Two days later the Russians in Pomerania broke through to the Baltic, thus giving the signal for the conquest of Germany. In the West the Allies at the beginning of March overran the west wall along its full extent from Aachen to the Palatinate. On March 6 they captured Cologne and established a bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine at Remagen. Then the Russians opened another grand offensive in Hungary and put Sepp Dietrich’s elite SS units to flight. Almost simultaneously Tito’s partisan armies went over to the attack, while the Western Allies crossed the Rhine at several additional points and advanced tempestuously into the interior of Germany. The war was entering its concluding phase.
Hitler reacted to the general collapse with renewed orders to hold out, with fits of rage and itinerant courts-martial. For the third time he relieved Field Marshal von Rundstedt of his post, had Sepp Dietrich’s units stripped of their armbands with the embroidered divisional name, and on March 28 tersely dismissed his chief of staff, ordering him to take a six-month recuperation leave at once. As the minutes of the conferences demonstrate, he had lost any over-all view and squandered his time in useless bickerings, recriminations, and reminiscences. Nervous and inconsistent meddling only made matters worse. At the end of March, for example, he gave the order to send a reserve unit of twenty-two light tanks to the vicinity of Pirmasens. Then, in response to alarming reports from the Moselle he directed them “to the vicinity of Trier,” then changed the order to “in the direction of Koblenz,” and finally, in response to changing reports from the front, ordered so many changes of direction that no one could possibly make out where the tanks were in actuality.
Now the strategy of doom reached the stage of realization. Rather than a calculated scheme of self-destruction, it was a chain reaction of reckless responses, outbursts of rage, and fits of hysterical weeping. Hitler’s heart was trembling after all. And yet at almost every juncture we can detect a craving (for catastrophe. In order to create an atmosphere of maximum intransigence, Hitler had as early as February issued instructions to the Propaganda Ministry to attack the Allied statesmen in such a way and to insult them so personally “that they will no longer have any possibility of making an offer to the German people.”47 With nothing but burned bridges behind him, he entered the last stage of the fight. A series of commands, the first of which was issued on March 19 (the “Nero Command”), ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial and food-supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.”
Preparations were at once made in the Ruhr for demolition of the mines and pitheads, for blocking canals by the sinking of cement-laden barges and for evacuation of the population into the interior, Thuringia, and the vicinity of the central Elbe. The abandoned cities, as Gauleiter Florian of Düsseldorf was slated to proclaim, were to be set afire. A so-called flag order made it clear that surrender was not to be thought of: all male persons were to be taken from houses showing a white flag and shot at once. An order to the commanders dated the end of March called for “the most fanatical struggle against the now mobile enemy. No consideration for the population can be taken.”48 In curious contrast were the efforts to safeguard the art treasures that had been looted from all over the continent, or Hitler’s preoccupation with the model of the city of Linz. These were last, futile stirrings of the lost dream of a state dedicated to beauty.
With the end drawing near, the mythologizing tendencies became increasingly dominant. Germany, embattled on all sides, was stylized into the image of the solitary hero. Idealized contempt for life and glorification of death by violence had long been deeply impressed upon the German mentality. Now that spirit was once again invoked. The fortresses and defense perimeters that Hitler had ordered to be established throughout the country and inflexibly held, symbolizing in miniature the idea of the forlorn hope that Germany as a whole represented. “There is only one thing I still want: the end, the end!” It was surely not accidental that Martin Bormann, in his last preserved letter from the chancellery written in early April, 1945, should have reminded his wife of the doom of “those old boys the Nibelungs in King Etzel’s [Attila’s] hall.” We may surmise that the assiduous secretary had also taken over this notion from his master.49
Goebbels, on his part, could exult once more when Wurzburg, Dresden, and Potsdam were leveled to the ground. For these acts of senseless barbarism sustained Hitler’s prediction that the democracies would ultimately be the losers, since they would have to betray their principles. Nor was that the only gratification. For these air raids were entirely in tune with Hitler’s own passion for destruction. In his proclamation of February 24 Hitler had actually voiced his regret that the Berghof on Obersalzberg had hitherto been spared by bombs. Not long after, the attack came. Three hundred and eighteen four-motored Lancaster bombers transformed the site, according to the report of an eyewitness, into a “moon landscape.”
The surmise that Hitler wanted to keep himself secure from the processes of doom he was so zealously sponsoring is probably mistaken. It is much more likely that despite all the shipwreck those weeks and days were irradiated by complex feelings of fulfillment. The suicidal impulse that had accompanied him throughout his life and predisposed him to take maximum risks, was at last reaching its goal. Once again he stood with his back to the wall, but now the game was up; there were no stakes left to double. In this end there was an element of excited onanism that alone explains the still considerable power of will summoned up by this “cake-gobbling human wreck,” as one member of his intimate entourage called the Hitler of the final weeks.
