Abstract
In the final months of the Second World War, large numbers of German soldiers and civilians were publicly executed by their fellow compatriots, often following decentralised summary judgment. Those targeted were people who up to that point had been part of the Nazi racial community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Judging these killings through the lens of a normatively singular ‘community’, however, has its limits. Local community structures changed rapidly and dramatically, especially as the frontline approached. A mass influx of soldiers, refugees, and other outside actors changed long-established certainties, and threatened the very fabric that had held these communities together during the previous years. These threats – both real and perceived – were acute and often had little bearing on the wider German society. This paper identifies and contextualises the motivations behind the many German-versus-German killings that took place while the regime collapsed. It restores agency to the different actors involved in late-war killings by examining six summary executions that took place in this period. Taken together, these examples show that the current narrative, which pits the ‘radicalised Nazi’ against the hapless German ‘defeatist’, needs adjusting; the ways in which these executions played out demonstrate that local circumstances greatly impacted behavioural patterns.
The last months of the Second World War rank among the most destructive and deadly in the history of Germany. More German civilians died between June 1944 and May 1945 than during the prior five years of war combined. 1 It was also a time during which the regime made its final efforts to rid itself of its enemies. Thousands of prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, foreign labourers, and political prisoners were killed during this period; crimes that have collectively become known as ‘Verbrechen der Endphase’, or ‘crimes of the final phase’. 2 The last two decades have seen scholars devote sustained attention to this wave of late-war violence. 3 Among those killed in 1945 were also large numbers of German soldiers and civilians who were publicly executed by their fellow compatriots – often following decentralised summary judgment – as a result of a supposed ‘betrayal’ to the community. Many of these executions took place days, or in some cases even hours, before Allied troops arrived in their respective communities. These public killings differed in one major aspect from other crimes of the final phase: they targeted people who up to that point had been part of the Nazi racial community, the Volksgemeinschaft.
These people were among the final victims of the Third Reich, and since the turn of the twenty-first century – which saw the acceptance of the idea of a multifaceted German victimhood 4 – their plight has been increasingly acknowledged. 5 Little research exists, however, that identifies and contextualises the motivations behind these German-versus-German killings. Being grouped together with other ‘crimes of the final phase’, they are mainly used to show how until the very end Nazi ideology influenced behavioural patterns at a local level. 6
Yet, in the final months of the war, community structures changed rapidly and dramatically, especially as the frontline approached. A mass influx of soldiers, refugees, and other outside actors changed long-established certainties and threatened the very fabric that had held these communities together during the previous years. These threats – both real and perceived – were acute and often had little bearing on the wider German society, the foundations of which had been steadily crumbing since the turn of the war. 7 On trial for their crimes after the war, perpetrators maintained that their actions were meant to combat ‘defeatism’, and pointed to the legislation of the time to argue that their behaviour followed the letter of the law. Judges and prosecutors rightly suspected ulterior motives – as did historians in the decades that followed – mainly drawing the conclusion that by adhering to these laws at this late stage of the war, the perpetrators were Nazi hardliners. This assumption, however, fails to fully appreciate two things.
First, it is not only Nazism, but also war itself that radicalises people. 8 Simply put: the approach of the frontline changed behaviour and refocused priorities. 9 There is an unmistakable correlation between the presence of the military and the spike in violence, and it is clear that the longer and area was fought over, the more likely it was that ‘crimes of the final phase’ would take place there. 10 It should be stressed that this paper examines the frontlines in western Germany where, in stark contrast with Eastern German Gaue such as East Prussia, Lower Silesia or Berlin, the path towards radicalisation rested much less on the fear of the Red Army. Nonetheless, the violence that occurred there – both its scale and its nature – only underscores the wider point this paper seeks to address: local differences mattered greatly in the way intra-ethnic violence played out. Unfortunately, without a surviving set of quantifiable data of perpetrators in cities such as Königsberg, Danzig, and Breslau, these areas remain under-investigated and prone to generalisations, but critically also here we see that German-versus-German violence was not only carried out by the singular ‘radicalised Party official’ as it emerged in the historiography. 11
Secondly, formal Nazi law above all served to enable behaviour that upheld citizens’ ‘communal obligations’, which, especially in times of war, would always be subordinated to ‘the need of the hour’. The Nazi judiciary, as the philosopher Herlinde Pauer-Studer rightly stresses, sought to create German law ‘which aligned with the moral feelings and sense of justice of those national comrades (Volksgenossen) whose lives it regulated’, and which would abandon ‘the opposition between law and morality’. 12 Since even Nazi legal scholars themselves struggled to identify what ‘German’ exactly meant within the context of law, it is hardly surprising that once German society became more fractured as a result of war, local differences emerged in the interpretation of ‘communal obligations’. Even within a totalitarian state, as Christian Gerlach has argued, there still existed ‘fairly unstable alliances between social groups with overall diverging political goals’ (‘coalitions of violence’) 13 which by inserting community-specific considerations helped determine the situation on the ground.
