Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  On that same day Albert Speer addressed a memorandum to Hitler informing him that the war was lost.

  Götterdämmerung

  To put the matter briefly, someone who has no heir for his house would do best to have himself burned with everything that is in it—as if on a magnificent pyre.

  Adolf Hitler

  On January 16, after receiving news of the beginning of the great Soviet offensive, Hitler returned to the chancellery. The vast gray pile, once intended to be the starting point for the reconstruction of the capital, had meanwhile become surrounded by a landscape of craters, ruins, and mountains of rubble. Bombs had damaged many of the wings, blown loose porphyry and marble, and blasted out windows, whose empty frames were boarded up. Only the section in which Hitler’s apartments and offices were located had remained undamaged; in this wing even the windows were scarcely shattered.

  Soon the almost continual air raids had forced Hitler to retire so often to the shelter installed twenty-four feet beneath the garden of the chancellery that after a while he decided to move in there. In any case, this withdrawal to the cave fitted in with the traits that were emerging with ever-increasing force: the fear, the suspicion, and the denial of reality. For a few weeks he continued taking his meals in the upper rooms, but in these, too, the curtains were always drawn. Meanwhile, outside, with the fronts cracking everywhere, against a background of burning cities and roads choked with refugees, of ruins and collapsing supplies, unprecedented chaos broke out.

  But through it all some guiding energy seemed to be at work, arranging matters, as it were, so that the Third Reich did not just end but went down to destruction. Hitler had repeatedly posed the alternative of world power or doom. A flat, undramatic end would have disavowed his entire previous life and his operatic temperament, his fascination with stunning effects. Early in the thirties, in one of his fantasies about the impending war, he had declared that if the National Socialists did not win, “even as we go down to destruction we will carry half the world into destruction with us.”®33

  But there was more than defiance and despair, more than histrionics, in his craving for catastrophe. In fact, Hitler saw disaster as his ultimate chance for survival. The study of history had taught him that only grand downfalls lent themselves to the process of mythmaking. Consequently, he was staking all his remaining strength on staging his departure. When Otto Ernst Remer, the officer who had suppressed the July 20 coup and had been rewarded by being promoted to a general’s rank, asked him at the end of January why he wanted to continue the struggle in spite of admitted defeat, Hitler replied darkly: “From total defeat springs the seed of the new.” He made a similar remark to Bormann about a week later: “A desperate fight retains its eternal value as an example. Think of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans. In any case it does not suit our style to let ourselves be slaughtered like sheep. They may exterminate us, but they will not be able to lead us to the slaughter.”34

  This determination lent an obstinate consistency to Hitler’s behavior through the entire final phase and shaped his last conception of how to wage the war: the strategy of grandiose doom. As early as the autumn of 1944, when the Allied armies had advanced to the German border, he had ordered the practice of “scorched earth” for the territory of the Reich and insisted that nothing but a desert should be left to the enemy. But the policy, which at first seemed justified by operational considerations, soon developed into an abstract mania for destruction, totally Without any discernible purpose. Not only industrial plants and supplies were to be demolished, but all facilities essential for the maintenance of life: supplies of food and sewerage systems, amplifying stations, long-distance cables and radio towers, telephone centrals, switching diagrams and stocks of spare parts, municipal registries, and bank-account records. Even those artistic monuments that had survived the air raids were consigned to destruction: the historic buildings, castles, churches, theaters, and opera houses. Hitler’s vandal nature was still there beneath the veneer of cultural respectability. Now that barbarian syndrome emerged undisguised. In one of the last military conferences he joined with Goebbels in regretting that they had not unleashed a revolution in the classical style. Both the seizure of power in 1933 and the annexation of Austria had been marred by the “flaw” of insufficient opposition. Goebbels, who now reverted to his radical beginnings and during these weeks with good reason moved closer to Hitler than ever before, eagerly chimed in that if there had been such opposition they “could have smashed everything to pieces.” Hitler, for his part, regretted his numerous concessions: “Afterwards you rue the fact that you’ve been so kind.”35

