Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

by SS guards.⁶⁴ Hitler’s power was fading fast; but it was not yet finally at an end.

Late that night, before leaving the bunker, Speer sat in Eva Braun’s room, drinking a bottle of Moet et Chandon and eating cakes and sweets. Eva seemed calm and relaxed. She told Speer that Hitler had wanted to send her back to Munich, but she had refused; she had come to Berlin to end it. At three in the morning, Hitler appeared. Speer felt emotional at saying farewell. He had flown back to the bunker precisely for this purpose. It was, for him, a poignant moment. Hitler proffered a weak handshake. ‘You’re going then. Good. Good-bye.’ That was all.⁶⁵

Another visitor besides Speer had arrived in the bunker unannounced the previous evening: General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the 56th Panzer Corps, attached to the 9th Army fighting to the south-east of Berlin. Communications had been lost with him since the evening of 20 April, and Hitler had ordered him arrested for desertion.⁶⁶ Astonishingly, he had made his way back to Berlin, and into the Fuhrer Bunker to protest his innocence. Hitler was impressed. Next morning, he made Weidling responsible for Berlin’s defence, replacing Colonel Ernst Kaether, who had held the post for all of two days.

It was a daunting assignment. Weidling had at his disposal units rapidly patched together, comprising 44,600 soldiers, along with 42,500 Volkssturm men (whose fighting capabilities were severely limited on account both of their age and their miserable equipment), around 2,700 boys from the Hitler Youth, and a few hundred other ‘combatants’ from the Labour Service and Organisation Todt, assigned to defend the bridges that Wenck’s relieving army would have to cross. A further 5,500 sailors had been promised by Donitz, but were not yet available. Facing them, and closing in on the city by the hour, were some 2? million combat troops in crack divisions of the Red Army. Weidling knew from the start that his task was an impossible one.⁶⁷

The news from the ever-narrowing fronts around Berlin was meanwhile becoming ever grimmer. By midday on 24 April, Soviet troops from Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies had met up in the southern suburbs of the city. The encirclement of Busse’s 9th Army was complete. Hopes of it fighting its way through to the west to join Wenck’s 12th Army — still only in the preparatory stage of its march on the capital — were now illusory. Reports were reaching the Reich Chancellery of bitter street fighting in eastern and southern districts of the capital. Several districts to the north were already in Soviet hands, and the Nauen road, the last main road to the west, was blocked by T34 tanks. Tempelhof aerodrome, close to the city centre, had been bombarded by Soviet artillery since lunchtime. By the evening, Gatow airfield on the banks of the Havel to the west of Berlin had also come under heavy shelling. The East-West Axis, where Albert Speer had landed the previous day, was in practice now Berlin’s last remaining thin artery of non-telephonic communication with the outside world.

By dawn next morning, areas close to the city centre had started to come under persistent and intense artillery fire. Around midday, the spearhead of Konev’s army, skirting round Berlin to the south, met up with forward units from Zhukov’s army, heading round the city to the north, at Ketzin in the west. Berlin was as good as encircled. About the same time, Soviet and American troops were smoking cigarettes together at Torgau, on the Elbe, in central Germany. The Reich was now cut in two.⁶⁸

Symbolically — there was absolutely no military purpose to the operation (other than striking at the possible focus of continued Nazi guerrilla warfare after formal cessation of hostilities from what transpired to be a mythical ‘National Redoubt’) — Hitler’s alpine palace, the Berghof, above Berchtes-gaden, had been reduced to smouldering ruins by RAF bombers that morning.⁶⁹

In his ever more isolated and beleaguered underground lair, with communications rapidly worsening, and with operational charts increasingly out of date and almost immediately overtaken by events, Hitler was still sure that he knew best. ‘The situation in Berlin looks worse than it is,’ he stated, with apparent confidence, on 25 April, having not ventured out of doors for five days. He ordered the city combed for all possible last reserves of manpower to throw into the fray and help prepare the ground from within for the arrival of Wenck.⁷⁰ By this time, Wenck had made some advance towards the lakes south of Potsdam. But parts of his army were still engaged in combat with the Americans to the west; on the Elbe north of Wittenberg. And only remnants were by now left of the 9th Army, which was to have joined forces with him.⁷¹ With what he had at his disposal, Wenck had only the remotest chance of reaching Berlin.

