The death of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April 1945 momentarily lifted the gloom in Hitler’s Berlin bunker. For Hitler, waving a newspaper clipping at Speer, this was ‘the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost. Read it! Roosevelt is dead!’198 Providence had come to his aid again. For a short while, fantastic schemes circulated round the corridors of the bunker. Speer would fly to meet Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, and peace would be signed. Hitler’s study had a picture of Frederick the Great on the wall; the Prussian King had recovered during the Seven Years’ War even after the Russians had occupied Berlin, and Hitler took inspiration from his example: indeed, Goebbels memorized the passage from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of the King in which the author, addressing the monarch directly, reassured him that he would prevail in the end, then recited it to the Nazi Leader as an encouragement.199 Hitler felt that the American President’s death was just like this turning-point in the wars of Frederick the Great, when the Tsarina Elizabeth had died, and Russia suddenly abandoned the anti-Prussian coalition. Before long, however, as it became clear that Truman had no intention of reneging on the policies of his predecessor, the brief euphoria subsided.200 On 20 April 1945 the Red Army opened the assault on Berlin. It was Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday.
In previous years the Leader’s birthday had been the occasion for nationwide festivities. Remembering these amidst the ruins of Berlin was too painful, and Hitler banned the usual office celebrations, though his staff none the less lined up in the bunker to give him their congratulations. Hitler emerged into the open briefly to review a small detachment of Hitler Youth in the Chancellery garden, where they had gathered with representatives of the army and the SS. He congratulated the boys, none of them more than fourteen years old, on their bravery, patted one or two of them, and then vanished below again. It was his last public appearance, and the last time he was formally caught on camera. In the following days, most of the remaining senior figures in the regime left the centre of Berlin, driving out of the city through the smouldering rubble on the few roads still left open before the Russians closed the circle. Speer, D̈nitz, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and a host of government ministers were among them. Hitler sent most of his personal staff away by plane to Berchtesgaden. Hermann G̈ring had already shipped much of his enormous art collection from his hunting lodge Carinhall, north of Berlin, to the south in a convoy of trucks, before saying his goodbyes to Hitler and departing for Bavaria himself. Only a few remained, notably Bormann, Hitler’s long-term factotum Julius Schaub, and the top military men, including Keitel and Jodl. Hitler now gave way to hysteria. He threatened to have his doctor, Morell, shot for trying to drug him with morphine. On 22 April 1945 he ranted at the generals. Everyone had betrayed him, he shouted, even the SS. Breaking down in despair, he told them for the first time openly that he knew the war was lost. He would stay and shoot himself. All attempts to dissuade him failed. Eventually Goebbels, to whom he had ranted in similar vein over the telephone, arrived and calmed him down. They agreed that the Propaganda Minister, his wife and his six young children would come to stay in the bunker for the final days. Hitler’s two remaining secretaries had also volunteered to stay. Meanwhile, Schaub burned Hitler’s private documents and then left for Berchtesgaden to make sure the same was done there.201
Two days later Speer returned to speak with Hitler one last time. Speer’s claim that he confessed his disobedience to Hitler in an outpouring of emotion was a later invention. The two men did not discuss their personal relationship at all, despite their years of friendship. Hitler simply asked him if he should give in to the entreaties of his entourage and leave Berlin for Berchtesgaden. Speer’s reply confirmed Hitler’s own intentions: he would stay on in the Reich capital, and kill himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. Eva Braun, his long-time companion, who had arrived in the bunker some weeks before, would die with him. Their bodies would be burned to avoid desecration. After an eight-hour stay, Speer flew out again, this time for good.202 Shortly afterwards Hitler’s resolve was strengthened when he learned of the fate that had overtaken Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. The pair were picked up by partisans on 27 April 1945 in a column of cars, trucks and armoured vehicles full of German troops and Italian Fascists on its way to Italy’s northern border, near Lake Como. An armed detachment led by the Communist partisan ‘Colonel Valerio’, who had spent five years in prison in the 1930s for anti-Fascist activities, put them up against a wall and shot them with a sub-machine gun in an act of ‘Italian people’s justice’. After executing fifteen more prisoners in the small town of Dongo, Valerio and his squad took all the bodies to Milan, where they dumped them on the Piazzale Loreto. A crowd gathered and desecrated the corpses in every possible way, spitting and urinating on them and shouting insults. Eventually Mussolini, Petacci and some of the others were hung upside-down from the gantry of a petrol station, where they were exposed to further insults.203 If anything were needed to confirm Hitler’s decision to kill himself, this was surely it.
