Nothing left to lose

In chess, the king is never taken. When defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Or they are toppled and replaced by fresh leaders who sue for terms, like Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, Reynaud in 1940 and Mussolini in 1943. ‘Wars are finally decided’, Adolf Hitler told his military commanders in December 1944, ‘by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more.’ Yet Hitler himself was to be virtually the only exception to the rule, unless we count Saddam Hussein.

At the time that he uttered these words Hitler was facing enemies on two fronts, each disposing of immeasurably greater forces than he could muster on all fronts combined. On the Russian front alone, he was outnumbered 11 times over in infantry, seven times in tanks, 20 times in field artillery, 20 times in airpower. The disproportion would have been greater still but for the hasty recruitment of large numbers of barely trained youths. The Luftwaffe, almost out of fuel and pilots, was on the verge of collapse, as allied strategic bombing forces ranged increasingly freely over German territory.

Precisely when Hitler himself realised that the game was up is unclear. For a long time, he was buoyed by extravagant hopes for the V2 ballistic missile and the Ardennes offensive, and then by un-realistic expectations of a break-up of the ‘unnatural’ coalition between the capitalist Anglo-Americans and their communist Russian allies. But by January 1945, Hitler knew that defeat was inevitable, and had already decided to commit suicide when it came. Yet even then he drove his forces on in a needless fight to the last man. Germany paid a terrible price for his furious obduracy. In the last ten months of the war, the German industrial base was wrecked.