Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

powers, and begged Bernadotte to pass his offer of capitulation to General Eisenhower in order to prevent further senseless destruction. Still by candlelight, Himmler drafted a letter to Sweden’s Foreign Minister, to be handed to him by Bernadotte, and passed on to the western Allies.¹¹³

Himmler, like Goring (if in a different way), had taken the news of Hitler’s outburst on 22 April to imply the Fiihrer’s effective abdication. Like Goring, Himmler was soon to be disabused of such presumption. His immediate instinct, however, now that his own decision had been clarified, was to build a cabinet, invent (at Schellenberg’s suggestion) the name for a new party — the ‘Party of National Concentration (Nationale Sammlungsparteiy — and ponder whether he should bow or shake hands when he met Eisenhower.¹¹⁴ It apparently never occurred to him that his offer of capitulation might be turned down. But that outcome — as good as certain to all beyond the perimeters of the detached mental world of Nazi leaders at this juncture — was precisely what had happened by the time, during the course of the afternoon of 28 April, the sensational news filtered out of the Reichsfuhrer-SS’s willingness to capitulate.¹¹⁵

For Hitler, this was the last straw. That his ‘loyal Heinrich’, whose SS had as its motto ‘my honour is loyalty’, should now stab him in the back: this was the end. It was the betrayal of all betrayals. The bunker reverberated to a final elemental explosion of fury. All his stored-up venom was now poured out on Himmler in a last paroxysm of seething rage. It was, he screamed, ‘the most shameful betrayal in human history.’¹¹⁶

When the outburst subsided, Hitler retired to his rooms with Goebbels and Bormann for a lengthy discussion. As soon as he reappeared, he sent for the imprisoned Fegelein and subjected him to a fearsome verbal assault. Fegelein’s recent disappearance now appeared to have sinister significance: joining the base treachery of the Reichsfuhrer-SS. Hitler’s paranoid suspicions were running riot. Possibly Himmler was plotting to assassinate him; or to hand him over to the enemy. And Fegelein was part of the plot. After the merest formalities in a hastily improvised ‘court martial’, Fegelein was summarily sentenced to death, immediately taken out, put in front of a firing-squad and executed.¹¹⁷ For some of the bunker inmates, there was a sense of shock that one from within the ‘inner circle’ was guilty of such ‘betrayal’, and had been so peremptorily dispatched. For Hitler, it was the closest he could come to revenge on the Reichsfuhrer-SS himself.

V

By now, Soviet troops had forced their way into Potsdamer Platz and streets in the immediate vicinity of the Reich Chancellery. They were no more than a few hundred yards away. A breakdown in communications for most of the day had left the bunker inmates desperate for any news of Wenck’s army (which remained, hemmed in, south of Potsdam).¹¹⁸ In the prevailing climate within the bunker, even the lapdog Keitel and the ever-reliable Jodl were now coming under suspicion of treachery for not bringing about the relief of Berlin.¹¹⁹

Soon after midnight, following Fegelein’s execution, Hitler commissioned Greim to deploy the Luftwaffe in making every effort to aid Wenck through attacks on Soviet positions blocking his route to Berlin. It was the faintest of faint hopes. He had a second commission for Greim — one, if anything, even more important. Greim was to leave Berlin and fly to Donitz in Plon to ensure that the traitor, Himmler, was arrested — better still, liquidated forthwith.¹²⁰ To this end, an Arado 96 training plane had been ordered to Berlin from Rechlin and, astonishingly, had defied all odds in touching down on the East-West Axis. Protesting their wish to stay with Hitler in the bunker, Greim, on crutches and far from recovered from his injured foot, and his companion Hanna Reitsch nonetheless accepted the commission, were driven in an armoured vehicle to the plane, waiting close to the Brandenburg Gate, managed to take off, and, even more remarkably, to negotiate the heavy Soviet anti-aircraft fire to fly to Rechlin, from where they later flew to Plon. The perilous journey was pointless. The few planes Greim was able to order into the defence of Berlin made not the slightest difference. And by the time he reached Donitz’s headquarters, the Grand Admiral had nothing to gain by having Himmler arrested, let alone shot. Even avoiding death in the bunker was no consolation to Greim and Reitsch. ‘It is the greatest sorrow of our lives that we were not permitted to die with the Fuhrer,’ they chorused some days later. ‘One should kneel in reverence at the altar of the Fatherland and pray.’¹²¹

