On the morning of October 25, 1944, eleven foreign workers were transported from their overcrowded cells in the infamous Brauweiler prison to the Cologne neighborhood of Ehrenfeld. Upon arrival the prisoners were forced to mount a gallows constructed in an abandoned concrete lot next to an elevated train line. In front of a large crowd of assembled onlookers and police, the accused were executed for crimes ranging from petty theft to armed resistance. Their executioners cataloged their handiwork from start to finish in a detailed series of photographs that revealed that for one unfortunate, the gallows proved too short, forcing the victim to be “assisted” by a plainclothes Gestapo officer who held his legs until he expired.Footnote ¹

Seventeen days later, on November 10, 1944, another execution was held at the same location. This time the victims were thirteen German teenagers and adolescents charged with belonging to a gang alleged to be plotting attacks against the police. Like their foreign counterparts on October 25, the bodies of the victims, the youngest of whom was nine years old, were left to hang throughout the day as a warning to other would-be “plunderers” and “terrorists.” This execution marked a point of departure; the same treatment meted out to the foreign subjects of occupied Europe was now extended to German civilians as the Nazi regime entered its final period of radicalization.

The significance of these atrocities does not stop here. They occurred within the context of a larger operation conducted by the Gestapo to restore order in place of the chaos that had erupted in the region as American troops arrived on the Reich's border. Throughout the month of September, the collapse of the region had appeared imminent. Coinciding with the arrival of the enemy, reports flooded regional Gestapo offices regarding robberies committed by retreating soldiers, gangs of youth, and escaped slave laborers as well as the appearance of flyers calling for the end of the war. In response, the Cologne Gestapo, in a move reminiscent of the anti-partisan warfare conducted on the eastern front, attempted forcibly to evacuate the civilian and forced-laborer population of the area between the border and the Rhine across the river, creating a secure “dead zone” behind the front. During the course of this operation, which removed by conservative estimates two hundred thousand people, the security services combed through the masses of deportees, searching for deserters, criminals, escaped prisoners, black marketeers, and suspected spies as they sought to regain order and prepare for the impending invasion. These efforts, initially conducted to strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, or people's community, for the upcoming final struggle, quickly devolved into widespread violence as the Gestapo came face to face with civilian discontent and the social problems posed by the region's structural collapse. Throughout autumn 1944, the security forces underwent a cumulative radicalization that enabled the final wave of bloodshed that occurred the following spring as the Third Reich imploded.Footnote ²

Termed the “End Phase” by historians, the period between September 1944 and May 1945 remains understudied. This is largely due to the sparse and scattered nature of the source material. Documents regarding the late war activities of the Nazi regime are rare; many were intentionally destroyed for security reasons, or unintentionally by Allied bombing. Some officials, faced with enormous workloads, simply stopped filing reports. Fortunately, records do exist, largely in the locales in which the events occurred, resulting in a historiography primarily generated by German historians engaged in regional studies. One valuable cache of documents, including weekly situation reports from the Cologne Gestapo from the middle of September through the end of November 1944, is housed at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. This material, alongside Gestapo files from the Nordrhein-Westfälisches Hauptstaatarchiv in Düsseldorf, forms the core of this study.

The few works that have examined the last months of the Third Reich have portrayed it as a time of arbitrary violence in which German civilians for the first time experienced the full brunt of the Nazis' destructive nature as die-hard fanatics attempted to carry out Hitler's vengeful call for the destruction of the Reich as defeat loomed. The violence that occurred against the Volksgemeinschaft in the last months of the war, however, had a long prehistory that was rooted in police practices developed during the racial war waged in the occupied territories. The connection between the “End Phase” and this prehistory has been overlooked, particularly the ways in which tactics of deportation and the so-called “Bandenkampf,” or the struggle against partisans, in occupied Europe influenced domestic evacuation policies during the final months of the Third Reich. Viewing late-war population removals and policing in this context enables us to uncover why the violence occurred, its scope, and, most importantly, its process of evolution.Footnote ³

Investigating the events that took place in the Cologne region will assist this endeavor. The fall 1944 period should be viewed as a crucial stage of transition for the regime's security forces instead as merely part of the “End Phase.” This is aptly demonstrated by the depopulation efforts conducted by the Cologne Gestapo. The operation, the only one of its kind to be carried out inside Germany, was originally aimed at bolstering the war effort by restoring civilian morale and harnessing material and labor resources for the Reich's defense. Only during the course of the operation did these efforts degenerate into mass violence. An examination of these events is better placed to highlight the continuities and breaks in police practice than the scattered episodes that occurred in spring 1945. Focusing an investigation on the activities of the Gestapo in the Cologne region will reveal how the organizational culture of the security services and the reliance on long-standing and brutal police tactics combined with a plethora of situational factors to enable the Gestapo for the first time to direct widespread and indiscriminate violence against German civilians.

The Rhineland: Autumn 1944

The rapid advance of the Normandy breakout had liberated most of France and Belgium with surprising ease, placing Allied armies on the German border within little over a month. Victory appeared to be weeks away as retreating German troops streamed back into the Reich in disarray. American units had already crossed the Reich's borders in the first weeks of September, penetrating the Westwall and reaching the border city of Aachen by September 12. By the end of the month, however, logistical problems and the shifting of American troops north to assist the airborne operation “Market Garden” in the Netherlands slowed the Allied momentum. The weather began to deteriorate as well, and the American divisions clearing the Huertgen Forest and Aachen could add rain and mud to the list of difficulties facing them.Footnote ⁴

The German military was able to regroup as the Allied advance slowed. Units were reorganized, and reserves were brought into line. Inserted into the defensive network of the Westwall, these forces helped to stem the Americans and, with the help of Allied logistical difficulties, stabilized the front. By the beginning of October the situation along Germany's western border resembled a stalemate. The Americans found themselves entangled in vicious street fighting in Aachen and bogged down in the muddy forests to the south. In the north, British troops entrenched for the winter after the failure of the “Market Garden” operation. Although this respite allowed the Wehrmacht breathing room to consolidate its forces, the situation in the rear area and the cities along the Rhine River remained chaotic.

