Why did the Germans fight on?

       By the end of 1944, Germany had lost France due to a joint assault by the Canadians, British, and Americans at the battle and ensuing defeat of D-Day. Not only were they being routed on the western front, but remnants of the vast army that had marched into Russia were also desperately fleeing from the impending Red Army coming in from the eastern front. Now with two large armies at the edge of the motherland, Germany was forced to try the same tactic as they had at the beginning of the war, cutting through the Ardennes to encircle all of the Allied armies. This became known as the Battle of the Bulge, the last German offensive of the war. As we all know, the offensive only lasted a month ending in complete failure, not completing the encircling movement and wasting the rest of the resources that Germany was able to commit to the war effort. At this point, Germany had no chance of winning, but they still continued to fight, even after their leader, Adolf Hitler, committed suicide in his bunker on April 30th, 1945. The question I have is why did the Germans decide to continue to fight on?
The decision to keep fighting was a costly one. In the 10 months between July 1944 and May, 1945 more German civilians died than in all the previous years of the conflict. More than 400,000 were killed by Allied bombing and there were up to 500,000 further civilian deaths, accompanied by widespread mass rape, as a result of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Germany’s eastern regions. As Kershaw notes, had the Stauffenberg assassination succeeded and the war subsequently ended in 1944, the lives of almost half of the German soldiers who died in the Second World War might have been saved: 49 percent of German military deaths occurred in the final 10 months of the conflict. Even the final week of the war was hugely costly, when Dönitz, who emerges here as a far more radical Nazi than is often claimed, pursued the fight after Hitler’s suicide. Forced to continue fighting, rather than being allowed to retreat to the west, 220,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Red Army between May 1st and May 8th, 1945, and 1.6 million after the final surrender.
So what kept the Germans fighting? A range of interacting factors ensured that the Nazi regime would fight on until the point of total self-destruction. In the east, extreme (and often justified) fears of Soviet atrocities against prisoners of war kept soldiers fighting, as well as ongoing propaganda, directed by Goebbels, about the potential horrors of a Bolshevik occupation. Hitler’s refusal to allow strategic retreats also ensured that “fortress cities”, such as Breslau, where 200,000 civilians were trapped after February 1945, were forced to hold out until devastated rather than negotiate a handover. In other eastern areas, Nazi regional leaders refused to evacuate the local German civilian population, before deserting their posts at the last minute and saving themselves.
The insistence of the Allies on unconditional surrender was another factor that kept Germany fighting. Rumors that the Allied coalition might split also gave false hope to the Nazi leadership, who, right up to May 1945, entertained fantastical ideas about Britain and the US changing sides and uniting with Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia. All of these reasons aside the most significant reason why Germany kept fighting was that Hitler’s system of charismatic rule remained in place, ensuring that, until his suicide, he alone, a leader who refused to countenance capitulation, determined all war policy.

Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/06/the-nazis-last-stand/302525/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141214-battle-of-the-bulge-hitler-churchill-history-culture-ngbooktalk/
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/did-you-know-ve-day-did-not-end-all-battles-in_europe-mm.html