I'm in the process of finishing Ian Kershaw's The End, a history of the final days of Nazi Germany. Although that subject has been covered elsewhere by Kershaw as well as many other historians, this fascinating book explores the question of why the Germans, when it was clear that the war was lost, continued to fight.
The brutality of Hitler's regime was a key reason. [People were being hanged for treason hours before the collapse.] Another reason was fear of Soviet retribution and occupation. Another was the rumor that the military had some miraculous new weapons which would turn the tide. Still another was the automatic loyalty of the generals to the government. There was also, of course, the belief that Hitler was some sort of super-hero who would ultimately produce victory.
One aspect which I have found to be especially interesting was the tendency of people to focus on their immediate responsibilities while the world was crashing around them. There were civil servants in Berlin who remained at their desks as Russian artillery shells were falling in the government district. The bureaucracy was operating almost to the end. German industrialists, who knew the war was lost and had an eye on post-war Germany, were scrambling to save factories from both the Allies and Hitler's scorched earth policy.
It was a nation held by a cult, not a standard-issue government, so rational behavior could not be expected. Those last days illustrate what can happen when fantasy weds power.
4 comments:
From professional and personal interest, I've spent many years studying this and similar episodes in history, and one thing I've learned is that the vast majority of people are creatures of habit, not of rationality.
In moments of stress, in particular when information is incomplete, they default to what they feel most comfortable doing, which is to say what they've done in the repeatedly in past.
The military, to which I belonged for many years, actually takes advantage of this reflexive behavior by training, training, and re-training specific responses to particular events.
By this repetitive process, a person's response in the heat of the moment can be reasonably assured. Faced with the thing they have been trained repeatedly to expect, their leaders hope they will produce the trained response.
This doesn't always work, of course. Sometimes the mental hurdle that much be crossed to produce the response is too great. The best example of this sort of failure that I can think of comes from the USS Cole bombing. The ship had weapons manned, but in spite of training for just such an eventuality, the crew on the weapons did not fire.
That failure may have been caused by factors ranging from a fear of reprimand for firing warning shots that weren't needed to a reluctance to actually killing the men in the boat before knowing with certainty that they were attacking. Who knows?
I do know, however, that significant effort would have been required by someone if there was a desire for those people in German offices to behave differently. I think that by 1945 that was impossible. So people did what they knew.
Larry,
Your observation may be particularly true in Germany which has long had a culture which favors order but it can apply, as you've noted, to other places.
I'm sure that during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror life was going on rather normally in most of France. Habit can be the real master.
Michael
Let me share what I heard from my German grandfather (through my father) and from family friends (both directly and through my father) who were put in the Berlin prisons. As the Russians approached, the guards behaved in three distinct ways.
Some followed their orders which usually involved killing the prisoners in their charge, either in Berlin or after transporting them elsewhere. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was among those prisoners. Some guards simply ran for their lives leaving their prisoners in their locked cells. And some set their prisoners free. Pastor {later Bishop) Hanns Lilje was among those prisoners.
Wally,
That is very interesting. The Kershaw book starts with an account of a young man who was hanged for cutting a telephone line (and thus sabotaging the war effort to spare the town from destruction) just a few hours before the Americans entered his town. The line the man cut was to a Wehrmacht unit which had already left.
Michael
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