This paper will restore agency to the different actors involved in late-war executions by drawing attention to six public executions that took place in March and April 1945. Taken together, these examples show that the current narrative, which pits the ‘radicalised Nazi’ against the hapless German ‘defeatist’, needs adjusting; the ways in which these executions played out demonstrate that local circumstances greatly impacted behavioural patterns. The paper argues that our view of both the victims and the perpetrators of late-war intra-ethnic violence lacks nuance: more than the mere ‘closing act’ of National Socialism, German-versus-German killings in 1945 hinged heavily on local concerns and power structures. Researchers should look beyond the narrative of a top-down, totalitarian system in which these crimes took place and incorporate local anxieties and trepidations, while at the same time considering more critically how the proximity of enemy forces shaped the ways in which the different actors behaved.
In the years following the fall of the Nazi regime, prosecutors in both East- and West Germany sought to bring to justice those men and women who during the Third Reich perpetrated deadly crimes. 14 At the 1966 German Jurists’ Conference, the decision was taken to make the West-German courts’ legal proceedings publicly available and compile them as the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen series. The trial briefs that feature in this canonical series are comprehensive and detailed, ensuring that the series has dominated the historiography of the 1945 public executions. 15 The rationale behind its publication was to allow researchers to ‘thoroughly investigate the issues related to National Socialist crimes’, 16 which, although praiseworthy, has also had some drawbacks – especially in cases dealing with ‘crimes of the final phase’. 17 Since West-German prosecutors had to prove individual guilt, and had to show ‘base motives’ or ‘malicious and cruel’ behaviour in order to get a murder conviction, 18 they spent little time reconstructing the wider motivations and circumstances that prompted or enabled people to kill. Moreover, since defendants were tried according to the legal principle of nulla poena sine lege (‘no punishment without a law’), they were judged according to pre-existing Nazi wartime law, 19 in which the remits for killing had been defined ever broader. This effectively meant that prosecutors only started legal proceedings against those men and women who were considered to have deliberately and callously surpassed the Nazi regime's already broad mandate to kill. It was these murder cases that feature in the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen series, which unwittingly contributed to a skewed picture of the scope of and intent behind the killings. 20 What emerged was the idea that the fervent Nazism of those on trial had detached them from ‘true German’ norms and morals, which by 1945 had supposedly left them with a ‘private lust for power [and] pathological bloodthirst’. 21 Yet thousands of Germans were killed by their compatriots in the final months of the war, 22 and this should not solely be explained by zeroing in on the perverted behaviour of individuals. It is precisely for this reason that this paper will limit itself to the cases brought forth in the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: reading this extensive source base ‘against the grain’ will show that by taking a fresh look at what has been compiled thus far can yield genuinely different conclusions.
Germans’ violent inward-facing behaviour in 1945 cannot be understood without considering their country's broader historical context. Any German over the age of 40 had witnessed both the First World War and its aftermath, in which their once-proud nation became an international pariah plagued with internal strife. 23 By 1945 those traumatic memories of ‘1918’ were still acutely felt, and the sense of guardianship many Germans in this age cohort shared, what Nicholas Stargardt refers to as ‘intergenerational responsibility’ was acutely felt. 24 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Germany underwent a ‘socialisation of violence’ (Vergesellschaftung der Gewalt), and transformed steadily into a country where ‘the organisation and use of force could no longer be limited to military institutions’. 25 Violence became so pervasive in Germany that contemporaries failed to recognise its unique symbiotic link with Nazism. During the Weimar years, ‘Nazi-violence’, whether it served to further its cause, act as a deterrent, or was used as means of communication, existed side-by-side with similar right-wing, Free Corps, communist or Marxist violence, 26 and was seemingly reigned in after 1934, when the regime was truly in the saddle. After 1934 it was mainly directed against ‘community aliens’, most notably during the November 1938 Kristallnacht, but, crucially, it never merely took place in the shadows. 27 As Detlev Peukert succinctly put it, it was highly visible, was documented in the press during the Third Reich, was given legitimacy in speeches of the Reich's leaders and was approved and welcomed by many Germans, at any rate while its targets were ‘enemies’ on the left and, later, the ‘asocial’. 28
The creation of a broadly defined but narrowly envisioned Volksgemeinschaft where ‘all authority emanates from the Volk’ 29 offered a certain ‘plausible deniability’ for both the Nazis and other members of the German majority society. Official legislation enacted by the Nazis offered much scope for violence to be directed against different groups placed outside of the norms. ‘Good citizens’ in Nazi Germany did not necessarily have to subscribe to core Nazi beliefs: they could act on ‘older German theories of heredity, race, “degeneration”, and criminality’, or on other long-established social prejudices against homosexuals or ‘gypsies’, knowing that carrying out violence against groups and individuals that met these prejudices could be done with impunity. 30 During the war, we see a similar interplay in Eastern Europe, where the Germans gave local populations free reign to act on their long-standing feelings of hatred toward local outsiders (often Jews and communists), but – even though they were in full agreement with it and created its conditions – without publicly claiming responsibility for it. 31 These dynamics have long been acknowledged in the scholarly literature, but are not applied to the intra-ethnic violence of 1945. There is still a tendency to detach late-war killings from this wider history and instead stick to clear ‘morally unjust’ killings to reflect on the regime's final months. This selective use of Justiz and NS-Verbrechen cases has led to a closed loop where every perpetrator also ‘happens to be’ a Nazi. 32 With the series’ stated mission to explore ‘Nazi violence’, it is perhaps less of a surprise that the other major driver of morality, religion, seems to have been kept out of the courtroom when ‘crimes of the final phase’ were on the docket. In the cases below, religion is not mentioned at all, and by and large the defendants’ faith remains conspicuously absent in the series. 33
