Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Soon afterwards Hitler in person is again on the phone. He wants exact figures on the current air strikes south of Berlin. I reply that such questions cannot be answered out of hand because communications with the forces no longer function reliably. We have to be content, I say, with the current morning and evening reports, which are automatically sent in; he is most enraged about this.

  Afterwards he telephones again and complains that jets did not come yesterday from their fields near Prague. I explain that the airfields are constantly covered by enemy fighters so that our own planes… cannot get away from the fields. Hitler rails. “Then we don’t need the jets any more. The Air Force is superfluous.”

  In his vexation Hitler mentions a letter from the industrialist Röchling, and screams: “What that man has written is enough for me! The whole leadership of the Air Force ought to be strung up at once!”

  In the evening between eight-thirty and nine he is again on the telephone. “The Reich Marshal is maintaining a private army in Karinhall. Dissolve it at once and… place it under SS Obergruppenführer Steiner”—and he hangs up. While I am still considering what this is supposed to mean, Hitler calls again. “Every available Air Force man in the area between Berlin and the coast as far as Stettin and Hamburg is to be thrown into the attack I have ordered in the northeast of Berlin.”… And there is no answer to my question of where the attack is to take place; he has already hung up….

  In a series of telephone calls I try to find out what is going on. Thus I learn from Major Freigang of General Konrad’s staff that he has heard Obergruppenführer Steiner is supposed to lead an attack from the Eberswalde area in a southward direction. But so far only Steiner and one officer have arrived in Schönwalde. Army units for the attack unknown.

  I telephone the Führer bunker, finally reaching General Krebs at 10:30 P.M., and ask for more precise information about the planned attack…. Hitler breaks into the conversation. Suddenly his excited voice sounds on the phone: “Do you still have doubts about my order? I think I expressed myself clearly enough.” At 11:30 P.M. another call from Hitler. He asks about the Air Force’s measures for Steiner’s attack. I report on this, emphasizing that the troops are altogether unused to battle, and have neither been trained nor equipped for ground fighting, moreover lack heavy arms. He gives me a brief lecture on the situation….”58

  It is necessary to know this background to grasp the fictitious nature of the Steiner offensive, on which Hitler was placing such far-reaching hopes. “You will see,” he retorted to Koller, “the Russians will suffer the greatest defeat, the bloodiest defeat in their history at the gates of the city of Berlin.” During the entire following morning he waited nervously, and in increasing despair, for a report on the course of operations. At three o’clock, at the beginning of the conference, no report from Steiner had yet arrived, but it now became apparent that his orders of the previous day had so confused and opened the front that the Red Army was able to break through the outer defensive ring in the northern part of Berlin and penetrate the city with its tank spearheads. The Steiner offensive never took place.

  In the afternoon the storm burst that made the conference of April 22 memorable. After a brief, brooding silence, as if still dazed by his utter disappointment, Hitler began to rage. He embarked on what amounted to a general denunciation of the cowardice, baseness, and faithlessness of the world. His voice, which in past weeks had dropped almost to a whisper, once more regained some of its former strength. Alerted by his screams, those living in the bunker crowded into the stairways and hallways while Hitler shouted that he had been betrayed. He cursed the army and spoke of corruption, weakness, lies. For years he had been surrounded by traitors and failures. He shook his fists furiously while he spoke; tears ran down his cheeks; and as always in the disastrous disenchantments of his life, everything collapsed along with the one hysterically magnified expectation. This was the end, he said. He could no longer go on. Death alone remained. He would meet death here in the city. Those who wanted to could go south; he himself would stick it out in Berlin. He rejected the protests and pleas of those around him, who regained their capacity for speech only after Hitler fell silent in exhaustion. He would not permit them to drag him around any farther; he should never have left the Wolf’s Lair. Telephoned attempts at persuasion by Himmler and Dönitz had no effect. He refused to listen to Ribbentrop. Instead, he declared once more that he would remain in Berlin and meet his death on the steps of the chancellery. According to one of the witnesses he repeated that phrase ten or twenty times. After he had dictated a radio message announcing (and thus making irrevocable) his decision that he personally had taken over the defense of the city, he ended the conference. It was eight o’clock in the evening. All the participants were shaken and exhausted.59

