played out in the west.’193
During early April, the last German troops pulled out of Hungary. Bratislava fell to the Red Army as it advanced on Vienna. To the north, the German troops cut off in Konigsberg surrendered the city on 9 April. In the west, Allied troops pushed through Westphalia, taking Munster and Hamm. By 10 April, Essen and Hanover were in American hands. The vice was tightening on the Ruhr, Germany’s battered industrial heartland. A sudden shaft of optimism penetrated the dense gloom enveloping Hitler’s bunker: the news came through of the death on 12 April, at his winter retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, of one of his greatest adversaries, and linchpin in the unholy coalition of forces against him, President Roosevelt.
Goebbels rang up, elated, to congratulate Hitler.194 Two weeks earlier, the Propaganda Minister had been given a file of astrological material, including a horoscope of the Fuhrer. It prophesied an improvement in Germany’s military position in the second half of April. Goebbels’s sole interest in the material, he said, was for propaganda purposes, to give people something to cling on to.195 It served this purpose now, for the moment, for Hitler. ‘Here, read this!’ Hitler, looking revitalized and in an excited voice, instructed Speer. ‘Here! You never wanted to believe it. Here!… Here we have the great miracle that I always foretold. Who’s right now? The war is not lost. Read it! Roosevelt is dead!’196 It seemed to him like the hand of Providence yet again. Goebbels, fresh from his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, reminded Hitler of the death of the Czarina Elisabeth that had brought a sudden change of fortune for the Prussian King in the Seven Years War. The artificial coalition enemies aligned against Germany would now break up. History was repeating itself.197 Whether Hitler was as convinced as he seemed that the hand of Providence had produced the turning-point of the war is uncertain. One close to him in these days, his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below, thought him more sober at the news than Goebbels — whose cynical eye was, as always, directed at the possible propaganda advantages.198
Even for those who saw him at close quarters, it was difficult to be sure of Hitler’s true feelings about the war. Field-Marshal Kesselring, who saw Hitler for the last time on 12 April, the day of Roosevelt’s death, later recalled: ‘… He was still optimistic. How far he was play-acting it is hard to decide. Looking back, I am inclined to think that he was literally obsessed with the idea of some miraculous salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a straw.’199
Whether genuine or contrived, Hitler’s jubilation did not last long. On 13 April, the news was given to him that Vienna had been taken by the Red Army. The following day, American attacks succeeding in splitting German forces defending the Ruhr. Within three days, the fighting in the Ruhr was over. Field-Marshal Model, a long- standing favourite of Hitler, dissolved his encircled Army Group ? rather than offer formal capitulation. It made no difference. Around 325,000 German troops and thirty generals gave themselves up to the Americans on 17 April. Model committed suicide four days later in a wooded area south of Duisburg.200
On 15 April, in anticipation of a new Soviet offensive — which he thought, probably taken in by Stalin’s misinformation directed at the western Allies, would first sweep through Saxony to Prague to head off the Americans before tackling Berlin201 — Hitler had issued a ‘basic order’ for the eventuality that the Reich might be split in two. He set up a supreme commander — in effect his military representative — to take full responsibility for the defence of the Reich in whichever part he himself was not situated should communications be broken. Great-Admiral Donitz was designated for the northern zone, Field-Marshal Kesselring for the south.202 The implication was that Hitler was keeping the option open of carrying on the fight from the south, in the fastness of the Bavarian Alps.
On the same day, Hitler issued what would turn out to be his last proclamation to the soldiers on the eastern front. It played heavily on the stories of Soviet atrocities. ‘For the last time, the Jewish-Bolshevik mortal enemy has set out with its masses on the attack,’ it began. ‘He is attempting to demolish Germany and to exterminate our people. You soldiers from the East know yourselves in large measure what fate threatens above all German women, girls, and children. While old men and children are murdered, women and girls are denigrated to barrack-whores. The rest are marched off to Siberia.’ It went on to alert the troops to the slightest sign of treachery, particularly — the long-standing exaggeration of the influence of the National Committee for a Free Germany, established in Moscow by captured German officers — troops fighting against them in German uniforms receiving Russian pay. Anyone not known to them ordering a retreat was to be captured and ‘if need be immediately dispatched, irrespective of rank’. The proclamation had its climax in the slogan: ‘Berlin stays German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.’203
It was to no avail. In the early hours of
General Busse’s 9th Army was pushed back towards the south of the city. Hitler had ordered Busse to hold a line which his Army Group Commander, Colonel-General Heinrici, had thought exposed the 9th Army to encirclement. Ignoring Hitler’s orders, Heinrici nevertheless commanded withdrawal westwards. By that time, only parts of Busse’s army could evade imminent encirclement.204 Meanwhile, the German General Staff was forced to flee from its headquarters in secure bunkers at Zossen to the Wannsee — its column of retreating vehicles mistaken by German planes for part of a Soviet unit and attacked from the air as they went.205 To the north, the forces under Colonel-General Heinrici and SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Felix Steiner were the last barrier to the ever more menacing prospect of encirclement of the city as the Red Army pushed through Eberswalde to Oranienburg. By 20 April, Soviet tanks had reached the outskirts of the capital. That afternoon, Berlin was under fire.206
The rumble of artillery fire could be plainly heard from the Reich Chancellery.207 There, with the Red Army on the doorstep, and to the accompaniment of almost non-stop bombing by Allied planes, leading Nazis gathered for what they knew would be the last time — to celebrate Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and, in most cases, to say their farewells. It was the start of the last rites for the Third Reich.
17. EXTINCTION
‘It’s the only chance to restore personal reputation… If we leave the world stage in disgrace, we’ll have lived for nothing.’
‘Above all, I charge the leadership of the nation and their subjects with the meticulous observance of the race-laws and the merciless resistance to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.’
The atmosphere in the bunker on 20 April 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, was more funereal than celebratory. There was no trace of the pomp and circumstance of earlier years. The gaunt ruins of the Reich Chancellery were themselves a stark reminder, if one was needed, that there was no cause for celebration. Hitler felt this himself. His birthday with the Russians at the gates of Berlin was — everything points to this — an embarrassment to him, and for all those who were obliged to offer him their birthday greetings.
Traditionally, Hitler’s personal staff gathered to be the first to offer their congratulations on the stroke of
