by Warfare History Network
18 March 2018
On 18 October 1944—the 131st anniversary of the Battle of the Nations’ victory over Napoleon in 1813—Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler stepped up to a microphone to make a national radio address announcing the formation of the Nazi Party-controlled Volkssturm, or People’s Militia.
The new Volkssturm drew inspiration from the old Prussian Landsturm of 1813–1815, that fought in the liberation wars against Napoleon, mainly as guerrilla forces. Plans to form a Landsturm national militia in eastern Germany as a last resort to boost fighting strength were first proposed in 1944 by General Heinz Guderian, chief of the General Staff.
The Army did not have enough men to resist the Soviet onslaught. So, additional categories of men were called into service, including those in non-essential jobs, those previously deemed unfit, over-age, or under-age, and those recovering from wounds.
The Volkssturm had existed, on paper, since around 1925, but it was only after Hitler ordered Martin Bormann to recruit six million men for this militia that the group became a physical reality. The intended strength of "six million" was never attained.
Standing with him was the new Chief of the General Staff, General Heinz Guderian; Dr. Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin; and Gauleiter [Regional Leader] Erich Koch.
The site of the address was at Bartenstein, East Prussia, on Koch’s turf, and he was already organizing his own local forces to fight the Red Army coming from the East.
Creating the Volkssturm From the Ashes of Operation Valkyrie
Guderian had come into office the day after the failed bomb explosion to kill Adolf Hitler, and the latter had virtually lost most of his faith in the regular German armed forces to win the war.
The radical Nazis—Dr. Josef Göbbels, Dr. Robert Ley, Himmler, and most of all Reich Leader and Secretary to the Führer Martin Bormann—were urging Hitler to turn to the very force that had brought him to power in the first place: the Nazi Party and its various organizations.
What all of them feared most was a second 1918-style collapse of the German state from within, an internal-type revolt that had toppled Kaiser Wilhelm II when the German Army was still fighting in the field on the Western Front.
It was their belief that the Party had rebuilt the state from that catastrophe starting anew in 1933, and now—11 years later—a similar program of rejuvenation was to be the order of the day.
This time, there would be no home front failure, and thus on 25 September 1944, Hitler, through the use of his familiar "Führer Decree", announced the creation of the Volkssturm and Himmler’s control of the organization; Bormann would be in charge of the administrative issues.
Thus, right from the start, there was the divided leadership that would plague the VS until the very end of its days in the defense of smoldering Berlin—in which it played at least half a part.
Hitler, like his rival, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had the leadership style of giving several different men the same functions, believing that competition would make them perform better and get the overall job done faster. This was also the overall leadership principle of the Nazi Party as a whole.
Bormann’s VS
The key individual, from inception to ultimate VS demise, was Bormann.
In his unique position of being at the Führer’s elbow night and day, he had Hitler’s ear on virtually everything and thus was able to convince Hitler to create the VS along the lines of the 1813 Home Guard, and also to place it under Lammers’s Reich Chancellery.
Bormann believed that only the Party could run the VS properly and ensured that service in it was mandatory for all civilian German males between the ages of 16 and 60.
This included the all-important Class of 1928—those who would turn 17 in 1945—the 550,000 boys of Artur Axmann’s Hitler Youth, literally the final remaining military manpower pool of Nazi Germany. The older men were veterans of World War I or those who had already fought in World War II and been wounded.
The VS would be organized on the model of the 42 Gaue, or Regions, of the Third Reich, all controlled by Bormann as virtual domestic dictator while Hitler ran the war.
This had been the setup ever since Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and thus Bormann understood his task thoroughly, governing the Reich via teleprinter, telegraph, radio, and telephone from wherever Hitler’s “Führer Headquarters” happened to be.
He would rule the VS through the Gau, Kreis [county], and Ortsgruppenleiters [town leaders].
In Bormann’s mind, the VS would fight like the sturdy Japanese in the Pacific: To the last man, bullet, and breath.
The nature of Bormann’s vision for the VS was unity overall, Party control, and formations based on the members’ place of residence.
The last factor was all important in his view, as he believed that it was critical to the fighting success of the VS as a combat unit that would be called into action when the enemy arrived at the edges of their towns and cities, most of which had been officially declared “fortresses” by the Führer anyway.
The Führer Decree of 25 September gave the Gauleiters the power to organize the VS in their domains, which included more than 800 counties in the Reich proper.
The average age of those who served [the national oath-taking was conducted on 12 November 1944] was between 45 and 52, and Bormann -aping Hitler, here– refused to call up women, unlike the Soviets.
Of those men who were called up, most were white-collar workers, unaccustomed to the harsh life of a soldier in the field.
The brief history of the Volkssturm [the 1944 mobilization of German civilian males between the ages of sixteen and sixty to form a national militia to resist the Allies] is well known.