Only now, at the very end, did Hitler’s closest associates begin to desert him. Informed of Hitler’s intentions by one of the generals present at the Leader’s hysterical outburst on 22 April, Hermann G̈ring assumed that the 1941 decree naming him as head of state if Hitler was unable to carry out his duties would now come into force. He sent a telegram to the bunker announcing that he would take over if he heard nothing by 10 p.m. on 24 April. Persuaded by G̈ring’s arch-enemy Bormann that this was an act of treason, Hitler sent a reply rescinding the 1941 decree and demanding the Reich Marshal resign all his offices for reasons of health. G̈ring did as he was told. Within a few hours he was under house arrest on the Obersalzberg. Himmler was next to defect. For several weeks, the head of the SS had been secretly negotiating with the Swedish Red Cross for the release of Scandinavian prisoners from the remaining concentration camps. On 23 April 1945, hearing of Hitler’s decision to kill himself, he met his intermediary, Count Bernadotte. Himmler grandly declared that he was now effectively the leader of Germany, and drafted an instrument of surrender to be passed to the Western Allies. Once more, Hitler exploded when he learned of what he called ‘the most shameful betrayal in human history’. He took out his fury on one of Himmler’s subordinates who had the misfortune to be in the bunker at the time: Hermann Fegelein, a corrupt SS officer who had entered Hitler’s entourage by marrying Eva Braun’s sister. Earlier in the week, Fegelein had left the bunker without warning and disappeared. He had been discovered later, in his apartment, drunk, dressed in civilian clothes and in the company of a young woman who was not his wife. Around him were bags full of money, ready for his getaway. Fegelein was arrested and brought before Hitler, who threw furious accusations at him. He was working for Himmler, he had disappeared from the bunker to plot Hitler’s arrest or assassination, he was a traitor. Hitler convened a drumhead court-martial which sentenced Fegelein to death. The guilty man was taken up to ground level and executed by firing-squad. 204
All the while, Hitler was still convening his military conferences and directing the defence of Berlin. But the armies he was ordering to punch through the Soviet lines or break through the gathering encirclement from outside scarcely existed any more as coherent units. They numbered no more than a few score thousand, hardly enough to repel more than 2 million Soviet troops now pushing forward for the final assault. By 25 April 1945 the Soviet generals Zhukov and Konev had closed the ring around Berlin and begun advancing through the suburbs towards the city centre. As in Stalingrad, the war degenerated into bitter, uncoordinated street fighting. General Gotthard Heinrici, whose reputation as a skilful commander of defensive operations had brought him command of the Army Group defending the capital, had maintained a semblance of order only by ignoring Hitler’s injunctions to stand firm, but on 29 April he finally resigned his post, unable to cope any longer with the Leader’s increasingly meaningless commands.205 Heinrici’s patriotic convi
ctions, together with the habits of military discipline and the fear of what would happen if he surrendered to the Russians, were still shared by many German soldiers, who carried on fighting even when all was so obviously lost. The thousands of members of the People’s Storm who were drafted in to defend the capital were not so determined; many of them deserted to go back to their families whenever the opportunity presented itself.206
By 29 April 1945 Soviet troops were entering the government quarter round the Potsdamer Platz at the heart of Berlin. The end was surely only hours away. Hitler made his last preparations. He summoned a city councillor, Walter Wagner, to the bunker. Now that there was no longer any need for concealment, he said, he would marry Eva Braun. As bombs and shells crashed down outside, Wagner performed the ceremony in front of Goebbels and Bormann as witnesses. A short champagne reception followed. At three in the morning, Hitler heard from Keitel that the last attempt at relieving Berlin from the outside had failed. As dawn broke, Soviet guns began bombarding the Reich Chancellery above. The military commanders told Hitler that it would all be over by the end of the day. After lunch, Hitler said farewell to his secretaries. All the remaining inhabitants of the bunker had been given prussic acid capsules, but Hitler did not entirely trust their effectiveness, although the previous day he had successfully had his dog Blondi put down with one. He retired to his study with Eva Braun at half-past three in the afternoon. Opening the door ten minutes or