Hitler's Volkssturm: the Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany, 1944-1945

Military Review, May-June, 2004 by Scott Stephenson

HITLER'S VOLKSSTURM: The Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany, 1944-1945, David K. Yelton, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 2002, 305 pages, $39.95.

Just as Saddam Hussein hoped his Fedayeen would somehow stall the U.S. drive on Baghdad in the spring of 2003, Adolf Hitler hoped an irregular force, the Volkssturm, would rescue Germany from defeat during the last months of World War II.

Unlike the Iraqi Fedayeen who were drawn from Ba'ath party diehards, the Volkssturm was to be a National Socialist levee en masse drawn from the entire able-bodied male population of Germany. According to Hitler's vision, the Volkssturm's numbers and patriotic zeal would make the conquest of Germany so costly that the Jew-dominated home fronts of Germany's enemies would collapse and the Reich would be saved. In reality, the Volkssturm was a military failure that did little to alter the course of the war's final campaigns.

David K. Yelton gives us clear reasons for the Volkssturm's failure: it was poorly equipped, poorly trained, and suffered from inevitable morale problems of a hodge-podge force asked to rescue a lost cause. As a result, its combat record was distinctly mixed. In a few places like Germany's eastern frontier, Volkssturm battalions, motivated to protect their homes from the Red Army's avenging fury, gave a reasonably good account of themselves. On the western front, the Volkssturm was usually less than a speed bump to Allied spearheads. In the final accounting, the Volkssturm did little to influence the course of the final campaigns.

Yelton is less concerned with the Volkssturm's fighting record than he is in why it was created and why it failed. In investigating these questions, he discovers that the institutional history of the Volkssturm offers a unique window into the bizarre politics of the Third Reich's last days.

Before autumn 1944, Hitler had been reluctant to create a popular militia. Recalling the collapse of the German home front in 1918, he feared that placing such heavy demands on the German populace would lead to a similar collapse in morale. Events and the influence of one man changed his mind.

The events included the arrival of Allied armies on the Reich's border and the spontaneous creation of local defense forces by Nazi gauleiters. Martin Bormann was the man who urged Hitler to let the party take control of a popular militia force to stiffen Germany's defenses while completing the "Nazification" of the German people. Bormann got his way and, using skillful ideological arguments and special access to Hitler, blocked attempts by Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels, and the German Army to wrest control of the Volkssturm from the Nazi Party. In doing so, Bormann showed himself the master of a Darwinian competition for power that characterized the fragmented political process in Nazi Germany.

For all his skill in bureaucratic infighting, Bormann lacked the resources and expertise to turn the Volkssturm into an effective fighting force. As the Third Reich collapsed, the Volkssturm failed to achieve any of the political or military objectives that Hitler and Bormann had laid out. Instead of legions of well-armed, patriotic Aryan warriors, middle-aged men carrying castoff weapons manned the Volkssturm battalions. Yelton argues that disparity between vision and execution offers clear evidence that, by late 1944, ideology had totally overwhelmed reality in Nazi decisionmaking.

Yelton's argument is based on impressive research and persuasive analysis. His book offers a fascinating, readable, highly recommended case study of the political culture of a dying regime.

LTC Scott Stephenson, USA Retired, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas