One feeble ray of hope did manage to pierce the gloom of the Führerbunker. On April 12, Franklin Roosevelt died. When Goebbels received the news, he telephoned the Führer. Only days before he had read to Hitler Thomas Carlyle’s depiction of Frederick the Great’s apparently hopeless position in the Seven Years’ War. A mighty alliance was arrayed against him; defeat was certain. But suddenly the czarina Catherine of Russia, a key figure in the anti-Prussian alliance, died, the coalition against Frederick frayed, and, against all odds, he emerged victorious. Hitler was so moved that he sent for his horoscopes (there were two), which were kept in Himmler’s research departments. Both predicted great triumphs in 1941, followed by a series of setbacks, and near catastrophe in the first half 1945. But then would come a turnaround in the second half of April and a respite until peace would be attained in August. Hard times were in store for the Reich, but Germany would rise again; it would again find greatness. When Goebbels now spoke to Hitler, he gushed, “My Führer, I congratulate you. Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us.” The Grand Alliance did not collapse, as Hitler predicted it would, but this is what passed for good news in April 1945.
On April 16, the Russians crossed the Oder at Küstrin, initiating the opening phase of the battle for Berlin. At 3 a.m. a massive barrage of a thousand heavy guns broke the silence; the bone-jarring concussions from the bursting shells could be felt in the eastern suburbs of Berlin forty-five miles away. German forces put up a tenacious defense on the Seelow Heights east of the city, inflicting terrible losses on the advancing Soviets, but after a four-day battle, the German defenses were overrun and the Red Army advanced on Berlin in a sweeping pincer movement. Meanwhile, on April 20, deep beneath the surface of the bomb-shattered Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler was marking his fifty-sixth birthday in the bunker to which he had retreated. All the major figures of the Third Reich—Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Speer, Bormann, Admiral Karl Dönitz, Keitel, and Jodl—made their way through the ruins of the city to Hitler’s subterranean headquarters to pay their respects. In previous years, the Führer’s birthday had been an occasion for national celebration—parades, concerts, public tributes. Not today. There was no fanfare, no talk of victory.
After greeting a group of Hitler Youth in the cratered Chancellery garden (the boys had distinguished themselves in combat against the Russians; the youngest was twelve), he descended again into the dank concrete chambers of the bunker for a review of the military situation. The Russians were closing fast on the capital of the Reich. Soon the city would be completely encircled. His cronies and commanders urged him to escape to the south, to continue leading the war from Alpine Berchtesgaden. Hitler refused. The others could go, he insisted, but he would remain at his post in Berlin. To his chief of operations, General Alfred Jodl, he confided, “I will fight as long as the faithful fight next to me and then I will shoot myself.” That afternoon convoys of government bureaucrats, high-ranking soldiers, and party officials—“the golden pheasants,” ordinary Berliners called them scornfully—began a frantic exodus from the doomed city. Time was running out.
That night an exhausted Hitler retired early, but Eva Braun, Hitler’s long time mistress, who had joined him in the bunker earlier in the month and was intent on staying until the end, had other ideas. She wanted to have a good time, perhaps her last, a break in the almost suffocating tension and claustrophobia of life in the bunker. With the sound of Russian artillery thudding dully around them, she moved through the narrow corridors of the bunker, gaily inviting all within earshot to a party in her room above in the Chancellery. As Hitler’s longtime secretary Traudl Junge recalled, “Eva Braun wanted to deaden the fear that had grown in her heart. She wanted to celebrate, when there was nothing more to celebrate—dancing, drinking, forgetting.” Wehrmacht officers and orderlies, secretaries, Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s portly physician, even humorless Martin Bormann happily climbed the stairs for a bit of revelry. A number of SS men arrived with young women in tow. Flowers adorned the large circular table Speer had designed for her, champagne flowed, cigarette smoke, unheard of in the Führerbunker, clouded the room; giddy laughter bubbled throughout the crowd. An ancient phonograph materialized, but only one record could be found: “Blood Red Roses Speak to You of Love.” It played over and over again. Dancing and intimacies were everywhere, interrupted only briefly by a loud explosion nearby. Eva wanted to dance, and it didn’t matter with whom. The determination to release the oppressive tension that jangled their nerves was an almost physical presence in the room. Artillery fire continued to thump all around them. “Blood Red Roses” could not drown it out. Watching the frantic scene, joining in at times, Traudl Junge felt a surge of nausea and fled to her room in the bunker below. This sort of frivolity seemed out of place under the circumstances.
