The Third Reich at War (119 page)

Perhaps it was pity for him, Speer thought, that kept his entourage from raising any objections ‘when, in the long since hopeless situation, he continued to commit non-existent divisions or to order units supplied by planes that could no longer fly for lack of fuel’.
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They listened in silence when he told them that Stalin and the west would surely come to blows before they had won the war, or claimed that, in such a situation, the west would find it impossible to do without him. Speer himself was still happy enough to spend time with him poring over the plans they had drawn up for the rebuilding of Linz after the war. Yet Hitler’s charisma was now ebbing away even amongst his immediate following. Speer noted later that where once everyone had stood when he entered a room, ‘now conversations continued, people remained seated, servants took their orders from guests, associates who had drunk too much went to sleep in their chairs, and others talked loudly and uninhibitedly’.
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Hitler now spent increasing amounts of time in the bunker complex beneath the Reich Chancellery. Initially he still lunched in the undamaged part of the Chancellery, but his apartment had been destroyed along with much else in an air raid on 3 February 1945, and he worked and slept underground, coming up only to exercise his dog Blondi in the Chancellery garden, surrounded by heaps of rubble. He would rise at midday or shortly afterwards, shave and dress, then have lunch before conducting a conference on the military situation, attended not only by senior commanders but also by Himmler, Bormann, Kaltenbrunner and sometimes Ribbentrop. After dinner, at around eight, there would be another military briefing, after which he would retire to his study and hold forth in his accustomed manner to his entourage until he went to bed, often at five or six in the morning.
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On 24 February 1945, on the anniversary of the promulgation of the Nazi Party programme in 1920, Hitler held a final meeting for the Nazi Party Regional Leaders in a still-standing hall in the Reich Chancellery. Arriving from all over Germany, the ‘Old Fighters’, many of whom had not seen him for some months, were shocked by the way he had aged. He shuffled rather than walked into the room, his eyes were bloodshot, his left hand and arm were visibly trembling, and he had to give up an attempt to raise a glass of water to his mouth to refresh himself. One participant noticed that he occasionally dribbled as he spoke. Attempting to rally them for one last effort, he promised yet again the arrival of wonder-weapons that would change the course of the war. They had to get the people of their districts to fight on until the new weapons were deployed, he said. Otherwise, if the German people were defeated, it would be clear that they did not deserve to win. The faith he expressed in the wonder-weapons was patently not sincere. But his belief in the Darwinian doom about to overtake the German people certainly was.
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II

By now, indeed, Hitler was looking mainly to what he imagined would be his place in history. Issuing a proclamation to the armed forces on 11 March 1945 (‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’), he announced that he had decided to provide the world with an example, going down, he implied, fighting, rather than surrendering cravenly as had been the case in 1918. Goebbels too decided that, if defeat was to come, then it would be a heroic defeat. He would devote his final weeks to creating inspiring images of Nazi self-sacrifice for future generations. Goebbels tried to persuade Hitler to broadcast to the nation again, but the Leader replied gloomily that he had nothing new to offer, and he was aware of reports from the Security Service of the SS that his proclamation of 24 February 1945 had not met with a positive reception. Goebbels was deeply frustrated. But Hitler knew that propaganda had finally failed in the face of the hard facts of invasion and defeat. At another level, as he moved increasingly depleted and in some cases non-existent armies around on his map in the bunker conference room, Hitler was now living a life almost entirely removed from reality. Such illusions were shared in full by Martin Bormann, who exercised his power over the Nazi Party by issuing a stream of directives, decrees and exhortations on a whole variety of issues. Goebbels complained that he was making a paper chancellery out of the Party Chancellery. The Regional Leaders, he thought, would not have the time to read the decrees, let alone the means to implement them. In government ministries, civil servants continued working despite their rapidly shrinking sphere of influence, like cartoon characters running off the edge of a cliff and keeping going despite the yawning abyss beneath.
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At the Berlin headquarters of the Hitler Youth at this time, wrote Melita Maschmann:

Every one of us worked with hectic energy. Countless projects were started up, knocked out by the effects of the war, abandoned, taken up again, cancelled, altered, rejected once again and so on. During the last months of this, the feeling crept over us that all this feverish activity on the part of the Reich Youth Leadership was hardly producing the slightest response in the country. Our office was like a termites’ nest, gradually pervaded by a sense of the coming collapse without a single person daring to breathe a syllable about it . . . Our brains gave birth to plans and still more plans, lest we should have a moment to stop and think and then to have to recognize that all this bustle was already beginning to resemble the convulsions of a dance of death.
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In the last weeks of the war, she gave up anything more than the occasional appearance at the office, and busied herself with helping refugees fleeing from the Red Army. Coming across a group of injured anti-aircraft auxiliaries, all schoolboys, many weeping after a bomb had destroyed their emplacement and killed many of their comrades, she heard one say when asked if he was in pain: ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter, Germany must triumph.’
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‘From all those weeks which immediately preceded the collapse of Germany,’ she recalled, ‘I cannot remember a single conversation in which the probability of our defeat was mentioned. ’
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But she moved in circles of true Nazi believers, of course. And even here, the atmosphere began to take on the bizarre characteristics of the last days of a crumbling empire. While Berlin burned, Maschmann’s boss, Reich Youth Leader Arthur Axmann, a man who boasted regularly of his working-class origins, held social evenings at the Youth Leadership’s inn at Gatow, to the west of Berlin, where, according to the puritanical Maschmann, by her account a reluctant participant, ‘the eating and drinking there was often sheer gluttony’, and the party-goers included film starlets, ‘charlatans and self-important egoists’.
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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!’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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