Perpetrators of late-war summary execution came from all walks of society, although there is no denying that many aspects of the Volksgemeinschaft made the path to intra-ethnic violence clearer. Especially the community's self-policing nature stands out as an important dynamic of the Nazi dictatorship. Historians’ fuller appreciation of the importance of this dynamic has drastically changed our perception of the scope of Nazi-terror and the way it was carried out during the Third Reich. Terror was not a top-down endeavour with the blanket goal of keeping the entire population in check, rather it was applied to select groups of well-established opponents. 34 Intimidation, as Pierre Bourdieu highlights, ‘can only be asserted on a person predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it, whereas others will ignore it’. 35 The limited size of the wartime Gestapo – Nazi-Germany's domestic instrument of terror – meant that its own initiative was expected from every Volksgenosse: most Gestapo investigations were only opened after members of the community provided concrete leads, hardly ever did it act on its own volition. 36 Eric A. Johnson found that its officials remained ‘extremely cautious when dealing with the ordinary German population and always concentrated the bulk of their terror on selected groups of targeted enemies’, a practice they kept up until the very end. 37 Repression and terror depended heavily on denunciations and public spectacle. Critically, the reasons to report, confront, or mock one's neighbour or co-worker extended well beyond mere ‘regime loyalty’: personal motives and self-interest were among the main drivers of this behaviour. 38
We should therefore not only ask ‘if’ and to what extent German Volksgenossen felt terrorised and threatened in 1945, but also by whom. In some of Germany's bigger cities, such as Berlin, Königsberg and Munich, where Gestapo-, police, and military headquarters were still intact and remained operational until the very end, the regime continued to exact its power through acts of repression and terror, but in many other communities its power eroded. 39 Gestapo officials focused almost all of their attention on traditional enemies by clearing out prisons or killing political opponents behind prison walls. 40 Meanwhile, many Party officials busied themselves with destroying incriminating documents, and many uniforms went up in flames in an effort to distance themselves from Nazism. Rather than tying themselves unreservedly to the Nazi cause at five minutes to twelve, often Party officials passively awaited defeat. 41 Put differently, if Germans felt terrorised in 1945, it was not only the instruments of the Party or state that took the initiative. 42
As the tide of war turned, Germans’ trust in the regime eroded, and even though most realised that everyone was ‘in the same boat’, 43 the different outlooks on the war's end nevertheless ate away at the foundations of the vaunted Volksgemeinschaft. They deepened the fractures that continued to exist between and within different local communities. Those still convinced that Germany could win might consider resorting to acts of terror in an effort to keep their neighbours in line, 44 while others choose to retreat into the private sphere. 45 In the final years of the Nazi regime, the Volksgemeinschaft had become, in Clemens Vollnhals’ words, an ‘apathetic emergency organisation that had only one goal: surviving the war’. 46 At the same time, many Germans were looking for ways to survive the coming peace too – ‘Enjoy the war, the peace will be dire’, as the saying ran. 47 A town's ‘known troublemaker’ 48 could therefore fall under sudden suspicion when he or she was considered to potentially cause problems in the postwar world, and there are cases in the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen of murders following individuals’ threats to reveal what happened in a town during the Nazi years. 49 Others might have chosen to leave the past in the past or realised that it was better to hold their tongues for the time being and come forward with incriminating information at a more opportune moment than the spring of 1945. This (un)willingness to kill aligns with Kühne's findings on Germans’ collectivist ethos and desire for community as basis for mass murder. Although this paper does not engage with mass murder, at microlevel, there is clearly some resemblance to Kühne's idea of togetherness through the removal of ‘pollution’, that is, the notion that ‘The only way to rebuild “Us” is to eliminate “Them.” To reassure one's own collective identity, it is necessary to get rid of the “Other.”’ 50
This brings us to what might be called an ‘inverse survivor bias’ 51 in the current historiography: it is only cases where the victim is murdered that caught the attention of postwar prosecutors and, subsequently, historians. Our views of the ‘final phase’ are retrospective, whereas the behaviour of perpetrators was prospective. The path from the victims’ supposed ‘criminal act’ in 1945 to their executions took many steps. It was only when all of these steps were taken that we end up with a summary execution. Many Germans discussed, yelled, or murmured defeatist remarks in the presence of others, but often the addressee simply took the insult without taking action against the ‘defeatist’ in question – if only because at this stage of the war there were more pressing issues. When someone nevertheless felt offended or slated enough to pursue the matter, the situation of 1945 ensured that outcomes could still vary. Sometimes acquaintances caught wind of an impending arrest and told denounced persons to make themselves scarce for a while (something we see especially in the military). 52 Faced with the overall chaos of those days, local constabularies often had little time, resources, or willingness to pursue the matter. If defeatists were arrested, they could still be given a relatively minor punishment or let go after interrogation. Whether or not someone was summarily executed was highly dependent on the internal dynamics of the communities in which they took place. Viewing Germany 1945 as a (mental and physical) space where these summary executions took place is only correct insofar we also consider that the mechanics that allowed them to happen also swung the other way.
