Barbarossa (79 page)

Then, on 16th April, the German front took the full shock of a
double assault by Zhukov and Koniev, deploying over three thousand
tanks on a forty-mile front between Schwedt and Frankfurt and between
Forst and Görlitz. The Soviet armour was fewer in numbers than
in some of the monstrous battles of 1943, and of the Vistula
fighting the previous January, but it was of the highest quality.
Stalins, T 34/85's, and the deadly SU self-propelled 122-mm. guns,
which could outrange every German tank except the
Jagdtiger
,
overwhelmingly outgunned as well as outnumbered the Panzers, which
were scattered defensively along the length of the front in an array
of unit numbers that looked impressive on the OKW wall map but in
reality represented no more than the feeble husks of once famous and
formidable divisions. Within two days the Russian tanks were through
to traverse the open countryside of Pomerania, leaving the infantry
to fight a rearguard action whose end was out of sight. "
Ein
Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!
"—all three were now
going under.

There is no doubt that Hitler's presence in Berlin was an
inspiration to the German Army, even if it was a source of anxiety
and annoyance to his court and advisers. Originally the Führer
had intended to leave for Obersalzberg on his birthday, 20th April,
and ten days earlier many of his personal staff had been sent ahead
to prepare the house for his arrival. But in the previous forty-eight
hours Russian tanks had taken Eberswalde to the north and Kottbus
to the south of Berlin. They were roaming almost at will behind the
German lines, and with Eisenhower's forces already on the Elbe at
five points, it was plain that Germany was on the point of being
divided into first two, then several parts.

Many of the birthday visitors to the Führer's bunker were,
therefore, understandably apprehensive. They were anxious for Hitler
to leave immediately for the mountains, where his personal safety
(and, by the transfer of the seat of government, their own) would be
assured. They must have been put out, these suppliants, to find that
the Führer was "still confident" and that no decison
had yet been made about the evacuation.

[The final authority for the birthday party and the events which
followed in the bunker remains Professor Trevor-Roper (
The Last
Days of Hitler
, 119 et seq., 1962 ed.). He gives as attending on
20th April, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Speer,
Keitel, Jodl, Doenitz, Krebs, Burgdorf, and Axmann (Schirach's successor in the
Hitlerjugend
), besides the usual secretarial and
SS staff, doctors, etc.]

Hitler was affable, but imprecise. The furthest he would go in
recognising the situation was to appoint two commanders, Doenitz for
the north, Kesselring for the south, who would hold the supreme
authority, under him, for military operations in their areas.

[In fact, Kesselring was already conducting surrender negotiations
through SS Gruppenführer Karl Wolf, another of the
dramatis
Personae
from the Langbehn affair (see p. 383).]

The Russians would "meet their bloodiest de-feat before
Berlin," he told his audience, and he had personally planned a
counterattack which would throw them back to and then across the
Oder. In the evening the party dispersed with feelings which though
they may have been mixed cannot have been agreeable. Trucks loaded
with documents, staff cars with personal luggage, a succession of
convoys, picked their way through the rubble with dimmed lights and
started on the journey south, down the last remaining land route
which remained open.

Some had business to attend to. Himmler had first to get through a
meeting with Norbert Masur of the World Jewish Congress, then to a
soothing night at Dr. Gebhardt's, followed by a breakfast appointment
(arranged by the desperate Schellenberg) with Count Bernadotte.
Goering, who was going to travel to Obersalzberg by air, had some
last-minute supervision of his private baggage, which included a
number of startling
objets d'art
. Bormann, Goebbels, and
Ribbentrop remained in Berlin. Only one man can have left the bunker
with his mind at rest. This was the remarkable and dispassionate
Albert Speer, who was devoting himself in the most single-minded
fashion to the sabotage of all Hitler's scorch-earth policies. He had
taken a day off to visit the forward commanders and enlist their
support in preventing demolitions, and also succeeded in persuading
Goebbels to preserve the Berlin bridges intact, and to site the
garrison with the minimum of risk of street fighting in the centre of
the capital.