  Subsequently, in Hitler’s private rooms, the arguments were revived in a smaller circle. Hitler had sent for Goebbels and proposed that he and his family move into the Führer’s bunker. Then he began gathering his personal papers and ordered the documents to be burned. Next, he commanded Generals Keitel and Jodi to go to Berchtesgaden. He refused their request for operational orders. When they renewed their objections, he declared emphatically: “I shall never leave Berlin—never!” For a moment each of the generals, independently of one another, considered whether they should forcibly remove Hitler from the bunker and take him to the “Alpine redoubt,” but quickly realized that the idea was impracticable. Keitel thereupon left for the headquarters of General Wenck’s army, thirty-seven miles south of Berlin, an army that once more was to be the focus of exaggerated hopes in the few remaining days; Jodi, only a few hours later, gave the following account:

  Hitler has… made the decision to stay in Berlin, lead the defense, and shoot himself at the last moment. He said he could not fight for physical reasons, and in any case would not personally fight because he could not risk being wounded and falling into the enemy’s hands. We all emphatically tried to dissuade him, and proposed that the troops be shifted from the west to the fighting in the East. He answered that everything was falling apart anyhow, he couldn’t do it; the Reich Marshal could try. Someone remarked that none of the soldiers would fight for the Reich Marshal. To that Hitler said: “What do you mean, fight? There isn’t much fighting left to do.”60

  At last he seemed to be bowing to the inevitable. The tremendous consciousness of mission that had accompanied him from early on, and had only occasionally been obscured but never shaken, now yielded to resignation. “He has lost his faith,” Eva Braun wrote to a woman friend. Only once in the course of the evening, when SS Obergruppenführer Berger mentioned the people that had “endured so loyally and so long,” did Hitler relapse into the agitation of the afternoon. “With face flushed purple,” he shouted something about lies and treachery.61 But, later, as he was bidding good-bye to his adjutant Julius Schaub, two of his secretaries, the stenographers, and many other persons of his entourage, he seemed calm again. And when Speer, filled with “conflicting feelings” once more flew into encircled, burning Berlin next day to bid him good-bye, he likewise displayed an almost unnatural composure and spoke of his impending death as a release: “It is easy for me.” Hitler remained calm even when Speer confessed that for months he had worked against the orders given him; he seemed rather impressed by Speer’s initiative.62

  But the next fit of fury was already in the offing. Indeed, the remaining hours of this life were marked by more and more abrupt changes of mood, from euphoria directly to profoundest depression. The symptoms suggest that these leaps were reflections of a final breakdown, produced by years of abuse of Morell’s mind-distorting drugs. That evening, it is true, Hitler had dismissed his doctor with the words: “I don’t need drugs to see me through.”63 But after Morell’s departure he continued to take the medicines. The equanimity he now achieved was surely, viewed as a whole, not philosophical in origin. Far from submission to his fate, there was always, in his resignation, an undertone of careless contemptuo
usness. He could be vacant, but not calm. The stenographic minutes of one of the last conferences has preserved the characteristic combination of illusionary exuberance, depression, and contempt:

  For me there is no doubt about this: the battle has reached a climax here. If it is really true that differences have arisen among the Allies in San Francisco—and they will arise—then a turning point can come about only if I deliver a blow to the Bolshevistic colossus at one place. Then the others may after all realize that there is only one force that can check the Bolshevistic colossus, and that is I and the party and the present German State.