In the cities, around-the-clock bombing had obliterated large swaths of buildings, transforming neighborhoods, industrial areas, and city centers into unrecognizable heaps of rubble. When American forces entered Cologne in March 1945, they found that eighty percent of the city had been destroyed, with its famous cathedral hovering over the ruined landscape. As one German eyewitness remarked, it was “the greatest rubble heap in the world . . . the paradigm of destruction.” Other neighboring cities shared similar fates; Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Essen, Duisburg, and Wuppertal all suffered at least fifty-percent damage.Footnote ⁵

Due to the bombing, most of the nonessential civilian population of these cities had been evacuated, and the remainder lived a tense day-to-day existence. Grimly combing through the ruins each day and living in air-raid shelters and cellars, these survivors not only faced danger from above, but also dwindling supplies, sporadic running water, no electricity, and the increasing threat of armed gangs of Germans and escaped foreign laborers living in the rubble who had resorted to robbery and theft to survive.Footnote ⁶

The residents of the countryside endured similar conditions. Due to the intensity of the Allied air campaign, factories had been relocated to smaller towns in the region, making these targets in turn. In fall 1944, heavy bomber raids were increased in an attempt to disrupt communications and traffic routes connected to the front. These raids were also supplemented by strafing attacks by Allied fighters operating from Belgium, allowing the air war to reach the remotest of locations. Such attacks were highly destructive in their own right, making travel extremely hazardous and contributing to the further disintegration of local infrastructure.Footnote ⁷

Unlike their urban counterparts, rural residents evacuated only when the front began to approach and the populations of these towns were swollen with refugees from the cities, the occupied Netherlands, and the border regions. These strangers added to the difficulties and frustration of residents, who suffered the additional burden of opening their homes and sharing their scarce resources with them. Criminality also began to rise as escaped prisoners from bombed factories and camps foraged for supplies. Disrupted supply networks also forced rural civilians, like their urban counterparts, to access the black market for essential goods or resort to theft. Like the regular soldiers, numerous German youth and adults sent to the front to work on the Westwall defenses also deserted and stole from farms and villages as they made their way back to their homes.Footnote ⁸

Morale

Underlying the chaos in the countryside and cities was a shared sense that the end was near, as the resigned attitude of “Durchhalten,” the notion of sticking it out until the end, dissipated as the Americans reached Aachen, less than fifty kilometers from the Rhine. Morale reports from the Cologne Gestapo noted with alarm that “many feel that the war will soon end” and that “continued fighting was purposeless and impossible.” Weekly situation reports from police units operating in the field further documented the volatile mood of the region. Officers began to encounter remarks such as, “We've lost the war, our opponents are stronger than we are, everything the government tells us is a lie,” and “The war can't be won, the situation here is the same as on the eastern front. Soon all the Nazis, especially the party officials, will be shot.” Others kept a wry sense of humor. A fireman from Cologne, commenting on his ruined home, joked that “Comrade Ley [the head of the Reich Labor Front] has given us workers sunny and airy apartments.” More disturbing to authorities was the fact that some Germans along the border were preparing to open their homes to the invaders or milled about the streets awaiting their arrival. These alarming reports, combined with those concerning the behavior of the foreign workers who populated the region, painted a scene of impending collapse.Footnote ⁹

An estimated 7,615,970 foreign laborers from the occupied territories were working in the Reich by 1944 and comprised almost fifty percent of the workforce in some vital sectors of industry. Based on the concept of racial purity, the Nazi state, from 1941 on, found itself faced with a growing internal contradiction as hundreds of thousands of foreigners were forced into the Reich's industries and farms, quickly becoming essential to the war effort. These people, particularly those from eastern Europe, were perceived as a security risk to the biological and ideological well-being of the German people. Attempting to reconcile the situation, the regime from the start implemented a harsh series of regulations to curtail interaction between Germans and forced laborers in an attempt to head off any attempts at rebellion and ensure productivity. By late 1944 these controls became increasingly uncompromising as the regime began to fear insurrection and sabotage as Germany's situation worsened.Footnote ¹⁰

A February 1944 Gestapo report reflected these fears in its gauging of the morale of foreign workers and documented the “fanatische Deutschenhass,” or “fanatical hatred of Germans,” among laborers throughout the Reich. It recorded comments such as “The Germans can't win, Stalin holds all the cards in his hands!,” and “After the war, the Germans will wear this badge [in reference to the colored patches the workers were required to wear].” One female worker remarked that although she took the train to Germany, her “Hausfrau” would be marching to Siberia on foot. Other details included the defacing of a propaganda flyer of Hitler by a worker who remarked that “The time is coming when the real [“lebendig”] one will have his eyes cut out.” The report attributed such inflammatory statements to enemy propaganda and the residue of communist ideology, rather than the harsh treatment, poor rations, long working hours, and unsanitary living conditions the workers experienced. The uneasy feelings of the Gestapo reflected in these reports were reinforced by the increasing number of escaped workers that had already begun to inhabit the ruined cities, stealing from stores and houses to supply themselves.Footnote ¹¹

Already sensitive to any notions of defeatism or revolt from inside Germany, Gestapo officers operating in the Rhineland in September 1944 viewed the current situation on the ground as the physical manifestation of the fears expressed in their reports. Desertion from the front, tuning in to enemy radio broadcasts, surly foreign workers, black marketeering, theft, and disparaging remarks about the regime were all considered evidence of the widespread demoralization and insurrection that undermined Germany's defense and threatened to repeat the “stab in the back” that had allegedly occurred in 1918. The July 20 attempt on Hitler's life had further seemingly proven that any citizen or soldier had the potential to turn against the regime. As the Reich faced invasion from without and widespread social disorder within, the security apparatus adapted organizationally and became increasingly violent as it attempted to regain order.

