Germans were not. They had been ‘belogen und betrogen’ — ‘deceived and betrayed’. Even German generals implied that they too had been victims of Nazism, for if Hitler had not interfered so disastrously in the way that they ran the war, then they would never have been defeated.
Not content with exculpating themselves, both civilians and generals then tried to persuade their interrogators of the Tightness of Nazi Germany’s view of the world. Civilians could not understand why the United States ever declared war on Germany. When told that in fact it was Germany which had declared war on the United States, they were incredulous. It contradicted their conviction that Germans were the true victims of the war.
Both officers and civilians tried to lecture their conquerors on the need for the United States and Britain to ally themselves with Germany against the common danger of ‘Bolschewismus’, which they knew only too well. The fact that it was Nazi Germany’s onslaught against the Soviet Union in 1941 which had brought Communism to all of central and south-east Europe — something which all the revolutions between 1917 and 1921 had completely failed to do — remained beyond their understanding. Rather as the minority Bolsheviks had managed to exploit ruthlessly the Russian conditioning to autocracy, so the Nazis had seized upon their own country’s fatal tendency to confuse cause and effect. As several historians have emphasized, the country which had so desired law and order in 1933 ended up with one of the most criminal and irresponsible regimes in history. The result was that its own people, above all the women and children of East Prussia, faced a similar suffering to that which Germany had visited upon the civilians of Poland and the Soviet Union.
The new line-up in the Cold War allowed many of the old guard from the Third Reich to believe that all they had been guilty of was bad timing. Yet some three decades after the defeat, the combination of a difficult historical debate and Germany’s economic miracle enabled the vast majority of Germans to face up to the nation’s past. No other country with a painful legacy has done so much to recognize the truth.
The government in Bonn was also extremely vigilant to prevent any shrine to Nazism and its leader. Yet Hitler’s corpse remained on the other side of the Iron Curtain long after the Stalinist campaign of disinformation, suggesting that he might have escaped to the West in the last moments of the battle. In 1970, the Kremlin finally decided to dispose of the body in absolute secrecy. The funeral rites of the Third Reich’s leader were indeed macabre. Hitler’s jaws, kept so carefully in the red box by Rzhevskaya during the victory celebrations in Berlin, had been retained by SMERSH, while the NKVD kept the cranium. These remnants were recently rediscovered in the former Soviet archives. The rest of the body, which had been concealed beneath a Soviet army parade-ground in Magdeburg, was exhumed at night and burned. The ashes were flushed into the town sewage system.
Hitler’s corpse was not the only one which lacked an identifiable grave. Countless victims of the battle — soldiers on both sides as well as civilians — had been buried by bombs and shells. Each year around 1,000 bodies from 1945 are still being found along the Seelow Heights, in the silent pine forests south of the city and on construction sites in the new capital of a reunited Germany. The senseless slaughter which resulted from Hitler’s outrageous vanity utterly belies Speer’s regret that history should emphasize ‘terminal events’. The incompetence, the frenzied refusal to accept reality and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime were revealed all too clearly in its passing.
1. Hitler Youth during the fighting in Lauban in Silesia, 30 March. 2. Part of the Grossdeutschland Corps being inspected in an East Prussian forest before the Soviet onslaught of 14 January. 3. Volkssturm captured in Insterburg, East Prussia, 22 January. 4. Berliners after a heavy air raid. 5. A ‘trek’ of German refugees from Silesia fleeing before the Red Army. 6. Red Army troops march into an East Prussian town, January. 7. Soviet mechanized troops enter the East Prussian town of Muhlhausen. 8. Red Army troops occupy Tilsit. 9. A Soviet self-propelled assault gun breaks into Danzig, 23 March. 10. A Hitler Youth at a Volkssturm parade taken by Goebbels. 11. Two German soldiers in the defence of the besieged Silesian capital, Breslau. 12. SS Panzergrenadiers before a counter-attack in southern Pomerania. 13. Goebbels decorates a Hitler Youth after the recapture of Lauban, 9 March. 14. German women and children trying to escape westwards by rail. 15. Famished refugees collecting beechnuts in a wood near Potsdam. 16. Eva Braun after the wedding of SS Gruppenfuhrer Hermann Fegelein to her sister Gretl, Berchtesgaden, June 1944. 17. Red Army doctors care for Auschwitz survivors. 18–19. A German engineer after committing suicide with his family before the arrival of the Red Army. 20. A German soldier hanged on the orders of General Schorner, whose motto was ‘Strength through fear’. The placard reads, ‘Whoever fights can die. Whoever betrays his fatherland must die! We had to die!’ 21. Hitler Youth tank-hunting squad with panzerfausts clipped to their bicycles. 22. Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who seldom touched a gun yet dreamed of being a military leader. 23. Marshal Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta. 24. A T-34 of Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front crosses the Oder. 25. Soviet sappers bridging the Oder to prepare the assault on Berlin.