  In a similar spirit, at the very beginning of the war—according to an account by General Halder—he opposed the opinions of the generals, insisting on the bombing and bombardment of Warsaw when the city was ready for surrender, and extracted aesthetic thrills from the images of destruction: the apocalyptically darkened sky, the walls pulverized by a million tons of bombs, people panic-stricken and wiped out.36 During the campaign in Russia he waited impatiently for the annihilation of Moscow and Leningrad, similarly in the summer of 1944 for the doom of London and Paris, and later he voluptuously pictured the effects an air raid would have upon the canyons of Manhattan. But he had been thwarted in all of this.37 Now he could once again, and almost without check, pursue his primal bent for destruction. That emotional bias matched effortlessly with his special strategy of doom and with his revolutionary hatred for the old world. It provided the slogans of the final phase in an act of extreme selfrevelation. “Under the ruins of our devastated cities the last so-called achievements of the bourgeois nineteenth century have finally been buried,” Goebbels raved. “Together with the monuments of culture, the last obstacles to the fulfillment of our revolutionary task are likewise falling. Now, when everything lies in ruins, we are forced to reconstruct Europe. In the past private ownership imposed bourgeois restraint upon us. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only razed the walls of the prisons that had incarcerated them…. The enemy who strove to annihilate Europe’s future has succeeded only in annihilating the past, and consequently everything old and worn out is gone.”38

  The air raid shelter into which Hitler had withdrawn extended beneath the chancellery garden and ended in a round concrete tower that also served as an emergency exit. In the twelve rooms of the bunker’s upper level, called the “ante-bunker,” some of the staff, Hitler’s diet kitchen, and several service rooms were located. A spiral staircase led into the lower Führer bunker, which consisted of twenty rooms. A wide corridor gave access to it. A door on the right led to the rooms occupied by Bormann, Goebbels, the SS physician Dr. Stumpfegger, and several offices. On the left was a wing of six rooms occupied by Hitler. At the front the corridor opened into the large conference room. During the day Hitler mostly stayed in his living room, which was dominated by a portrait of Frederick the Great and contained only a small desk, a narrow sofa, a table, and three armchairs. The bareness and closeness of the windowless room made for a depressing atmosphere. Many visitors complained of this. But undoubtedly this last refuge of concrete, stillness and electric light expressed something of Hitler’s true nature, the isolation and artificiality of his existence.

  All witnesses to the events of those weeks agree in their description of Hitler. Above all they noted his hunched posture, his gray and somber face, his progressively feebler voice. The once hypnotic eyes were now glazed with weariness and exhaustion. More and more he let himself go; it seemed as if the many years of maintaining a stylized image were at last exacting their price. His jacket was frequently soiled by driblets of food; crumbs of cake clung to his sunken, old man’s lips. Whenever, during the daily report, he took his glasses into his left hand, they clinked lightly against the desk top. Sometimes he would lay them aside as if caught napping. He was kept on his feet by will alone, and the trembling of his limbs tormented him partly because it belied his view that an iron will could achieve anythi
ng. An elderly General Staff officer described his impression as follows:

  Physically he presented a dreadful sight; He dragged himself about painfully and clumsily, throwing his torso forward and dragging his legs after him from his living room to the conference room of the bunker. He had lost his sense of balance; if he were detained on the brief journey (seventy-five to a hundred feet), he had to sit down on one of the benches that had been placed along either wall for this purpose, or else cling to the person he was talking to…. His eyes were bloodshot; although all documents intended for him were typed out in letters three times ordinary size, on special “Führer typewriters,” he could read them only with strong glasses. Saliva frequently dripped from the corners of his mouth.39