Early on, war crimes prosecutors as well as scholars maintained that the Volkssturm failed to help stem the Allied advance because it was poorly led and trained, badly equipped, and composed of those who were physically and chronologically unable to withstand the rigors of combat.
The general conclusion was that the militia was a tragic example of what state tyranny and fanaticism could create when faced with a national emergency.
However, the Volkssturm was not t simply a vehicle that the party cynically hoped it could ride to regain domestic power and influence lost during the war.
True believers, first and foremost Martin Bormann, viewed the German civilian militia as the instrument through which victory would be salvaged or, at worst, defeat averted.
Why would zealots believe that military amateurs could defeat Germany's more numerous and better armed adversaries?
Because they insisted that a racially superior people, convinced of its superiority, could not and would not admit defeat.
To the contrary, they argued that Germans, motivated by effective propaganda and inspired by the party leadership, could be mobilized to fight so fanatically that their enemies, lacking in racial superiority and without similar fanaticism, would choose to make peace.
Bormann and others, sincerely saw the militia as Germany's last best weapon.
Ideology played a vital role in the creation of the Volkssturm and it continued to be a factor in how the organization evolved and performed.
However, Bormann learned at the outset that ideology had to be employed selectively. For example, the notion that aroused racial nationalism would bring victory implied using the Volkssturm to spearhead a German resistance movement. But resistance in the guise of partisan warfare stripped those prosecuting it of combatant status.
Fearing that partisan war would expose all German citizens to unrestricted Allied military reprisals, and mindful that this threat had a negative effect on the public's acceptance of the Volkssturm, Bormann fought for the militia's designation as a military formation.
Marksmanship vs Anti-tank Weapons
On 27 November 1944, Himmler took command of Army Group Upper Rhine, thus making him Bormann’s first serious rival for power, as both wanted to succeed Hitler as Führer.
Each reasoned that if they were able to win the war for Germany, they would accede to the mantle, and there was, indeed, some logic in their positions. As it turned out, Himmler’s tenure as commander was brief, as he proved to be completely incompetent in the position.
Even though Bormann irritated Himmler by referring to the units as "my VS", it was a top SS man—General Gottlob Berger—who was chief of staff of the Volkssturm and who reported directly to Himmler, not Bormann.
Indeed, it was Berger who announced that the VS would be trained and ready for combat against the Russians and Western Allies no later than 31 March 1945.
In training, Berger wanted individual rifle marksmanship stressed for the civilian warriors, while Bormann opted instead for small anti-tank weapons to defeat the masses of Russian T-34s and American M-4 Sherman tanks.
In the end, Bormann prevailed, and in this instance his view was militarily sound as events were to prove, especially in the defense of Berlin and other German cities.
The citizen-soldiers trained on weeknights and for six hours on Sundays, and what rifle training was provided was given by SA Chief of Staff Wilhelm Schepmann’s brown-shirted Stormtroopers.
Schepmann had wanted a real wartime role for the SA ever since 1939, and he saw the VS as a way of achieving it at the expense of the SS [its hated rival since 1934], the Party, and the German Army [which it had wanted to replace as early as 1930].
Hitler and Bormann, too, saw this danger, and they were not about to let Schepmann achieve an ambition that had eluded the murdered SA leader Captain Ernst Röhm in the Blood Purge of 30 June 32 July 1934.
Thus, Schepmann would be allowed to arm and train the VS but not lead it.
On 26 September 1944, Schepmann was appointed Chief of Staff for the German Volkssturm’s Shooting Training [Inspekteur der Schießausbildung im Deutschen Volkssturm].
Nor would Dr. Josef Göbbels in his capacity as Hitler’s appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War.
Despite the famous wartime newsreels of the leather-coated Propaganda minister reviewing VS troops passing on parade, his role with the Volkssturm was really quite minimal,
The National Socialist Motor Corps led by Erwin Kraus, provided courier motorcyclists and truck drivers to transport the VS men to their sites, as well as units of the Nazi Flieger Korps [NSFK].
“Wars Were Winner-Take-All Affairs”
It seemed that every Party organization wanted its finger in the VS pie, and for a very simple reason, then and now still incomprehensible to those in the West:
The Nazis believed that the war could still be won!
First, from Hitler on down, the true Nazis took it as an article of faith that racially pure Germans of good stock would defeat the tainted Slavs from the steppes of Russia and the corrupt Americans, British, and Canadians from the West.
Dr. Göbbels’s propaganda screamed its slogans:
"Never again, 1918! Our walls may break, but our hearts never"”
The citizen-soldiers of the Third Reich—indoctrinated as true believers—would also be fighting for their own homes and families on German soil, and the threat from the East.
As one historian put it, “Wars were winner-take-all affairs”