During their postwar trials, perpetrators deliberately hid behind this muddled state of the German rule of law as it existed in 1945, and claimed to have executed their victims in the name of a wide variety of authorities and jurisdictions. Certainly, the war had seen a sprawl of bodies that possessed some form of summary jurisdiction (Standgerichtsbarkeit), 53 which hardened as the war worsened for Germany. In effect, Nazi authorities’ reliance on summary courts allowed decentralised violence to take on a life of its own, as it sanctioned social groups with diverging goals to inject their own morals into the killing process. They were very much aware of what Wolfgang Franz Werner has dubbed the Verinselung, or ‘islandisation’ of society, 54 and the anticipated breakdown of communications between the centre and periphery was built into the judicial process. The most notable effort to decentralise the judicial process was Reich Minister Otto Thierack's 15 February 1945 ‘Decree on the Establishment of Summary Courts’, which ordered that ‘anyone who attempts to shirk their duties to the community, especially those who do so out of cowardice or self-interest, must be immediately held accountable with the necessary severity’. 55 The novelty of Thierack's decree lay in the fact that it granted Party officials the power to summarily execute individuals in areas that were immediately threatened by the enemy: these powers had up to that point been reserved to the military. 56 Jürgen Zarusky aptly calls the decree an ‘instrument of eradication’ (Instrument des ‘Ausmerzens’), while also chastising the West-German judiciary which, in its repeated recognition of the legitimacy of these summary courts, was ‘completely blind to reality’. 57 As a result, as Geoffrey Hosking rightly asserts, ‘we have been unduly influenced by lawyers seeking retrospectively to justify authoritarian social relationships by drawing up documents based on Roman or canon law, which drew too sharply the demarcation between rulers and ruled’. 58 Doing so ignores Germans’ own agency and implicitly suggests a strict top-down approach in which ‘Berlin’ remained able to assert its will unobstructed upon all its subjects until the very end. Historians’ willingness to follow this line of argument stands in sharp contrast with the research dedicated to dispelling the ‘superior orders’ defence put forward by German generals on trial, which time and again showed that the individual agency of German field commanders was crucially important in the ways in which mass murder and genocide played out – especially in the ‘lawless’ area that was the Eastern Front. 59
The case that typifies how historians have so far dealt with summary executions, and by far the best-known case of a summary execution, is that of Robert Limpert, a student from Ansbach, a town not far from Nuremberg. 60 Having witnessed the destruction of Würzburg, Limpert started printing pamphlets that urged Ansbach's citizens to refrain from fighting, and on 18 April he even went to city hall to discuss Ansbach's surrender with its mayor, Albert Böhm. Böhm was an archetypical Nazi official, and the only notable Party member to remain in the town. He had joined the NSDAP in 1923 and the SS in 1933. Böhm was open to Limpert's ideas as he did not consider the imminent occupation much cause for concern, and it is worth noting that neither one of the men considered their conversation out of the usual given the situation. 61 On his way to discuss his progress with like-minded others, Limpert learned that the area's battle commander, Oberst Dr. Ernst Meyer, intended to defend the town ‘to the end’. He therefore decided to take personal action by cutting the telephone lines to the military command post. He was spotted by two Hitler Youths, who passed on what they saw to the local police. Limpert was searched by police officer Zippold, who found a gun, wire cutters, a ski mask, and pamphlets. Zippold nevertheless pointed out to his colleague ‘that [Limpert] could lose his head if he got into the hands of the battle commander’, and, given how close American troops were, he ‘expressed asked’ whether they ‘should let the man go’. His colleague instead opted to call Oberst Meyer, who came over from Nuremberg (about one hour from Ansbach). Upon his arrival, Zippold shared his findings with Oberst Meyer, who immediately formed a kangaroo court that he headed himself. 62 Trying to maintain a semblance of legality, Meyer ordered Zippold, Zippold's superior, and his orderly to take place on it, after which he summarily sentenced Limpert to death, personally hanging him not much later that day.
Limpert's acts can rightly be considered to be heroic, and he was one of the few people who, in the closing days of the war, took active steps to prevent damage to his community. It was one of the cases that featured in the Justiz-und NS-Verbrechen, 63 and local newspapers had on occasion turned to it prior to the series’ publication. The brief of this court case lay at the basis of Elke Fröhlich's research (‘A young martyr’) for the acclaimed Bayern in der NS-Zeit. Fröhlich's examination is multifaceted and offers a thorough analysis of both Limpert's actions and motivations in the run-up to his execution, as well as those of the other actors involved in it – judging the whole series of events to be a ‘macabre piece of mindless police official routine’. 64 The story of a relatable and amicable young student who falls victim to a brutishly fanatic Nazi also contains clear moralistic lessons, which meant that the last days of Limpert's life were discussed at local high schools during the 1950s and 1960s. 65
During the last two decades, Limpert's case was introduced to the broader international audience, featuring in the works of Stephen G. Fritz (Endkampf, 2004) and Ian Kershaw (The End, 2011). Especially Fritz's study stays close to the source base, and argues that men like Meyer were ‘running amok against the reality of defeat’. 66 Meyer remained loyal to the Nazi cause even during his 1947 trial, allowing Fritz to conclude that the brutality of Meyer's behaviour was rooted in the ‘extreme sense of duty to the Führer [which] outweighed all notions of morality or compassion’. 67 There should be no doubt that Fritz accurately captured Meyer's notion of ‘duty’, but accepting Meyer's postwar justification as self-evident poses historiographical problems. What we are left with is the idea that ‘duty’ equated to ‘killing’, and that ‘duty’ was above all felt to the regime, which largely ignores that many Party members interpreted duty differently. Those officials who left Ansbach apparently saw it as their duty to keep the Party apparatus intact on the constantly decreasing territory still in the regime's hands (conveniently getting out of harm's way in the process), whereas, as evidenced by mayor Böhm, others felt that their duty was towards their Kreis, city, or town. Again, other Party members, as we will see below, saw it as their duty not to survive the regime by committing suicide.