The Security Forces

The organizational culture of the security forces, established in the late 1930s, laid the foundation for the violence that occurred in fall 1944. The core of this culture was its emphasis on preemptive action, initiative, and the application of overwhelming force. The Gestapo, whose officers led efforts to restore order to the region, best embodied these central tenets. These men set the tone of the operation and ensured that violence would become routine practice during the efforts to depopulate the region.

Originally assigned the task of political policing during the Weimar Republic, the Gestapo was absorbed and expanded by the Nazis upon their seizure of power in 1933 and fell under the purview of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. In 1939, the Gestapo, party intelligence service (SD), and criminal police (Kripo) were centralized under the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), commanded by Reinhard Heydrich, former head of party intelligence. Under Heydrich and his adjutant Werner Best, the security services were revamped. Both men, in conjunction with Himmler, sought to fuse the police with the SS, combining their investigative ability with the martial spirit and ideology of the party into a “fighting administration” committed to the physical and spiritual defense of the Reich. This new police apparatus was to be characterized not only by its administrative efficiency but also by its reliance on preemptive action and personal initiative. Its commanding officers were largely recruited from among members of the educated middle class, giving the organization's leadership cadre a broad social homogeneity and political reliability.Footnote ¹²

These men were not only career-minded professionals but had also experienced a degree of politicization prior to joining the Gestapo. Many belonged to the “war youth generation” that had been too young to participate in World War I but old enough to have been infused with a strong sense of patriotism. This foundation was built upon during the years of the Weimar Republic as feelings of national humiliation over conditions of the Versailles Treaty combined with economic crisis to push middle-class voters toward the Nazis. The overcrowded university system also played an important role in the nascent political awareness of these men. As the republic's economic problems worsened, more students failed to complete their studies or find jobs, creating a sense of victimization among a milieu that considered itself the bulwark of German nationalism.Footnote ¹³

The personnel file of Hauptsturmführer Kurt Matschke, reflects the background of much of the Cologne Gestapo's leadership. Born in 1908 in Domsel, Upper Silesia, Matschke was the son of a railway inspector. He experienced the postwar border conflicts and Polish uprising of 1923 as a teenager, and these events shaped his nationalist outlook. Later he entered the University of Breslau with the intention of studying law, but due to financial difficulties was forced to cut his studies short. Faced with limited job prospects, Matschke worked as a low-level civil servant and eventually gravitated toward the Nazi Party, becoming a member in 1932. He joined the SS the same year and obtained the rank of sergeant by January 1933. The following year he entered the Gestapo and rose to the rank of captain by 1944. Within a decade Matschke advanced from being a junior civil servant with limited opportunity to become an officer of the elite who enjoyed greatly expanded power and responsibilities as a leading officer in the Cologne security apparatus.Footnote ¹⁴

The Gestapo offered both the prospect of career advancement and prestige. Not only did the organization invest considerable effort in building a strong sense of espirit de corps but also offered its personnel the chance to use their intelligence and leadership potential. The organization thrived on action and initiative and sought to embody the “Führerprinzip,” or leadership principle. Officers armed with almost limitless police powers and vague, easily expanded definitions of criminality were expected to work proactively toward the perceived needs of the party and people. Consequently, Gestapo personnel were not bound to a rigid chain of command and exercised a great deal of latitude in everyday decision making, further fostering an elite feeling and sense of mission.Footnote ¹⁵

The older, less educated, or politically active men that often composed the rank and file of Gestapo offices became committed perpetrators as well. Kriminalassistent Josef Hoegen, a native of Cologne and a veteran of World War I, was born in 1898 and hailed from lower-middle-class origins. During the 1923 inflation crisis he joined the criminal police as an auxiliary and found regular employment as an officer in 1924. In 1935 he joined the party and was transferred to the Cologne Gestapo's anti-Marxist desk. Hoegen also served briefly with Einsatzgruppe B on the eastern front before returning to the Cologne office. His postwar trial, in which he was charged with fifty-eight counts of abuse and torture, revealed that he became an enthusiastic and often overzealous perpetrator. He was hardly the exception to the rule. Many policemen from the Weimar Republic stayed at their posts, enticed by Nazism's removal of legal constraints, which allowed them a freer hand to pursue their investigations.Footnote ¹⁶

The personnel files of both Matschke and Hoegen illustrate another important aspect of the Gestapo's organizational culture: the rotation system. Shifting personnel throughout the Reich and occupied territories allowed not only extensive cross training, but it also permitted the Gestapo to use an officer's particular skills, rushing him to an area where his expertise was needed most. Transferred several times in his career, Matschke first moved from Breslau to Saarbrücken, where he worked in the office tasked with anti-Marxism. In 1941 he was assigned to the Ukraine as a member of Einsatzgruppe B. He served two tours with the unit, participating in the murder of Jews and suspected partisans before being reassigned to the field staff of the unit. Matschke returned to the Reich in 1943 and was assigned to Cologne where he initially oversaw the deportation of the city's Jews. He finished his career in fall 1944 as the office's chief executioner, handing down sentences to suspects arrested during the efforts to clear the region.Footnote ¹⁷

