Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Outside Berlin, the winding-up orders on the Third Reich were meanwhile in the process of being served. However, they were carried out by the new Donitz regime — based in Flensburg in the north of Schleswig- Holstein — with great reluctance, and only under the evident compulsion of the hopeless military situation. At the end of the First World War, disastrous though the defeat had been, it had proved possible to save the existence of the Reich and the German army. The basis for the hopes of national rebirth had been laid. Donitz held to the illusion that this much might be achieved a second time.¹⁶ Even at this late hour, he was hoping through the offer of partial capitulation to the west to avoid total and unconditional surrender on all fronts, at the same time sustaining, with western backing, the German Reich to form, alongside the western powers, a common front against Bolshevism. For this, he needed to gain time — also to allow withdrawal to the west of as many as possible of the Wehrmacht troops still engaged in bitter fighting against the Red Army. He was ready to sanction, therefore, the German capitulation in northern Italy on 2 May, which had already been agreed between Himmler’s former right-hand man Karl Wolff and OSS chief Allen Dulles on the day before Hitler’s suicide. He also reluctantly conceded on 4 May a further partial capitulation involving German troops in north-west Germany, Holland, and Denmark. In the south, where the Americans reached Munich on the day of Hitler’s death, Innsbruck on 3 May, and Linz — Hitler’s home town — four days later, Kesselring negotiated the surrender of the German divisions in the northern Alps on the 5th and in Austria on 7 May.¹⁷ Donitz did not, however, include in the partial capitulation the German troops further east, still fighting in Yugoslavia.¹⁸

The Grand Admiral’s hopes of rescuing the remnants of Hitler’s Reich were visible in his choice of cabinet. Though he rejected Himmler’s overtures for inclusion, and turned his back, too, on Ribbentrop, he retained several members of Hitler’s cabinet, among them Albert Speer, while foreign affairs and the direction of the cabinet were placed in the hands of the long-standing finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who, it was presumed, would appear unsullied by the worst crimes of Nazism. He made no changes in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s mainstays, Keitel and Jodl, were left in post. The Nazi Party was neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still adorned the walls of government offices in Flensburg. One of the few concessions that Donitz made was the reintroduction of the military salute in the Wehrmacht to replace the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting. But military courts continued to hand out death-sentences even as the last rites on the Third Reich were being pronounced.¹⁹

The tactics employed by Donitz were at least successful in enabling an estimated 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid Soviet captivity by surrendering to the western Allies — though at a high cost of continuing bloodshed and suffering before the fighting could be finally terminated. While the eastern front had since 1941 been the main theatre of war, under a third of the 10 million or so German prisoners-of-war fell into Soviet hands.²⁰ But Donitz’s intentions of a one-sided, partial capitulation to win the West at this late stage to the defence against Bolshevism cut little ice with Allied leaders. When his envoy (and successor as Commander- in-Chief of the Navy) Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg journeyed with a delegation to Rheims, Eisenhower’s headquarters, hoping to seal an agreement with the western Allies amounting to a capitulation to the west, but not to the Soviet Union, Eisenhower was having none of it. He insisted on a full and unconditional surrender on all fronts. Accordingly, on 6 May, Donitz sent Jodl to Rheims on seemingly the same mission — to persuade the West to accept German surrender, but to avoid total capitulation — though this time with powers to agree to a complete capitulation (following final authorization from Flensburg) and instructions to gain maximum time — at least four days — in order to bring back the largest German fighting unit still in combat, Army Group Centre, across American lines. Eisenhower remained unmoved. He insisted on the capitulation being signed that very day, 6 May, with effect from midnight on 9 May, and threatened a renewal of air-raids if the agreement were not forthcoming. Jodl was given half an hour to think it over. After difficulties in communication with Flensburg, Donitz, faced with no alternative, eventually conceded his authorization in the early hours. At 2.41a.m. on 7 May, in the presence of representatives of all four of the Allied powers, the capitulation was signed, stipulating a complete ending of all German military engagements by the end of the following day.²¹

