a depot by the huge administration building. They received an order to prepare to counter-attack south-eastwards towards Britz. They were reinforced with a few King Tiger tanks and some Nebelwerfer rocket launchers, but the main anti-tank weapon of this force was the ‘Stuka on foot’, a joke name for the panzerfaust.
After his visit to the Twelfth Army, Keitel returned to the Reich Chancellery at 3 p.m. He and Jodl went to see Hitler for the last time. On their return to the temporary OKW headquarters at Krampnitz, they heard that Russian forces were approaching from the north — this was the 47th Army — and the camp was abandoned in the early hours of the morning.
It continued to be a busy afternoon in the Fuhrer bunker after Weidling’s departure. Hitler, seizing on Keitel’s report on his visit to the Twelfth Army, gave himself another injection of optimistic fantasy. A hopeless addict, he felt a renewed conviction that the Red Army could be defeated. Then Albert Speer, to everyone’s surprise — and to a certain degree his own — returned to Berlin to see Hitler for the very last time. The leave-taking on Hitler’s birthday had been unsatisfactory for him when surrounded by so many others. Despite changing feelings about his Fuhrer and patron, he evidently still experienced an egotistical charge from this extraordinary friendship, which some have termed homoerotic.
Speer had driven from Hamburg, trying to avoid roads clogged with refugees, then found that his way was blocked. The Red Army had reached Nauen. He went back to a Luftwaffe airfield, where he commandeered a two- seater Focke-Wulf trainer, and then flew to Gatow airfield on the western edge of Berlin. From there, a Fieseler Storch spotter plane had brought him into the centre, landing at dusk short of the Brandenburg Gate on the east- west axis. Eva Braun, who had always adored Speer, was overjoyed to see him, partly because she had predicted that he would return. Even Bormann, who loathed Speer out of jealousy, seemed pleased to see him, and greeted him at the bottom of the stairs. Speer was probably the only person capable of persuading Hitler at this late hour to leave Berlin. For Bormann, who did not share the fascination with suicide of those around him, especially Goebbels, this was the only hope of saving his own neck.
Hitler, Speer found, was calm, like an old man resigned to death. He asked questions about Grand Admiral Donitz and Speer sensed immediately that Hitler intended to nominate him as his successor. Hitler also asked his opinion about flying to Berchtesgaden or staying in Berlin. Speer said that he thought it would be better to end it all in Berlin rather than at his country retreat, where ‘the legends would be hard to create’. Hitler seemed reassured that Speer agreed with his decision. He then discussed suicide and Eva Braun’s determination to die with him.
Speer was still in the bunker on that evening of 23 April when Bormann rushed in with a signal from Goring in Bavaria. Goring had received from General Koller a third-hand account of Hitler’s breakdown the day before and his pronouncement that he would stay in Berlin and shoot himself. Goring was still the legal successor, and he must have feared that Bormann, Goebbels or Himmler would stake a rival claim. He clearly did not know that Donitz had been chosen as the unanointed heir. Goring spent over half a day discussing the situation with advisers and with General Koller, who had flown down from Berlin that morning with the inaccurate version of what had been said in the Fuhrer bunker. He then drafted the text which was transmitted to Berlin that night. ‘My Fuhrer! — In view of your decision to remain at your post in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over, at once, the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad, as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of 29 June 1941? 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. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all. Your loyal Hermann Goring.’
It cannot have been hard for Bormann to have roused Hitler’s suspicions. A second telegram from Goring to Ribbentrop, summoning him for discussions, helped convince Hitler that this was outright treason. Bormann immediately offered to draft a reply. A stinging rebuke stripped Goring of all his responsibilities, titles and powers of command. He was, however, offered the option of retirement from all his posts on health grounds. This would save him from far graver charges. Goring had little option but to agree. Even so, on Bormann’s orders, an SS guard surrounded the Berghof and Goring effectively became a prisoner. As a further humiliation, the kitchens were locked, supposedly to prevent the disgraced Reichsmarschall from poisoning himself.