Transfer to the occupied territories was crucial to the development of these perpetrators, allowing them to put ideology into practice and physically address the enemies of the Reich by joining killing squads in occupied Europe. Other members of the Cologne Gestapo, among them the office's chief, Dr. Max Hoffman, served in such units and were active in the murders of thousands of men, women, and children. Such encounters created callous, brutalized individuals socialized to the use of violence. Postwar trial testimony recounts the cold behavior Matschke exhibited toward the victims of his unit at Starodub in the Ukraine, where he walked among the bodies, delivering headshots with his pistol to those still alive.Footnote ¹⁸

Returning to the Reich, such men found themselves tasked with areas of responsibility that grew enormously in the last few months of the war. Gestapo offices inside Germany had always functioned with a small number of personnel. As the war progressed and more personnel were sent to the occupied territories, the work of the various subsections increasingly fell on fewer officers. In addition to their regular duties, officers became responsible for the apprehension of deserters, traffic control, and evacuations once the enemy approached in autumn 1944. These heavier workloads combined with increased independence in decision making to fuel the radicalization of the personnel during fall 1944.Footnote ¹⁹

The growing autonomy of the Gestapo's personnel, caused by the fragmentation of the organization, was the crucial spark that ignited the violence that occurred in autumn 1944 and enabled the final wave of atrocity that occurred the following spring. Due to the air war's devastating effect on communication and loss of coordination caused by retreat on all fronts, regional offices found themselves by September 1944 increasingly isolated and left to adjudicate as they saw fit. Cut off from daily communication with headquarters in Berlin, the Gestapo's regional organization continued to devolve down to the local level. Allied air superiority meant snarled communications as offices were destroyed, relocated, and destroyed again. In response, the Cologne Gestapo began to use courier service to communicate with outlying posts, and correspondence could take from twelve hours to four days to reach some locations in the Rhine region. As the enemy approached, verbal communication also became common due to fear that radio transmissions or written messages would be intercepted. As reliable, consistent communication with their superiors effectively ceased to exist, Gestapo officers became increasingly independent.Footnote ²⁰

The news that did arrive from Berlin only served to fuel the radicalization of the personnel. On September 20, Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) in the west Karl Gutenberger met with the directors of the Aachen and Cologne Gestapo. He informed them that Himmler had authorized them to execute plunderers, criminals, saboteurs, and deserters in an attempt to regain order behind the front. This directive was later circulated via telex on October 12. In terse and notably vague prose, it stated “‘the honorless’ [‘ehrevergessene’] behavior of civilians should be punished with the sharpest measures [nun mit größter Schärfe geahndet würden].” Such orders were the essential ingredient of radicalization. They unleashed ideologically committed, brutalized individuals armed with the power to apply lethal violence at their discretion into a tense and disordered environment unfettered from the oversight of any chain of command.Footnote ²¹

By late September 1944, the Gestapo had effectively decentralized itself to meet the challenges posed by the chaos erupting inside the Reich. The flexibility of the organization itself enabled regional commanders to rest assured their operations needed little day-to-day coordination since their officers, due to their initiative and experience, were capable of addressing the problems in their areas of control. This dispersal of decision making continued to grow throughout the fall and eventually encompassed the personnel directed by the Gestapo.

These forces were appropriated from a wide range of sources. To supplement the limited manpower of the Cologne Gestapo, retreating personnel from the dissolved Paris, Brussels, and Aachen offices were reassigned, bringing the total number of available Gestapo personnel to 241. The arrival of the personnel from Paris and Brussels, experienced in anti-partisan methods, further aided the radicalization of the operation. Despite this infusion of manpower, the office remained understaffed as it became responsible for an expanded area of operation roughly one hundred kilometers long and fifty kilometers wide. Additionally, not all personnel were fully fit. A report from the Cologne office to HSSPF Gutenberger on November 9 noted that due to poor weather conditions and lack of adequate shelter, many of the personnel were sick. Additionally, the constant bombing and long working hours also led to an outbreak of stress-related illnesses such as heart attacks and emotional collapse.Footnote ²²

To help solve the manpower shortage, Gendarmerie units and border police were also subordinated to the Gestapo as well as the factory guards and militia overseeing foreign workers. Periodically these forces were supplemented by Order Police units from the four battle groups of police reservists HSSPF Gutenberger formed to assist the evacuations and plug gaps in the front lines. Although composed of middle-aged reservists, these units were the most effective manpower available to the Gestapo. Many of these policemen had seen combat and had participated in genocide and anti-partisan operations in occupied Europe. They were also well armed and organized. The rest of the available manpower was of a more dubious nature. Gendarmerie and militia units were composed of lightly armed and untrained older men and teenagers or, as in the case of the factory guards, invalid soldiers. The poor quality of these forces aided the expansion of the violence, as the insertion of inexperienced personnel into a highly charged and chaotic atmosphere guaranteed that violence would become uncontainable.Footnote ²³