The document to which the signatures were appended was, however, a shortened version of the original text of surrender, agreed by all the Allies. It was, in fact, regarded by the OKW leadership as ‘not final’, and to be replaced by ‘a general capitulation treaty’ still to be signed. Meanwhile, the order had gone out to bring back as many troops and as speedily as possible to the west for surrender to the British and Americans.²² At Stalin’s insistence, Allied representatives assembled once more, on 9 May, just after midnight, this time at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin, headquarters of Marshal Zhukov, to sign the full document of capitulation. Since the terms agreed at Rheims had already come into effect a few minutes earlier, the document was dated 8 May.²³ Keitel, Friedeburg, and Colonel-General Hans-Jurgen Stumpff (representing the Commander- in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Ritter von Greim) signed from the German side. Zhukov, the British Air-Marshal Arthur W. Tedder (representing Eisenhower), the French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, and the US General Carl Spaatz signed for the Allies.²⁴

The last Wehrmacht report, on 9 May 1945, retained a tone of pride, speaking of ‘the unique achievement of front and homeland’ which would ‘in a later, just verdict of history find its final appreciation’. These words, hollow for millions, followed the declaration: ‘On command of the Grand Admiral the Wehrmacht has stopped the fight which had become hopeless. The struggle lasting almost six years is accordingly at an end.’²⁵

Hitler’s war was over. The reckoning was about to begin.

III

Many of those bearing heaviest responsibility, after Hitler, for the terrible suffering of the previous years and the deep pall of sorrow left behind escaped full retribution. Suicide, Hitler had always said, was easy. Some of his leading henchmen now followed his example. Heinrich Himmler, the embodiment of police terror, captured by the British under false identity and wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht sergeant, crunched a phial of potassium cyanide in captivity at Luneburg on 23 May as soon as his true identity had been established.²⁶ Robert Ley, the stridently antisemitic head of the German Labour Front, captured by American troops in the mountains of the Tyrol, strangled himself in the lavatory of his prison cell at Nuremberg on 24 October while awaiting trial.²⁷ Arrested by US forces near Berchtesgaden on 9 May 1945, Hermann Goring, for so long Hitler’s designated successor until his abrupt dismissal in the last days of the Third Reich, also committed suicide — cheating the hangman awaiting his presence next day on the late evening of 15 October 1946 after being convicted on all charges, including crimes against humanity, at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.²⁸

Others among the regime’s leaders, unwilling or unable to end their own lives, suffered the fate imposed upon them by the Tribunal and were hanged at Nuremberg. Convicted for crimes against humanity — in all but one case war crimes, and in some instances conspiracy to commit or actual commission of crimes against peace — the warmongering former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel; head of the Operations Department of the Wehrmacht and Hitler’s chief military adviser Alfred Jodl; Nazi ideological guru and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg; Reich Minister of the Interior (until his removal from office in 1943) Wilhelm Frick; Hitler’s key man in Vienna at the time of the Anschlu? and later Reich Commissar in the Netherlands Arthur Sey?-Inquart; Labour Plenipotentiary who presided over the slave-labour programme Fritz Sauckel; Heydrich’s fearsome successor as head of the RSHA Ernst Kaltenbrunner; Governor-General of Poland and leading Nazi lawyer Hans Frank; and the former Gauleiter of Franconia, leading Jew-baiter Julius Streicher were executed on 16 October 1946.²⁹ Few mourned them.

Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister whose hands were barely less dirty than Sauckel’s in the exploitation of forced labour, was one of those fortunate to escape the hangman’s noose. Like the last head of state Admiral Donitz, Economics Minister Walther Funk, Foreign Minister (until his replacement by Ribbentrop in 1938) Konstantin von Neurath, head of the navy Erich Raeder, long-time Hitler Youth leader and Gauleiter of Vienna Baldur von Schirach, and (until his flight to Scotland in 1941) deputy head of the Nazi Party Rudolf He?, Speer was given a long prison sentence. Funk, Neurath, and Raeder were released early on health grounds. Donitz, Speer, and Schirach left