Meanwhile, on 18 April the encircled Army Group B in the Ruhr surrendered with more than 300,000 men to the Americans. Their commanding officer Field-Marshal Model committed suicide. At the same time, British troops were pushing deeper into the northwest German plain, on 15 April liberating the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and on 19 April reaching the River Elbe at Lauenburg. American troops swept through central and southern Germany, taking Magdeburg on 18 April, Leipzig on 19 April, and, after several days of fighting, Nuremberg on 20 April.44
From his headquarters in Berlin, Hitler followed the varying degrees of commitment with which the Gauleiters approached the final battle for their region. On 12 April he sent a telegram to Gauleiter Hanke, who was holding on in an encircled Breslau, to tell him he had been awarded the highest order of merit; he clearly intended to put Hanke under moral pressure to continue the hopeless defence of the city.45 On 16 April he sent an encouraging telegram to Gauleiter Karl Holz in Nuremberg, who since the fall of Streicher had been in charge of the Franconian Gau and was now determined to defend the city to the last: ‘That fanatical struggle that reminds us of our own struggle for power is now beginning.’ Hitler conferred on Holz the Golden Cross of the German Order; four days later Holz died in the rubble of his Gau capital, presumably by suicide.46
20 April was Hitler’s 56th birthday. This year there were no festivities. At midnight his closest colleagues gathered in the anteroom to his office, where he received their congratulations apathetically. He then withdrew again to his private quarters, leaving them in the afternoon for a short sortie into the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where further well-wishers, among them representatives of the Hitler Youth, the army, and the SS, had assembled. In the late afternoon those leaders of the regime who were still in Berlin also gathered in the bunker to congratulate Hitler ahead of the military briefing. Among them were Goebbels, Bormann, Göring, Dönitz, Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, Ley, Ribbentrop, and Himmler. After the briefing people were generally keen to get away. Göring, Ley, Rosenberg, Himmler, and the other ministers quickly left Berlin.47 Hitler charged Dönitz with taking over command of the ‘Northern area’.48 On the evening of 20 April he gave instructions for some of his personal staff to be flown out to Munich/Berchtesgaden and this was done during the next few days.49
On 21 April the first Red Army shells landed in the centre of Berlin. Hitler was incredulous to hear that the shelling came not from long-range railway guns but Soviet field artillery, which had already reached the suburb of Marzahn.50 Without any more precise intelligence about the situation, he now gave orders for the city to be relieved by Army Group Steiner from the north and the 9th and 12th Armies from the south. Yet the idea that these decimated and war-weary remnants of armies, propped up by makeshift improvised units, could hold up the vastly superior Soviet troops quickly proved to be an illusion. When Hitler realized this at the military briefing on 22 April he became immensely agitated, heaped reproaches on his generals, and announced he would remain in Berlin and lead the defence of the city himself. Those around him had the impression that he was having a breakdown and now regarded the situation as hopeless.51 This impression was reinforced by the fact that Hitler now had his adjutant Schaub destroy those personal papers of his that were in the bunker and the Reich Chancellery and then sent him to Berchtesgaden to do the same.52
On this same 22 April Goebbels and his wife and their six children moved into Hitler’s bunker, occupying five rooms.53 Goebbels had announced publicly on several occasions that in the event of defeat he planned to kill himself and his entire family.54 When at the beginning of March he told Hitler of Magda’s intention to remain in Berlin with the children, even if the city should be encircled, it was evident what the consequences of this decision would be. As Goebbels noted in his diary, Hitler had approved it ‘after some hesitation’.55 As in the case of every important decision in the life of the Goebbels family, Hitler’s consent had to be sought for this final one. The dictator’s substitute family was to go down with him.