“To Be Carried Out with the Harshest Measures”: Consolidation

These forces were organized into commandos led by officers from the Cologne Gestapo and assigned specific areas of operation. Four of these were detailed to the area directly behind the front and were based at Düren, Jülich, Erkelenz, and Schleiden. A fifth commando was based in the city itself, while a sixth unit led by Hauptsturmführer Matschke was tasked with processing suspected espionage cases in the region. The Brauweiler and Klingelpütz prisons served as regional detainment facilities for those arrested during the operation before their transportation to concentrations camps deeper inside Germany. Liaison officers were also attached to the Wehrmacht to coordinate jurisdictional issues. The military conducted their own clearances in the combat zone and civilian suspects apprehended by military patrols were to be handed over to the Gestapo for further questioning. In return the military police were to receive apprehended deserters from the Gestapo for sentencing in military courts. The six Gestapo commandos were subordinate to Dr. Hoffman, who in turn kept HSSPF Gutenberger apprised of developments.Footnote ²⁴

Both men felt that the best solution to the social disorder in the region was to remove the population forcibly behind the Rhine and into the Reich's interior. The goals of this operation were threefold. First, depopulating the area would create a secure zone behind the front. In September the situation along the Reich's western border remained porous and the hundreds of refugees on the roads posed a problem for supply transport moving to the front, as well as a security risk. The Gestapo feared that the Allies would use the chaos to infiltrate spies into the region to gather intelligence, sabotage facilities, and incite foreign workers to revolt. Second, the removal of the population, useful equipment, and food supplies would deprive the invaders of any form of assistance. Finally, the deportees and equipment could also be consolidated and redirected toward the Reich's defense once across the Rhine.Footnote ²⁵

These goals reveal the dependence on police practices developed while fighting partisans in occupied Europe. From 1942 on, the German military and police had shifted from sporadic reprisals to mass operations designed to limit support for partisans by creating huge swathes of land stripped of people and food stocks. Once deported, the able-bodied were sent to the Reich to work in the war industry while those unable to work were either killed outright or placed in internment camps. Hoffman and Gutenberger were intimately familiar with these operations as evidenced by their reports. Both men, as well as their subordinates, repeatedly referred to the forcible removal (“Zwangsräumung”) of the populace and described the operation as “Bandensicherungsaufgaben,” or an attempt to secure the region from “bandits.” Such vernacular underscores how the experiences of the partisan war had come to permeate the thinking and practice of the security apparatus by late 1944, influencing the decision to remove the inhabitants of the Rhineland as they grappled with the problem of population control.Footnote ²⁶

In the course of these forced evacuations, the Gestapo began to encounter an increasingly frustrated populace tired of war and reluctant to leave their homes. The fact that these units also appropriated personal property such as clothing, farm equipment, coal, food, and livestock for the war effort only increased tensions. Gestapo reports recounted comments such as “Nazi whores!,” “Hitler is a tramp, the party are all criminals and rascals,” and “It's good the enemy is coming, that means that the war is over.” Some encounters became violent, such as an incident in the village of Honef, where a man threatened to stab a party official who was assisting the evacuation in the throat, further revealing the animosity directed at personnel.Footnote ²⁷

In some locations residents took to the woods to avoid Gestapo units or fled toward the front to seek shelter with army units, while others attempted to pass through the lines to the Americans. Other residents refused to leave their homes, claiming to have heard rumors about the shoddy treatment given to evacuees upon arrival at their destinations, expressing little faith in the party's ability to provide for them. This attitude was further influenced by the haphazard nature of the evacuations, which ensured that it often took several days to evacuate even the smallest towns and villages. The lack of available transport meant that most residents would have to march to their destinations or the nearest functioning rail station. The poor organization of the evacuations was exacerbated by the fact that many of the local party officials responsible for planning them had fled, further demoralizing the populace. Such experiences undermined civilian cooperation and the stubborn attitude encountered by the personnel who were conducting the clearances led HSSPF Gutenberger to issue new directives in late October. He ordered the arrest of those who refused to leave and sanctioned the use of “necessary force” against those who continued to resist. Such experiences undoubtedly fueled the belief by members of the security forces that the German people had lost its collective will to fight.Footnote ²⁸

Further evidence of widespread defeatism came from personnel who manned the check points established to screen travelers and apprehend deserters. These stops revealed many civilians were armed, carrying pistols and occasionally military weaponry, an indication of the widespread feelings of insecurity felt by the populace. These patrols also functioned as press gangs, creating a pool of labor from recaptured prisoners and civilians caught without proper identification. The prisoners were first detained at a hastily erected work punishment camp at Hückelhoven and then moved to locations on the other side of the Rhine.Footnote ²⁹

Situation reports from the Cologne office indicate detained suspects faced further interrogation and sentencing by officers at detainment facilities. Most executions of German civilians during the autumn took place in the prisons and work camps due to concerns regarding civilian morale. Although Himmler ordered that the cases of Germans slated for execution be passed onto Berlin for approval, he acknowledged the communication difficulties personnel in the region faced. His directives noted that if Berlin could not be reached, the directors of regional offices were empowered to adjudicate. The majority of these death sentences pertained to so-called acts of “espionage.” This nebulous definition expanded as the operation progressed, encompassing not only alleged acts of sabotage or spying but also civilians and foreign laborers caught attempting to cross the border, seen near military installations, or in possession of enemy propaganda. Gestapo reports also indicate that most prisoners accused of other crimes were sentenced to forced labor, reflecting the view that redeemable manpower should be directed to the war effort rather than wasted on vengeful acts. Regardless, this was a period in which one could be detained and possibly executed for the slightest infractions, as the security forces broadly applied definitions of criminality in a quick attempt to restore order. Some units in the field, despite directives, also passed judgment themselves, accenting the role that deliberate decentralization and poor communication played in broadening the scope of the violence.Footnote ³⁰

If the situation had worsened for Germans, it was even worse for the region's foreign workers. Fears of escaped gangs of slave laborers, particularly east Europeans, were widespread among Germans and account for the weapons found among civilians stopped at checkpoints. In fact, escaped workers suffered not only at the hands of security personnel, but the work of Ulrich Herbert has also recorded several episodes of “lynch justice” by civilians during the last months of the war and noted that the presence of these groups provided the Gestapo with a convenient scapegoat. Officers could claim to the public that they had restored law and order by eliminating these “bandits” stereotyped as the source of crime. This racist hysteria contributed to the chaos and violence, as increasingly larger segments of the German populace began to take the law into their own hands and was encouraged to do so by the Gestapo.Footnote ³¹

Many foreign workers were simply caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. Air raids had destroyed many of the camps and factories in the area, enabling them to escape. Expecting the quick arrival of the Allies, some factory guards simply disappeared, leaving their charges unattended. Bombing also cut off vital food supplies, and due to the racial hierarchy of life in the Third Reich, these prisoners were often left to fend for themselves as their overseers appropriated dwindling food stocks. Thus by September 1944 increasing numbers of prisoners found themselves on the roads, foraging for food and shelter or seeking a way through to the American lines.Footnote ³²

By October these escapees found a net of security personnel standing between them and the freedom of the Allied lines, and this net began to tighten as the Gestapo commandos systematically swept the region. Although these units often detained escapees, they also executed foreigners suspected of theft or caught attempting to cross into the zone directly behind the front. In contrast to most German suspects, many of these victims died at the scene of the alleged crime, their bodies summarily deposited in bomb craters, cemeteries, parks, or patches of woods.

Undoubtedly, ethnicity played a role in the choice of victims. One situation report reveals a Belgian worker detained for possessing black-market goods lived to see another day while three Ukrainians, considered racial inferiors in the Nazi hierarchy, accused of breaking into a house were executed at the scene. Indeed, as the consolidation operation continued, Gestapo reports ceased to record the numbers of eastern European victims, merely noting in passing large numbers of “eastern workers” had been arrested for plundering and theft, some of whom were executed while others were sent to concentration camps. Such records not only indicate the busy workloads of Gestapo personnel during the operation but also reflect the low regard held for east Europeans, whose fates were not worth a passing mention. Faced with the choice of either a quick death by firing squad or a return to abysmal conditions in factories and camps that endured constant aerial bombardment, many escaped prisoners fled east, hoping to seek shelter and wait out what appeared to be the last few weeks of war in the ruins of Cologne.Footnote ³³

Cologne

By fall 1944 the battered cities of the region had become the home of a rapidly expanding shadow community made up of criminals, escaped prisoners, and deserters. Cologne, the largest city in the region, was the most attractive choice for fugitives. The vast, unpopulated rubble fields offered a perfect hiding place, and one's needs could be met by the thriving black market. Additionally, supply depots dotted the city and the chaos caused by the air war allowed thieves to take full advantage of the food, fuel, and weapons that were available. The gangs that inhabited the ruins, living in cellars and only emerging under the cover of darkness, also provided a much-needed sense of camaraderie and access to the underworld.

These groups can be divided into two general categories. Foreign laborers who had managed to escape from the work camps and factories that dotted the region composed the first. The second was made up of German adolescents and teenagers, collectively termed the “Edelweiss Pirates” by the authorities, who had deserted from the front or had left their jobs in the war industry. Although the Gestapo, as well as many postwar historians, marked the origins of these groups in the youth movements of the Weimar Republic, their real source lay in the disintegration that occurred within the Hitler Youth as the war progressed.Footnote ³⁴

As the air war intensified the Hitler Youth was detailed to civil defense duties such as firefighting, manning Flak units, and assisting evacuees. As a result, the structured environment the organization provided dissolved, allowing bored or disgruntled youth to drift away. These adolescents formed their own groups that were characterized by acts of nonconformity such as dressing in civilian clothing, smoking, drinking, and playing pranks. They wore distinctive symbols on their clothing, gave their groups adventurous names such as “Navajos,” and appropriated local landmarks such as parks or air-raid shelters as their meeting places. By late 1944 these groups grew larger as the war effort increasingly fell upon the shoulders of German youth. Bored and tired of the long hours in the factories and sleepless nights with civil defense units, more and more skipped work or quit entirely, drawing increased attention from the Gestapo as concerns about the war effort rose as the Reich faced defeat.Footnote ³⁵

From the beginning the Nazis expressed concern over the presence of those they considered parasitic “useless eaters” who lived among the racial community but contributed nothing in return. This core negative concept held by Nazis converged with fears about the productivity of the war industry to create a series of strict regulations for factory workers. Any worker suspected of loafing on the job or chronic absence could be sent to a labor reeducation camp (“Arbeitserziehungslager,” or AEL) for several months of hard labor in wretched conditions. In response many youths chose to go underground, especially once the end seemed near. Unable to access regular supply channels, these individuals turned to their social network, forming gangs and engaging in theft and black marketeering. As the police struck back, attempting to reincorporate these youths into the war effort, these gangs, like their foreign counterparts, began to resist, giving rise to a series of street battles that occurred in the city throughout the fall.Footnote ³⁶

