A graphic illustration of feeling towards the man who had so recently been the focus of such unprecedented adulation arose in a remembrance ceremony on 11 March 1945 for the dead of the war around the memorial in Markt Schellenberg, a small alpine town lying within a few minutes’ drive of Hitler’s residence on the Berghof: ‘When the leader of the Wehrmacht unit at the end of his speech for the remembrance called for a “Sieg Heil” for the Fuhrer, it was returned neither by the Wehrmacht present, nor by the Volkssturm, nor by the spectators of the civilian population who had turned up. This silence of the masses,’ commented an observer from the local police, ‘had a depressing effect, and probably reflects better than anything the attitudes of the population.’61
In most people’s eyes, Hitler, the leader so many of them had come close to adoring, was now hindering an end to their suffering. The perception was correct. He was also prolonging even now the end of the far greater suffering of Nazism’s victims.
The torment of these victims — in prime place among them, as ever, the Jews — continued unabated. In contrast to the general ‘mood of catastrophe’, the few Jews remaining within Germany could at least begin cautiously to hope that the end of the regime would not be long delayed once the Soviet offensive had begun in mid-January. But the hopes were still hedged with anxiety that the mortally wounded regime could turn upon them at any moment, or that even at this late hour they would be deported.62 When most of the small number of Jews still existing in Dresden and deemed fit for work were rounded up in mid-February for ‘evacuation’, they knew they had to interpret what lay before them as a ‘march into death’.63 One of those left behind remarked to Victor Klemperer, the former specialist in French literature at Dresden’s technical university: ‘We’ve only got a stay of execution of about eight days. Then they’ll fetch us from our beds at six in the morning. It’ll be no different for us than for the others.’64 It was, as the remarks indicate, still a life ruled by the most acute fear. But the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews and others in the clutches of the SS in the camps in the east was infinitely more dreadful. Their lives continued to hang by a thread on the arbitrary whim of their persecutors as the rapid breakthrough of Soviet troops brought a final and terrible phase of their agony.
The death camps in Poland had been closed one after the other as the Red Army advanced, with hurried attempts made to conceal the evidence of genocide. But over 700,000 prisoners of differing nations, creeds, ethnic groups (prominent among them, of course, Jews) and political persuasions still remained incarcerated in the huge, sprawling web of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe.65 Over a third of them would die in the horrendous forced marches those in the eastern camps now had to endure as they were driven — starving, frozen, exhausted, eating snow to still the raging thirst — in terrible treks, five abreast, at gunpoint westwards through icy blizzards, and at punishing pace, by their merciless captors whose hatred showed no signs of diminishing even at this late stage.66 There were mixed reactions among those who encountered the trekking columns on the streets, often adding to the crowds of refugees fleeing from the oncoming Red Army. Some — the merest ripple of humanitarianism in the unrelenting sea of cruelty — took pity on the prisoners, offering them titbits of food (which the guards prevented them from accepting). Others reacted with hostility to the human wrecks trudging by.67 Seeing themselves as Hitler’s victims did not even at this late hour necessarily offer an antidote to vindictiveness towards those persecuted by the regime. Frequently building upon pre-existing phobias and prejudice, the years of Nazi outpourings of hatred towards ‘enemies of the state’, towards Jews above all, had done their work.