On 23 April Goebbels announced that Hitler was in the capital and had assumed command of ‘all the forces assembled to defend the city’ in order to ‘crush the deadly enemy, Bolshevism, wherever it appears’.56 Hitler was recovering from his depression of the previous day and took part in briefings in the usual manner. In these he seemed not at all ready to give up, once again placing his hopes in the 9th and 12th Armies positioned to the south of the city. He regarded the fact that the enemy had almost encircled Berlin and was already in the outer suburbs as ‘the best opportunity for us . . . to lure him into a trap. . . . In four days the matter must be decided.’57
The same day Speer arrived by plane in Berlin in order to take leave of Hitler. As he described the meeting in his memoirs, he had the sense of talking to ‘someone whose life was over’. According to Speer’s account, Hitler had been determined to remain in Berlin (which Speer supported) and to end his life there. In this confidential tête-à-tête there was no mention of any final chance of averting defeat.58
While Speer was in the bunker (he left the city the same evening) a radio telegram arrived in the afternoon from Göring, who had now reached Berchtesgaden. Göring asked if Hitler agreed that he, Göring, as Hitler’s deputy should take over the overall leadership of the Reich ‘with complete freedom of action internally and externally’. Göring added that if he should receive no answer by 22.00 he would assume that Hitler had ‘lost his freedom of action’ and that he, Göring, could therefore act independently as his deputy. In addition, it became known in the bunker that Göring had sent a telegram to Ribbentrop, summoning the foreign minister on the assumption that the plan for Göring to deputize for Hitler would go ahead. Bormann presented this matter to Hitler as Göring being highhanded and delivering an ultimatum, to which Hitler responded by flying into an uncontrollable rage: In his cabled reply he declared his decree of 29 June 1941 concerning his successor to be null and void, dismissed Göring as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, accused him of treason, and ordered his arrest in Berchtesgaden.59
During the following days, Hitler attempted from his bunker to gain a clear picture of the progress of the operations of the two armies he had earmarked for the relief of Berlin. He was equally persistent in demanding that in the north of the city General Rudolf Holste and not General Steiner, whom he had in the meantime written off, should lead a corps to break through the Soviet encirclement. His bizarre orders had no effect, however; the troops were in no position to make any impact on the Red Army; instead, the commanders of the 9th and 12th Armies had been trying since 25 April to break out towards the west across the Elbe, so that they could become prisoners of war of the Americans.60
On the evening of 26 April Colonel General Ritter von Greim, up until then commander-in-chief of Air Fleet 6, arrived in the Chancellery bunker after an eventful flight along with his pilot Hannah Reitsch and was appointed Göring’s successor. Reitsch and Greim only just managed to get their plane out of the embattled city again. Nevertheless, Hitler succeeded during those few short hours in conjuring up an optimistic image of the situation, such that after the meeting the new Luftwaffe commander-in-chief declared to his chief of staff that he felt he had been ‘rejuvenated’. This is another episode that indicates that Hitler was capable, at least for limited periods, of overcoming his lethargic and depressed mental state.61
In his last recorded briefings Hitler again tried to create the illusion that he could defy the Red Army amid the ruins of Berlin. The hopeful message he was putting out was that a military success would create the opportunity to break up the enemy coalition. ‘If I can strike a successful blow here and hold the capital, perhaps the British and Americans may begin to hope that there might still be a chance to stand up to this whole threat alongside Nazi Germany. And I am the only man for this task.’62 If this could not be done – and this alternative was looming ever larger in his mind – he would, he said, at least have achieved an important victory
for his own prestige, avoided ‘disgrace and dishonour’,63 and set a marker for the future. This was the idea he now clung to.
On 28 April 1945 even Hitler could not pretend to himself that he would get out of the bunker alive. On this day Soviet forces penetrated the innermost defensive ring surrounding the government district, in places coming within almost 2,000 metres of the bunker, while the inner city was under heavy artillery fire. It was particularly depressing for Hitler to hear via international radio stations that the head of the SS, Himmler, up to that point his most loyal colleague, had set out the terms for a possible capitulation to the Western Allies. Hitler was furious and determined to eject Himmler from all his posts in the Party and the state. It was evidently during this fit of rage that he had Hermann Fegelein, the chief Waffen SS liaison officer in the Führer headquarters and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, shot for defeatism after he quitted the headquarters without leave.64
In view of his hopeless situation Hitler’s behaviour in the forty-eight hours remaining to him was relatively circumspect and remarkably unheroic. First, he married his partner of many years, Eva Braun, during the night of 28/29 April.65 He then dictated his political testament, openly acknowledging his responsibility for the murder of the Jews, urging the nation ‘to adhere strictly to the laws of race’, and dividing his succession between Admiral Dönitz (Reich President) and Goebbels (Reich Chancellor). He settled his personal property in a private testament. He then poisoned his Alsatian, for whom there could be no life in a world without him, spoke by radio during the night of 29/30 April with the remaining members of the OKW to convince himself one last time that his situation was completely hopeless, took comprehensive leave of his colleagues and staff, and finally gave instructions that his body should be burned. On the afternoon of 30 April 1945, while Eva Hitler died next to him of poisoning, he shot himself on the sofa in his office.
