What Hitler Said When German Civilians Begged Him to End the War…

February 1945, Joseph Gerbles sat at his desk in the propaganda ministry reading the latest Sicker Heights Deanst report on civilian morale. His hand trembled slightly as he turned the pages. The intelligence services agents had been thorough, perhaps too thorough. From Hamburg to Munich, from the Rur to Saxony, the message was the same.

German civilians wanted the war to end. They didn’t care about victory anymore. They just wanted it to stop. One report from Essen described a woman who had lost her husband at Stalingrad, her son in Normandy, and her home in an RAF raid. She had been overheard in a food queue saying she would welcome the Americans if they brought peace.

Another from Dresdon, still smoldering from the firestorm that had killed tens of thousands just days earlier, documented crowds openly weeping and asking why the furer didn’t surrender. A third from Berlin noted that civilians were no longer seeking shelter during air raids. They were too exhausted to care whether they lived or died.

Gerbles had been Hitler’s most loyal propagandist for over 20 years. He had crafted the mythology of the thousand-year Reich had turned Hitler into a secular god in the minds of millions. But now sitting in his office with these reports spread before him, he faced an impossible task. How do you maintain faith in victory when the people no longer believe? How do you inspire hope when mothers are burying their children in bomb craters? He had tried everything.

His propaganda machine still churned out promises of miracle weapons, of imminent victory, of enemies collapsing from exhaustion. But the gap between his words and German reality had become too vast to bridge. People were starving. Cities were burning. The Red Army was crossing the Oda River, less than 50 mi from Berlin. And the furer, the man who had promised to make Germany great, refused to even look at what his war had done to his people.

The distance between Hitler and the German people he claimed to serve had been growing for years, but it had become absolute. He hadn’t given a public speech since January 1944. He hadn’t visited a bombed city since the war began. While German civilians huddled in cellars and subway tunnels, listening to the whistle of falling bombs, Hitler lived in heavily fortified headquarters, surrounded by concrete and steel, insulated from the consequences of his decisions.

Gerbles gathered the reports and prepared for his daily briefing with the Furer. He had been documenting civilian morale in his diary for months, each entry more desperate than the last. He knew what Hitler would say. He had heard it before, but he had to try. The German people were breaking, and someone had to make Hitler understand.

The pattern had started long before 1945. As early as 1943, after the catastrophe at Stalinrad, the SD reports had begun noting a shift in civilian attitude. The invincibility myth had cracked. If the Vermach could be defeated in Russia, perhaps Germany could lose the war. But these early doubts were still mixed with hope.

People believed Hitler would find a way. They trusted in his genius, his luck, his destiny. Then came Hamburg in July 1943. Operation Gamora. The RAF and American bombers created a firestorm that consumed 8 square miles of the city. The fire generated winds of 150 mph and temperatures of 1,500°. [Music] People who fled into the streets were cooked alive or suffocated when the flames consumed all oxygen.

Those who sheltered in cellars were baked to death when the buildings above them collapsed into infernos. 40,000 people died in a single night. The survivors emerged into a landscape of ash and twisted metal. Bodies lay everywhere. Some burned beyond recognition. Others perfectly preserved but killed by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Children searched for parents. Parents searched for children. And everyone asked the same question. Why? Gerbles wanted Hitler to visit Hamburg. He believed that seeing the destruction, meeting the survivors, showing solidarity with the suffering would help maintain morale. It was what Churchill did in London during the Blitz.

It was what Roosevelt would have done. It was what any leader concerned with his people would do. Hitler refused. Gerbles documented the conversation in his diary. He had explained that the people needed to see their furer, needed to know he understood their sacrifice. Hitler’s response was cold. “I cannot bear to see such scenes,” he said.

They would interfere with my ability to make the necessary decisions. A surgeon cannot operate if he allows himself to feel the patients pain. But there was something else in Hitler’s refusal. Something Gerbles only gradually came to understand. Hitler wasn’t avoiding Hamburg out of sensitivity or emotional weakness.