so later, Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge, accompanied by Bormann, found Hitler’s body on the sofa, blood oozing from a hole in his right temple, his pistol at his feet; Eva Braun’s body was next to his, giving off a strong smell of bitter almonds. She had taken poison. Following Hitler’s prior instructions, his personal adjutant Otto G̈nsche, assisted by Linge and three SS men, took the bodies, wrapped in blankets, up into the Reich Chancellery garden, where, watched by Bormann, Goebbels and the two remaining senior military officers, Krebs and Burgdorf, they were doused in a large quantity of petrol and set alight. Observing the macabre scene from behind the partly opened bunker door, the funeral party raised their arms in a last ‘Hail, Hitler!’ and returned underground. Not long after six in the evening, G̈nsche sent two SS men to bury the charred remains. All that remained to identify them when Soviet investigators found them a few days later were dental bridges that the technician who had worked for Hitler’s dentist since 1938 certified belonged to the former Nazi leader and his companion.207
Hitler left a brief private will, disposing of his personal possessions, and a much longer ‘Political Testament’, dictated to his secretary on 29 April 1945, in which he denied bringing about the war that had begun in 1939. It was remarkable for its scarcely veiled confession - or rather, boast - that he had had the Jews killed in revenge for the part he supposed they had played in starting the war. That war, he reaffirmed, ‘was willed and incited exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests’. Recalling once more his prophecy of 30 January 1939, and thinking of the First World War and, perhaps, the Depression that had been so crucial in bringing him to power, he reminded his future readers that he had left nobody in any doubt
that the real people to blame for this murderous struggle would be: the Jews! I further left nobody in any doubt that this time not only would millions of . . . grown men suffer death and not only would hundreds of thousands of women and children be incinerated in the cities and bombed to death, but also that the real guilty parties would also have to expiate their guilt, even if by more humane means.
He ended by calling upon Germany and the Germans ‘to observe the racial laws precisely and to resist pitilessly the world-poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry’.208
III
After the completion of Hitler’s will, Goebbels had dictated a codicil of his own to the secretary. Weeping copiously, he said that for the first time he was going to disobey a direct order from his Leader. Hitler had told him to leave Berlin. But he was going to stay ‘at the Leader’s side to end a life which for me personally has no further value if it cannot be used in the service of the Leader and by his side’.209 The day before, Magda Goebbels had written to her son by her first marriage, informing him that she was going to kill herself along with her husband and their children:
The world that will come after the Leader and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and therefore I have taken my children away. They are too dear to endure what is coming next, and a merciful God will understand my intentions in delivering them from it. We have now only one aim: loyalty unto death to the Leader. That we can end our lives with him is a mercy of fate that we never dared hope for.210
At twenty to nine in the evening of 30 April 1945, Helmut Kunz, an SS doctor, gave each of the six Goebbels children a morphine injection to put them to sleep, then Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s physician in the last period of his life, put a phial of prussic acid into each child’s mouth and crushed it, causing instant death. Goebbels and his wife climbed up the steps to the Reich Chancellery garden, and bit on their capsules. An SS man shot each body twice just to make sure they were dead. The bodies were then set alight, but there was very little petrol left over from the incineration of Hitler and Eva Braun’s corpses, so the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were easily recognized by the Red Army troops when they came into the garden the following day.211 The two remaining generals, Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Krebs (Hitler’s last Chief of the Army General Staff) also killed themselves, along with the commander of Hitler’s military escort, Franz Scḧdle. The rest of the bunker’s inhabitants made their way into an underground railway tunnel in a desperate attempt to escape. Emerging into the open at the Friedrichstrasse station, they were confronted by a scene of unbelievable devastation, with shells falling everywhere, the buildings reduced to smoking rubble, and Soviet troops engaging small groups of German soldiers in the final assault. Amidst the noise and confusion, the secretaries and a few others somehow succeeded in evading capture and found their way to the west; others, including G̈nsche and Linge, were taken prisoner; many were killed by stray bullets or suspicious Soviet soldiers. Bormann and Stumpfegger managed to get as far as the Invalidenstrasse but found their way blocked by Red Army troops and took poison to avoid capture.212