Conclusion
The so-called Third Reich capitulated on 8 and 9 May 1945, only a few days after Hitler’s suicide. The final outcome of his years in power could hardly have been more devastating: war and genocide had claimed the lives of more than 50 million people, vast swathes of Europe lay in ruins, and the German population’s support for this criminal regime now made them appear morally corrupt in the eyes of the world.
It is beyond question that no single individual was responsible for this catastrophic outcome of twelve years of dictatorship. Millions of committed Nazis had worked tirelessly for this regime; a huge army of willing helpers and opportunistic fellow travellers had given it unquestioning support; the elites had been only too glad to put their specialist knowledge and expertise at its disposal; officers and soldiers had carried out their military tasks obediently and with great commitment; the great majority of the German population had followed their ‘Führer’ devotedly and without protest. And yet these facts on their own are not adequate to explain what happened. There had to be a political figure who knew how to exploit these preconditions and forces, how to integrate them and channel them effectively into a political process designed to realize his own aims and ambitions. At the heart of the Third Reich there was a determined dictator who shaped this process at every level, focused all these energies on himself as an individual, and managed to acquire such extensive powers that he enjoyed unprecedented freedom of action.
The first decades of Hitler’s life gave no hint of what was to follow. This book presents him as someone who up to the end of the First World War was simply insignificant, a nobody. Although this part of his life was later presented, first of all by himself, as the period when his ‘genius’ matured (Nazi propaganda seized on this glorification of Hitler’s past and saturated the country with it in numerous forms), nothing in his first thirty years pointed to the formation of a character destined to pursue an exceptional political career. These first three decades are nevertheless revealing within any historical analysis, though for another reason. For in Hitler’s early history we can discern (and to some extent explain) a series of personality traits that would be significant in the light of his later actions: his retarded emotional development and inability to form close ties with others; his lack of empathy and of a private self, which he compensated for by constructing a ‘public image’ fed by grandiose plans and complex fantasies; his intense anxiety about losing control, which expressed itself among other things in his refusal to be tied into structures of any kind; his exaggerated fear of humiliation, which made defeat intolerable and was the reason why he responded to real or supposed threats with excessive aggression to the point of annihilation.
Any sober appraisal of Hitler at the end of the First World War reveals someone who had failed repeatedly and would certainly not have assumed a public role, had it not been for the specific circumstances prevailing in Bavaria in the immediate post-war period. The start of his political career in Munich in 1919 was not therefore marked by his ‘resolve’ to save the fatherland, a claim he repeated like a mantra. His entry into politics was rather organized by external forces with a particular agenda. Hitler was trained by the army [Reichswehr] unit based in Munich as a propagandist and assigned as such to the German Workers’ Party [DAP]. Behind this lay concrete political motives. For far from being no more than the insignificant debating society to which Hitler and Nazi propaganda reduced it in retrospect, in the autumn of 1919 the DAP occupied a key position within a network of army officers, völkisch journalists and newspapers, and extreme right-wing organizations, who were all united in the aim of building up a platform for anti-socialist agitation, above all within the working class, in post-revolutionary Munich. These activities were sponsored and encouraged by conservative forces in the state, in particular after Gustav von Kahr, the new Prime Minister, proclaimed in March 1920 that Bavaria was a ‘cell of order’. During the following months, as plentiful evidence shows, influential figures on the extreme Right promoted and directed Hitler, who quickly rose to be the leading propagandist, principal speaker, and policy maker for the party. Even the conservative establishment lent him and the DAP their support.
