The Volkssturm

On 18 October 1944, the 131st anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke in a factory hall at Bartenstein (today Bartoszyce) in East Prussia. The province’s Gauleiter, Erich Koch, read out Adolf Hitler’s proclamation establishing the Volkssturm – the “people’s storm”, a levy en masse of all men capable of bearing arms aged 16 to 60 who had not so far served in the army. In the hall stood the first East Prussian Volkssturm men, in civilian clothes with armbands on their sleeves. Himmler spoke of 1813 and the Prussian levy of the Napoleonic Wars, of the fighting since 1939, and of how the Germans would defend every house. According to his appointments diary the rally began at 4 p.m., and in the evening the Reichsführer drove to the Wolf’s Lair to meet Hitler.

War chronologies often state that on this day Hitler “ordered” the call-up of men from 16 to 60. In fact Hitler had already signed the decree establishing the Volkssturm on 25 September 1944, and it reached the Gauleiters as a confidential instruction. 18 October was the day of its public announcement, chosen for propaganda reasons; the decree was officially published two days later. Some accounts confuse these dates and move Himmler’s speech to 20 October.

Where the Volkssturm came from

In the autumn of 1944 the war reached the borders of the Reich for the first time. In August the Red Army reached the borders of East Prussia, in September the Americans crossed the border near Aachen, and from 2 October the attack on the city itself was under way. On 16 October the 3rd Belorussian Front struck at East Prussia – so Himmler was speaking less than a hundred kilometres from the fighting. By some estimates the Wehrmacht had lost more than a million men killed, wounded and captured in the east and west in the summer of 1944, and ordinary conscription could not keep pace with the losses.

The idea of a territorial defence force drawing on older age groups had been put forward earlier, according to his own memoirs, by the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Heinz Guderian: he wanted to create a Landsturm on the Reich’s eastern borders, subordinate to the army. Hitler, however, put the matter in the hands of the party. After the 20 July plot he did not trust his generals, and the NSDAP leadership saw the new formation as a way of “instilling” fanaticism in the population. The model was the Prussian Landsturm of 1813 – hence the date of the announcement.

The party, the SS and an armband

The decree divided authority between the party and the SS. Raising and commanding the battalions was the responsibility of the Gauleiters, who were to draw on cadres from the NSDAP, the SA, the SS, the NSKK motor corps and the Hitler Youth. The head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, issued the political and organisational regulations – the Volkssturm was to be organised by the party’s territorial units, into companies and battalions. Himmler, as commander of the Replacement Army, which he had taken over after the 20 July plot, was responsible for weapons, training and military employment; his chief of staff for Volkssturm affairs was General Hans Kissel. The SA Chief of Staff, Wilhelm Schepmann, became inspector of rifle training. The Volkssturm was not part of the Wehrmacht, but in combat its members had the status of soldiers and came under military command.

In the regions of the Reich command was taken by the Gauleiters – in the Wartheland Arthur Greiser, in Danzig-West Prussia Albert Forster, in Vienna Baldur von Schirach. Those called up were divided into four levies (Aufgebote). The first comprised fit men born in 1884–1924 who were not in the army – mostly men over fifty, often veterans of the First World War. The second consisted of men aged 16 to 50 exempted from military service because of their work in industry, who were to be called up only briefly and close to home. The third took boys born in 1925–1928, provided they were not yet serving in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS; the sixteen-year-olds born in 1928 were to be trained by the Hitler Youth until the spring of 1945. The fourth comprised men unfit for military service, earmarked for guard duties.

The plans envisaged some six million men in more than six thousand battalions. Most Volkssturm members received no uniforms: they wore their own clothes with an armband reading “Deutscher Volkssturm – Wehrmacht”. The armband was no trifle – only identifiable combatants could expect treatment in accordance with the Hague Conventions, and many Germans feared that the enemy would regard them as partisans. Britain and the United States later confirmed that they would treat them as combatants, provided they observed the laws of war.

Weapons, training and morale

The biggest problem was weapons. In the autumn of 1944 the Wehrmacht was losing more rifles each month than industry could produce, and it had no intention of sharing them with a party militia. The Volkssturm therefore received captured rifles – Czech, Italian, French, Norwegian – often without suitable ammunition, old rifles from the First World War and machine guns withdrawn from the air force. According to a return compiled by Kissel in November 1944, the first two levies in the threatened regions needed 1.3 million small arms and had fewer than 19,000. Production of simplified “people’s rifles” was launched specially for the Volkssturm, but it only got under way in 1945. The formation’s most characteristic weapon became the single-shot Panzerfaust anti-tank launcher – cheap, simple to use and dangerous to a tank at close range.

Training usually took place after work and on Sundays, and in practice amounted to drill, digging trenches and the occasional shooting exercise. The propaganda of Joseph Goebbels, who since the summer of 1944 had been Plenipotentiary for Total War, presented the Volkssturm as an outburst of national enthusiasm and the culmination of the slogans of his Sportpalast speech. Newsreels showed parades and oaths sworn to Hitler. Morale reports and eyewitness accounts speak rather of resignation. Germans repeated the joking rhyme “Wir alten Affen sind des Führers neue Waffen” (“We old apes are the Führer’s new weapons”), and at the sight of grey-haired men and boys in overcoats too big for them, many concluded that the war was lost.

The Volkssturm in 1945

In 1944 the Volkssturm was used mainly to build fortifications, guard roads and bridges and man anti-tank barriers in the rear. From January 1945, when the great Soviet offensives began, battalions were sent to the front line. They fought in cities declared fortresses, on the Oder, in Pomerania, in East Prussia and in Berlin. According to German studies some 15,000 Volkssturm men took part in the defence of Breslau (Wrocław), which Gauleiter Karl Hanke forced on the city until May 1945. Losses could be very high: in the Battle of Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) they exceeded 60 per cent according to some authors, and during the storming of Königsberg in April some 2,400 members of the formation are said to have been killed. In the battle for Berlin Hitler Youth boys fought alongside older men.

In the west Volkssturm battalions usually threw down their weapons quickly and their members dispersed to their homes. In the last weeks of the war, however, fanatical party officials hunted down “defeatists” and hanged people who hung out white flags or refused to fight. The exact losses are not known. Kissel estimated that more than 700 battalions saw combat; German historians assume that most of the roughly 175,000 Volkssturm members listed as missing were killed.

Its place in the history of the war

The Volkssturm did not change the course of the war – it had neither the weapons nor the training to halt the armies that entered Germany from east and west in 1945. As Bormann and Goebbels intended, it was meant to raise the cost of every kilometre the Allies gained and push them towards a compromise peace, but that calculation proved illusory. It has gone down in history as a symbol of the final phase of the Third Reich, when the regime, no longer able to win, sent older men and teenagers into battle to prolong the war by a few months. Many of them died in fighting in which nothing could any longer be decided.