Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself. The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945

It was the same story with all the people from the party—Otto’s Deutsches Jungvolk leader, for example, and the district group leader—they had all spread hope and refused to hear of escape, and now they’d gone and escaped themselves.

The Wehrmacht made no secret of their intention to surrender the town and blow up the bridges behind them as they moved west. It was the last chance of escape for any doubters and ditherers.

A few days in March had been enough to transform an ordinary factory into a model Nazi business run by party loyalists.

Irene Bröker spent the nights in constantly changing hiding places to avoid assault. She slept in hedges of brambles and behind rabbit hutches, in a concrete trough in the attic, and in the shelter beneath the compost heap.

Like millions of other Germans, he’d had to make a choice: either he could toe the line and silence his inner voice, or he could stay true to his convictions and be ostracised.

When the concentration camps were discovered, the Allies hung pictures of the atrocities outside town halls and showed films. Julius Posener recalled that all the Germans he spoke to guilelessly told him they’d known nothing about it. But they’d all had a friend or cousin at the front or in the hinterland who’d passed on this or that to them.

Violence was so ubiquitous as to have become normal. Johann Radein, still a member of the Hitler Youth, felt sucked in by it; the violent acts condoned and even glorified by the grown-ups seemed to him inevitable, intrinsic to human nature. But this didn’t make them any less frightening. The cold tyranny of the law of the strongest left Johann feeling numb and scared and helpless.

Not everyone was rallying behind the new government. Roussel saw people avert their eyes as the brown-shirted troops passed. People in a hurry to get back inside their flats. People having trouble concealing their anger, helplessness, distress or fear. A young girl with tears pouring down her face.

Roussel had come up against a phenomenon that increasingly troubled neutral observers and deeply embittered the regime’s victims and former opponents. Not long after the end of the war, most Germans considered themselves victims of the Nazis.