In April 1945 Germany lay in ruins. The historic cities of Germany, famous for their beauty before the war, had been bombed to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been burned to unidentifiable ashes in firestorms, asphyxiated in bomb-shelters that had been sucked airless, cooked in public fountains that had seemed to be refuges but became deathtraps. Millions of survivors were homeless. The few remaining newspapers had stopped printing the black-edged columns with the lists of dead soldiers as they only depressed civilian morale. Although, in the First World War the naval blockade introduced by the Allieshad reduced Germany to famine conditions, this wasn't really repeated in the Second. Rations were scant for most Germans by 1944 there was no mass starvation for them. If you weren't German, if you were Slavic or Jewish, you were less lucky. 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity were deliberately starved to death.

The radios, the cinema, the newspapers screamed about the barbarous Asiatic hordes of the Russian army which were pouring into Germany, the mass rapes (at least 1.4 million German women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone), the massacred villages. If Germany lost, the Jews, the Anglo-American capitalists, the sub-human communist Slavs would exterminate the German race and destroy civilization forever! If only the German people resisted for a little longer, miracle weapons that German scientists were building would turn the tide of battle. Trust in Hitler, who does not weaken or falter, who is everything that is good and brave and true in us, who warms us with the glow of his great soul: the Führer!

Millions of refugees fled from the approaching Russian army; many froze to death or drowned in the icy waters of the Baltic. Sometimes there were mass suicides, as dozens, even hundreds of people shot, poisoned or drowned themselves and their children rather than live in a Germany without National Socialism. Or they killed themselves because they feared revenge. Every adult German knew that something terrible had been happening to the Jews of Europe, and that if Germany had won the war then hundreds of millions of Slavs would need to be ... replaced... by German settlers. Brothers and husbands serving in the army brought back tales of vast ditches filled with human bodies; when entire villages (like Lidice) were executed in retaliation for resistance activity the radio and newspapers announced it matter-of-factly. Now German civilians began to see what their nation had done with their own eyes. Peaceable small German country towns glimpsed strange, terrible apparitions - shuffling columns of gaunt, barely human concentration camp inmates in their striped uniforms, guarded by SS men in black. Occasionally one of the skeletons collapsed and the sharp crack of the kill shot rang out.

Sources:

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945, Nicholas Stargardt, 2015

Germany 1945: From War to Peace, Richard Bessel, 2012

Downfall 1945: The Fall of Hitler’s Third Reich, Steven Zaloga, 2016