In 2011 Ian Kershaw used the Limpert case to show that ‘in its terroristic repression the Nazi regime functioned to the last’, making the point that ‘those wielding power continued to work in the interests of the regime’. 68 Here Kershaw alludes both to the top-down dimensions of the Volksgemeinschaft and the continued effectiveness of the Party apparatus during the war's final months, but he downplays a number of important points – especially regarding the perpetrators. Meyer was not among ‘those wielding power’ in the town during the previous years of Nazi rule (but Böhm was), rather he executed Limpert in his capacity as the area's battle commander (incidentally, Kershaw does not reflect on Meyer's military background, and the way this might have shaped Meyer's outlook). In fact, had Meyer been part of the community, he could have tried Limpert according to ‘regular’ summary law, in which case there would not have been grounds for Meyer's postwar prosecution. 69 Secondly, ‘those wielding power’ were not the ones who set Limpert on a course to death (once again, Böhm played no role in it): it is fanatical Hitler Youths and complacent low-ranking police officers that lay the groundwork for Limpert's eventual execution. For his heroism, Limpert deserves our attention and admiration, but by playing up the role of the singular perpetrator Meyer at the expense of a closer analysis of the community in which Limpert's execution took place, an image emerges that is not representative of the war's final months.
The ‘victim-perpetrator’ dichotomy perpetuated by the attention to cases such as Limpert's poses historiographic challenges, some of which we have touched on above. After the war, many of the victims of late-war summary executions were elevated to the status of ‘opponents’ or ‘resisters’, both in academic works and as part of public memory culture. Yet, as Edgar Wolfrun rightly stresses, not all victims opposed the regime, and establishing who classified as a ‘resister’ is not a straight-forward process. Wolfrum establishes two important indicators of resistance: a ‘partly conscious opposition to National Socialism’ and the ‘willingness to take risks’. 70 A closer look at these – generously defined – markers, shows that the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen cases that have been used up to this point indeed fit these categories, 71 but a great many other cases, which show other dynamics of late-war intra-ethnic violence and which do not fit these markers, are ignored. 72
Challenging the first marker, the ‘partly conscious opposition to National Socialism’, we see that among the victims there is a significant group of mid-level NSDAP officials that fits particularly awkwardly in our current understanding of the 1945 intra-ethnic murders. On 3 April 1945, in the district of Sontheim in the city of Heilbronn, Karl Taubenberger, a former deputy Ortsgruppenleiter who had long been a ‘staunch supporter of the NSDAP’, was executed as he had not obstructed the dismantlement of an anti-tank barrier. Taubenberger had earlier tried to gain official permission to have it removed but failed to locate the local Ortsgruppenleiter. When a local woman was arrested for her role in the dismantlement of the anti-tank barrier, she was pressed by Heilbronn's Kreisleiter Richard Drauz to name others and stated that Taubenberger had been present at the scene. Drauz, who already held a low opinion of Taubenberger, immediately ordered his execution. 73 Taubenberger was called into the Kreisleitung, and was clearly unaware of his ‘wrongdoing’, as he informally addressed those present and wanted to shake Drauz's hand as he entered. Drauz brusquely rejected this gesture, and informed Taubenberger that he was sentenced to death for ordering the dismantling of the anti-tank barrier. Taubenberger unsuccessfully pleaded his case, after which he was brought back to the anti-tank barrier, where he was executed by three Volkssturm men. A sign was placed around his neck with the text ‘This is what happens to all traitors’. 74
A similar scenario played out in Ingelheim, a city on the south-western bank of the Rhine. On 9 March 1945, the ‘old fighter’ Hermann Berndes was appointed as its battle commander and tasked with its defence. A week later, in the night of 16–17 March 1945, orders arrived at the local Party headquarters indicating that most of the city's functionaries were to make their way across the Rhine – making Berndes one of the few Party officials to remain. The next day he took measures to bring the city in a state of defence, but was told by Volkssturm company commanders that they were too poorly equipped to be of any real use. In the hours that followed army units flooded back through Ingelheim, and to determine a course of action, Berndes repeatedly tried to contact military commands. When these could not be reached, he had a white flag prepared.
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The next morning, 17 March, Berndes ordered the dissolution of the Volkssturm, and had party members disarm the Hitler Youths. Although many of these men complied with his orders, some of them notified the SS and accused Berndes of treason. A few hours later, Oberst Weiß, the army commander of ‘Bridgehead Mainz’ (a short-lived defensive entity of which Ingelheim was part), dispatched Major Otto Karl Kraffert to the city to take over its defence. After learning of Berndes’ actions, Major Kraffert had him arrested. That evening the city's higher Party officials discussed his fate and decided that an immediate execution was the only suitable punishment. On 19 March at 03:45, the major and some of Ingelheim's few remaining Party members hanged Berndes from a chestnut tree on the town hall square with a sign on his chest reading, ‘This is how everyone dies who betrays his fatherland’. Shortly thereafter they left the city, which was occupied by American troops on 20 March, without a fight.