He was avoiding it because he didn’t care. The suffering of German civilians had become irrelevant to him. They were pieces on a strategic board, resources to be expended, tools to be used until they broke. The bombing intensified throughout 1944. Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stoutgart.

Every major German city felt the weight of Allied air power. The Americans bombed by day with precision raids targeting factories and rail yards. The British bombed by night with area raids designed to break civilian morale. Between them, they were destroying Germany city by city, block by block. The civilian death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands.

But these weren’t just statistics. Each number represented a person with a name, a life, a family. A mother who would never see her children grow up. A child who would never have the chance to grow up at all. an elderly couple who had survived the First World War only to be incinerated in their own home in the second.

And with each raid, with each thousand dead, the civilian desire for peace grew stronger. The SD reports documented it in painful detail. People were no longer using the Hitler salute. They were no longer donating to war relief funds. They were no longer volunteering for civil defense. They were hiding in cellars, hoarding food and whispering about surrender.

The reports reached Hitler regularly. Martin Borman, his personal secretary, controlled access to the Furer, but he couldn’t shield him from the intelligence summaries. Hitler read them or had them read to him. He knew what the German people were thinking. He knew they wanted the war to end. His response was not sympathy. It was contempt.

Albert Spear, the armament’s minister, witnessed this contempt firsthand. Spare was one of the few people who could still speak relatively frankly with Hitler, though that privilege was eroding by early 1945. He had been trying for months to make Hitler understand that the war was lost, that continuing would only increase German suffering, that the honorable thing would be to negotiate some kind of peace.

In January 1945, Shpar brought Hitler a memorandum. It was carefully worded, technically focused, designed to appeal to Hitler’s supposed rationality. Spear laid out the industrial situation. Coal production had collapsed. Steel production was a fraction of what it had been. Transportation networks were shattered. The synthetic fuel plants that kept the Vermacht mobile were being systematically destroyed.

Without fuel, without ammunition, without replacement equipment, the German military could not continue fighting. The memorandum’s conclusion was inescapable. Germany would lose the war within 6 to 8 weeks. The only question was how much destruction would occur in those final weeks. Every day the war continued meant more German cities destroyed.

More German civilians killed, more of Germany’s future consumed in a pointless final struggle. Spear expected anger. He expected denial. What he got was worse. Hitler read the memorandum slowly, his hands shaking from the Parkinson’s disease that was progressively destroying his nervous system. When he finished, he looked up at Spare with cold, pale blue eyes.

“If the war is lost,” Hitler said, “the German people will be lost as well. There is no need to consider the basis of even a most primitive existence any longer. On the contrary, it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves. The nation has proved itself weak, and the future belongs solely to the stronger Eastern nation.

” Besides, those who remain after the battle are of little value, for the good have fallen. Spear stood frozen. This wasn’t the response of a leader concerned for his people. This was the response of a man who had come to hate them. Hitler wasn’t trying to save Germany. He was willing to destroy it rather than admit defeat.

The ideology behind Hitler’s response had always been there, lurking beneath the nationalist rhetoric and the promises of German greatness. Hitler was a social Darwinist who believed in survival of the fittest in the idea that history was a struggle between races and nations and that the weak deserved to perish.

He had applied this ideology to Jews, to Slavs, to everyone he considered inferior. Now he was applying it to Germans themselves. If Germany lost the war, Hitler reasoned, it proved that Germans were not the master race he had claimed them to be. They were weak. They deserved their fate. And if they were going to be destroyed anyway by the advancing allies, they might as well be destroyed thoroughly, completely with nothing left for the victors to claim.

This was the thinking that led to the Nero decree of March 19th, 1945. The official title was demolitions on Reich territory decree, but it became known as the Nero decree after the Roman Emperor who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned. The decree ordered the destruction of all military, industrial, transportation, and communications facilities in Germany.

Bridges were to be blown. Factories were to be demolished. Power plants were to be wrecked. Food stores were to be burned. The decrees purpose was not military. The war was already lost. Destroying German infrastructure wouldn’t stop the Allied advance. The purpose was punitive. If the German people had failed to win Hitler’s war, they would be left with nothing.