The murder of several party officials during a rash of armed robberies that plagued the city throughout September emphasized the need for a concerted effort to restore order in the city. One murderer's revelation under interrogation that he targeted his victim because of his brown party uniform underscored the idea rebellion was afoot, as did the appearance of broadsheets calling for workers to boycott the war effort and soldiers to desert their posts. The Gestapo considered such activities evidence that attempts were being fostered to manifest a “stab in the back” similar to the one alleged to occur in November 1918. Such efforts, it was feared, would undermine the war effort and lead to the collapse of the Reich as it faced enemy invasion.Footnote ³⁷

Initially, the Gestapo was unable to respond adequately to such activity. Throughout the month of September personnel were conducting other operations in the region, accenting the expanded duties and lack of manpower that troubled the organization. Consequently, the Cologne office did not begin a systematic effort to engage gang activity until late October when the front stabilized. These operations carried on well into December. Six companies of police reservists bolstered by a Gestapo unit led by Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Mohr launched an effort to purge the city of subversives. In November reinforcements from Brauweiler prison commanded by Kriminal Kommissar Ferdinand Kütter joined the operation, highlighting the difficulty the Gestapo faced securing the ruined terrain. These units, like those behind the front, established traffic stops to check for proper identification and weapons, searched labor camps for contraband, and directed evacuees farther east in an orderly fashion. Their primary and most difficult task, however, was sweeping the ruins and air-raid shelters for runaways and stashes of black-market goods.Footnote ³⁸

Efforts to clear the city's rubble fields took on a military form as Gestapo officers and Order Police armed with machine pistols and hand grenades spread out across the city. Their encounters with cornered fugitives who decided to fight rather than surrender quickly led to firefights throughout the city. Barricaded in cellars and armed with small arms and sometimes explosives, these suspects, mostly deserters and foreign workers, knew they likely faced execution if apprehended. Consequently they were difficult to root out. One particularly tense incident that lasted more than twelve hours reveals the brutal nature of the clearance operation. On December 10 Gestapo officers acting on a tip passed to them by an informant attempted to raid a gang hideout. After repeated assaults were repulsed by small-arms fire, the Gestapo brought in military engineers to blast the suspects out of the cellar, and no quarter was given to the survivors. The death of the office's commander, Dr. Hoffman, and the wounding of the head of the Cologne commando, Friedrich Mohr, which occurred during an assault on another gang refuge the following day, further radicalized the Gestapo's efforts to secure the city.Footnote ³⁹

Such experiences reinforced the notion that the situation in Cologne had become open rebellion. Captured suspects, be they Germans or foreign laborers, were now described as “bandits” or “terrorists” in police reports as harried personnel tried to make sense of the chaotic situation by falling back on National Socialist ideology. This terminology had been commonplace in the reports written during anti-partisan operations in occupied Europe and was broadly applied, extending to unarmed women and children. The application of such labels to the civilian population indicates the extent to which criminality, war weariness, and allegedly deviant behavior had become politicized as the Third Reich faced defeat.

Contributing to the fear of rebellion was the fact that many Gestapo personnel had only the most basic military experience. Although many personnel had served in killing squads abroad, most were not experienced in urban combat. They found themselves at a tactical disadvantage and took considerable casualties, leading to increasing frustration among the personnel as they faced suspects who were familiar with the terrain and well entrenched. As a result, the Gestapo's operation became increasingly unmerciful, pursuing, mistreating, and killing suspects who, for the most part, posed no real threat to the regime.

The majority of German gang members were probably ambivalent or even somewhat sympathetic to the regime. Some had tried previously to join the SS, and during the early postwar years they attacked former concentration camp prisoners and foreign laborers, reflecting their adherence to the Third Reich's racism. Hans “Bomber” Steinbruck, a gang leader who emerged as a posthumous hero in the postwar resistance mythology surrounding the Edelweiss Pirates, had aspired to be a Gestapo agent himself. Although many of these youths had become disenchanted with their obligations to the war effort, they hardly posed an insurrectionary threat and would have been content to have been left alone. They fought only when attacked because they knew that the end was coming and that internment in a work camp or prison meant a drastically reduced chance of survival.Footnote ⁴⁰

Other individuals merely suspected of “deviant” behavior, such as homosexuality, supplying or fraternizing with foreigners, found to be in possession of enemy propaganda, out after curfew, or making disparaging comments about the regime, also found themselves the victims of official brutality due to the tense situation in the city. Police and Gestapo personnel, ideologically committed, overworked, and fearing for their own safety, reacted with lethal force against anyone who resisted arrest or attempted to escape. Those who did surrender were subjected to savage interrogations and pestilent conditions in the prisons, whose overcrowded nature helped to expand the scope of violence that took place in the region.Footnote ⁴¹

Confinement

The first tribulation facing the Gestapo's prisoners was their transport to a larger detainment facility. Strafing attacks by Allied fighters were common, and traffic jams, another frequent occurrence, left prisoners stranded on the roadways, making them easy targets. When these attacks did occur, panicked guards often shot prisoners in response to real or imagined escape attempts. Directives from the Cologne office advised units to return prisoners to their own detention centers if they had been unable to reach Klingelpütz or Brauweiler by twilight, underscoring the difficulties posed by the chaotic nature of the road system.Footnote ⁴²

The poor condition of transportation routes inevitably led to overcrowding in both the outlying AELs and the larger prisons as new detainees were added daily to facilities that were unable to move their prisoners on to other locations. In fact, Brauweiler and Klingelpütz, the mainstays of the regional penal system, had been dangerously overcrowded since August. In the wake of the July 20 assassination attempt on Hitler the Gestapo initiated nationwide arrests, code named “Aktion Gewitter.” This sweep detained hundreds of suspected political dissidents in the Rhineland, among them the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, to ensure they would not fall into the hands of the Allies and aid a postwar government. The prison cells in the basement of the EL DE Haus, the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo, were similarly overburdened with as many as thirty-four prisoners confined in rooms designed to hold eight. Thus, arriving prisoners found themselves deposited in unsanitary cells already overflowing with prisoners sick with disease or bearing the marks of the interrogations which could be heard echoing down the halls.Footnote ⁴³

