the son of a saddler in the Saxon industrial metropolis of Leipzig in 1893, learned the trade of cabinet-maker but, after serving in the German army in the First World War, quickly became a full-time political agitator and official. He counted as an ultra-loyal servant of Stalin who had refined his ruthless skills during twelve years of exile, first in Prague and Paris, and then, from 1938, in the Soviet Union. His cold efficiency, relentless energy and unquestioned loyalty to Moscow (he was also a signed-up member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) enabled him to survive Stalin’s frequent purges of foreign émigrés. These characteristics also made Ulbricht a natural choice as the head of the elite group of German communists flown in a Soviet military aircraft into the shattered ruins of Berlin at the end of April 1945, during the final days of the battle for the city.