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In 1947 the court concluded that the actions of Berndes’ erstwhile colleagues constituted …the disgraceful murder of a man – an old fighter of the regime – who had put himself at the disposal of the regime for its entire duration, and who only eight days earlier had been entrusted with the great powers of that of combat commander of the Ingelheim Volkssturm. In no way did he belong to a party hostile to the regime, let alone to an ‘inferior race’; he was only ever a valued member of the ‘movement’.
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with strong contempt for Dr. Bergmann, because he was of the opinion that as representative of the state he had woefully fallen short and shown a cowardly, fear-driven attitude. He saw in Bergmann's suicide attempt at this hour a cowardly dereliction of duty, like a desertion. The Führer has transferred summary jurisdiction to the Reich Defence Commissioners. The Reich Defence Commissioner has appointed me as his deputy. The Landrat Bergmann has tried in a cowardly manner to take his life. I sentence him to death. Drive him somewhere outside of the city and shoot him.
The many executions of Party members by their erstwhile comrades are a clear reflection of the radicalised uncertainty that held much of Germany in its grip during the war's final months. These men had depended on each other for many years and, once one of them ‘fell out of line’, had much reason to feel disappointed and betrayed. In the current literature, we tend to find this back as Party members ‘settling old scores’, 80 but once again we should keep in mind that this accusation constituted the ‘base motive’ that formed the foundation of a postwar trial. Scores could also be settled after the war, and in fact the very first case that features in the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen is that of a murder that takes place more than a week after the liberation of a village, Wetterfeld, by the Americans (yet it is still classified as a ‘crime of the final phase’). 81 Moreover, as a result of their position, they were often the first to familiarise themselves with new laws, and some of these officials used the perceived leeway new legislation gave them as a way of showing initiative and willingness to continue to shape the regime's course. 82 Kreisleiter Heilig offers the clearest example of this: by falsely invoking the Thierack decree and by claiming that as the Gauleiter's deputy he had summary jurisdiction, he knowingly overstepped his authority. In effect, regime hardliners did not only use these laws in their attempts to terrorise the larger German population, they just as much served to keep each other in check. In the diverging courses of action of their colleagues, they saw proof that traitors had been in their midst all along, which led to a sharp increase of inward-facing terror. On trial for the murder of Berndes, his two party comrades claimed to have been gripped by a kind of ‘Endkampf-psychosis’, since as party members they had been exposed to ‘constant appeals’ that sought to curb a ‘softening’ of attitudes (Weichwerden). This, they argued to the court, ensured that terror ‘extended to the last member of the party apparatus and also spread through the Wehrmacht. All impulses of reason were cruelly suppressed as treason and cowardice before the enemy’. 83 Although statements such as this gloss over the possibility of independent critical thought and deliberately diminish the responsibility and agency of the party's rank-and-file, doubtlessly efforts were made to create an environment where war-ending efforts were looked upon with the deepest suspicion. Both Taubenberger and Berndes tried to communicate with other Party and military commands right up to when they acted ‘in defiance’. As representatives of the community, they acted in line with everything that had been expected of them, and saw it as their duties to ensure the survival of their respective communities. They actively considered to fight to the last bullet, but eventually rejected that option when they no longer considered it viable. 84 Bergmann acted even more in line with Nazi principles, and considered it his duty not to survive the regime. The trial briefs do not give any indication that these men felt that they acted in opposition to National Socialism; rather strongly suggest that they interpreted their duty to the regime differently than their Party counterparts.
Wolfrun's other marker, the ‘deliberate willingness to take risks’, is also not met in numerous cases. Many people were executed after merely having uttered ‘defeatist’ remarks that were overheard, after which they were denounced by others. These denouncers could either be members of their own community, or people who temporarily stayed there (such as refugees), or people who moved through it as a result of the developing wartime circumstances (such as soldiers). The war, and especially its final year, uprooted millions of Germans, and both the anxieties from the refugees themselves and the fear of how their arrival would alter long-standing community structures contributed to feelings of unease.
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Local actors dealt with these (perceived) sudden changes the war brought upon their towns and cities in different ways. Some stuck to the self-policing practises that had come to define the years of Nazi rule, while others, as a Gestapo report already noted in November 1943, ‘hold back from making complaints because they do not want to take responsibility for the expected high sentences’.
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These are the two sides of Selbstermächtigung, which had earlier been directed at Jews and other social outsiders.
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Denunciations continued until the very last moments of the Third Reich,
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which we already saw in the case of Hermann Berndes. Whereas earlier in the war, defeatist remarks could lead to months-long prison sentences, the looming end of the war changed that. Being interviewed for The Nazis: A warning from History in the 1990s, Walter Ferner, a former National-Socialist Leadership Officer in charge of a summary court-martial, explained why, 50 years after the facts, he still believed that sentencing soldiers and civilians to death for minor acts of defeatism had been a valid course of action at that point of the war. When a judge says ‘this is a case for a court-martial’, then I cannot say ‘why don't we sentence him to three or six months in prison?’ That would be like saying to soldiers ‘Why don't you commit some minor offence, get sentenced by a court-martial, and get locked up for six months? By the time you’re out, the war will be over, the others dead, and you alive’.
