Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich

by Stephen G. Fritz

At the end of World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, fearing that retreating Germans would consolidate large numbers of troops in an Alpine stronghold and from there conduct a protracted guerilla war, turned U.S. forces toward the heart of Franconia, ordering them to cut off and destroy German units before they could reach the Alps. Opposing this advance was a conglomeration of German forces headed by SS-Gruppenführer Max Simon, a committed National Socialist who advocated merciless resistance. Under the direction of officers schooled in harsh combat in Russia, the Germans succeeded in bringing the American advance to a grinding halt.

Caught in the middle were the people of Franconia. Historians have accorded little mention to this period of violence and terror, but it provides insight into the chaotic nature of life while the Nazi regime was crumbling. Neither German civilians nor foreign refugees acted simply as passive victims caught between two fronts. Throughout the region people pressured local authorities to end the senseless resistance and sought revenge for their tribulations in the "liberation" that followed.

Stephen G. Fritz examines the predicament and outlook of American GI's, German soldiers and officials, and the civilian population caught in the arduous fighting during the waning days of World War II. Endkampf is a gripping portrait of the collapse of a society and how it affected those involved, whether they were soldiers or civilians, victors or vanquished, perpetrators or victims.

Genres: History, World War II, Germany, Military Fiction, Military History, War, American History

382 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 2004

Reviews

[Jonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating examination of the events in Bavaria at the end of the Second World War.

There's a very clear examination of the sudden shift in the Western allies focus away from Berlin; as the narrative states , quite simply, U.S. Intelligence, still smarting from the latest in a long line of failures in the Ardennes, fell hook, line and sinker for German reports of an Alpine Redoubt;

Once conceived, the fear of an Alpine fortress exercised a strange fascination on American officials determined to avoid any further shocks like the Ardennes offensive.

However, in an irony of gargantuan proportion, and proving that some things never change, the Americans had been pranked on a national scale;

Unfortunately, despite the undeniable logic of American assumptions, much of the information on which their suppositions were based had been planted by SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Gontard, head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD) office in the border town of Bregenz. Having intercepted the OSS report to Washington warning of the Alpenfestung, Gontard could only marvel at what seemed to him boundless American gullibility. In late September, in fact, Gontard showed a copy of the report to Franz Hofer, the Gauleiter (party leader) of Tyrol, whom the OSS regarded as a radical Nazi fanatic, in order to demonstrate the ineptitude of the American intelligence service.

Hereafter, American and German forces are sucked into combat in an area which had been Nazism's spiritual heartland; it also proved to be ideal defensive country.

The fighting which ensured in the lead up to the German surrender was, perhaps, some of the bitterest of the war; Americans desperate not to be the last man to die, and Germans wholly impotent to prevent the American advance and/or forcing their forces and civilians to continue the pointless and unequal struggle in the cruellest possible way; atrocities by both sides are described up to the closing of hostilities.

The tiny village of Langenfeld, just northwest of Neustadt an der Aisch, disappeared under a storm of American steel, the result of a single Panzerfaust shot at an approaching American tank. None of these actions affected the outcome of the war, and most would be regarded as insignificant operations, except to the twenty-four civilians who lay dead, and to their brethren who saw their ancient villages, many a millennium old, destroyed as a result of the actions of fanatic defenders of Hitler’s would-be thousand-year Reich.

The book concludes with two excellent chapters on the American occupation of the area; the first chapter dealing with relations with the defeated Germans, and containing excellent sections describing the actions of, and the reactions to, the Nazi resistance movement, and the second detailing the fraught dealings with the Displaced Persons and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, which proved somewhat surprising.

All in all, an excellent, honest and well written account of the end of the Second World War and it's aftermath in an underreported area of the battlefront.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explores the question of why, in the face of certain defeat, German soldiers continued to fight for and German civilians continued to support the regime that had led to Germany's destruction. He looks specifically at a small section of Germany where fighting against the Americans was at its fiercest, and the terms of the occupation there up to 1947, by which time the "Stunde Null" had been survived and a new attitude was finally being cultivated among the defeated.

Fritz offers some interesting new perspective in his attempt to apply chaos theory to human societies, although his discussion of this concept ends up being rather cursory and his application of it unconvincing. He does make the interesting point that the individuals navigating the complex environment of disintegrating authority (and authoritarianism) cannot be easily divided into categories of victims, perpetrators and resistors, as many had to negotiate each position according to the immediate situation. He also contributes to the current debate around Nazi morality or conscience by exploring the relationship of the myth of the Nibelungslied to that of Treue and the famed German resignation in the face of death.

As a work of military history, Fritz both succeeds in giving on-the-ground details of a fairly obscure combat history and also in tying military operations in to wider social and cultural concerns. The book is both entertaining and informative and does raise a number of fascinating points for discussion and further research.

[Alan Carlson · Rating 2 out of 5]

In March 2021 I wrote some short essays on 'Pointless Defiance' and "Bitter Enders."  My interest in the why of armed resistance to a foregone defeat remains, and to that end I read "Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, " by historian Stephen G. Fritz.  I cannot recommend that anyone else read the book. 

