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Review
| Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, by Stephen G. Fritz. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 416 pp. $35.00, cloth.
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| Stephen G. Fritz examines the little known and neglected story of Nazi efforts to thwart the U.S. Army's advance through the Franconian region of central Bavaria in the last months of World War II, and a concurrent disinformation campaign that changed U.S. strategy in Germany in 1945. Basing his study largely upon published and unpublished German and American primary sources, Fritz presents the story in a fast-paced format that will keep the reader intrigued. He notes that intelligence failures preceding the American defeat at Kasserine Pass in North Africa (1943), substantial U.S. casualties among the hedgerows in Normandy (1944), and the unexpected German offensive through the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge 1944–1945) had by early 1945 convinced Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, that he could not afford to dismiss intelligence reports that remnants of the German military were actively attempting to establish an Alpenfestung (Alpine redoubt) which the Nazis hoped would enable them to initiate a guerrilla war and prolong the fighting for months. As early as July 1944, Swiss intelligence began informing Office of Strategic Services (OSS) station chief Allen W. Dulles in Bern, Switzerland that despite the massive human and material resources arrayed against them, the Germans would likely continue their hopeless struggle with a last-ditch effort in the south. Fritz points out that Dulles was somewhat skeptical of the Swiss assessment, but forwarded the information on to Washington. Subsequent reports from other sources, however, supported the Swiss analysis. Aware that the redoubt would sit within the eventual U.S, zone of occupation, American planners realized that it was up to the U.S. Army to keep it from becoming operational. |
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According to SS-Sturmbahnführer Hans Gontard, who headed the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service or SD) office in a small Austrian border town on the Bodensee, he intercepted an OSS transmission to Washington and was amazed that the Americans found the story credible. He also believed that a redoubt should be created. By September, the SD sent a letter to Nazi Party head and personal secretary to Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann, pressing for the creation of a mountain redoubt. Bormann failed to pass it on to the Führer, but the potential propaganda value of a supposed Alpenfestung was not lost on Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who worked quickly to exploit American fears through a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign. Fritz recounts how in December 1944 Goebbels called a secret meeting with German journalists and editors at which he stressed the need for absolute secrecy regarding stories concerning an Alpine redoubt, thus ensuring that word would spread. Rumors about the redoubt were leaked also to neutral embassies and to the Wehrmacht so that German prisoners of war and neutral governments would relate similar information to Allied intelligence gatherers,. This plan was designed to give the mythical redoubt more credence. The ruse brought tangible results. Fritz gives Goebbels partial credit for Eisenhower's decision not to send his forces toward Berlin. Instead, Ike determined to divide Germany in two, sending units to the south and southeast in order to interdict German troop movements headed for concentration in the Alps. |
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The German response to the relentless American advance through Bavaria varied. Resistance could be fierce, but on the whole, it was sporadic and uncoordinated. Fritz relates that some towns decided to fight and the GIs promptly subjected them to machine gun and artillery fire that reduced them to burning rubble. Civilians in several towns wished to save their homes from destruction, asking their troops to pull out and then removed tank traps and other defensive obstacles before the Americans arrived. In one town, local women told a German officer to withdraw his soldiers. When he refused, they continued to press him. Perturbed, he threatened to line them up and shoot every fifth one; the women dispersed. However, residents discovered the officer's body the next morning. His former command withdrew soon after. By April 1945, many German soldiers and civilians who had witnessed the U.S. Army's staggering superiority in men, vehicles, and weaponry, realized the senselessness of resistance, but still there were fanatics who decided to continue the fight, even after Germany's surrender. The last chapters of Endkampf describe the initial American occupation, a period in which terror groups such as Werwolf and Edelweiss Piraten sporadically beat, shot, bombed, and maimed victors and German government officials. |
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Endkampf is an outstanding addition to the historiography of the Second World War in Europe and should be used in undergraduate and graduate history courses on World War II or Nazi Germany. |
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| Rutgers State University |
Paul B. Hatley |
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