But the program for doom now encountered an unexpected block. Albert Speer, who had come close to being Hitler’s friend and had been his partner in past architectural enthusiasms, in the fall of 1944 began using his authority as Armaments Minister to counter Hitler’s destructive orders. Speer made his opposition felt in the occupied countries and in the German border areas as well. In taking this course, he was by no means free of scruples. Increasingly disenchanted though he had become, he was still conscious of owing a great deal to Hitler, whose personal liking for him had determined his whole career, and given him generous opportunities to develop his art, influence, fame, power. But when Speer was put in charge of the destruction of industries, his sense of responsibility, peculiarly colored by objective as well as romantic motivations, ultimately proved stronger than feelings of personal loyalty. In a series of memorandums he had tried by means of realistic situation analyses to persuade Hitler that from a military point of view the war was hopeless. All he gained, however, was Hitler’s disfavor, though modified by Hitler’s sentimentality. In February he had, in his “despair,” finally conceived the plan of killing the inmates of the Führer’s bunker by introducing poison gas into the underground ventilation system. But a last-minute reconstruction of the air shaft balked the plan and once again saved Hitler from assassination. On March 18 Speer handed him another memorandum predicting the impending “final collapse of the German economy with certainty” and reminding him of the leadership’s obligation “in a lost war to preserve a nation from a heroic end.” Speer later reproduced the gist of the conversation in a letter to Hitler:
From the statements you made that evening the following was unequivocally apparent—if I did not misunderstand you: If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. In any case, only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.
These words shook me to the core. And a day later when I read the demolition order and, shortly afterward, the stringent evacuation order, I saw these as the first steps toward carrying out these intentions.50
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Although the demolition order stripped Speer of power and overrode all his instructions, he traveled to the regions close to the front and convinced the local authorities of the senselessness of the order. He had explosives disposed of under water and issued submachine guns to the heads of plants vital for the civilian economy so they could defend themselves against the appointed demolition squads. Called to account by Hitler, he insisted that the war was lost, and refused to go on vacation, as Hitler required. Later, in a dramatic scene, Hitler demanded that he take back what he had said about the war’s being lost, and then, when Speer remained obstinate, that he declare his faith in ultimate victory. Finally, as an almost piteous compromise, he asked Speer for an expression of hope in nothing more than “a successful continuance of the war”: “If you could at least hope that we have not lost! You must certainly be able to hope…. that would be enough to satisfy me.” But Speer still did not answer. Abruptly dismissed and given twenty-four hours to think it over, he finally escaped the threatened consequences by making a personal declaration of loyalty. Hitler was so moved that he actually restored part of Speer’s former powers.51
During these days Hitler left the bunker for the last time in order to visit the Oder front. He drove in a Volkswagen to the castle at Freienwalde, where generals and staff officers of the Ninth Army were waiting for him: a stooped old man with gray hair and sunken face who occasionally, with an effort, ventured a confident smile. Over the map table he pleaded with the officers standing around it: the Russian onslaught upon Berlin must be broken; every day and every hour gained was precious; he was fabricating the most frightful weapons and these would bring about the turning point; that was why he begged them to make a final effort. One of the officers commented that Hitler looked like a man who had risen from the grave.
But while in fact it proved possible to check the Soviet advance in the East for a short while, the Western front now fell apart. On April 1 General Model’s army group in the Ruhr area was encircled, and by April 11 the Americans reached the Elbe. Two days earlier Königsberg had fallen. At the Oder, meanwhile, the Russians were preparing their offensive against Berlin.
In those hopeless days Goebbels, according to his own account, consoled the despondent Führer by reading aloud to him from Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great, choosing the chapter that describes the difficulties the King encountered in the winter of 1761–62:
How the great king himself did not see any way out and did not know what to do; how all his generals and ministers were convinced that he was finished; how the enemy already looked upon Prussia as vanquished; how the future appeared entirely dark, and how in his last letter to the Minister Graf Finckenstein he set himself a time limit: if there was no change by February 15 he would give up and take poison. “Brave king!” Carlyle writes, “wait but a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Behind the clouds the sun of your good fortune is already rising and soon will show itself to you.” On February 12 the Czarina died; the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass. The Führer, Goebbels said, had tears in his eyes.52
The tendency to seek signs and portents outside reality extended far beyond books as the end came closer; here once again the irrationality of Nazism was revealed, which had been somewhat masked by its seeming modernity. In the early part of April Robert Ley became all excited over an inventor of “death rays.” Goebbels sought predictions in two horoscopes; and while American troops had already reached the foothills of the Alps, while Schleswig-Holstein was cut off and Vienna lost, out of planetary conjunctions, ascendants, and transits in the quadrant, hopes once more flickered up of a great turning point in the second half of April. Still full of these parallels and prognoses, Goebbels learned on April 13—he was returning from a front-line visit to Berlin during a heavy air raid and was sprinting up the steps of the Propaganda Ministry in the glare of fires and exploding bombs—that President Roosevelt had died. “He was in ecstasy,” one witness has described the scene, and immediately telephoned the Führer’s bunker. “My Führer, I congratulate you!” he shouted into the telephone. “It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. Today is Friday, April 13. It is the turning point!”53
In the bunker itself Hitler had meanwhile summoned cabinet ministers, generals, and functionaries, all the skeptics and men of little faith whom he had had to receive repeatedly during the past months in order to “hypnotize” them again and again. In a rush of words, with an old man’s excitability, he showed them the report: “Here! You never wanted to believe it…,”54 Once more Providence seemed to be trying to show it was on his side, to corroborate all the many miraculous dispensations of his life in one last overwhelming intervention. For a few hours a mood of noisy exhilaration prevailed in the bunker, a mingling of relief, gratitude, confidence, and something approaching certainty of victory. But nowadays no feeling could last. Later, Speer recalled, “Hitler sat exhausted, looking both liberated and dazed as he slumped in his armchair. But I sensed that he was still without hope.”