They would starve in the ruins of their cities. They would freeze without fuel or electricity. They would have no means to rebuild. Germany would become a wasteland and the German people would suffer for their failure. Spear was horrified. He understood immediately what the decree meant. It was a death sentence for millions of German civilians.

Without bridges, food couldn’t be transported. Without power plants, hospitals couldn’t function. Without factories, there would be no peaceime economy to provide employment. Hitler was ordering the murder of his own people through deliberate destruction of the means of survival. Spear tried to reason with Hitler. He explained that the allies would need German infrastructure to govern occupied Germany, that destroying everything would only make the occupation harsher, that the German people would suffer more, not less. Hitler’s response was

dismissive. If the war is lost, the people will be lost also, he repeated. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things, for the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.

In any case, only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.” The logic was monstrous, but internally consistent. Hitler had spent 12 years telling Germans they were the master race destined to rule Europe. Now that they were losing, he concluded they had been unworthy all along.

The soldiers who died in Russia, in France, in North Africa, they were the best of Germany. Those who survived, the women and children and elderly huddling in cellars. They were the weak, the inferior, the ones who deserved to perish. Spear left the meeting shaken. For the first time, he understood that Hitler was not just indifferent to German suffering. He actively desired it.

The man who had promised to make Germany great was now determined to make Germany extinct. But Hitler’s contempt for the German people had been visible earlier for those willing to see it. Throughout 1944, as the military situation deteriorated, Hitler had become increasingly critical of German performance.

When generals reported that units were exhausted, that soldiers were surrendering in large numbers, that morale was collapsing. Hitler blamed the soldiers. They were weak. They lacked will. They had been corrupted by defeatism. When Gerbles reported that civilian morale was cracking under the bombing, Hitler blamed the civilians. They were soft.

They had grown comfortable during the easy victories of the early war years. Now, when tested, they revealed their true nature. When industrial production fell short of targets, Hitler blamed the workers. They were sabotaging the war effort. They were putting their own comfort above the nation’s survival.

They deserve to be punished. The pattern was consistent. Nothing was ever Hitler’s fault. The failed strategy in Russia, the lost battle in North Africa, the invasion of Normandy, the collapse of the Eastern Front, none of it resulted from his decisions. It was always someone else’s failure. The generals were incompetent. The soldiers were cowardly.

The people were weak. By early 1945, this blame had crystallized into a comprehensive rejection of the German people. They had failed him. They had proven unworthy of his leadership, and therefore they deserved whatever fate awaited them. The civilians who begged for peace, who wanted the war to end, who couldn’t understand why Hitler wouldn’t negotiate, they were seeing this rejection in real time.

But most of them couldn’t comprehend it. They still believed, despite everything, that Hitler cared about Germany, that he was trying to save them, that there was some plan or strategy that would make sense of the continued fighting. They were wrong. There was no plan. There was only spite. In the final months, as the Allies closed in from East and West, the disconnect between Hitler’s rhetoric and reality became absolute.

He still spoke of victory, of wonder weapons that would turn the tide, of enemy coalitions collapsing, of final triumph. But these weren’t strategic assessments. They were fantasies, delusions, the desperate imaginings of a man who could not accept failure. The German people, meanwhile, lived in a nightmare of his creation.

Refugees from the east fled before the advancing Red Army. Millions of them carrying what they could, leaving behind everything else. They walked through winter snow, slept in ditches, starved by the roadside. Thousands froze to death. Thousands more were caught by Soviet troops and killed or enslaved. In the cities, civilians huddled in ruins.

Food was scarce. Water was contaminated. Disease spread. The bombing continued relentlessly. Berlin, once a city of 4 million, was being systematically destroyed. By April 1945, entire neighborhoods had ceased to exist. Where apartment buildings had stood, there were now fields of rubble. Where parks had provided green spaces, there were now mass graves.

