By mid-August 1944, any German with the slightest grasp of military reality could discern that the end was nigh in the east. In just two months of summer fighting, the Red Army had swept the last remnants of the Wehrmacht from Belorussia and eastern Poland, all but annihilating Army Group Center in the process, and now stood poised on the frontier of the Reich. Though NSDAP functionaries continued to preach the time-honored faith of unconditional victory and devotion to the genius of the Führer, the message from the pulpit of National Socialism in these dark times increasingly emphasized an unseasoned and decidedly baleful theme: “Strength through Fear.” Defeat meant extermination. If the “blind destructive fury” of the Bolshevik hordes was not checked, “no creatures would survive in Germany, no blade of grass would grow, no insects would live” (p. 86). All Germans in the east, soldiers and civilians alike, must prepare for the Soviet onslaught. All must fight. The impending battle would determine the fate of the German race.

Fear and the exploitation of fear animate Alastair Noble's impressive new study. Concentrating on the pervasive German dread of Soviet occupation and the variety of ways in which Nazi authorities and propagandists attempted to manipulate public anxiety to prolong the hopeless defense of the Reich, Noble lays bare the havoc and the cruelty of the war's last months in eastern Germany. His geographical focus is primarily East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and Silesia, i.e. those eastern provinces of the Reich that had an overwhelming German majority and that lay within Germany's prewar borders. His research is meticulous, based on an imposing mass of archival sources, most notably a trove from the Ost-Dokumentation collection in Bayreuth and an extensive range of “mood,” “behavior,” and activity reports compiled by and for the Sicherheitsdienst, the Propaganda Ministry, and the Reich Ministry of Justice. The author has seemingly left no file unopened, no document unread.

Noble's work consists of three parts. The first, which surveys eastern Germany from 1939 to 1944 and introduces the key Nazi players in the east, tends to leap about topically and chronologically, but once Noble moves into the heart of his study, he hits his stride. Part II begins with the collapse of Army Group Center in July 1944 and closes with the launch of the Red Army's Vistula-Oder Offensive in January 1945. “Popular mobilization” campaigns in the eastern provinces are the chief focus of this section. Via two major initiatives—the construction of the so-called Ostwall, a system of improvised trenches and fortifications “designed” to hold back the coming Soviet assault, and the creation of the Volkssturm, a nation-wide party-controlled “Home Guard” meant to incorporate all men ages sixteen to sixty previously exempt from military service—Nazi leaders attempted, as Noble puts it, “to boost morale by instilling a sense of participation in total war” (p. 13). Participation they did receive. Some 500,000 German and foreign workers took part in the Ostwall scheme, and around 650,000 Volkssturm men ultimately fought on the eastern front. But the Ostwall and the Volkssturm proved of negligible worth, militarily speaking. On the former, one wag predicted “these ditches will hold up the enemy for one hour and two minutes: one hour to get over the laughing fits the Russian soldiers will have when they first notice them and two minutes to get across” (p. 115). The Russians may not have expressed the anticipated mirth, but his prophecy regarding the Ostwall's military value was by and large correct. Likewise, the Volkssturm may well have boosted morale, and it certainly helped the party prolong its hold of power, but the young boys and old men were in the end little more than human speed bumps for T-34s.

Part III, appropriately titled “Endgame,” covers the “systematic throttling” and wholesale collapse of German military forces in the east, the disintegration of the NSDAP and state machinery, and—if their local Nazi overseers allowed it—the mass evacuation of much of the region's civilian population. The spotlight is on terror. During these final months of the war, demoralized German soldiers and panicked civilians found themselves trapped “between military and Party terror” and the “horror of the Red Army.” “To sustain the resistance,” Noble writes, “the standard mixture of propaganda and terror was dispensed, with the former losing all touch with reality as the latter became even more prevalent and ‘German on German’ focused” (p. 217). Manifestations of “defeatism” were habitually met with summary shootings and hangings. Party functionaries in “fortress” cities such as Breslau and Königsberg forced men, women, and children to build barricades and dig trenches at gunpoint. Thousands of eastern Germans resorted to suicide to escape the wrath of the Soviets. Countless others fell to their wrath. Meanwhile, with “callous indifference” to the suffering of their fellow Germans, many leading Nazi officials frantically sought to save their criminal skins and fled.

This is an ambitious book, but it could be more so. The “incorporated territories” of Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland, annexed to the Reich immediately following the Polish campaign, were considered integral components of the German east. While Noble discusses late-war developments in these districts several times in passing, they deserve more attention. Expanding his geographical focus to include the “incorporated territories” would have captured the contemporary definition of “eastern Germany” and thus rounded out his study. Even so, Noble's work stands as well-researched and richly detailed exploration of the death throes of the Third Reich in the east.