In what was by far the biggest of the camps, the immense complex of terror at Auschwitz, not far from Kattowitz in Upper Silesia, some of the huge crematoria had been dismantled and blown up — one of them in a rising by Jewish prisoners — during autumn 1944.68 But the horror continued without respite. There were still over 65,000 prisoners of numerous nationalities — the majority of them Jewish — in Auschwitz and its numerous subsidiary camps in mid-January 1945, as the Red Army approached. As desperate attempts were were made to cover up traces of unimaginable inhumanity, the arrangements to evacuate the camps were improvised with great haste. A last note smuggled out by two prisoners just before the clearance of the camps started gave a foretaste of what was to come: ‘Now we are experiencing evacuation. Chaos. Panic among the SS — drunks… The intentions change from hour to hour since they don’t know themselves what orders they will get… This sort of evacuation means the annihilation of at least half of the prisoners.’69
For five days, beginning on 17 January, long columns of emaciated, starving, and frozen prisoners left the camp complex and were driven westwards by SS guards in forced marches of up to 250 kilometres. Some 56,000 left on foot, another 2,200 were at the end of the evacuation sent by rail.70 Hundreds too weak or sick to begin the marches were shot in the camps. The mortalities on the terrible journeys were predictably enormous. Those dropping by the wayside, unable to sustain the punishing pace, or attempting to escape were shot on the spot. Even stopping for the briefest of moments for the most basic human necessity was to risk incurring the wrath of the guards. ‘It was as if they were shooting at stray dogs… They didn’t care and shot in every direction, without any consideration. We saw the blood on the white snow and carried on walking.’71 In one of the marches alone, around 800 prisoners were murdered by their SS guards.72 After days of marching on starvation rations in freezing conditions, the survivors reached the more and more disastrously overcrowded concentration camp at Gro?-Rosen in Lower Silesia.73 Most were dispatched within a short time in open rail way-wagons in journeys lasting up to two weeks in the midst of winter to more than ten other camps, including Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, and — in their tens of thousands — to Bergen-Belsen, near Celle in north-west Germany, now grossly overcrowded and rapidly descending into the depths of the hell-hole found by stunned and horrified British soldiers in April 1945.74
On 26 January, an SS unit blew up the last of the crematoria in Birkenau. The next day, the SS guards retreated in heavy fighting as Soviet troops liberated the 7,000 exhausted, skeleton-like prisoners they found in the Auschwitz camp-complex. They also found 368,820 men’s suits, 836,244 women’s coats and dresses, 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes, 13,964 carpets, large quantities of children’s clothes, toothbrushes, false teeth, pots and pans, and a vast amount of human hair.75
III
The man at the centre of the rapidly imploding system that had unleashed such unpredecented horror and misery boarded his special train at Ziegenberg, his western headquarters, on the evening of 15 January 1945 and, with his regular entourage of orderlies, secretaries, and adjutants, left for Berlin. As one wit pointed out, Berlin was more practical as headquarters; it would soon be possible to travel from there both to the eastern and western front by suburban railway. Hitler was still able to raise a laugh.76 But his hopes of military success in the west were definitively at an end. Trying to stave off the Soviet offensive in the east was now the urgent priority.77 His departure had been prompted by Guderian’s opposition to his order on 15 January to transfer the powerful Panzer Corps ‘Gro?deutschland’ from East Prussia to the vicinity of Kielce in Poland, where the Red Army was threatening to break through and expose the way forward through the Warthegau. Not only, Guderian pointed out, was the manoeuvre impossible to execute in time to block the Soviet advance; it would at the same time gravely weaken the defences of East Prussia just as the Soviet attack from the Narev was placing that province in the utmost peril. As it was, the ‘Gro?deutschland’ troops sat in railway sidings while the Fuhrer and his Chief of the General Staff argued on the telephone about their deployment. Hitler would not rescind his order. But the dispute helped to persuade him that he needed to direct affairs at closer quarters. It was time to move back to Berlin.78
His train, its blinds pulled down, pulled into the capital that night. Triumphant arrivals in Berlin were no more than distant memories. As his car made its way amid the rubble through unlit streets to the Reich Chancellery — now cold and dismal, its pictures, carpets, and tapestries removed to safety in view of the increasing air-raids on Berlin — few inhabitants of the city even knew he had returned; probably still fewer cared.79 Hitler in any case had no wish to see them. The path to his portals was blocked for all but the few who had the requisite papers and passes to satisfy the intense scrutiny of SS guards armed with machine-guns and posted at a series of security checks. Even the Chief of the General Staff had to surrender his weapons and have his briefcase meticulously examined.80
Hitler was completely immersed during the next days in the events on the eastern front. His insistence on the troops standing fast and refusing to concede a metre of territory had proved successful in stemming what could