On April 21, amid fierce fighting, Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s First White Russian Front reached the northern suburbs of the Reich capital. The fighting was intense, street by street, house to house. Buildings crumbled. Masonry and glass covered the streets. Bodies lay in the rubble. Casualties were high. Four days later, Russian forces completed the encirclement of the city. On that same day, eighty miles to the south, Russian and American troops met at Torgau on the Elbe. The Third Reich was now cut in half. Hitler listened to the reports at his daily military briefing, but seemed not to grasp the seriousness of the situation. While his generals presented the dire predicament they confronted, the military situation, they implied but would not express directly, was hopeless. Hitler resisted the obvious conclusion. Instead he clung to the fantasy that Walther Wenck’s Twelfth Army to the southwest could wheel about, join with Theodor Busse’s Ninth Army, and relieve the city while Felix Steiner’s Waffen-SS units to the north would launch a counterattack against Zhukov’s spearhead. Together they would crush the Russians and save Berlin. None of the military men present at the briefings dared state the obvious. Expecting salvation from these much depleted forces was utter fantasy.
At the situation briefing the next day, General Hans Krebs, Guderian’s successor as army chief of staff, had reluctantly to confess that Steiner had not yet begun to move. He was unable to marshal the necessary forces. At first Hitler sat motionless, reeling from the news. In a subdued voice, he ordered everyone out, except his close circle, Bormann, Krebs, Keitel, and Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hitler’s ranking military adjutant. When the door was closed, he exploded in a quivering rage. He spewed venom on the army and its generals, liars and traitors all. They had no understanding of his grand design, his historic mission, he shrieked, his voice crackling with fury. They were responsible for this disastrous turn of events. He shook violently, his pallid face white as a corpse. Then, exhausted, he dropped abruptly into his chair and uttered words that none had ever expected to hear from him: “The war is lost!” The Third Reich had ended in failure and all that was left for him was to die. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the end. I shall remain here in Berlin and shoot myself when the time comes. Each of you must make his own decision on when to leave.”
All pleaded with him to escape to the Obersalzberg, to lead the fight from there, but he again refused. “Everything is falling to pieces anyway and I can do no more.” Göring would now act as his personal representative. There was little fighting left to be done, and if it came to negotiating with the Allies, Göring could do a better job of it than he could. He would either fight and win the Battle of Berlin or die in Berlin. He could not risk falling into Russian hands, and would shoot himself at the last minute. It was his “final, irrevocable decision.” When someone pointed to the portrait of Frederick the Great and mentioned the “miracle” that had saved him, Hitler could only shake his head. “The Army has betrayed me, my generals are good for nothing. My orders are not carried out. It is all finished. National Socialism is dead and will never rise again!” The German nation had failed him, and now “Germany is lost. It actually was not quite ready or quite strong
enough for the mission I set for the nation.”
The next day, April 23, a cable from Göring arrived. The Reich Marshal had taken up residence on the Obersalzberg, where most of the party’s and state’s ministries were now located. He was officially second in command of the National Socialist state, Hitler’s designated successor, and he interpreted Hitler’s outburst on the previous day as meaning that the Führer had, in effect, abdicated. The cable asked if that was correct and concluded by saying that if he did not hear back by 10 p.m. (eight hours) he would assume that Hitler had lost freedom of action and was no longer in a position to lead. He would therefore assume leadership of the Reich. When Hitler read through the cable he erupted in a volcanic rage, stoked by Bormann’s insistence that the message was clear evidence of Göring’s treachery. Hitler immediately ordered the SS to place the Reich Marshal under house arrest, expelled him from the party, and stripped him of all state offices. Bormann, always scheming, pressed for execution, but Hitler could not do it. Göring had been with him since the early days of the party, had marched with him in the Beer Hall Putsch, and played a critical role in creating the Nazi police state.