  By now his postponement of sleep had literally reversed day and night; the last military conference usually ended toward six o’clock in the morning. Then, lying on the sofa totally drained, Hitler waited for his secretaries to give them their instructions for the coming day. As soon as these women entered the room, he rose heavily. “With shaking legs and quivering hand,” one of them subsequently reported, “he stood facing us for a while and then dropped exhausted down on the sofa again. His servant would prop up his feet. He lay there completely torpid, filled with only one thought… chocolate and cake. His ferocious appetite for cake had become actually morbid. Whereas in the past he had eaten at most three pieces of cake, he now had the platter handed to him three times, and heaped his own plate each time…. He virtually did not talk at all.”40

  In spite of this precipitate decline, even now Hitler refused to let the conduct of operations out of his hand. A mixture of obstinacy, suspicion, sense of mission, and will power repeatedly lent him new impetus. One of his doctors who had not seen him since the beginning of October, 1944, was stunned by the impression he made in mid-February, 1945. He particularly noted Hitler’s weakening memory, his inability to concentrate, and his frequent spells of absent-mindedness. Early in February Guderian offered a plan for building a defensive position in the East that ran completely counter to Hitler’s concept. Hitler did not say a word; he merely stared at the map. Then he rose slowly, took a few staggering steps and paused, staring into space, then tersely dismissed the participants in the conference. Yet there is no saying how much play-acting went into such scenes. A few days later an objection by the chief of staff provoked one of his major outbursts: “Cheeks flushed with rage, with raised fists, he stood before me with his whole body shaking, beside himself with fury and altogether out of control. After each eruption of wrath Hitler paced back and forth on the edge of the rug, then paused right in front of me and hurled the next reproach at me. He choked up with shouting; his eyes bulged from their sockets and the veins in his temples swelled.”41

  Such shifts of mood were characteristic of his state during those weeks. He abruptly dropped people who had been close to him for years, and just as abruptly drew others to himself. When his doctor of many years, Karl Brandt, together with his associate von Hasselbach, attempted to check Morell’s influence and free Hitler from his fatal dependence on drugs, Hitler abruptly dismissed Brandt and shortly afterward condemned him to death. With similar brusqueness, Guderian, Ribbentrop, Göring, and many others were shunted aside. Frequently Hitler lapsed into that dull brooding that had been characteristic of his early formative years. Absently, he would sit on his sofa, a male pup of Blondi’s latest litter on his lap. He called the pup Wolf and was training it himself. In every obstacle, every retreat, he saw treachery. Humanity was too wicked, he occasionally complained, “for it to be worthwhile going on living.”42

  The already noted need to vent his misanthropy by tasteless teasing of his entourage once again grew stronger. Thus he might tell a group of women that “lipstick is manufactured from Paris sewage.” Or during meals he would speak of Morell’s drawing blood from him and would banter with his nonvegetarian guests: “I’ll have blood-sausages made for you from my surplus blood. Why not? After all, you’re so fond of eating meat.” One of his secretaries had reported how one day, after the usual grand lament over treachery, he spoke mournfully of the time after his death: “If anything happens to me, Germany will be leaderless; for I don’t have a successor. The first went mad [Hess], the second has thrown away the attachment of the people [Göring], and the third is rejected by the party membership [Himmler]… and is a totally unartistic person.”43

  Nevertheless, he managed repeatedly to throw off these depressions. Frequently he took his stimulus from the chance mention of an admired troop leader, or some other resounding triviality. It is possible to trace in the minutes of the last conferences the way he habitually seized upon a word, a reference, reshaping it, magnifying it, and finally deriving a euphoric certainty of victory from it. Sometimes he manufactured illusions by the skin of his teeth. From the autumn of 1944 on he had had many so-called people’s grenadier divisions levied—infantry divisions stiffened by experienced front-line cadres. At the same time he directed that the remnants of defeated traditional divisions should not be dissolved; they should continue as entities and be allowed gradually to “bleed to death,” because he considered the demoralizing effect of a severe defeat something from which a division never recovered.44 The result of this order, however, was that in spite of increasing casualties he could cherish the illusion of a tremendously growing armed force. One of the features of that mad world of the bunker was his dealing in ghost divisions, which he repeatedly deployed for new offensive operations and finally for decisive battles that would never take place.

