The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (221 page)

That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of the Fuehrer’s most trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering, the latter in a motor caravan whose trucks were filled with booty from his fabulous estate,
Karinhall
. Each of these Old Guard Nazis left convinced that his beloved Leader would soon be dead and that he would succeed him.

They never saw him again. Nor did Ribbentrop, who also scurried for safer parts late that night.

But Hitler had not yet given up. On the day after his birthday he ordered an all-out counterattack on the Russians in the southern suburbs of Berlin by S.S. General Felix Steiner. Every available soldier in the Berlin area was to be thrown into the attack, including the Luftwaffe ground troops.

“Any commander who holds back his forces,” Hitler shouted to General Koller, who had remained behind to represent the Air Force, “will forfeit his life in five hours. You yourself will guarantee with your head that the last man is thrown in.”
¹¹

All through the day and far into the next Hitler waited impatiently for the news of Steiner’s counterattack. It was a further example of his loss of contact with reality. There was no Steiner attack. It was never attempted. It existed only in the feverish mind of the desperate dictator. When he was finally forced to recognize this the storm broke.

April 22 brought the last turning point in Hitler’s road to ruin. From
early morning until 3
P.M
. he had been on the telephone, as he had been the day before, trying to find out from the various command posts how the Steiner counterattack was going. No one knew. General Roller’s planes could not locate it, nor could the ground commanders, though it was supposed to be rolling only two or three miles south of the capital. Not even Steiner, though he existed, could be found, let alone his army.

The blowup came at the daily military conference in the bunker at 3
P.M.
Hitler angrily demanded news of Steiner. Neither Keitel nor Jodl nor anyone else had any. But the generals had other news. The withdrawal of troops from the north of Berlin to support Steiner had so weakened the front there that the Russians had broken through and their tanks were now within the city limits.

This was too much for the Supreme Warlord. All the surviving witnesses testify that he completely lost control of himself. He flew into the greatest rage of his life. This was the end, he shrieked. Everyone had deserted him. There was nothing but treason, lies, corruption and cowardice. All was over. Very well, he would stay on in Berlin. He would personally take over the defense of the capital of the Third Reich. The others could leave, if they wished. In this place he would meet his end.

The others protested. There was still hope, they said, if the Fuehrer retired to the south, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner’s army group in Czechoslovakia and considerable forces of
Kesselring
were still intact. Doenitz, who had left for the northwest to take over command of the troops there, and Himmler, who, as we shall see, was up to his own game, telephoned to urge the Leader not to remain in Berlin. Even Ribbentrop called up to say he was about to spring a “diplomatic coup” which would save everything. But Hitler had no more faith in them, not even in his “second
Bismarck
,” as he once, in a moment of folly, had called his Foreign Minister. He had made his decision, he said to all. And to show them that it was irrevocable, he called for a secretary and in their presence dictated an announcement that was to be read immediately over the radio. The Fuehrer, it said, would stay in Berlin and defend it to the end.

Hitler then sent for Goebbels and invited him, his wife and their six young children to move into the
Fuehrerbunker
from their badly bombed house in the Wilhelmstrasse garden. He knew that at least this fanatical and faithful follower, and his family, would stick by him to the end. Next Hitler turned to his papers, sorted out those he wished to be destroyed, and turned them over to one of his adjutants, Julius Schaub, who took them up to the garden and burned them.

Finally that evening he called in Keitel and Jodl and ordered them to proceed south to take over direct command of the remaining armed forces. Both generals, who had been at Hitler’s side throughout the war, have left vivid accounts of their final parting with the Supreme Warlord.
¹²

When Keitel protested that he would not leave without the Fuehrer, Hitler answered, “You will follow my orders.” Keitel, who had never
disobeyed an order from the Leader in his life, not even those commanding him to commit the vilest war crimes, said nothing further, but Jodl, less a lackey, did. To this soldier, who, despite his fanatical devotion to the Fuehrer whom he had served so well, still retained some sense of military tradition, the Supreme Warlord was deserting the command of his troops and shirking his responsibility for them at a moment of disaster.