And through it all, Hitler remained in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, 50 ft underground, surrounded by concrete walls 8 ft thick. He held military conferences with maps showing armies that no longer existed. He issued orders to units that had been destroyed weeks earlier. He planned counterattacks with divisions that had no fuel, no ammunition, no will to fight.

When aids tried to tell him the truth, he raged. When generals suggested retreat or surrender, he fired them. When anyone dared to suggest that the war was lost, that Germany should seek terms, that the killing should stop, Hitler’s response was always the same. They were defeists. They were traitors.

They lacked faith in final victory. The few times Hitler did acknowledge German suffering, his comments revealed his true feelings. In one conversation with Gerbals in February 1945, Hitler discussed the bombing of Dresdon, which had killed at least 25,000 civilians in a single night. Gerbles expected Hitler to express outrage at the Allies, to use the bombing for propaganda purposes, to show solidarity with the victims.

Instead, Hitler was dismissive. The people of Dresdon failed to evacuate when ordered, he said. They ignored the warnings. They prioritized their own comfort over obedience. This is the consequence of their disobedience. Gerbles was stunned. He tried to explain that many of the dead were refugees from the east, that the city was overwhelmed with displaced persons that the firestorm had been so intense that evacuation was impossible.

Hitler wasn’t interested. In his mind, German civilians who died in bombing raids had only themselves to blame. If they had fought harder, if they had worked more efficiently, if they had believed more fervently, the Allies would have been defeated and the bombing would have stopped. This was the answer to the question that tormented millions of Germans in those final months.

Why won’t he end this? Why won’t he surrender? Why does he keep fighting when the war is clearly lost? The answer was simple, though almost impossible for ordinary Germans to accept. Hitler didn’t care if they died. In fact, at some level, he wanted them to die. They had failed him. They had proven themselves unworthy.

And in his twisted ideology, their destruction was not a tragedy, but a justified consequence of their weakness. The Nero decree was the clearest expression of this desire. But Spear managed to partially sabotage its implementation. He worked with military commanders and regional officials to delay or ignore the destruction orders.

Many bridges were saved. Many factories remained intact. Much of Germany’s infrastructure survived not because of Hitler’s leadership, but despite it, because Germans disobeyed their furer to preserve their own future. But Hitler’s rejection of the German people extended beyond infrastructure. In the final weeks, as Soviet forces entered Berlin, Hitler had the opportunity to evacuate civilians from the city.

The battle for Berlin would be brutal. Everyone knew it. Hundreds of thousands of civilians would be caught in the crossfire, but Hitler refused to order evacuation. He wanted civilians to stay, to fight, to die defending the capital. His reasoning was both military and ideological. Militarily, he believed that defending soldiers would fight harder if their families were present, that they wouldn’t retreat if it meant abandoning their wives and children.

Ideologically, he believed that Germans, who wouldn’t fight to the death, didn’t deserve to live anyway. The result was carnage. When Soviet artillery began shelling Berlin in midappril, civilians had nowhere to go. They huddled in cellars and subway tunnels while the city disintegrated around them. Soviet and German forces fought street by street, building by building, room by room.

Civilians were caught in the middle, killed by artillery, by snipers, by collapsing buildings, by fires that consumed entire blocks. Estimates of civilian deaths in the Battle of Berlin range from 22,000 to 125,000. The true number will never be known. Many bodies were never recovered. Many were buried in mass graves without identification.

Many simply disappeared in the chaos. And while this was happening, while Berlin burned and German civilians died in the ruins, Hitler sat in his bunker and blamed them for losing his war. In his final days, Hitler’s contempt for the German people became explicit. On April the 22nd, 1945, when told that his orders for a counterattack could not be executed because the necessary forces didn’t exist, Hitler erupted in a rage that lasted for hours.

He screamed that the German people had betrayed him, that the generals had betrayed him, that everyone had betrayed him. He said that the German people deserve to be destroyed because they had proven themselves weak. This was not the rant of a leader mourning his nation’s defeat. This was the rage of a narcissist who could not accept responsibility for his own failures.