With the party over, Hitler's future, or rather his decision
regarding his future, hung on the fate of the "Steiner attack,"
ordered for 22nd April. And here the Führer fell victim to his
own delusions. For Steiner's forces amounted to very little. Five SS
Panzergrenadier
divisions on the OKW situation map were down,
in most cases to little more than regimental strength—and of
their number only two were German, the others were hodgepodge units
of foreign SS, some not even Nordic in their characteristics, who
were only too eager to divest themselves of the once dreaded black
uniforms, which now, like the mark of Cain, raised every man's hand
against them and made the Russians shoot on sight.

Of his few reliable Panzer units Steiner had already committed all
those that still had fuel in trying to contain the southern rim of
the Soviet breakthrough and channel the torrent of Red armour away
from the outskirts of Berlin. His own headquarters had lost touch
with most of its subordinate formations, he had no artillery, no
contact with the Luftwaffe, and was now receiving alternate (and conflicting) orders from Heinrici and Doenitz in addition to those which
emanated from the bunker.

It is no surprise, then, to learn that the "Steiner attack"
never materialised. Instead the day passed with a number of
disjointed local reports from units down to battalion level showing a
gradual, and irreversible, erosion of the front around Berlin.
Russian tanks were firing on Oranienburg, whence the concentration
camp inspectorate had been hurriedly evacuated and, to the south of
the city, had reached the Elbe at Torgau.

With the realisation that the day had passed and his orders—the
most crucial orders, it seemed, that he would ever issue—had
been disobeyed, Hitler fell into a paroxysm of rage. By all accounts,
the scene which was staged at the evening conference at the end of
that day must have made all of Hitler's previous outbursts seem
negligible by comparison. For three hours his audience trembled,
and when, at last, they were dismissed it was forever.

Keitel, Jodl, Berger, Hitler's two adjutants, even Dr. Morell ("I
don't need drugs to see me through," Hitler told him), all these
left the bunker in the next twenty-four hours, never to return. To
the world Goebbels broadcast that the "Führer was in
Berlin, that he would never leave Berlin, and that he would defend
Berlin to the very last." That evening the members of the staff
who remained in the bunker began to burn the papers there.

Worse was to come. For the Reichsmarschall, hearing of the
hysterical scene of 22nd April and fastening on some purported phrase
about "negotiation" which Hitler had uttered to Keitel
and Jodl, bestirred himself to send a telegram from Obersalzberg to
the bunker. In spite of the disclaimer, added apparently as an
afterthought, that "Words fail me to express myself," the
message was painfully clear. Goering was entering into his
inheritance, "the total leadership of the Reich, with full
freedom of action at home and abroad. ... If no reply is received by
ten 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."

[The decree of 29th June, 1941, which named Goering as Hitler's
deputy.]

Speer was to say of Hitler after the war, "He could hate
fiercely in some fields, while forgiving almost anything to those he
loved." And the bonds of ancient
Kameradschaft
were too
strong for him to turn completely on his old crony of twenty years.
Bormann handled the affair, ordering the SS at Obersalzberg to
arrest Goering immediately, but the Führer insisted that Goering
be excused the extreme penalty in view of his earlier services in
the Party, and this dispensation was duly communicated to the Reichsmarschall in the reply which Bormann telegraphed to him that night.

Now indeed the Reichsleiter's wishes were being fulfilled with the
same chilling exactitude and loaded horror of
The Monkey's Paw
.
And within days the second part, the elimination of
Treuer
Heinrich
, was to follow. For the National Leader had at last
taken upon himself the task of forming a government, a "Party of
National Union" (the title had been suggested by Schellenberg),
composed largely of senior SS officials who could administrate while
Himmler, Schellenberg, and Schwerin von Krosigk conducted the
diplomacy.

On 28th April news of Himmler's activities reached the bunker. For
Hitler there was nothing left to say. He had already expended the
whole of his self-pity to Hanna Reitsch on 26th April.

Nothing now remains! Nothing is spared me! No loyalty is kept,
no honour observed; there is no bitterness, no betrayal that has not
been heaped upon me; and now this! It is the end. No injury has been
left undone!