“You can’t direct anything from here,” Jodl said. “If you don’t have your Leadership Staff with you how can you lead anything?”

“Well, then,” Hitler retorted, “Goering can take over the leadership down there.”

When one of them pointed out that no soldier would fight for the Reich Marshal, Hitler cut in. “What do you mean, fight? There’s precious little more fighting to be done!” Even for the mad conqueror the scales at last were falling from the eyes. Or, at least, the gods were giving him moments of lucidity in these last nightmarish days of his life.

There were several repercussions to Hitler’s outbursts on April 22 and to his final decision to remain in Berlin. When Himmler, who was at
Hohenlychen
, northwest of Berlin, received a firsthand account on the telephone from Hermann Fegelein, his S.S. liaison officer at headquarters, he exclaimed to his entourage, “Everyone is mad in Berlin! What am I to do?”

“You go straight to Berlin,” replied one of Himmler’s principal aides, Obergruppenfuehrer
Gottlob Berger
, the chief of the S.S. head office. Berger was one of those simple Germans who sincerely believed in National Socialism. He had no idea that his revered chief, Himmler, under the prodding of S.S. General Walter Schellenberg, was already in touch with
Count Folke Bernadotte
of Sweden about surrendering the German armies in the West. “I am going to Berlin,” Berger said to Himmler, “and it is your duty to go too.”

Berger, but not Himmler, went to Berlin that night and his visit is of interest because of his firsthand description of Hitler on the night of his great decision. Russian shells were already bursting near the Chancellery when Berger arrived. To his shock he found the Fuehrer “a broken man—finished.” When he ventured to express his appreciation of Hitler’s resolve to remain in Berlin—“one couldn’t desert the people after they had held out so loyally and long,” he says he declared—the very words touched off the Leader again.

Berger was also the head of Himmler’s Prisoner-of-War Administration, and after the Fuehrer had calmed down they discussed the fate of a group of prominent British, French and American prisoners as well as of such
Germans as Halder and Schacht and the former Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, who were being moved southeast to keep them out of the hands of the Americans advancing through Germany. Berger was flying to Bavaria that night to take charge of them. The two men also talked of reports that there had been outbreaks of separatism in Austria and Bavaria. The idea that revolt could break out in his native Austria and in his adopted Bavaria once more convulsed Hitler.

Whether this was an order to shoot all the separatists or all the distinguished prisoners, or both, was not clear to Berger, but apparently to this simple man it meant the whole lot.

General
Koller
had stayed away from the Fuehrer’s military conference on April 22. He had the Luftwaffe to look after, and “besides,” he says in his diary, “I should never have been able to tolerate being insulted all day long.”

General Eckard
Christian
, his liaison officer at the bunker, had rung him up at 6:15
P.M
. and in a breathless voice had said, “Historical events, the most decisive of the war, are taking place here!” A couple of hours later Christian arrived at Air Force headquarters at
Wildpark-Werder
on the outskirts of Berlin to report to Koller in person. “The Fuehrer has broken down!” Christian, an ardent Nazi who had married one of Hitler’s secretaries, gasped, but beyond saying that the Leader had decided to meet his end in Berlin and was burning his papers, he was so incoherent that the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff set out, despite a heavy British bombing that had just begun, to find General Jodl and ascertain just what had happened that day in the bunker.

At
Krampnitz
, between Berlin and Potsdam, where the now Fuehrerless OKW had set up temporary headquarters, he found him, and Jodl told his Air Force friend the whole sad story. He also revealed something which no one else had yet mentioned to Koller and which was to lead to a certain denouement during the next few frantic days.