Hitler had started the war. Hitler had made the strategic decisions. Hitler had refused to listen to advice, had fired competent generals, had insisted on holding untenable positions, had wasted resources on prestige projects while the front collapsed. But in his mind, none of this was his fault.

The failure was Germany’s, not his. Those around Hitler in the bunker were shocked by the venom in his words, though they shouldn’t have been. The signs had been there for years. Hitler had never truly cared about the German people. He cared about his own vision, his own legacy, his own place in history.

Germans were useful in so far as they served his purposes. When they could no longer deliver victory, they became worthless to him. On April the 29th, the day before his suicide, Hitler dictated his political testament. It was his final message to the German people, his last chance to address the nation he had led for 12 years.

Some expected an apology, or at least an acknowledgement of the suffering he had caused. Others expected a call for continued resistance, a demand that Germans fight to the last. What they got was neither. The testament was a long, rambling document that blamed Jews for starting the war, blamed generals for losing it, and blamed the German people for not fighting hard enough.

There was no sympathy for German suffering. There was no regret for German deaths. There was only anger that Germany had failed to achieve his vision. The Testament ended with orders for his successors to continue the war, to maintain racial purity, and to never surrender. Even in death, Hitler demanded that Germans keep dying for a cause that was already lost.

The next day, April 30th, 1945, Hitler shot himself in the mouth. His body was burned in a shell crater in the Reich Chancellory Garden. Within a week, Germany surrendered unconditionally. The war in Europe was over. The final accounting of Hitler’s war was staggering. Approximately 5 million German soldiers had died.

Between 400,000 and 600,000 German civilians had been killed in bombing raids. Hundreds of thousands more had died in the final battles. Millions were refugees displaced from their homes in the east. Every major German city was damaged or destroyed. The economy was shattered. The nation was divided and occupied, and all of it, every death, every destroyed city, every ruined life, could have been prevented if Hitler had been willing to end the war when it became clear Germany would lose. By late 1944, at the latest,

and arguably much earlier, the war’s outcome was inevitable. Continuing to fight only increased the suffering, only added to the death toll, only made the final defeat more catastrophics. German civilians understood this. They begged for peace, for surrender, for an end to the killing. They didn’t care about victory anymore.

They just wanted to survive. They wanted their children to survive. They wanted some chance of a future. Hitler’s response to these pleas, rejection, and ultimately a desire to destroy the German people along with himself. When Germans begged him to end the war, he blamed them for losing it. When they suffered under Allied bombing, he said they deserved it.

When they faced starvation and death, he ordered the destruction of the infrastructure that might have saved them. This was not the behavior of a leader who loved his people. This was the behavior of a malignant narcissist who, faced with the failure of his grandiose vision, chose to punish those he blamed for that failure.

The German people had been his tools, his instruments for achieving greatness. When they could no longer serve that purpose, he discarded them with contempt. The tragedy is that millions of Germans never understood this. They kept faith in Hitler long after he had abandoned them. They believed until the very end that he was trying to save Germany, that there was some plan or purpose to the continued fighting.

They couldn’t comprehend that their furer, the man they had trusted with their nation’s future, had come to hate them. The lesson of what Hitler said when German civilians begged him to end the war, is not just about one man’s monstrous ideology. It’s about the danger of investing absolute power in any leader, about the importance of maintaining democratic accountability, about the need for citizens to question and challenge their leaders rather than blindly following them.

Hitler’s contempt for the German people was always there, hidden beneath the propaganda and the promises. But it only became visible when he no longer needed them to believe in him. when the war was lost and his only remaining power was the power to destroy. In those final months when Germans most needed leadership, protection and compassion, Hitler gave them only blame, punishment, and death.

That is what Hitler said when German civilians begged him to end the war. He said they deserved to die. He said they had proven themselves weak. He said the future belonged to stronger peoples. He said it was better to destroy Germany completely than to preserve anything for the survivors. And then he destroyed as much as he could before destroying himself, leaving the German people to face the consequences of his hatred alone.