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Party and army often worked together at local level to defend German territory, and as a result, the lines of communication were often short. The execution of Volkssturm man Eugen Spilger on 20 April 1945 shows how the military initially identified a breach of its values, but subsequently expected the Party to deal with it. In mid-April, Spilger tried to cycle from his hometown of Neckartenzlingen to his evacuated family in Simmerfeld in the Black Forest, a distance of 70 kilometres, or 45 miles, to the west. During his trip he learned that Simmerfeld had already been occupied by French forces, but he nevertheless continued until the town of Nagold – about two-thirds of the way – where he was strafed by enemy fighters and met by fleeing German civilians who told him that enemy tanks were rapidly approaching. These events prompted Spilger to turn around and return to Neckartenzlingen. In the evening of his return, he visited the local inn, where he reiterated the stories of the refugees he had encountered, surmising that the French would soon be in Tübingen (about 10 miles west of Neckartenzlingen). His story was overheard by two Volkssturm men, who dismissively discussed it upon return at their barracks. The town's battle commander, a certain Leutnant Schmid, also happened to be present there, and ordered Spilger's arrest. Spilger was brought to the command post of Leutnant Schmid, who interrogated him the next day. He was forced to wear a sign around his neck that read, ‘I am a malicious rumour-spreader’, and was brought to the nearby Nürtingen Kreisleitung, where a summary court had been established a few days earlier. Schmid wanted to set an example by executing Spilger, since a few days prior, inhabitants had demonstrated against the planned demolition of a nearby bridge over the Neckar. Having to appear in front of a summary court, Spilger now fell under the jurisdiction of the deputy Kreisleiter Häsler, 92 who oversaw political measures in the district. Häsler considered foregoing official summary proceedings and discussed the matter with his subordinate Hagen, who suggested bringing Spilger to Neuffen, where Hagen knew ‘reliable people’. The reliable person in question was a non-commissioned officer, Pionierzugsführer Dettmer, who after Spilger's arrival phoned Hagen to express his ‘reservations about carrying out this order’, especially since there was no official paperwork. He proposed alternatives, such as having Spilger dig defensive positions, but Hagen remained adamant ‘that the order must be carried out under all circumstances’. Hagen dispatched an employee from the Kreisleitung to Dettmer in Neuffen, after which the two men executed Spilger. The series of events get infinitely sadder if we consider that Spilger's execution could have been the result of mistaken identity, since during the 1950 trial one of the defendants stated that it might have resulted from the ‘confusion with another case where a non-commissioned officer had failed to blow up a bridge in defiance of received orders’ a few days earlier. 93
Also, the execution of Eberhard Osthoff,
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close to Tarmstedt (near Bremen), shows the impact of the military on a community. As a specialist engineer for the Luftwaffe, Osthoff was called up in October 1944 to serve in an anti-aircraft unit, and had used his military connections to obtain a posting near his place of residence. This allowed him to return home at the end of his shift, which made him unpopular in his unit – something that was aggravated by the fact that he was often called away to inspect local searchlights. Moreover, as an intelligent man who managed to assert his interests over others, he was ‘not particularly popular with the residents’ either. The combination of his vague military connections, the absence from his unit, the inspections of other military installations, and his reputation as a smart but peculiar man ensured that rumours started circulating that he was a spy. On the other hand, ‘no one could accuse him of anything defamatory or even accuse him of a criminal act’. This changed in April 1945, when different military units moved into the area. The first of these was a so-called Auffangstab (collection staff),
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whose men – often hardened veterans – were tasked with returning soldiers to their units. Part of this staff were Oberleutnant von Steegen, an East Prussian estate-holder, and Oberfeldwebel Lange, who was wounded during the fighting in East Prussia two months earlier. Here we see concrete evidence that the arrival of refugees from Eastern Germany contributed to the anxieties felt by the local population. These men came into contact with a unit of parachutists who, as part of their retreat, had arrived in the area and who ‘wanted to continue fighting despite the desperate military situation in order to force an honourable outcome to the war’. The parachutists were quartered in Osthoff's house, where the group discussed Germany's plight, and where especially von Steegen lamented the loss of his ancestral homeland. He was outraged and desperate that more and more Germans considered the continuation of the war pointless and were not willing to make any more sacrifices. But what galled him most was the thought that some of them aided the conquering enemy by weakening their own defences through espionage or sabotage.