What is remarkable is that Hitler was not content with the role he had been given. Instead, in the summer of 1921 he took over the leadership of the party with dictatorial powers, used exceptional skill to secure for himself further resources, both material and non-material, from the conservative establishment, and through cooperation with the Reichswehr in particular gained access to the latter’s weapons arsenals. At the same time, throughout the various phases of Bavarian post-war politics he constantly alternated between conditional cooperation with those close to the government and radical opposition, always keeping ‘his’ party’s independence in view and exploiting the extremely tense relations between Bavaria and the national [Reich] government. In this way, within a few years he established the NSDAP in Munich and Bavaria as a serious political force. What is more, from the end of 1922 he was growing increasingly in the eyes of his followers as well as in his own into the role of leader [‘Führer’] of the whole of the political extreme Right, in particular because the army, the state apparatus, political organizations, the right-wing press, and, increasingly, sections of the affluent commercial middle class gave him continued support. In the autumn of 1923, however, as the entire political Right in Bavaria mobilized for a coup, he was in danger of being instrumentalized by the government and the forces around it. This situation was incompatible with his self-perception as ‘Führer’. Hitler feared that his adherents would consider him a failure if he did not follow up his voluble predictions of a coup d’état with real actions, and this was in essence the reason why in November 1923 he staged his own putsch. Viewed as Hitler’s attempt to free himself through violent action from his dependence on conservative forces and to assume political leadership himself, the putsch was, however, doomed to fail in the context of the power relations in post-war Bavaria. The forces that had set Hitler up now turned against him when he exceeded his role as an agitator or ‘drummer’.
How
ever unequivocal his defeat, Hitler was not prepared to accept it as such. Rather, he recast his woeful failure of November 1923 as a grandiose failure and invented for himself the role of political martyr who had fallen victim to the intrigues of the conservative establishment. For him this was the only way possible to come to terms with his spectacular miscalculation of the actual political situation. And his followers were only too ready to accept this interpretation. For its part, the Bavarian judicial system (in order to avoid revealing the extent of the Bavarian state’s collusion with right-wing extremists in the autumn of 1923) benevolently saw to it that, during the trial and the ‘honourable’ detention that followed it, he could present himself in a heroic light. From his prison cell Hitler complacently observed during this period of political abstinence how the völkisch-national socialist movement fell apart in his absence. He was aware that without a central political figure as leader it was structurally unable to act, and after his ‘heroic stand’ in the November putsch he was irreplaceable in that role. This failure nevertheless remained a festering wound in Hitler’s self-perception. It was the reason why, once in power, he repeatedly tried to shore up his reinterpretation of the events of 8–9 November 1923 by means of bombastic rituals of commemoration.
Even when the Weimar Republic was stabilizing, the expectation of a ‘Fuhrer’ was built into the structure of the extreme right-wing movement and after his release Hitler was to succeed in fulfilling that expectation. He marginalized competing elements in the Party or brought them under his control, and, within a few years, built up the NSDAP into the most powerful force in the extreme right-wing camp, even though it had little electoral success. It was not until the Weimar Republic was in political and economic crisis from 1929 onwards that this splinter party turned into a mass movement. The fact that the NSDAP under Hitler’s leadership had become not only a national and tightly organized party but a ‘movement,’ in which paramilitary formations (SA and SS) were combined with special organizations for young people, women, and individual professions and occupations, now paid real dividends. Thus the Party could offer something to a wide range of groups among the discontented masses of the electorate. The wave of support for the NSDAP was prompted not only by the fact that the crisis had led to the impoverishment of large sections of society. Rather, the decline (or the increasing political impotence) of the liberal and conservative milieus – a process that had begun in the mid-1920s – brought the Party large numbers of politically ‘homeless’ voters who were sceptical about Weimar democracy and therefore willingly accepted the authoritarian ideas of order propounded by the NSDAP, as well as its nationalism, militarism, and anti-Semitism. The various Presidential governments between 1930 and 1933 were an additional factor. On the one hand, they were unable to develop an effective strategy to tackle the crisis and thus gave broad swathes of the population the impression of being left in the lurch. On the other hand, they adopted an attitude to the NSDAP that was by turns distanced and supportive, because they were toying with the idea of using the Party to attract a mass base to support their policies.
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