That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of the Fuehrer’s most trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering, the latter in a motor caravan whose trucks were filled with booty from his fabulous estate, Karinhall. Each of these Old Guard Nazis left convinced that his beloved Leader would soon be dead and that he would succeed him.
They never saw him again. Nor did Ribbentrop, who also scurried for safer parts late that night.
But Hitler had not yet given up. On the day after his birthday he ordered an all-out counterattack on the Russians in the southern suburbs of Berlin by S.S. General Felix Steiner. Every available soldier in the Berlin area was to be thrown into the attack, including the Luftwaffe ground troops.
“Any commander who holds back his forces,” Hitler shouted to General Koller, who had remained behind to represent the Air Force, “will forfeit his life in five hours. You yourself will guarantee with your head that the last man is thrown in.”11
All through the day and far into the next Hitler waited impatiently for the news of Steiner’s counterattack. It was a further example of his loss of contact with reality. There was no Steiner attack. It was never attempted. It existed only in the feverish mind of the desperate dictator. When he was finally forced to recognize this the storm broke.
April 22 brought the last turning point in Hitler’s road to ruin. From early morning until 3 P.M. he had been on the telephone, as he had been the day before, trying to find out from the various command posts how the Steiner counterattack was going. No one knew. General Roller’s planes could not locate it, nor could the ground commanders, though it was supposed to be rolling only two or three miles south of the capital. Not even Steiner, though he existed, could be found, let alone his army.
The blowup came at the daily military conference in the bunker at 3 P.M. Hitler angrily demanded news of Steiner. Neither Keitel nor Jodl nor anyone else had any. But the generals had other news. The withdrawal of troops from the north of Berlin to support Steiner had so weakened the front there that the Russians had broken through and their tanks were now within the city limits.
This was too much for the Supreme Warlord. All the surviving witnesses testify that he completely lost control of himself. He flew into the greatest rage of his life. This was the end, he shrieked. Everyone had deserted him. There was nothing but treason, lies, corruption and cowardice. All was over. Very well, he would stay on in Berlin. He would personally take over the defense of the capital of the Third Reich. The others could leave, if they wished. In this place he would meet his end.
The others protested. There was still hope, they said, if the Fuehrer retired to the south, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner’s army group in Czechoslovakia and considerable forces of Kesselring were still intact. Doenitz, who had left for the northwest to take over command of the troops there, and Himmler, who, as we shall see, was up to his own game, telephoned to urge the Leader not to remain in Berlin. Even Ribbentrop called up to say he was about to spring a “diplomatic coup” which would save everything. But Hitler had no more faith in them, not even in his “second Bismarck,” as he once, in a moment of folly, had called his Foreign Minister. He had made his decision, he said to all. And to show them that it was irrevocable, he called for a secretary and in their presence dictated an announcement that was to be read immediately over the radio. The Fuehrer, it said, would stay in Berlin and defend it to the end.
Hitler then sent for Goebbels and invited him, his wife and their six young children to move into the Fuehrerbunker from their badly bombed house in the Wilhelmstrasse garden. He knew that at least this fanatical and faithful follower, and his family, would stick by him to the end. Next Hitler turned to his papers, sorted out those he wished to be destroyed, and turned them over to one of his adjutants, Julius Schaub, who took them up to the garden and burned them.
Finally that evening he called in Keitel and Jodl and ordered them to proceed south to take over direct command of the remaining armed forces. Both generals, who had been at Hitler’s side throughout the war, have left vivid accounts of their final parting with the Supreme Warlord.12
When Keitel protested that he would not leave without the Fuehrer, Hitler answered, “You will follow my orders.” Keitel, who had never disobeyed an order from the Leader in his life, not even those commanding him to commit the vilest war crimes, said nothing further, but Jodl, less a lackey, did. To this soldier, who, despite his fanatical devotion to the Fuehrer whom he had served so well, still retained some sense of military tradition, the Supreme Warlord was deserting the command of his troops and shirking his responsibility for them at a moment of disaster.
“You can’t direct anything from here,” Jodl said. “If you don’t have your Leadership Staff with you how can you lead anything?”
“Well, then,” Hitler retorted, “Goering can take over the leadership down there.”
When one of them pointed out that no soldier would fight for the Reich Marshal, Hitler cut in. “What do you mean, fight? There’s precious little more fighting to be done!” Even for the mad conqueror the scales at last were falling from the eyes. Or, at least, the gods were giving him moments of lucidity in these last nightmarish days of his life.
There were several repercussions to Hitler’s outbursts on April 22 and to his final decision to remain in Berlin. When Himmler, who was at Hohenlychen, northwest of Berlin, received a firsthand account on the telephone from Hermann Fegelein, his S.S. liaison officer at headquarters, he exclaimed to his entourage, “Everyone is mad in Berlin! What am I to do?”