But Wenck was now the only hope. Hitler was still looking for one final victory, one last chance to turn the tables on his enemies. Even now, he clung to the belief that the Alliance against him would fall apart if he could deliver a stinging blow to the Red Army. ‘I think the moment has come when out of self-preservation-drive the others will confront in any case this hugely swollen proletarian Bolshevik colossus and moloch… If I can be successful here and hold the capital, perhaps the hope will grow among the English and Americans that they could maybe still face this whole danger together with a Nazi Germany. And the only man for this is me,’ he asserted.⁷²

His comments to Goebbels that day were in part still apparently directed at convincing himself that his decision not to go to southern Germany and to stay in Berlin was the right one. ‘I’d regard it as a thousand times more cowardly to commit suicide on the Obersalzberg than to stand and fall here,’ he stated. ‘They shouldn’t say: “You, as the Fuhrer…” I’m only the Fuhrer as long as I can lead. And I can’t lead through sitting somewhere on a mountain, but have to have authority over armies that obey. Let me win a victory here, however difficult and tough, then I’ve a right again to do away with the sluggish elements who are constantly causing an obstruction. Then I’ll work with the generals who’ve proved themselves.’⁷³

More than anything, Hitler’s words were aimed at his place in history. Even now, Hitler — egged on, naturally, by Goebbels — remained the propagandist, looking to image. Whether leading to glorious victory, or sacrificial self-destruction, the last stand in the bunker was necessary for prestige purposes. It never occurred to him to question the continued slaughter of soldiers and civilians to that end. ‘Only here can I attain a success,’ he told Goebbels, ‘… and even if it’s only a moral one, it’s at least the possibility of saving face and winning time.’⁷⁴ ‘Only through a heroic attitude can we survive this hardest of times,’ he went on. If he won the ‘decisive battle’ he would be ‘rehabilitated’. It would prove by example that he had been right in dismissing generals for not holding their ground.

And if he were to lose, then he would have perished ‘decently’, not like some ‘inglorious refugee sitting in Berchtesgaden and issuing useless orders from there’. He saw, he said, ‘a possibility of repairing history’ through gaining a success. ‘It’s the only chance to restore personal reputation… If we leave the world stage in disgrace, we’ll have lived for nothing. Whether you continue your life a bit longer or not is completely immaterial. Rather end the struggle in honour than continue in shame and dishonour a few months or years longer.’ Goebbels, with Frederick the Great’s exploits at the famous Battle of Leuthen — the Prussian King’s epic victory in 1757 over an Austrian army far superior in numbers — tripping once more from his tongue, summed up the ‘heroic’ alternatives: ‘If all goes well, then it’s in any case good. If things don’t go well and the Fuhrer finds in Berlin an honourable death and Europe were to become bolshevized, then in five years at the latest the Fuhrer would be a legendary personality and National Socialism would have attained mythical status (ein Mythos) …’⁷⁵

III

Not everyone in the maze of tunnels below the Reich Chancellery was looking to share the ‘heroic’ end that Hitler and Goebbels were contemplating. ‘I don’t want to die with that lot down there in the bunker,’ thirty-one- year-old Major Bernd von Freytag-Loringhoven, Krebs’s tall adjutant, uttered. ‘When it comes to the end, I want my head above ground and free.’⁷⁶ Even the SS guards from Hitler’s bodyguard were anxiously asking about Wenck’s progress, consoling themselves with drink when off duty, and looking for possible exit-routes from what looked more and more like a certain underground grave. In the streets above, despite the threat — often carried out — of summary execution by ‘flying courts-martial’ for ‘defeatism’, let alone desertion, many elderly Volkssturm men, aware of the utter futility of carrying on such a hopeless unequal fight and looking to avoid a pointless ‘hero’s’ death, sought any opportunity at the approach of Soviet troops to melt away and try to rejoin families taking what refuge they could in cellars and bunkers.⁷⁷

Amid the burning ruins of the great city, living conditions were deteriorating rapidly. Food was running out. The water-supply system had broken down. The old, infirm, wounded, women and children, injured soldiers,