After this drama, Speer visited Magda Goebbels. He found her pale from an angina attack, lying on a bed in a tiny concrete room. Goebbels would not leave them alone together for a moment. Later, when Hitler had retired about midnight, an orderly arrived with a message from Eva Braun asking Speer to visit her. She ordered champagne and cakes for the two of them and they chatted about the past: Munich, skiing holidays together and life at the Berghof. Speer had always liked Eva Braun — ‘a simple Munich girl, a nobody’ — whom he now admired for her ‘dignity, and almost a kind of gay serenity’. The orderly returned at 3 a.m., to say that Hitler had risen again. Speer left her to make his final farewell to the man who had made him famous. It lasted only a few moments. Hitler was both brusque and distant. Speer, his former favourite, had ceased to exist in his mind.
At some time during the course of that evening, Eva Braun wrote her last letter to Gretl Fegelein, her sister. ‘Hermann is not with us,’ she wrote of Gretl’s husband. ‘He left for Nauen to gather a battalion or something of the sort.’ She did not know that Fegelein’s journey to reach Nauen was in fact an aborted secret meeting with Himmler which was part of the plot to make peace with the Western Allies. ‘He wants to fight his way out in order to continue the resistance in Bavaria, anyway for a time.’ She was clearly mistaken. Her brother-in-law had risen too far to want to be reduced to a mere partisan.
Eva Braun, practical within her unworldliness, then proceeded to concentrate on business matters. She wanted Gretl to destroy all her private correspondence. ‘On no account must Heise’s bills be found.’ Heise was her dressmaker and she did not want the public to know how extravagant she had been at the Fuhrer’s expense. Once again, she was concerned with the disposal of her jewellery. ‘My diamond watch is unfortunately being repaired,’ she wrote. Gretl was to track down SS Unterscharffuhrer Stegemann, who had apparently arranged to have it repaired by a watchmaker, almost certainly Jewish, ‘evacuated’ from Oranienburg concentration camp in one of the last death marches.
20. False Hopes
Frightened Berliners could not resist believing Goebbels when he promised that Wenck’s army was coming to save them. They were also encouraged to believe in the rumour that the Americans were joining in the battle against the Russians. Many heard aircraft fly over the city during the night of 23 April without dropping bombs. These planes, they told each other, must have been American, and perhaps they were dropping paratroops. But the two US Airborne divisions had never emplaned.
Just about the only troops coming to Berlin at this time were neither American nor German, but French. At 4 a.m. on Tuesday 24 April, Brigadefuhrer Krukenberg was woken in the SS training camp near Neustrelitz, where remnants of the ‘Charlemagne’ Division had been based since the Pomeranian disaster. The telephone call was from Army Group Vistula headquarters. Evidently, General Weidling had informed Heinrici that he insisted on removing Brigadefuhrer Ziegler from command of the
Henri Fenet, the surviving battalion commander, was woken immediately and he roused his men. Krukenberg was dressed in the long grey leather greatcoat of a Waffen SS general when he addressed the assembled officers and men. He asked for volunteers to accompany him to Berlin. Apparently, the vast majority wanted to go. Krukenberg and Fenet chose ninety, because that was all that the vehicles available could carry. Many were officers, including the divisional chaplain, Monsignor Count Mayol de Lupe. After the war, Krukenberg claimed that none of them were National Socialists. This may well have been true in the strict sense of the term, but French fascism was probably closer to Nazism than to the Italian or Spanish varieties. In any case, these volunteers ready to die in the ruins of the Third Reich were all fanatical anti-Bolsheviks, whether they believed in New Europe or ‘
The volunteers selected filled their pockets and haversacks with ammunition and took the battalion’s remaining panzerfausts. At 8.30 a.m., as they formed up by the road to climb into their vehicles, they suddenly saw