“You go straight to Berlin,” replied one of Himmler’s principal aides, Obergruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger, the chief of the S.S. head office. Berger was one of those simple Germans who sincerely believed in National Socialism. He had no idea that his revered chief, Himmler, under the prodding of S.S. General Walter Schellenberg, was already in touch with Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden about surrendering the German armies in the West. “I am going to Berlin,” Berger said to Himmler, “and it is your duty to go too.”
Berger, but not Himmler, went to Berlin that night and his visit is of interest because of his firsthand description of Hitler on the night of his great decision. Russian shells were already bursting near the Chancellery when Berger arrived. To his shock he found the Fuehrer “a broken man—finished.” When he ventured to express his appreciation of Hitler’s resolve to remain in Berlin—“one couldn’t desert the people after they had held out so loyally and long,” he says he declared—the very words touched off the Leader again.
All this time [Berger later recounted] the Fuehrer had never uttered a word; then suddenly he shrieked: “Everyone has deceived me! No one has told me the truth! The Armed Forces have lied to me!” … He went on and on in a loud voice. Then his face went bluish purple. I thought he was going to have a stroke any minute …
Berger was also the head of Himmler’s Prisoner-of-War Administration, and after the Fuehrer had calmed down they discussed the fate of a group of prominent British, French and American prisoners as well as of such Germans as Halder and Schacht and the former Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, who were being moved southeast to keep them out of the hands of the Americans advancing through Germany. Berger was flying to Bavaria that night to take charge of them. The two men also talked of reports that there had been outbreaks of separatism in Austria and Bavaria. The idea that revolt could break out in his native Austria and in his adopted Bavaria once more convulsed Hitler.
His hand was shaking, his leg was shaking and his head was shaking; and all that he kept saying [Berger reported] was: “Shoot them all! Shoot them all!”13
Whether this was an order to shoot all the separatists or all the distinguished prisoners, or both, was not clear to Berger, but apparently to this simple man it meant the whole lot.
GOERING AND HIMMLER TRY TO TAKE OVER
General Koller had stayed away from the Fuehrer’s military conference on April 22. He had the Luftwaffe to look
after, and “besides,” he says in his diary, “I should never have been able to tolerate being insulted all day long.”
General Eckard Christian, his liaison officer at the bunker, had rung him up at 6:15 P.M. and in a breathless voice had said, “Historical events, the most decisive of the war, are taking place here!” A couple of hours later Christian arrived at Air Force headquarters at Wildpark-Werder on the outskirts of Berlin to report to Koller in person. “The Fuehrer has broken down!” Christian, an ardent Nazi who had married one of Hitler’s secretaries, gasped, but beyond saying that the Leader had decided to meet his end in Berlin and was burning his papers, he was so incoherent that the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff set out, despite a heavy British bombing that had just begun, to find General Jodl and ascertain just what had happened that day in the bunker.
At Krampnitz, between Berlin and Potsdam, where the now Fuehrerless OKW had set up temporary headquarters, he found him, and Jodl told his Air Force friend the whole sad story. He also revealed something which no one else had yet mentioned to Koller and which was to lead to a certain denouement during the next few frantic days.
“When it comes to negotiating [for peace],” Hitler had told Keitel and Jodl, “Goering can do better than I. Goering is much better at those things. He can deal much better with the other side.” Jodl now repeated this to Koller.14
The Air Force General felt that it was his duty to immediately fly to Goering. It would be difficult and also dangerous, in view of the enemy’s monitoring, to try to explain this new development in a radio message. If Goering, who had been officially named by Hitler years before as his successor-designate, were to take over peace negotiations, as the Fuehrer had suggested, there was no time to lose. Jodl agreed. At 3:30 on the morning of April 23 Koller took off in a fighter plane and sped toward Munich.
At noon he arrived on the Obersalzberg and delivered his news to the Reich Marshal. Goering, who had been looking forward, to put it mildly, to the day when he might succeed Hitler, was more circumspect than might have been expected. He did not want to lay himself open, he said, to the machinations of his “deadly enemy,” Bormann, a precaution which, as it turned out, was well founded. He perspired under his dilemma. “If I act now,” he told his advisers, “I may be stamped as a traitor; if I don’t act, I’ll be accused of having failed to do something in the hour of disaster.”
Goering sent for Hans Lammers, the State Secretary of the Reich Chancellery, who was in Berchtesgaden, for legal advice and also fetched from his safe a copy of the Fuehrer’s decree of June 29, 1941. The decree was quite clear. It stipulated that if Hitler died Goering was to be his successor and that if the Fuehrer were incapacitated Goering was to act as his deputy. All agreed that by remaining in Berlin to die, cut off in his last hours from both the military commands and the government offices, Hitler was incapacitated from governing and that it was Goering’s clear duty under the decree to take over.
Nevertheless the Reich Marshal drafted his telegram to Hitler with great care. He wanted to make sure of the delegation of authority.
MY FUEHRER!
In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o’clock tonight, I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider the conditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of our country and our people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all.