With bad news cascading all around him, Hitler was increasingly out of touch with reality. He had retreated into the bunker beneath the old Reich Chancellery on January 16 and emerged only twice in the remaining months of the war—105 days lived fifty feet beneath the surface of the Chancellery garden. A penumbra of the surreal surrounded him and all he did. He was living on a diet of amphetamines and sedatives, and ever since the bomb attack on July 20, 1944, his health had deteriorated and his paranoia mounted. Those who had not seen him for a period of time were shocked at his appearance. His eyes were swollen and red, his skin pasty, his shoulders stooped, his uniform, always so immaculate, now bore stains, and his left arm visibly trembled—an early sign of Parkinson’s. He had, Albert Speer remarked, “reached the last stage in his flight from reality, a reality he had refused to acknowledge since his youth. At the time I had a name for this unreal world of the bunker: I called it the Isle of the Departed.”
Hitler was convinced that he was surrounded by traitors and liars, but Speer, Hitler’s favorite, was not among them. A bond of mutual admiration bound them together, but on April 23 the Führer received another unwelcome surprise. In March he had issued an order stating that if the Allies should enter the Reich, Germany’s infrastructure—bridges, factories, the communications and transportation systems, as well as all material assets, everything that might be of use to the enemy—was to be destroyed. Speer had protested that such actions would eliminate “all further possibility for the German people to survive,” to which Hitler responded: “If the war is lost, the people will also be lost [and] it is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even those things. For the nation has proved to be weak, and the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the east. Whatever remains after this battle is in any case only the inadequate, because the good ones will be dead.” He was determined to die in Berlin. So complete was Hitler’s identification with the German people that if he had no future, neither did they. Since receiving the “Nero order,” as it came to be called, Speer had done everything possible to sabotage Hitler’s plans. He had worked with industrialists, military leaders, and local officials to ensure that Hitler’s scorched-earth policy would not be carried out. He had even contemplated assassinating Hitler by introducing poison gas into the bunker’s ventilation system. Now he had come to Berlin for a last leave-taking and to admit that he had disobeyed his Führer’s order. It was a tense situation, but Hitler received the news with an air of resignation. The man who had ruled Germany for twelve years, who had created a vast European empire, who was one of the most powerful men in the world, was now “empty, burned out, lifeless.”
Speer’s admission of disobedience was disappointing and Göring’s “betrayal” was a shock, but they were as nothing compared to the news that reached him on April 27. From a foreign press report he discovered that Himmler, his “loyal Heinrich,” was attempting to negotiate peace with the Western Allies. He had been carrying on secret talks with Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross in Germany, in hopes of arranging a peace deal with the West while continuing the fight against the Soviets in the East. He was convinced that the Allies would need him and the SS to maintain order in Europe. Besides, he knew more about the Communist underground all over the continent than any Allied intelligence service. His assistance would be invaluable. He even wondered at one point whether when he met Eisenhower, he should offer the general his hand or give him the Nazi salute. Hitler was not the only one in the top echelons of the Third Reich whose grip on reality was tenuous.
Hitler was stunned. He immediately dismissed Himmler from his position as chief of the SS, voided his party membership, and ordered his arrest. Himmler managed to evade arrest, but for Hitler his “betrayal” was a terrible blow, the final straw. Alone among the Führer’s inner circle whose loyalty remained unshakable was Goebbels. He had earlier moved into the Führerbunker, and days later, Hitler invited Magda and their six children to take up residence in the bunker as well. They had come, Goebbels told Speer, “in order . . . to end their lives at this historic site.” Hitler had always been solicitous of Frau Goebbels and was happy to have her and the children join the dwindling group in the bunker. In these final days he gave her his gold party pin as a token of his appreciation for her loyalty and commitment.
