Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (25 page)

Olga Tschechowa’s most pressing concern as Berlin was about to fall was for her son-in-law Wilhelm Rust. The field hospital where he was based had been withdrawn northwards towards Lübeck on the Baltic coast when the great offensive was launched against Berlin. Stalin had given orders to his army to take Berlin by 1 May so that his victory would be the triumphant conclusion of the May Day celebrations. He didn’t trust the British or the Americans to keep their word that the Soviets could have the honour of taking Berlin, so he needed a speedy end to the war. Now the German population, which had hailed Hitler as their messianic
Führer
and had jubilantly rejoiced at the fall of France five years before, began
to curse his name as they became crushed between the lines on every side of Germany’s capital. The people wanted only an end to the carnage – probably no more than around 10 per cent of the population still supported Hitler
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– but although the war was lost and further fighting futile, Hitler had decided there was to be no surrender.

Lübeck, where Wilhelm Rust found himself, was expected to fall to the Red Army. Olga and her daughter Ada discussed whether he should desert and hide out at the Gross Glienecke house, but decided instead that he should surrender at the first opportunity to the Soviets, whereupon Olga would arrange for guarantees for him using her NKVD contacts;
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at last her role as a ‘sleeper’ agent would serve a practical purpose. To achieve all this, she had to have been able to make contact with her NKVD controllers so that the message that Wilhelm Rust was to be taken alive and treated well was passed down to the front line. The plan, however, was dependent on many factors way beyond anyone’s control.

The onslaught on the Oder began on 16 April. Olga’s neighbours, including her former lover Carl Raddatz and his wife, and the Afghan ambassador, asked if they could join Olga and her family when the Soviets arrived because she spoke Russian.
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Goebbels and Magda made a final visit to their lakeside villa at Schwanenwerder; she carried out an inventory of the house, knowing she would never return there, while her husband busied himself destroying all his correspondence and personal memorabilia. Among his belongings was a signed photograph of Lída Baarová which he had kept hidden in his desk. He showed it to a colleague who had come to say goodbye, saying, ‘Look, that’s a woman of perfect beauty.’
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On 19 April 1945, Goebbels summoned his staff in the ministry building and talked of the film
Kolberg
and its theme of a heroic resistance. Then he told them:

Even as defeat stared him in the face, Goebbels had not given up his delusion of a legendary Hitler film.

On 20 April 1945, Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in the bunker, and for one last time Goebbels praised his
Führer
on the radio in what might be described as a fanatical eulogy. ‘He was born from the womb of the German people. They raised him onto their shield in a free election: a man of truly secular greatness, of unparalleled courage; of a steadfastness that uplifts and loves hearts and spirits.’ Goebbels and other high-ranking Nazis, including Ribbentrop and Göring, who had just arrived from blowing up his house at Karinhall with dynamite, gathered for the last time in the Reich Chancellery to wish Hitler a happy birthday.

Olga Tschechowa did not even think of Hitler on his birthday, but thought only of her lover Albert Sumser, and as Hitler turned fifty-six, she walked to the Potsdam barracks and told Sumser that if he would desert, she would hide him. He later escaped from the barracks on an army motorcycle, just before his unit marched off to defend Potsdam.
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By 21 April, Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front had broken through the last defences of General Gotthard Heinrici’s Army Group Vistula during the Battle of the Seelow Heights. Facing little resistance, the Soviets advanced into the outskirts of Berlin, which was now surrounded by over a million Soviet troops. Shells began to hit the government buildings in the administrative district of the city. Hitler heard the guns for the first time when he was woken by his manservant at 9.30 a.m., and asked where the gunfire was coming from. He had not believed the Russians were so close so
soon. From that moment on his only real concern was his place in history.

Albert Speer had once advised Hitler that when the curtain fell, he should be centre stage, and Hitler took this literally, fantasising about a theatrical finale with magnificent spectacle in the manner of a Wagnerian opera; he found these thoughts comforting at a time when everything was lost. He imagined being buried in a sarcophagus, high above the new city of Linz in Austria, of which he had a model in the bunker. He would die on an altar, if not in Linz then in Berlin. His
Götterdämmerung
. He would have considered this end more fitting than a victory, for as Joachim Fest said, ‘What would he have done with a victory? The end suited him. It was a logical consequence of everything he had ever thought, wished or hoped for.’
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To his mind, he would not have been a failure.

Now he would conclude his personal drama with
Götterdämmerung
and turn a humiliating defeat into a heroic catastrophe.

On 22 April the Goebbels family moved into the bunker to die. Joseph and Magda were willing to sacrifice their lives for the ideology of National Socialism, and for their
Führer
. Magda had no compulsion about taking her children with her, though the children didn’t know that was the purpose of moving in with Uncle Adolf. They were each allowed to bring one toy and some nightclothes. For Goebbels, this act of total loyalty completely finalised his reunification with Hitler since the Lída Baarová scandal.

Field Marshal Keitel drove to the front line to personally relay an order to Wenck – ‘Liberate Berlin and get the
Führer
out.’ The plan was for Wenck to turn his army, currently facing the Americans to the west, and move east towards Berlin, where it would link up with the 9th Army and break through to the city. Keitel told Wenck that it was now up to him to save Germany. Wenck knew he would be sending his soldiers into Berlin to be slaughtered, but rather than betray his true thoughts to Keitel, he told him he would do his best. The army began to move east, not to rescue the city but to pick up thousands of wounded soldiers.