  If fate decides differently, then I would vanish from the stage of world history as an inglorious fugitive. But I would think it a thousand times more cowardly to commit suicide at Obersalzberg than to stand and fall here. I don’t want anyone saying: You as the Leader…

  I am the Leader as long as I can really lead. I cannot lead by sitting down somewhere on a mountain…. I did not come into the world solely in order to defend my Berghof.

  He then referred with gratification to the enemy’s casualties, which, he said, had “consumed a great part of his strength.” In the house-to-house fighting for Berlin the enemy would be “forced to bleed to death.” He added: “Today I shall lie down slightly reassured, and wish to be awakened only when a Russian tank stands before my sleeping nook.” Then he grieved over all the memories he would be losing in death, and stood up shrugging: “But what does all that matter! Sooner or later everyone has to leave all such nonsense behind.”

  On the evening of April 23 Göring wired from Berchtesgaden to ask whether Hitler’s decision to remain in Berlin brought into force the law of June 29, 1941, which appointed him, the Reich Marshal, as successor. The telegram was couched in loyal terms, and Hider had received it calmly. But Göring’s old antagonist, Martin Bormann, succeeded in representing the matter as a kind of coup d’état. With a few whispered words, he incited Hitler to one of his grand outbursts. Hitler denounced Göring for laziness and failure, accused him of having “made corruption in our state possible” by his example, called him a drug addict, and finally—in a radio message written by Bormann—stripped him of all his offices and privileges. Then, exhausted and with an expression of dull satisfaction, he slumped back into his apathetic state and added contemptuously: “Well, all right, Let Göring negotiate the surrender. If the war is lost anyhow, it doesn’t matter who does it.”64

  He now had no reserves left. The feelings of impotence, anxiety, and selfpity demanded expression. The pathetic camouflages of the past would no longer serve. All his life he had needed and sought roles to play. Now he was at a loss: the role of the beaten man had never entered his repertory, while the panache of the Wagnerian hero put too great a strain upon his remaining energies. The lack of control that was expressed in the fits, bursts of rage, and spells of uncontrolled sobbing was partly caused by this loss of his roles.

  That was once more revealed on the evening of April 26, when General Ritter von Greim, whom he had appointed Göring’s successor as commander in chief of the air force, flew into the encircled city with the pilot Hanna Reitsch. They came because Hitler had insisted on making the appointment in person. He had tears in his eyes, as Hanna Reitsch described it. His head drooped and his face was deathly pale when he spoke of Göring’s “ultimatum.” “Now nothing remains,” he said. “Nothing is spared to me. No loyalty, no honor is left; no disappointment, no treachery has been spared me—and now this on top of it all. Everything is over. Every possible wrong has been inflicted upon me.”

  Nevertheless, he still had one hope, a small one, but he elaborated it in interminable soliloquies into one of his phantasmagorical certainties. During the night he summoned Hanna Reitsch and told her that the great cause for which he had lived and fought now seemed lost—unless the army of General Wenck, which was approaching, managed to break through the ring of the besiegers and relieve the city. He gave her a vial of poison. “But I still have hope, dear Hanna. General Wenck’s army is moving up from the south. He must and will drive the Russians back far enough to save our people.”

  That same night the first Soviet shells struck the chancellery, and the bunker vibrated under the impact of tumbling walls. In some areas the conquerors had moved to within a half a mile of the chancellery.

  The following day, SS Gruppenführer Fegelein, Himmler’s personal representative in the Führer’s headquarters, was picked up in civilian dress, and within the bunker new laments at the steadily spreading treachery were heard. Hitler’s suspicions now turned against everyone. Eva Braun, who was related to the arrested man, since Fegelein had married her sister Gretl, exclaimed: “Poor, poor Adolf, they’ve all deserted you, all betrayed you.” Aside from Eva, only Goebbels and Bormann remained beyond suspicion. They formed that “phalanx of the last” which Goebbels had hailed years before, in one of his paeans to doom. The more Hitler succumbed to his fits of melancholia and his misanthropies, the more closely he drew these few loyal souls around him. Since his return to the chancellery he had spent most of his evenings with them, although occasionally Ley was included. There was evidence of something secret going on, which soon aroused the curiosity of the other bunker inmates.