April 29 was a day of dramatic developments. The Russians were now only a half mile away and would be at the bunker within a day. Hitler decided that the time had come for him to put his affairs in order: he would marry his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, and would compose his last will and testament. A festive table, with fine “AH” monogrammed linen, silver service, and champagne glasses, had been placed in the corridor where the wedding ceremony would be held. But before the wedding ceremony got under way, Hitler retreated to the small conference room, where he dictated his last will and testament. It contained no confessions or explanations or revelations. For the most part, he reprised the recriminations and accusations of the previous days. But he did return to the theme that had obsessed him throughout his political life: the Jews and their nefarious world conspiracy. In one last scalding blast of hate, he wrote:
It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked solely by international statesmen either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. I have made too many offers for the limitation and control of armaments, which posterity will not be cowardly always to disregard, for responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be placed on me. Nor have I ever wished that, after the appalling First World War, there would be a second against either England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will grow anew against the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its henchmen.
The testament concluded with low Hitlerian melodrama, stating that “My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation. It is our wish that our bodies be burned immediately, here where I have performed the greater part of my daily work during the twelve years I served my people.” A bit later Hitler surprised his inner circle and married Eva Braun in a brief civil ceremony. The nervous official who performed the ceremony was plucked from a nearby Volkssturm unit and had, by law, to ask both parties if they were of pure Aryan heritage. The situation was awkward—the bride wearing black as if for a funeral; halfhearted toasts; the rumbling of artillery fire; the signing of the legal documents, to which the new bride could at last write “Eva Hitler.”
Hitler had already decided that this was his day to die, but the news of Mussolini’s execution by partisans was perhaps the final straw. It is not clear whether Hitler was informed of the details of the Duce’s demise—his pummeled body and that of his
mistress strung up by the feet in front of a gas station in Milan—but they could have only confirmed the decision he had already made. He and his wife would commit suicide in the bunker and their bodies would be burned in the Chancellery garden. He still held a final military briefing, where he was told that there would definitely be no rescue. The Russians were at the Reichstag, in the Tiergarten, at the Potsdamer Platz. They would be at the Chancellery no later than May 1.
At a little past 2 a.m., Hitler bade farewell to the two dozen or so guards, servants, and medical personnel still in the bunker; he shook hands with each of them, and released them from their oaths of loyalty. He hoped that they could escape to American or British lines. Around noon he ordered his SS adjutant Otto Günsche to collect as much petrol as possible. Shortly after 3 p.m. he disappeared into his study along with Eva Braun. Goebbels, Bormann, and Günsche gathered in the eerily quiet corridor and waited. No noise escaped the study. Finally, after ten minutes Günsche and Bormann pushed open the door. Hitler and his bride were slumped on the sofa. A strong odor of cyanide rose from Eva’s body. To her right on the sofa was the body of Adolf Hitler. His head drooped forward. Blood spilled from a bullet hole in his right temple; his pistol lay at his feet.
The loyal Günsche carried the Führer’s body, wrapped in a dark army blanket, into the Chancellery garden, placed it into a shallow shell hole, brimming with gasoline. Then Hitler’s chauffeur and Günsche struggled up the four flights of stairs with the body of Eva Braun, now Eva Hitler. She was placed alongside Hitler and their bodies doused by more gasoline. Then, during a lull in the artillery barrage, the chauffeur tossed a lighted rag into the depression, igniting a towering fireball—one of hundreds around the blasted city. From the entrance to the bunker stairwell, Bormann and Goebbels witnessed the scene. Günsche returned every three hours or so to pour gasoline onto the corpses.
The Third Reich Page 71