Your loyal
Hermann Goering
That very evening several hundred miles away Heinrich Himmler was meeting with Count Bernadotte in the Swedish consulate at Luebeck on the Baltic. Der treue Heinrich—the loyal Heinrich, as Hitler had often fondly referred to him—was not asking for the powers of succession; he was already assuming them.
“The Fuehrer’s great life,” he told the Swedish count, “is drawing to a close.” In a day or two, he said, Hitler would be dead. Whereupon Himmler urged Bernadotte to communicate to General Eisenhower immediately Germany’s willingness to surrender to the West. In the East, Himmler added, the war would be continued until the Western Powers themselves had taken over the front against the Russians—such was the naïveté, or stupidity, or both, of this S.S. chieftain who now claimed for himself the dictatorship of the Third Reich. When Bernadotte asked that Himmler put in writing his offer to surrender, a letter was hastily drafted by candlelight—for an R.A.F. bombing that night had shut off the electricity in Luebeck and driven the conferees to the cellar. Himmler signed it.15
Both Goering and Himmler had acted prematurely, as they quickly found out. Although Hitler was cut off from all but a scanty radio communication with his armies and his ministries—for the Russians had nearly completed their encirclement of the capital by the evening of the twenty-third—he was now to demonstrate that he could rule Germany by the power of his personality and prestige alone and quell “treason,” even by the most eminent of his followers, by a mere word over his creaky wireless transmitter suspended from a balloon above the bunker.
Albert Speer and a remarkable lady witness whose dramatic appearance in the last act of the drama in Berlin will shortly be noted have described Hitler’s reaction to Goering’s telegram. Speer had flown into the besieged capital on the night of April 23, landing in a cub plane on the eastern end of the East–West Axis—the broad avenue which led through the Tiergarten—at the Brandenburg Gate, a block from the Chancellery. Having learned that Hitler had decided to remain in Berlin to the end, which could not be far off, Speer had come to say his farewell to the Leader and to confess to him that his “conflict between personal loyalty and public duty,” as he puts it, had forced him to sabotage the Fuehrer’s scorched-earth policy. He fully expected to be arrested for “treason” and probably shot, and no doubt he would have been had the dictator known of Speer’s effort two months before to kill him and all the others who had escaped Stauffenberg’s bomb.
The brilliant architect and Armament Minister, though he had always prided himself on being apolitical, had had, like some other Germans, a late—a too late—awakening. When he had finally realized that his beloved Fuehrer was determined through his scorched-earth decrees to destroy the German people he had decided to murder him. His plan was to introduce poison gas into the ventilation system in the bunker in Berlin during a full-dress military conference. Since not only the generals but invariably Goering, Himmler and Goebbels now attended these, Speer hoped to wipe out the entire Nazi leadership of the Third Reich as well as the High Command. He procured his gas, inspected the air-conditioning system and then discovered, he says, that the air-intake pipe in the garden was protected by a twelve-foot-high chimney, recently installed on Hitler’s personal orders to discourage sabotage, and that it would be impossible to inject his gas into it without being interrupted by the S.S. guards in the garden. So he abandoned his project and Hitler once again escaped assassination.
Now on the evening of April 23 Speer made a full confession of his insubordination in refusing to carry out the wanton destruction of Germany’s remaining installations. To his surprise Hitler showed no resentment or anger. Perhaps the Fuehrer was touched by the candor and courage of his young friend—Speer had just turned forty—for whom he had long had a deep affection and whom he regarded as a “fellow artist.” Hitler, as Keitel also noted, seemed strangely serene that evening, as though having made up his mind to die in this place within a few days had brought a peace of mind and spirit. But it was the calm not only after the storm—of the previous day—but before the storm.
For Goering’s telegram had meanwhile arrived in the Chancellery and after being held up by Bormann, who saw his opportunity at last, was presented to the Fuehrer by this master of intrigue as an “ultima
tum” and as a treasonous attempt to “usurp” the Leader’s power.
“Hitler was highly enraged,” says Speer, “and expressed himself very strongly about Goering. He said he had known for some time that Goering had failed, that he was corrupt and a drug addict”—a statement which “extremely shook” the young architect, since he wondered why Hitler had employed such a man in so high a post so long. Speer was also puzzled when Hitler calmed down and added, “Well, let Goering negotiate the capitulation all the same. It doesn’t matter anyway who does it.”16 But this mood lasted only a few moments.
Before the discussion was finished, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, dictated a telegram informing Goering that he had committed “high treason,” for which the penalty was death, but that because of his long service to the Nazi Party and State his life would be spared if he immediately resigned all his offices. He was ordered to answer with one word: Yes or No. This did not satisfy the wormlike Bormann. On his own hook he got off a radiogram to the S.S. headquarters in Berchtesgaden ordering the immediate arrest of Goering, his staff and Lammers for “high treason.” Before dawn the next day the Number Two man of the Third Reich, the most arrogant—and opulent—of the Nazi princes, the only Reich Marshal in German history and the Commander in Chief of the Air Force, found himself a prisoner of the S.S.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 177
