The urge to fight until the bitter end was even stronger on the Eastern Front. German soldiers’ fear of the Red Army, encouraged by Nazi propaganda, and the brutality of the war as it was waged on both sides did not make internment as a POW seem like a very attractive prospect. “Then there’s another point which rather bothers me personally, and that is the following,” reflected General Cramer. “It also has to do with my experience in RUSSIA about which you also know. It is of course a fact that the final fighting in AFRICA was not so intense as that in RUSSIA, because the soldiers know that to be a PW in ENGLAND is bearable in contrast to being killed in RUSSIA.”⁶²⁴ In addition to the last battles in Tunisia, Cramer had personally experienced the collapse of southern German lines on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad had been surrounded. He was thus in a position to compare the Wehrmacht’s two greatest military catastrophes in the years 1942 and ’43, and there was undeniable truth to his observation, as countless other examples show.⁶²⁵ German soldiers’ fear of the Red Army meant that many of them refused to capitulate in the final year of the war. When surrounded in places like Tarnopol, Vitebsk, Budapest, Poznan, and finally Berlin, the last defenders of the Third Reich often preferred the most hair-raising attempts to break through to their own lines to the option of simply surrendering. In so doing, thousands of soldiers marched to their own deaths like lemmings. Had they capitulated, most of them would have survived.⁶²⁶ Nowhere in the West, neither in Cherbourg and Saint-Malo nor Metz and Aachen, did German soldiers show the same reluctance to surrender. But such reluctance was only a tendency, not an iron rule. Hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht troops did allow themselves to be captured on the Eastern Front. The estimated number was 860,000 from 1941 to 1944.⁶²⁷

DYING WITH HONOR

The German navy developed a relationship all its own to the trope of fighting down to the last bullet. As we have seen, the German navy command, ever conscious of the shame of the sailors’ rebellion of 1918, had placed utmost priority upon making amends in World War II. The fatalist command that navy men be ready to “die with honor” followed immediately upon Britain’s entry into the war, which few of the top leaders had expected.⁶²⁸ Navy Commander in Chief Raeder may have covered up the 1939 case of the crew of the MS Admiral Graf Spree sinking their own ship to avoid a lopsided battle with the British and save their own skins. But he also ordered that in future German warships were to battle to victory or go down with flags flying.⁶²⁹ There are numerous examples of navy commanders demanding this sort of sacrifice from their men during the course of the war. And Raeder’s successor, Dönitz, placed even more emphasis on “dying with honor” in the second half of the conflict.

For example, in November 1942, when Dönitz learned that Captain Hans Dietrich von Tiesenhausen, commander of U-331, had waved the white flag in order to save his helpless vessel from enemy aircraft, he immediately condemned the action and promised to have the captain court-martialed upon his return to Germany. “There can be no doubt in the Navy,” Dönitz fumed, “that waving a white flag or taking down one’s flag is equivalent to dishonorable surrender… and a violation of the venerable military and seaman’s principle of preferring to go down with honor rather than lowering one’s flag.” In Dönitz’s view, the commander should have sunk his own vessel after exhausting his capacity to do battle rather than heading for the African coast in order to better the chances of saving his crew. “Officers are to be instilled with the uncompromising rigor to regard the honor of the flag as more important than the lives of individuals,” Dönitz added. “There is no such thing as raising a white flag in the German Navy, either at sea or on land.”⁶³⁰

It had become a general trend during the nineteenth century for warships to refuse to surrender, and the same behavior can be found in various navies in the first half of the twentieth.⁶³¹ In Germany, Hans Bohrdt’s painting The Last Man had provided an iconic image of this idea during World War I. Bohrdt’s work was a stylized representation of a naval battle off the Falkland Islands in December 1914, in which sailors from the capsized cruiser MS Nuremberg had supposedly held up German flags to approaching British warships, and subsequently drowned.⁶³²