Berlin itself had been doomed from the moment of Doenitz's and
Kesselring's appointments. For this had been a tacit admission that
Germany would henceforth fight, if she fought at all, in two halves,
and as these areas contracted the city poised between them would
fall into the pit. Heinrici and Army Group Vistula were pulling their
right flank back fast, to form the south side of a "box"
resting on the Baltic and the Elbe. Schörner, with the strongest
forces left in the Reich, was sitting tight in the Carpathians.
Wenck, the man whose appointment Hitler had so energetically resisted
in January, and who was now commanding an army against the Americans,
was the recipient of a personal message sent by hand of the ever
obedient Field Marshal Keitel, appealing to him to turn his back on
Eisenhower and march east, to the relief of Berlin. He moved
extremely slowly. Aside from half-armed irregulars, the Berlin
"garrison" amounted to fewer than 25,000 men: Mummert's
57th Corps, with two regular but depleted infantry divisions; SS
Nordland
; a battalion of the French SS (
Charlemagne
);
and Mohnke's SS Guard Battalion.

The thud of Russian shellfire was now audible inside the tunnels
of the bunker itself, and Soviet tanks had, by 27th April, broken
into the Potsdamer Platz. From the Chancellery garden you could hear,
through the clatter of small-arms fire, the sound of their tracks.
Below ground the man who had made the world tremble himself shook
with suppressed hysteria and the pain of emergence from habitual
sedative addiction. Only a few units could still be reached with his
commands, among them the fanatic Hitler Youth, who continued to
defend the Spree bridges against the expected arrival of Wenck's
"relief army," and the Frenchmen, three of whom, such is
the irony of history, were the last people to be decorated by Hitler
with the Knight's Cross. The Führer, who still had nearly six
million men under arms, could control scarcely one division. No
ascent in history had been so meteoric, no power so absolute, no
decline so complete.

But at least one of Hitler's qualities remained—his personal courage. He had said that he would remain in Berlin and die
there, and so he did. Hitler may have despised the Prussian
aristocracy, but few exits from the stage of history have been so
scrupulous in their honouring of the seignorial code.

Hitler wrote his will, he addressed a few words to everyone of
his retainers, he poisoned his faithful dog. Then at a formal
ceremony he made an honest woman of his mistress, retired to an
antechamber, and shot himself.

His epitaph he had already written, twenty years before:

At long intervals in human history it may occasionally happen
that the practical politician and the political philosopher are one
. . . Such a man . . . reaches out towards ends that are
comprehensible only to a few. Therefore his life is torn between
hatred and love. The protest of the present generation, which does
not understand him, wrestles with the recognition of posterity, for
whom he also works.

For a few hours the spell lingered on. Bormann, rightly
apprehensive that the news of the Führer's suicide would finally
sterilise the bunker as a source of authority, continued to send
telegrams—to Doenitz, to Kesselring, to Schörner—
but omitted mention of his death. Hitler's body and that of Eva Braun
were taken up the stairs of the emergency exit to the garden, where
Biondi had sniffed and padded on her daily exercise jaunt with a
sergeant of the SS, and there laid in a bomb crater. Several
jerricans of gasoline were emptied on them, and a match struck.

As the flames leaped to the sky, the tension which held the
bunker, and the Reich itself, taut with obedience relaxed. There were
smoking and laughter in the hallowed conference chamber. And as the
news spread outward, the vast geodetic structure of the Germany
military machine collapsed. In a frantic
sauve qui peut
men
threw away uniforms, shaved moustaches, buried gold and documents,
burned everything that might incriminate them, from flags to home
movies.

Alone the German Army preserved to the end a kind of discipline
and even exchanged shots with the SS on occasion.

[When Himmler's bodyguard, the Mohnke battalion, arrived in Ber-lin, it had shown a stronger taste for rounding up deserters than
taking on the Russian armour. Mummert, the General commanding the
57th Corps, took the view that "A division that has the greatest
number of bearers of the Knight's Cross with oak leaves does not have
to be persecuted by these young louts."]