“When it comes to negotiating [for peace],” Hitler had told Keitel and Jodl, “Goering can do better than I. Goering is much better at those things. He can deal much better with the other side.” Jodl now repeated this to Koller.
¹⁴

The Air Force General felt that it was his duty to immediately fly to Goering. It would be difficult and also dangerous, in view of the enemy’s monitoring, to try to explain this new development in a radio message. If Goering, who had been officially named by Hitler years before as his
successor-designate, were to take over peace negotiations, as the Fuehrer had suggested, there was no time to lose. Jodl agreed. At 3:30 on the morning of April 23
Koller
took off in a fighter plane and sped toward Munich.

At noon he arrived on the Obersalzberg and delivered his news to the Reich Marshal. Goering, who had been looking forward, to put it mildly, to the day when he might succeed Hitler, was more circumspect than might have been expected. He did not want to lay himself open, he said, to the machinations of his “deadly enemy,”
Bormann
, a precaution which, as it turned out, was well founded. He perspired under his dilemma. “If I act now,” he told his advisers, “I may be stamped as a traitor; if I don’t act, I’ll be accused of having failed to do something in the hour of disaster.”

Goering sent for Hans Lammers, the State Secretary of the Reich Chancellery, who was in Berchtesgaden, for legal advice and also fetched from his safe a copy of the Fuehrer’s decree of June 29, 1941. The decree was quite clear. It stipulated that if Hitler died Goering was to be his successor and that if the Fuehrer were incapacitated Goering was to act as his deputy. All agreed that by remaining in Berlin to die, cut off in his last hours from both the military commands and the government offices, Hitler was incapacitated from governing and that it was Goering’s clear duty under the decree to take over.

Nevertheless the Reich Marshal drafted his telegram to Hitler with great care. He wanted to make sure of the delegation of authority.

That very evening several hundred miles away
Heinrich Himmler
was meeting with Count
Bernadotte
in the Swedish consulate at
Luebeck
on the Baltic.
Der treue Heinrich
—the loyal Heinrich, as Hitler had often fondly referred to him—was not asking for the powers of succession; he was already assuming them.

“The Fuehrer’s great life,” he told the Swedish count, “is drawing to a close.” In a day or two, he said, Hitler would be dead. Whereupon Himmler urged Bernadotte to communicate to General Eisenhower immediately Germany’s willingness to surrender to the West. In the East, Himmler added, the war would be continued until the Western Powers themselves had taken over the front against the Russians—such was the
naïveté, or stupidity, or both, of this S.S. chieftain who now claimed for himself the dictatorship of the Third Reich. When Bernadotte asked that Himmler put in writing his offer to surrender, a letter was hastily drafted by candlelight—for an R.A.F. bombing that night had shut off the electricity in Luebeck and driven the conferees to the cellar. Himmler signed it.
¹⁵

   Both Goering and Himmler had acted prematurely, as they quickly found out. Although Hitler was cut off from all but a scanty radio communication with his armies and his ministries—for the Russians had nearly completed their encirclement of the capital by the evening of the twenty-third—he was now to demonstrate that he could rule Germany by the power of his personality and prestige alone and quell “treason,” even by the most eminent of his followers, by a mere word over his creaky wireless transmitter suspended from a balloon above the bunker.

Albert Speer and a remarkable lady witness whose dramatic appearance in the last act of the drama in Berlin will shortly be noted have described Hitler’s reaction to Goering’s telegram. Speer had flown into the besieged capital on the night of April 23, landing in a cub plane on the eastern end of the East–West Axis—the broad avenue which led through the Tiergarten—at the Brandenburg Gate, a block from the Chancellery. Having learned that Hitler had decided to remain in Berlin to the end, which could not be far off, Speer had come to say his farewell to the Leader and to confess to him that his “conflict between personal loyalty and public duty,” as he puts it, had forced him to sabotage the Fuehrer’s scorched-earth policy. He fully expected to be arrested for “treason” and probably shot, and no doubt he would have been had the dictator known of Speer’s effort two months before to kill him and all the others who had escaped Stauffenberg’s bomb.