These interrogations marked a prisoner's second set of tribulations. The testimony given during the postwar trial of Kriminalassistent Josef Hoegen and other members of Kommando Kütter reveal the brutal methods used. They committed dozens of beatings in Brauweiler prison, assaulting prisoners, including adolescents, elderly men, and a pregnant woman, with metal bars, chairs, clubs, and their fists. The plight of suspects during these interrogations was exacerbated by the fact that their interrogators were often the very same officers who had arrested them. Due to the manpower shortage all officers were active in the field, chasing down suspects during the day and then questioning them the same evening or during the following days. Thus the frustrations of overworked officers were taken out on their prisoners, and the fact that some of these beatings were delivered by middle-aged men with their fists denotes the personal nature many of these interrogations took on for the officers involved.Footnote ⁴⁴

If prisoners survived interrogation they languished in overcrowded cells. Many were executed for their real or perceived crimes against the regime. Between August 1944 and March 1945, 437 prisoners were executed at the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo alone, while another seventy-two were executed at Brauweiler. Although the Cologne Gestapo, specifically Hauptsturmführer Matschke, initially made the selections for execution, prison guards themselves took over this process in the AELs and prisons as communication broke down. Some prisoners were killed “attempting to escape” by bored or paranoid guards. Others died during air raids because they lacked proper shelter. Many also succumbed to disease as the guards appropriated their rations and refused them medical care. Finally, the last set of tribulations appeared in the spring, when Gestapo personnel evacuated the prisoners into the interior of the Reich.Footnote ⁴⁵

Postscript: Spring 1945

By the end of the year the Gestapo had managed to regain its hold on the region, although the situation remained tense. Large operations took place in Krefeld and Düsseldorf in January and February 1945 as the security forces in those cities also sought to consolidate control and apprehend fugitives fleeing from Cologne. Despite the best attempts by authorities, residents of the left-bank region also tried to return to their homes, ensuring continued friction between the population and the security forces. The failure of the Ardennes offensive in December was a serious setback to morale, and while Gestapo reports remained optimistic about striking a truce or a final victory, in the same breath they characterized the morale of the populace as marked by a high degree of apathy (“Im Volk herrscht eine tiefe Apathie”) and noted this dispirited condition was dangerous for the war effort (“Aber die Müdigkeit im Volk ist gefährlich”). The only question that remained was when the Allies would strike.Footnote ⁴⁶

The long-anticipated blow came on February 9, when the American First and Ninth armies launched Operation Grenade, directed at clearing the region between the border and the left bank of the Rhine. German opposition crumbled within the month, and by March 3 elements of the American Seventh Corps reached the outskirts of Cologne. As the front collapsed, the situation in the rear quickly deteriorated, and the remaining command structure of the security forces ceased to exist. Despite orders to stand and fight, most Gestapo and police personnel fled east or simply returned to their homes to await the end.Footnote ⁴⁷

During this period the Gestapo, militia, and police unleashed a final wave of spontaneous violence fueled by Hitler's “Nero Order” of March 19 that ordered the destruction of anything that could be deemed useful to the Allies. This directive ostensibly referred to material goods and industry. Nevertheless, due to the regime's reliance on slave labor and recent fears about the emergence of a postwar occupational government, the order can effectively be interpreted as pertaining to human beings as well. Police and military personnel also targeted civilians who refused to join the fighting. In the overcrowded prisons and work camps, guards also executed sick and “politically unreliable” prisoners, complying with Himmler's orders to liquidate them before evacuation.Footnote ⁴⁸

The experiences of the autumn created the final wave of violence in the spring. Faced with limited resources and widespread social disorder, the Cologne Gestapo resorted to the application of tactics developed while pacifying the populations of occupied Europe as they attempted to restore order quickly and prepare for the Reich's defense. The decision to undertake a mass operation to depopulate the region was pivotal. Directed against German civilians, the efforts to create a secure “dead zone” behind the front was not intended to be carried out with the same levels of force as those endured by the peoples of occupied Europe. Despite this intention the operation rapidly spiraled into violence.

The lack of manpower and the woeful state of transportation and supply networks hampered the Gestapo's efforts to carry out their mission efficiently. These factors combined with civilian animosity to generate an increasing sense of frustration among the overworked personnel. The depopulation efforts also exposed widespread criminality and “defeatist talk.” The theft and grumbling caused by the region's shattered infrastructure belied the myth of a unified community of fate and revealed the “Volksgemeinschaft” was apparently unwilling to defend the Reich at its darkest hour.

Consequently the Gestapo underwent a cumulative radicalization during fall 1944 as the organization's institutionalized reliance on violence and initiative came face to face with these ideological contradictions. Here the purposeful decentralization of command proved to be crucial as ideologically committed and brutalized personnel were freed from any oversight that might have checked the violence. The unraveling of the Gestapo's few remaining ethical restraints that occurred throughout fall 1944 in the face of civilian war weariness and apathy ushered in the final wave of arbitrary violence in spring 1945. This period, termed the “Katastrophe,” or catastrophe, by the Germans, was the moment when the citizens of the Third Reich became intimately familiar with the true face of the Nazi regime as its destructive nature was for the first time directed inwardly against the now unworthy racial community it had sworn to protect.