Thomas Mann looms large across the European literary scene. Critics consider him one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Born in Lübeck, Germany in 1875, Mann represents the European intellectual that came of age alongside the German Empire, as it demanded its place in the sun and damn near single-handedly dominated the world in industrial and scientific achievement.

German dead in the last ten months of the war, in the last ten months of the war, when defeat was a looming certainty, can at least be estimated and are already numbing. Some 2.6 million German soldiers were killed in ten months between July 1944 and May 1945 – half of the total German military deaths in the entire war. The “vast majority” of the 400,000 civilians killed in Allied air raids died in the same period as the bombing war hit home; and when the Nazi regime turned its vengeance on to alleged traitors among its own people in the final few months of the war, tens of thousands of deserters and civilian “defeatists” were executed after summary trials, or simply out of hand. The moral and psychological costs of this physical onslaught can never be quantified. Yet these payments in blood and depravity were also pointless: there was no prize on offer, at any price.

It might be said that we are judging Germany by an unfair standard if we refuse to admire its current desperate struggle, its refusal to accept defeat, its resistance to the last man, the last bullet and the last drops of blood, or to recognize the heroism enshrined in this. History has always celebrated this kind of ultimate resistance as memorable and heroic – and now all of a sudden, for Germany, it is held to be meaningless or criminal. This line of argument is false. The perpetuation of the war by Germany beyond defeat to annihilation has nothing to do with heroism, but is in fact a crime committed against the German people by its leaders. The people’s suicidal struggle is not voluntary but has been extorted through moral and physical terror – by rulers who pretend that the Germans are bleeding for their honour and self-preservation, when the fact is that they are giving their utmost and more for the survival of the scoundrels who drove them into this war and who refuse to abdicate at any price, including that of Germany’s absolute ruination.