The final case is that of the murder of the retired Feldgendarmeriewachtmeister Michael Lottner in Regensburg on 23 April 1945. Earlier that day, rumours had started circulating that there was going to be a demonstration for the city's bloodless surrender at the central Moltke square, in front of the local Kreisleitung. By 6 p.m. a ‘large crowd’, mostly consisting of women and children, had gathered, and chanted slogans in the direction of the Kreisleitung hoping to persuade the Party not to fight for the city. In line with ‘social role theory’, which argues that ‘women will generally act more communally and less instrumentally than men in the same context’, we see the women of Regensburg gathering in a large group to force change. 98 This behaviour evidently prevented officials from pinning the mood on an individual ‘dissenter’, and they clearly show reluctance to engage such a large group of people. On top of that, the gendered Nazi dismissal of women as actors capable of affecting change seems to have played a role. 99 Party officials fired shots over the crowd and sounded an air raid alarm, but the crowd refused to disperse. Whereas local officials stuck to threats, the neighbouring building was occupied by Volkssturm men from Coburg, who ‘arrested men, women, children and wounded at random and dragged and pushed them into the Kreisleitung’. Two Volkssturm men were stabbed in the resulting commotion – one in the neck, and one in the eye. Not much later, Lottner was brought into the Kreisleitung, being accused of these stabbings. Rather than being asked to explain his actions, he was beaten and kicked mercilessly. At some point during this abuse, ‘Lottner apparently saw an opportunity to evade his tormentors for the moment, because he jumped towards an open sliding door to (…) the adjoining conference room’. At that point, Hans Hoffmann, a high-ranking member of the Kreisleitung staff, and HJ-Bannführer Müller both fired a single shot at him from close range, killing him instantly. Only a small folded and clean pocketknife was found when his body was searched, leaving the men at the Kreisleitung to conclude that Lottner was not responsible for the stabbings. When a day later a hearse arrived to transport him to the cemetery, Hoffmann stopped the corpse bearers, and after a telephone call with the Kreisleiter ordered them to bring the corpse to the Moltkeplatz and place it next to two other corpses of men who had been hanged a few days before, following their conviction by a summary court. 100 Hoffmann told the men that ‘He won’t go to the cemetery to be celebrated as a hero, bring him to the others on the Moltkeplatz!’ 101 As a result of a series of compounding errors of judgment, Lottner was turned from a passive member of a crowd into an active resister unworthy of regular burial. In an effort to cover up Lottner's murder, the perpetrators hid behind the muddled jurisdictions of the time, trying to pass the spectacle of his displayed corpse as ‘proof’ of proportionate and justified summary judgment.
The brevity of this article cannot offer a complete image of late-war summary executions, but it has pointed to some of the limits of our current methodology, and showed that it is worthwhile to look at these crimes differently. To reconstruct the nature of their behaviour, those involved in summary executions should be brought into the fold of wider Third Reich perpetrator research. 102 A sentiment both victims and perpetrators shared was that they considered themselves to be at a so-called ‘critical juncture’: their actions indicate that they felt that there was a window during which there was ‘a substantially heightened probability that [their] choices [would] affect the outcome of interest’. 103 Few of the victims were heroic resisters, but many of them were emboldened to protest or be subversive. These acts constituted ‘interruptions of routines’, and put them on a path to death. 104 Perpetrators, meanwhile, engaged in what the political scientist Kathleen Thelen has called ‘institutional layering’, ‘the partial renegotiation of some elements of a given set of institutions while leaving others in place’. 105 Capital punishment was an accepted part of the Third Reich, but its move from the state to the street nevertheless represented an important change. Thelen's findings also align closely with those of social scientist Kjell Anderson, who asserts that ‘the decision to perpetrate, like all decisions, is made not in terms of absolute values, but rather according to the ranking of values’. 106 Just as German genocidal policies rested on more than anti-Semitism alone, so these executions depended on more than just radicalised Nazism.
The wider processes that shaped and brutalised German conduct elsewhere earlier in the war can also be observed in 1945. There is a notable link between Germans’ domestic tendency to self-police their communities and the 1945 executions, but it should be stressed that it was the approach of the frontline that transformed policing into killing, and as such these executions represent more than a mere continuity of ‘home front’ policies. The prospect of having to face the approaching enemy forces hardened attitudes among some civilians and officials, while at the same time German troops imposed their norms upon the communities they were ordered to defend. Many of their compatriots would inevitably ‘fall short’, and the ways in which their supposed shortcomings were dealt with was highly dependent on local circumstances and the attitudes of the actors involved.
It therefore makes little sense to speak in absolutes when dealing with Germany in 1945: neither was it a lawless no man's land, nor did every area remain under the full control of the regime. Certainly, Nazism continued to inform behavioural patterns, but at the same time we see that decision-making became a more local affair. It is worth remembering that for every village, town, or city engulfed in intra-ethnic violence, another would fall to the Allies without a fight or following mere symbolic resistance. Rather than reverting to the evocative but analytically meaningless concept of Götterdämmerung as a way to explain late-war violence, we should establish the different flashpoints of killing and dying, and apply to them the lessons of sociology, psychology, and criminology with the same rigour as they have been applied to other examples of German mass violence. The 1945 summary executions were part of the widespread violence that erupted in the war's final months. Like the many Nazi mass killings that came before them, they were carried out following different concerns and motivations, and should be treated as such. The perpetrators’ overall lack of remorse stems from a failure to understand how Nazism had hardened and radicalised them: they saw their actions as being rooted not only in regime loyalty, but also in organisational norms and local concerns, which, although deeply flawed, helps us better understand why these executions were so widespread in the war's closing months. The fall of Nazism was without a doubt the main catalyst for German-versus-German violence, but the violence it engendered should not be viewed solely through the prism of a nation-wide inevitability. Local circumstances played a decisive role in the ways in which violence played out at local level.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Large parts of this paper were developed during my time as a member of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Compromised Identities? Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism’, funded by the AHRC and the Pears Foundation, and the project ‘Communities of Violence: Public Execution in Germany 1945’, funded by the Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship SAS-2020-005\3.
