Reviewed by Robert Swan

Students of military history know that when a country is completely overpowered by an opponent, it generally sues for peace in an effort to salvage something from the disaster.  Germany did this relatively readily in 1918, toward the end of World War I. But the same nation failed to do so in 1945, despite the parlous state of its finances and resource base and while facing a catastrophic military situation with a two-front conflict. Ian Kershaw’s The End offers a thorough explanation of this anomaly.

Kershaw structures his argument chronologically, beginning with the July 20, 1944, bomb plot against Hitler’s life. While assuring us that the book is not a military history, he provides excellent capsule summaries of military events leading to April 1945 and Hitler’s suicide, ending with the brief regime headed by Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz. In between his description of the military situation, Kershaw analyzes German domestic reactions to military events, as well as the perspectives and attitudes of soldiers at the front and even those captured by Allied forces.

Ironically, the attempt to kill Hitler and end the war in July 1944 had the opposite of its intended effect. Not only did the plot fail, it nullified any possibility that the one institution in Nazi Germany that could have toppled Hitler — the army — would do so. Embarrassment that high-ranking members of the military had broken their oath of allegiance to Hitler helped reinvigorate nationalist fervor among substantial segments of officers as well as the rank and file. The army was “Nazified.” The standard military salute was replaced by the raised-arm “Hitler salute,” mandated for use throughout the military, and all officers were designated “National Socialist Leadership Officers”; they became, in effect, political commissars as well as military commanders, spreading the party line and aggressively indoctrinating soldiers with Nazi Party propaganda.

Geographic as well as systemic factors prompted the army to continue to fight. Many German soldiers recognized all too clearly that surrender meant falling into the hands of Russian soldiers, who would reciprocate brutality with vigor. In the west, while soldiers were willing to surrender more readily to secure an easy berth in a British or American POW camp, there were good reasons to continue fighting. Beyond resignation and some sense of nationalism, there was fear of the Nazi regime, which in the last year of the war became more radicalized than ever before in routing out enemies. Civilians were subject to increasing scrutiny, manipulation and control by Nazi Party authorities, directed from the center in the interests of insuring the civilian population would continue to support the regime.

Kershaw argues that in the wake of the July assassination attempt, a “quadrumvirate” of four powerful key members of Hitler’s regime — Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann and Albert Speer — radicalized the war effort and helped Germany continue the fight.

All resources and virtually every available able-bodied person would be mobilized to hold out as long as possible against Germany’s enemies, enabling the regime to bring “super weapons” into play against the allies and giving the Allies a chance to splinter along ideological lines, England and America embracing Nazi Germany in a fight against the common enemy, Soviet Communism.

Heinrich Himmler oversaw the political reliability of troops. The symbolic power of his appointment was clear. Himmler, chief of the dreaded SS and in charge of internal security, was a policeman, not a general, and would be absolutely ruthless in the suppression of the merest hint of disloyalty or rebellion. This knowledge helped keep military personnel in line and fighting.  Joseph Goebbels made a key contribution to the continuing war effort by coordinating defensive measures, vastly increasing manpower available for frontline combat and home defense, as well as creating coercive mechanisms — including the infamous “werewolf” brigades — which effectively, in Kershaw’s words, “dragooned, corralled and controlled” the German population.  Martin Bormann’s remit involved the expansion of party power to mobilize and terrorize the civilian population of Germany as well as the state bureaucracy. Gauleiter, regional Nazi Party governors, answered directly to Bormann and were given enormous independent power to turn cities within their regions into “fortresses” of opposition to invading Allied forces.

The “hinge” figure with the least power in the quadrumvirate arguably had the greatest impact on Germany’s capacity for continuing the war. Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, minister for armaments and war production, possessed a staggering capacity for crushing hours of hard work and was an organizer of true genius. In his nauseatingly exculpatory post-war memoirs, as well as in a slew of interviews, Speer presented himself as an omni-competent technocrat who kept the machinery of war well oiled to the very end of the Third Reich’s existence. Kershaw quotes the man himself — “Without my work the war would perhaps have been lost in 1942-43” — and then goes on to say that “he [Speer] was surely right.” Kershaw asserts that Speer was “a crucial — possibly even the most important member of the quadrumvirate.” The bottom line: without armaments, the army could not fight. Speer was instrumental in maintaining armaments production. Hence Germany could continue fighting.

Systemic factors also aided Hitler in maintaining Germany’s war effort. There was no alternative to Hitler’s will as a final source of authority. By contrast, Kaiser Wilhelm II was, in effect, fired by his own chief minister in 1918. He could find no support in a “Leader Principle” (Führerprinzip), which was the organizational basis for Hitler’s power. Most important, each member of the quadrumvirate remained personally loyal to Hitler to the end. In Kershaw’s magisterial two-volume biography of Hitler, he emphasizes that Hitler’s was a “charismatic” dictatorship in which personal factors, not just brute force and terror, were crucial to maintaining his authority and his regime throughout the 12 years of its existence. Never was this aspect of Hitler’s rule more vital than at the end of World War II. Kershaw concludes that the charismatic nature of Hitler’s regime and the systemic structures and mentalities that undergirded it were the decisive factors in keeping Germany fighting at the end of World War II.

Some caveats regarding Kershaw’s arguments relating to the fall of the Third Reich: He makes innovative use of a vast array of different kind of sources, including internal security assessments of the SD, diary entries of civilians and combatants, and even the secretly recorded conversations of captured German soldiers and officers. However, he acknowledges that he can provide only a minute sample to support contentions about the mind set of whole classes of people. This is problematic when combined with tentative language (“almost certainly,” “but conceivably”); one wonders at the validity of basing conclusions about “officers” or “civilians” or “the ordinary soldier” on quotes from a single individual.

Additionally, Speer’s contribution to Germany’s war effort has recently been challenged, most notably by Adam Tooze in Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Kershaw asserts Speer’s key role with little substantive analysis to back his claims. Given the weight that Kershaw gives to Speer’s achievement, I would have appreciated a far more nuanced and detailed assessment.

The End is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the factors that led to Nazi Germany’s historically aberrant and ferocious willingness to continue to fight beyond the limits of reasonableness. In his preface, Kershaw writes that he will be “well satisfied” if readers come closer to a better understanding of how and why Hitler’s regime sustained itself and Germany kept fighting as long as it did in the deteriorating conditions at the end of World War II. He has achieved his goal admirably.

Robert Swan teaches history and philosophy in the International Baccalaureate program at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md.