For a variety of reasons, German personnel losses are hard to
determine with any precision. Few of these cobbled-together units
kept any records of losses, German graves registration had largely
ceased to exist, and sympathetic civilians buried some of those
killed. To gain a sense of the intensity of the fighting in the
Endphase (final stage), though, it is worth noting the latest
calculations of German military deaths by Rüdiger Overmans. Through
his careful and exhaustive research, Overmans has concluded that
approximately 1.23 million German military personnel (including
Volkssturm men, who suffered more than 50 percent of the entire
losses) died in the final four months of the war. This average of
roughly three hundred thousand killed monthly (compared with “only”
one hundred thousand per month on the eastern front in 1944)
represented the highest such German losses in the entire war. Even
if one accepts his further estimate that two-thirds of the
casualties in the Endphase occurred on the eastern front, that
still leaves over four hundred thousand deaths during the hard
fighting in the west. In the triangle of terror and destruction
marked by Aschaffenburg, Ansbach, and Heilbronn, estimates of
civilian deaths alone number over two thousand, with an equal
number of soldiers sent to their deaths just in the region bounded
by the Main and Neckar Rivers.
By throwing a mixed bag of men into battle, many with little
training and all with insufficient weapons, supplies, and
equipment, German commanders had sent their troops to the
slaughter, in a futile attempt to offset iron with blood. No
rationality or military purpose attended to this decision, for
Germany was going to lose the war in any case. Rather, it
illustrated the destructive will of Nazi political and military
leaders, both against the enemy and their own population. In
directing terror at all, Nazi authorities took little notice of the
military situation and betrayed no regard for the well-being of the
local civilian population. All villages and hamlets were to be used
as obstacles and defensive positions, with the result that many
heretofore untouched by war fell victim to the wave of destruction
unleashed in the last days of the conflict. To the average citizen
this meant only unnecessary and pointless terror and devastation.
But to the Nazi leadership, having created a system that reveled in
terror and unwilling to bring the destruction to an end, there
existed another goal, yet realizable. For Hitler, the end of the
Nazi regime and the end of the German people and nation were to be
synonymous.
As war had assumed a life of its own, independent of the will of
the people, many Germans ironically saw their own soldiers as a
greater danger than the Americans. While Nazi propaganda continued
to portray Volk and army, citizen and soldier, forged together and
fighting side by side, civilians for the most part just wanted the
war to end, while Landers numbly fought on, exhausted from their
exertions, ground down by overwhelming enemy superiority, and
suffering from lack of supplies. The hesitancy of the American
advance, in a further paradox, ensured that more Germans, both
soldiers and civilians, would be killed—by both sides—and more
villages destroyed. For the civilian population, threatened by
brutal Nazi measures at the end of war, trust in the regime finally
came to an end. People could now see with their own eyes the
senselessness of continuation of the war, for there no longer
existed any possibility of winning or even defending against the
enemy. At the end of this war most Germans wanted only to preserve
and salvage what could be preserved and salvaged. They had already
begun thinking of the future and of the task of reconstruction. An
advertisement in the Windsheimer Zeitung for a local bank put it
succinctly, “save in war, build in peace!”
Thank you for a beautifully written piece that gave me more than the information I sought: percentage of casualties in the Volkssturm. I am a student of this war and I crave information presented in such an organized way. You write of the hesitancy of the American advance. That is something I don't know about--unless it has to do with allowing the Soviets the first bite of the Berlin apple. I think you are referring to something else. I will have to research that. Many thanks for the excellent details in your piece. Very specific.
ReplyDelete