Roosevelt’s death had no effect upon military events. Three days later the Russians, with 2.5 million soldiers, 41,600 artillery pieces, 6,250 tanks, and 7,560 airplanes, opened the offensive against Berlin.
On April 20, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, the leadership of the regime met for the last time: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, Speer, Ley, Ribbentrop, and the top leaders of the Wehrmacht. A few days earlier Eva Braun had unexpectedly arrived, and everyone knew what her coming signified. Nevertheless, the artificial optimism of the bunker persisted; Hitler himself tried, during the birthday congratulations, to revive it once more. He delivered a few brief speeches, praised, encouraged, exchanged reminiscenses. In the garden he received a number of Hitler Youths who had proved their courage in the struggle against the rapidly advancing Soviet armies; he patted and decorated them. About the same time, the last death penalties arising out of the July 20, 1944, plot were carried out—as though sacrifices were being offered to some pagan demigod.
Originally Hitler had expressed the intention of leaving Berlin on his birthday and withdrawing to Obersalzberg, there to continue the fight from the “Alpine redoubt” within sight of the legend-haunted Untersberg. Some of the staff had already been sent ahead to prepare the Berghof. But on the eve of his birthday he had begun to waver. Goebbels in particular had passionately urged him to take up his post at the gates of Berlin for the struggle that would decide the war and, if need be, to seek death amid the ruins of the city as the only end appropriate to one of his historic rank. In Berlin, Goebbels argued, it was still possible to achieve a “moral world’s record.” Everyone else, however, now besought him to abandon the lost city and use the still remaining narrow corridor to the south for escape. In a few days or even hours the ring around Berlin would be closed. But Hitler remained uncertain, consenting only to the establishment of a northern and a southern command, in case Germany should be divided in the course of the enemy advance. “How am I to call on the troops to undertake the battle for Berlin,” he declared, “if at the same moment I withdraw myself to safety!” Finally he said that he would leave the decision to fate.55
On the evening of that same day the exodus began. Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer, and nearly the entire top command of the Luftwaffe joined the long columns of trucks that had been readied for departure. Pale and sweating, Göring took his leave of Hitler. He spoke of “extremely urgent tasks in South Germany.” But Hitler merely stared vacantly at Göring’s still massive figure;56 and there is some indication that his contempt for the weaknesses and opportunistic calculations that he now discovered all around him was already predetermining his decision.
At any rate, he gave orders that the Russians, who had advanced as far as the city line, were to be thrown back in a major attack by all available forces. Every man, every tank, every plane, was to be committed, and any unauthorized actions were to be punished with maximum severity. He entr
usted SS Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner with the leadership of the offensive. But he himself started the units marching, determined their initial positions, and set up divisions that had long ago ceased to exist. One of the participants later expressed the suspicion that the new chief of staff, General Krebs, unlike Guderian did not bother giving Hitler accurate information, but instead let him occupy himself with “war games” that bore no relationship to reality but that took account of his illusions as well as the nerves of everyone involved.57 A vivid impression of the confusion of those days can be gathered from the notes of Karl Koller, chief of staff of the Luftwaffe:
April 21. Early in the morning Hitler telephones. “Do you know that Berlin is under artillery fire? The center of the city!” “No.” “Don’t you hear that?” “No! I am in the Werder game park.”
Hitler: “Intense excitement in the city over distant artillery fire. It is said to be a heavy caliber railroad battery. The Russians are said to have seized a railroad bridge across the Oder. The Air Force is to locate and attack the battery at once.”
I: “The enemy has no railroad bridge across the Oder. Maybe he has been able to capture a heavy German battery and turn it around. But probably what you are hearing are medium cannon of the Russian field army; by now the enemy should be able to reach the center of the city with them.” Prolonged debate over whether or not the firing comes from a railroad bridge over the Oder and whether artillery of the Russian field army can reach the center of Berlin….
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