  Even now his entourage followed him almost without a murmur into the more and more transparent fantasies fabricated from self-deception, distortion of reality, and delusion. Shaking, with bowed torso, he sat in front of the map table and swept his hand jerkily over the maps. Whenever a bomb struck some distance away and the ceiling light began to flicker, his eyes wandered restively over the unmoving faces of the officers who stood erect and straight before him: “That was close!” But frail and feeble though he was, he still preserved something of his magnetic powers.

  It is true that certain signs of dissolution seeped into the bunker. There were breaches of protocol and revealing informality on the part of the staff. It became a rarity for anyone to stand up when Hitler entered the main conference room; hardly a conversation stopped. But these were revocable laxities; the predominant note remained the unreal climate of court societies, if anything, intensified by the unreality of the cave dweller’s world. One of the participants in the military conferences has reported that everyone was “psychically almost suffocated by this atmosphere of servility, nervousness and prevarication. You felt it to the point of physical illness. Nothing was authentic there except fear.”

  Yet Hitler still succeeded in transmitting confidence and in awakening the most preposterous hopes. In spite of all the mistakes, lies, and misconceptions, his authority remained entirely unchallenged until literally the last hour, when he no longer had the power to punish or reward and could no longer enforce his will. Sometimes it seems as if he had the faculty for shattering, in ways hard to understand, the relationship to reality of all those who entered his presence. In the middle of March Gauleiter Forster appeared in the bunker in despair. Eleven hundred Russian tanks were at the gates of Danzig, he reported; the Wehrmacht had only four Tiger tanks. He was determined, he announced in the anterooms, to present “the whole frightful reality of the situation” to Hitler with all candor and “to force a clear decision.” But after only a brief conversation he returned “completely transformed.” The Führer had promised him “new divisions,” he said; he would save Danzig, “and there’s positively no doubt about it.”45

  Such incidents also permit another conclusion: of how artificial the system of loyalties in Hitler’s entourage was, how dependent upon the Führer’s continual commitment of his own person. His excessive suspiciousness, which assumed morbid and grotesque forms during the last months, was not without grounds. Even before the Ar
dennes offensive he had tightened the existing strict rules of secrecy by an unusual measure: the army commanders had to give him a written pledge of silence. On January 1, 1945, the Luftwaffe fighter-plane force, briefly revived by summoning up its last reserves, fell victim to this suspicion. On that day a grand armada of approximately 800 planes launched a surprise low-level attack upon the Allied airfields in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. Within a few hours, with a loss of approximately one hundred of their own planes, they put close to 1,000 enemy aircraft out of action. But on the return flight, thanks to the exaggerated rules of secrecy, they ran into their own antiaircraft fire and lost nearly 200 additional planes.

  When Warsaw was lost by mid-January, Hitler Ordered the officers in the sector to be arrested at gunpoint, and had his acting chief of staff subjected to hours of interrogation by Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Chief Müller.

  As he came to distrust everyone with whom he now had dealings, he once again reached out to his old fellow fighters, as though they could give him back the daredevil spirit, the radicalism and the faith of the past. His appointment of the gauleiters to the newly created posts of Reich defense commissioners was one such way of reviving old intimacies. Now he also remembered Hermann Esser, the party comrade of his early ventures into politics, pushed into the background some fifteen years before. On February 24, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the party program, he had Esser read a proclamation in Munich, while he himself received a deputation of high party functionaries in Berlin. In his address to them he tried to inspire the group with the idea of a heroic Teutonic struggle to the last man: “Even though my hand trembles,” he assured the group, who had been visibly shocked by the sight of him, “and even if my head should tremble—my heart will never tremble.”46