The deaths in the bunker and the burned-out streets above were only the crest of a vast wave of suicides without precedent in modern history. Like Hitler, some senior Nazis killed themselves out of a warped sense of honour, fearing the indignity of being put on trial, the shame of being publicly condemned for their crimes, and the insults that would perhaps be done to their bodies. Hermann G̈ring was the most prominent among them. As American troops entered his Bavarian hideout near Berchtesgaden on 9 May 1945, he gave himself up voluntarily, evidently thinking he would be regarded as a significant figure from a defeated regime who would be used to negotiate terms of surrender. The American commander shook his hand and gave him a meal, after which reporters were allowed to quiz him on his role in the Third Reich and his views on what lay ahead (‘I see a black future for Germany and the whole world’). A furious Eisenhower embargoed the reports and had G̈ring moved to prison, put on a diet, weaned off his drug dependency and subjected to gentle but persistent interrogation. Recovering much of his former energy, the ex-Reich Marshal charmed his interrogators and impressed his captors with the way he quickly came to dominate his fellow prisoners. Unrepentent and still proud of what he had done, he was condemned to death by hanging, and when his demand that he should be allowed to die an honourable soldier’s death before a firing-squad was rejected, he obtained a poison capsule, probably through one of the guards, and killed himself on 15 October 1946.213
Almost a year before this, the former German Labour Front leader Robert Ley had hanged himself in the prison cell where he was awaiting trial. Ley’s mental deterioration, caused by a combination of an air crash during the First World War and heavy drinking thereafter, accelerated under the conditions of
confinement, and he occupied himself mainly by writing lengthy letters to his wife, Inge, who had herself committed suicide in 1942. He also wrote in the dead Inge’s imaginary responses to his letters (‘You have courageously portrayed the Leader as he really is: The greatest German of all time’) and tried to communicate with the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, whom he regarded, not without some justification, as a fellow antisemite. On receiving his indictment for war crimes, Ley shouted: ‘Stand us against the wall and shoot us! You are the victors!’ He rejected the charges laid against him and killed himself, as he wrote in his suicide note, because he could not bear the shame of being treated as a criminal when he was none.214 Heinrich Himmler also killed himself. Leaving Flensburg disguised with an eye-patch and a false passport, and accompanied by a few aides, including Otto Ohlendorf, Himmler had managed to cross the river Elbe before running into a British checkpoint, where he and his companions were arrested. On their arrival at an internment camp near L̈neburg, the commandant sent the others to their cells while detaining Himmler (a ‘small, miserable-looking and shabbily dressed’ man) for further questioning. Realizing the game was up, Himmler took off the eyepatch and put on a pair of spectacles instead. It was instantly obvious who he was, even before he whispered the name ‘Heinrich Himmler’. He was searched, and a phial of poison was taken off him, but his interrogators were still not satisfied, and ordered a medical examination. When the doctor ordered Himmler to open his mouth, he noticed a small black object between the SS leader’s teeth. As he took Himmler’s head to turn it towards the light for a better look, Himmler snapped his teeth sharply together. There was a crunching sound, and he fell to the ground. He had bitten into a glass cyanide capsule and was dead within seconds. He was forty-four years old. Other leading SS officers followed his example, including Odilo Globocnik, who also took poison, Ernst Grawitz, the SS chief medical officer and enthusiastic experimenter on concentration camp inmates, who blew himself up together with his family by detonating two hand-grenades, and Friedrich Wilhelm Kr̈ger, the SS and police chief who had made such trouble for Hans Frank in the Polish General Government.215
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