After Greim and Reitsch had left, Hitler became calmer. It was time to make preparations. As long as Hitler had had a future, he had ruled out marriage. His life, he had said, was devoted to Germany. There was no room for a wife. It had also been politically inconvenient. No one outside the inner circle was to know of Eva Braun’s existence. She had been forced to accept that she was no more than an appendage, there when Hitler wanted her to be, stored well out of sight for the rest of the time. But she had chosen to come to the bunker. And she had refused Hitler’s own entreaties to leave. She had committed herself to him once and for all, when others were deserting. The marriage now cost him nothing. He did it simply to please Eva Braun, to give her what she had wanted more than anything at a moment when marrying him was the least enviable fate in the world.

Eva Braun had dropped a hint earlier in the day that this would be her wedding night.¹²² Now, following the departure of Greim and Reitsch, not long after midnight on 29 April, in the most macabre surroundings, with the bunker shaking from nearby explosions, Hitler and Eva Braun exchanged married vows in the conference-room in front of one of Goebbels’s minor officials, city councillor Walter Wagner, dressed in Nazi uniform with a Volkssturm armband, who had been brought to the bunker in an armoured car to conduct the bizarre ceremony. Goebbels and Bormann were witnesses. The rest of the staff waited outside to congratulate the newly wedded couple. Champagne, sandwiches, and reminiscences — with somewhat forced joviality — of happier days followed.¹²³

Just before the wedding ceremony, Hitler had asked his youngest secretary, Traudl Junge, to go with him to the room where his military conferences took place. It had been about 11.30p.m. when he said that he wanted her to take down some dictation. She was still wondering what this might be at such a late hour when, leaning on the table, he started to dictate his last will and testament.¹²⁴

He began with a brief Private Testament. He referred first to his marriage to Eva Braun, and her decision to come to Berlin and die at his side. He disposed of his possessions to the Party — or, should it no longer exist, to the state; he still hoped his collection of paintings would go to a gallery in Linz; and he appointed Martin Bormann as executor to see that relatives and his long-serving staff had some reward for their support.¹²⁵

He came to the more significant part. ‘This is my political testament,’ he declared. Traudl Junge paused for a moment, expectantly. But she had heard it all before.¹²⁶ His last words for posterity were a piece of pure self-justification. The rhetoric is instantly recognizable, redolent of Mein Kampf and countless speeches; the central idea of the responsibility of international Jewry for the death, suffering, and destruction in the war remained unchanged, even as he himself now looked death in the face. ‘It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939,’ he dictated, ‘it was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or who worked for Jewish interests… Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and cultural monuments the hatred will ever renew itself against those ultimately responsible whom we have to thank for everything: international Jewry and its helpers.’ The conspiracy theory continued unabated. He attributed the rejection of his proposal on the eve of the attack on Poland partly to the business interests of ‘leading circles in English polities’, partly to the ‘influence of propaganda organized by international Jewry’.

He came to a key passage — an oblique reference to the ‘Final Solution’ — relating once more to the fulfilment of the ‘prophecy’ of 1939: ‘I also left no doubt that, if the nations of Europe are again to be regarded as mere blocks of shares of these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is really guilty of this murderous struggle, will be called to account: Jewry! I further left no one in doubt that this time millions of children of Europe’s aryan peoples would not die of hunger, millions of grown men would not suffer death, and hundreds of thousands of women and children not be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real culprit having to atone for his guilt, even if by my more humane means.’¹²⁷

Despite all its setbacks, the six-year struggle, he went on, would one day go down in history as ‘the most glorious and valiant manifestation of a nation’s will to existence’. He himself could not forsake Berlin. The forces there were too small to hold out against the enemy and — the inevitable side-swipe against those deemed to have betrayed him — ‘Our own resistance is gradually devalued by deluded and characterless subjects’. He would choose death at the appropriate moment.

Again, he gave an indication of his own fear of what he saw as the still dominant power of the Jews: ‘I do