Fritz focuses on Franconia, in northern Bavaria, from the crossing of the Rhine in late March 1945 to the end of the war in May, and then the American occupation through mid-1947.  Having read other accounts of the 1945 campaign, notably The Last Offensive, the official US Army account, it is my view that Fritz wrongly attributes the relatively slow advance of the Americans through Middle Franconia to strong German resistance. While the southern advance of the US Seventh Army did slow for about two weeks, I would attribute that to its focus on driving to the east, covering the American and Allied advance to the Elbe to meet there with advancing Soviet armies. That achieved, the Seventh swung south and resumed its prior rapid advance, reaching the Brenner Pass in Austria to meet US troops in Italy on May 4th, covering over 300 miles in three m"Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, " by historian Stephen G. Fritz.onths.  (That's roughly as fast as the German 'blitzkrieg' into the USSR in 1941.) 
Fritz however asserts that German armed resistance was notable in Franconia, because Franconia was an early center and continuing stronghold for the Nazis -- Nuremberg, famed for its annual Party rallies, is on the east edge of Franconia and its largest city; Munich, site of Hitler's abortive 1924 putsch, lies just beyond to the south.  Fritz claims that the "SS and Hitler Youth units, ..., often mounted astonishingly effective defense." This he attributes to "These men had been more thoroughly socialized and indoctrinated in the Nazi system, so they displayed higher morale and a more determined committment to Nazi ideology..." p. 271. I would agree that these factors could explain why the SS - both its military wing and police - Gestapo -- were relentless in terrorizing German civilians -- old men and women were all that were left -- in to not surrendering their towns to the American advance, prompting the US to use its overwhelming firepower to burn and flatten such villages - which destruction as even Fritz mentions (but does not stress) often saw the German army leaving overnight rather than resist.  But morale does not win battles cf. "les pantalons rouges" in 1914, when the French Army took its most horrific losses at any point in World War One. 

Fritz is not careful with his sources, and takes at face value any account which furthers his thesis, even though he shows that he can evaluate and weigh accounts -- when they go against his argument. German actions against "forced laborers" (slave -  the word is slave) is said to be 'justified' and "confirmed the most frightening of Nazi racial anxieties" (p. 225), but shooting of Germans by Soviet DPs (displaced persons) is "excused with the claim that they believed they acted legally" (p. 231) - three evasive words in one phrase.   A "riot" in July 1945 at Wolfrathausen is downgraded by Fritz to an "affair," Fritz criticizing the official report for "sins of omission and commission, engaging in hyperbole while neglecting certain key details." (p. 251) 

Fritz is also willing to accept without hesitation sole-source accounts that support his views. Recounting a three-day battle (April 18 to 20) for the town of Merkendorf, which saw control swing back and forth several times, Fritz asserts that on April 20, "SS men ... discovered two mass graves. In one they found eleven bodies, the other fourteen, all presumably executed by the enraged Americans in the aftermath of this discouragingly ferocious combat." (p. 178).  Even though Fritz demonstrates, again and again, the viciousness with which the Nazis used terror and drum-head executions to enforce disclipline on the civilian populace, here he blithely attributes the deaths to Americans, and implies the 25 bodies are all civilians. His source appears to be a postwar account by a single eyewitness - Fritz's notes are often unclear as to which source is being cited for a given assertion. 

In a last example from me on Fritz's carelessness with the veracity of sources, near the end of his tale Fritz summarizes at length a story of a mid-1945 confrontation, in which a "vengeance squad" of 11 Jews killed "140 Werwolves" (German Nazi guerillas) "in hail of bullets and shrapnel." Dead too was the German leader, Erwin Weinmann. Fritz relates that the vengeance squad then also accounted for another SS officer, Hubert Schwartz, and a senior Nazi official, Dr. Ernst Wetzel, "both of whom disappeared shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances." (p. 257) Fritz gets this story from a BBC journalist, the American Michael Elkins, himself a fervent Zionist, who claimed to have interviewed members of the vengeance squad for his 1971 book. The problem with the story, besides there being no contemporary validation for the massacre, is that Weinmann disappeared earlier in May 1945, near Prague. Schwartz was executed for war crimes by the French in 1947. Wetzel died in 1975, having been imprisoned by the Soviets and later East Germans from May 1945 to December 1955. 

[Paul Janiszewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notions believed and myths conjured, conspire in a potion that meld together through culture, time and action; and paints a picture, that we in our condition might dare call a reality, such is the nature of the human and his/her civilization. We believe as a collective: what we have come to believe; and what we are told to believe, and none may question where we are at for acceptance is the master in our minds, of a will driven by the force of instinct: to be a part; a member; a participant. The difficulty in all of this is separating one from the other (come to or told to) and here lies the dilemma.
Fritz seeks an answer to the question of why the German people so faithfully followed their fuhrer to such a catastrophic end and what followed. He concentrates on personal stories on the western front bringing together the varied perspectives of American GI's, German soldiers, local officials, ordinary civilians, foreign workers and Jewish survivors seeking revenge. Each inculcated and driven by their own dynamic notions.
For the Germans, at least, I see their 'mix' is reconfirmed:
CULTURE: key notions in art, literature and music:
'Nibelungentreue' (Wagnerian invocation of self sacrifice).
'Desverlangen' (longing for death)
'Gotterdammerung' (destruction of all things in a final battle)
'Volksgemeischaft' (one consolidated national community)
'Blut und Boden' (entwined in race, family and the land)
'Heimat' (the homeland, the family, the belonging)
TIME: historical memory of events that shaped the physical and moral landscape:
'Stab in the back' (loss of a war because of betrayal from within)
'November criminals' (ruling elite of communists and Jews)
'Red Front' (the wave of communism taking over Europe)
ACTION: the current physical events consolidating the notions:
'Untermensch' (classification and treatment of the subhumans)
'krystalnacht' (public persecution of the jews)
'final solution' (extermination of the jews)
'total war' (ruthless mobilization and dedication to war)
Fritz concludes with a reference to a German novelist:
Thomas Mann - 'Doctor Faustus' (1947):
"How strange that lament for culture... raised now against crimes that we called down upon ourselves".

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another view point of life in Germany, and the relationships with the occupying forces at the end of the war...was not a rosy picture...a lot of angry people on both sides of the fence.