Intra-ethnic Violence in the Dying Days of the Reich : Local Perspectives on Late-War Summary Executions

Willems, Bastiaan (2025) Intra-ethnic Violence in the Dying Days of the Reich : Local Perspectives on Late-War Summary Executions. Journal of Contemporary History, 60 (2). pp. 274-295. ISSN 0022-0094

Abstract

In the final months of the Second World War, large numbers of German soldiers and civilians were publicly executed by their fellow compatriots, often following decentralised summary judgment. Those targeted were people who up to that point had been part of the Nazi racial community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Judging these killings through the lens of a normatively singular ‘community’, however, has its limits. Local community structures changed rapidly and dramatically, especially as the frontline approached. A mass influx of soldiers, refugees, and other outside actors changed long-established certainties, and threatened the very fabric that had held these communities together during the previous years. These threats – both real and perceived – were acute and often had little bearing on the wider German society. This paper identifies and contextualises the motivations behind the many German-versus-German killings that took place while the regime collapsed. It restores agency to the different actors involved in late-war killings by examining six summary executions that took place in this period. Taken together, these examples show that the current narrative, which pits the ‘radicalised Nazi’ against the hapless German ‘defeatist’, needs adjusting; the ways in which these executions played out demonstrate that local circumstances greatly impacted behavioural patterns.