When news arrived that the 12th Army had reached Ferch, south-west of Berlin, Hitler became excited and turned hopefully towards General Albert Krebs, who said, ‘My
Führer
, Ferch is not Berlin.’
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But to Hitler this was providence – a last-minute rescue, almost exactly as it had happened to Frederick the Great in 1762. A portrait of Frederick hung in Hitler’s study, and he stood looking at it for some time as if it would help bring a miracle to pass. Although he had long given in to the thought that his death would be the war’s inevitable conclusion, he craved victory as long as there was a chance, and this news of imminent rescue shook him into a state of desperate hope – a drowning man clutching at straws. The miracle never happened. Those in the bunker had privately admitted defeat, but were forbidden from even thinking of surrender and were ordered by Hitler to keep fighting ‘in an irrational hope for victory,’ said Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, adjutant in the bunker.
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At 7 o’clock in the morning of 26 April, a fine dust made its way into the bunker through the ventilation system. It came from the barrage outside as the Soviet artillery fired directly at government buildings, but those inside the bunker didn’t know exactly where the Red Army soldiers were. Radio communications were down so random phone numbers were dialled, and whoever answered was asked if they knew where the Soviet troops were; this was the only method by which those in the bunker could find out how much time they had left. A guard came running in and announced that the Russians were firing at the entrance, and it seemed the end had come; but then it was discovered to be a false alarm, and Hitler again hoped for a miracle.
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That same day the Red Army arrived at the house where Olga Tschechowa and her niece Marina and husband lived; Albert Sumser was also there. Upon discovering that Olga spoke Russian, the first Russian soldiers sent for a large female commissar, who almost immediately grabbed her by the throat and screamed that she was a traitor. A colonel arrived, demanding to know what the trouble was; Olga explained who she was, and the colonel
immediately turned on the commissar, yelling at her that she was stupid for not knowing the name Chekhova. He sent her out and ordered two soldiers to stay in the house to take care of the family.
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Olga immediately wrote to her Aunt Olya in Moscow that they were ‘alive and in good health – miracles do happen. I’m so excited, I can hardly breathe.’
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For Olga and her family, the Red Army came as liberators, while to most Berliners they came as rapists and killers; they were the very last soldiers the women of Berlin wanted to fall into the hands of, and the last that German soldiers wanted to surrender to. (Olga Tschechowa later wrote a highly melodramatic and largely fictitious account of their ‘liberation’, claiming a wounded Russian soldier staggered into their house, aimed his gun at them, but fell dead, after which the family were marched off believing they were all going to be shot.)
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On 27 April, Berlin was completely cut off from the rest of Germany, and as the Soviet forces closed in, Hitler’s followers urged him to flee to the mountains of Bavaria to make a last stand. But he was determined to either live or die in the capital. ‘It is over, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘I will stay in Berlin and shoot myself when the time comes. Whoever wishes to leave is free to do so.’
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He arranged for all the women in the bunker to be evacuated to his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, but Eva Braun, having dedicated her life to Hitler, refused to leave. Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge saw Hitler kiss Eva, which he had never done before in front of witnesses. Junge and the other two secretaries decided they would stay as well. Hitler still commanded loyalty from a few who responded to what they perceived to be his nobility and even kindness towards them.

There can be nothing admirable to be found in Hitler. He starved his own people during the final weeks of the war, caring nothing for them because, to his mind, by losing the war the nation had shown itself to be the weaker of the nations, and he said he would not shed a tear for it.

Although he knew the war could not be won, he was obsessed with having it end differently to the way the First World War had.
There was to be no repeat of 1918, and above all else he had to perpetrate his own myth by fighting to the very end, against all the odds while betrayed on all sides, abandoned by all, standing heroically alone at the last; this was how he wanted to be remembered in posterity. If ever there was to be a Hitler film, this is how it would portray him.

Outside the bunker was chaos. German soldiers trying to surrender to the Soviets were shot by SS officers. The citizens sought any kind of food, often carving up dead horses in a frenzy, desperate to avoid starvation. The German people no longer cared about Hitler or the Third Reich or National Socialism.

On the evening of 28 April, a staff car with two Soviet officers pulled up outside Olga Tschechowa’s wooden house at Gross Glienecke; to the officers she was Olga Chekhova. She said
goodbye
to her daughter Ada, granddaughter Vera and her lover Albert, who thankfully had not been taken away as a POW, and was driven off into the night.

After midnight on 29 April, Hitler and Braun were married in a small civil ceremony in the bunker. As long as there had been a future, Hitler had not wanted to marry Eva, or anyone else – except Winifred Wagner, and then only when he was still a rising star – but the time had come to reward Eva for her unending loyalty. Eva’s cousin Gertraud Weisker was of the opinion that Hitler was ‘no longer in a position to refuse or resist [marrying her]. He had no reason to [resist] any more. He’d been married to Germany, and now there was no Germany.’
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The event was witnessed by Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Afterwards, Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife, then he took Traudl Junge to another room to dictate his last will and testament.
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Junge later said she had hoped that Hitler’s last will and testament would finally explain ‘why this war is ending the way it is, and why things went the way they did’; but all he dictated was a document full of arrogant gratification and unrestrained hatred of the Jews. He claimed he never wanted the war and blamed others
for starting it. Junge noted that the document contained ‘no regrets, no explanation as to why he had not surrendered. The testament was one huge disappointment for me.’
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After signing the documents at 4 a.m., Hitler went to bed. That afternoon, he was informed of the assassination of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. That same day, the US Army was liberating the concentration camp at Dachau and witnessing firsthand the horror of Hitler’s Final Solution. Dead bodies were heaped into piles. Those who were still alive when the US soldiers opened the gates were like walking skeletons. Thirty thousand people were murdered in Dachau. The German people were now faced with the full extent of the evil that had been unleashed with their support. More than thirty years later Wolfgang Preiss commented, ‘What happened to the Jews is a guilt we must bear. It isn’t enough to say “I didn’t know”, because, of course, you did know
something
. Who could believe a whole nation could be murdered?’
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