  Years later it became known that Hitler, in meetings between the beginning of February and the middle of April, had embarked on a kind of general retrospective, summing up his life, as it were. In a series of lengthy monologues he once more examined the course he had taken, the premises and goals of his policies, and their prospects and errors. As always, he elaborated his reflections verbosely and chaotically. But on the whole the pages as they stand constitute one of the fundamental documents of his life. They reveal his intellectual energy, though somewhat diminished, and also the old obsessional ideas.

  The starting point of his reflections was the still rankling failure of an Anglo-German alliance. Up to early 1941, this senseless mistaken war could have been ended, especially since England had “proved her will to resist in the sky above London” and moreover “had on the credit side of her ledger the shameful defeats of the Italians in North Africa.” Had the war been thus ended, America would have been kept out of European affairs. The “phony” world powers, France and Italy, would have been compelled to renounce their “anachronistic politics of greatness” and instead could have undertaken a “bold policy of friendship with Islam.” England, still the heart of his grand design, would have been able to devote herself “entirely to the welfare of the Empire,” while Germany, secure in the rear, could turn to her true task, “the goal of my life and the reason for the genesis of National Socialism: the extirpation of Bolshevism.”65

  Probing for the causes that had ruined this design, he once again encountered the enemy who from the very beginning had blocked his way and whose power he had nevertheless failed to appraise correctly. This was, as he now saw it in retrospect, his most serious mistake: “I had underestimated the overpowering influence of the Jews upon the British under Churchill.” And he complained: “If only fate had sent an aging and calcified England a new Pitt instead of this Yid-ridden half American souse!” Now he hated the arrogant islanders, whom he had courted in vain more than any other of his enemies, and did not conceal his satisfaction that in the days to come they would be departing from history and, in keeping with the law of life, would go to their doom. “The English people will die of hunger or tuberculosis on their damned island.”66

  The war against the Soviet Union, he insisted once again, stood above all arbitrary considerations. It had been the principal goal of all his endeavors. Granted, it was possible that it might fail and end in defeat. But not to have undertaken it would have been worse than any defeat, equivalent to an act of treason. “We were condemned to wage war, and our concern could only be to choose the most favorable moment for its start. At the same time it was beyond question that we could never give up once we had become involved in it.”

  As to what the most favorable moment might have b
een, Hitler manifested far less certainty. The excitement with which he returned to this theme on several evenings, examining its tactical and strategic aspects and finding justifying arguments, indicates that he considered his choice of the moment his gravest error. Characteristically, he presented the situation as one without alternatives:

  It is the nemesis of this war that it began for Germany too soon on the one hand, somewhat too late on the other hand. From the military point of view it was to our interest to begin it a year earlier. In 1938 I ought to have seized the initiative, instead of letting it be thrust upon me in 1939, since it was inevitable in any case. But I couldn’t do anything since the British and French accepted all my demands at Munich.

  To that extent, then, the war came some time too late. In regard to the preparation of our morale, however, it came far too soon. I had not yet had time to shape the people to the measure of my policies. I would have needed twenty years to bring a new elite to maturity, an elite which so to speak had imbibed the National Socialist way of thinking with its mother’s milk. It is the Germans’ tragedy never to have enough time. Circumstances are always forcing us. And if we lack time, that is chiefly due to our lack of space. The Russians, in their tremendous plains, can afford the luxury of not being hurried. Time is working for them. It is working against us….

  Fatefully, I have to complete everything during the brief span of one human life…. Where the others have an eternity at their disposal, I have only a few miserable years. The others know that they will have successors who will take up their work just where they have left it, who will make the same furrows with the same plow. I ask myself whether the man will be found among my immediate successors who is destined to take up the torch that is slipping from my hand.