The End

The outward facade of invincibility had to be maintained. Robert Ley, the Labour Front Leader, whose public utterances—and reputation for drunkenness—were an embarrassment to Goebbels and other leading Nazis,¹³⁰ even managed to draw positives from the Dresden inferno, declaring that as a consequence the struggle for victory would no longer be distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture.¹³¹ Yet privately Ley could see as well as anyone how desperate the situation was on the fronts.¹³² Even within leading SS circles, Himmler held to the myth that the war would turn out well for Germany. Rituals were to continue as usual. Himmler wrote to Obersturmfuhrer Freiherr von Berlepsch to congratulate him on the birth of his eighth child and let him know that the ‘light of life’ (Lebensleuchter)—part of the pseudo-religious cultism within the SS—for little Dietmar could be sent only after the war.¹³³ The Reichsfuhrer-SS let it be known among his leading aides that he wanted every year in May to establish which book he would give to higher SS leaders at the ‘Julfest’—the order’s pagan version of Christmas. A list was to be provided by 30 April 1945 on which the titles of the books in question were to be presented.¹³⁴ And replying to the father of one of his godchildren, who had written to thank him for all the presents to his family, mentioning that a Christmas plate (Julteller) had arrived broken, Himmler had Rudolf Brandt, his aide, provide assurance that, should a small contingent be available after the war, ‘I will gladly again send you a Christmas plate’.¹³⁵ Speaking privately to Albert Speer, Himmler kept up pretences. ‘When things go downhill, there’s always a valley-bottom, and only when that’s reached, Herr Speer, do they go up again.’¹³⁶ This maintenance of illusions came from a man, wavering between his own growing sense of delusion and hard- headed awareness of realities, who was already making tacit overtures to the enemy with an eye to his post-war future.

A curious mixture of unreality and ‘business as usual’ prevailed, too, in the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy. Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the long-serving Finance Minister who had held office since 1932, before Hitler’s accession to power, dispatched numerous letters in early 1945 to Nazi leaders and government ministers offering advice on the conduct of the war. Little notice was taken of them. His main preoccupation, however, was the desolate state of Reich finances. In January he compiled a lengthy dossier, sent to leading figures in the regime, which began by stating: ‘The current finance and currency situation is characterized by rising costs of war, falling state income, increased money supply and smaller purchasing power of money.’ It was urgently necessary, he concluded, drastically to restrict money supply by reducing Reich expenditure and by increases in postage, rail and local transport prices, and by raising taxation on tobacco and alcohol, visits to the cinema, hotel accommodation, radio licence fees and newspapers, as well as increasing the war supplement on gas, water and electricity prices. With remarkable logic—justifying the post-war impression of him as an individual of singular ineptitude, an utter ‘ninny’¹³⁷—he reasoned that ‘it cannot be objected that essential provisions for the population are thereby being made more expensive’ since ‘a large part of the population has already been entirely without regular access, or with only restricted access, to water, gas and electricity for months’.¹³⁸ He presented his proposals for a fourfold rise in property tax to a meeting of ministers on 23 February, lamenting Bormann’s absence from the meeting and his unwillingness to discuss the dangers of a collapse of the currency. All he could get out of the Party Chancellery was a suggestion that a programme should be devised by state officials after which Bormann would be able to judge whether it could be ‘politically implemented’.¹³⁹ In any normal political system, the imminent collapse of the state currency would have been a matter of the utmost priority. To the Nazi leadership, in the conditions of February 1945, it was of no consequence. Undeterred, Krosigk continued to work on his plans for tax reform, which were criticized in late March by Goebbels—as if they were about to be implemented—for placing the burden upon consumer tax rather than income tax. By that time, it was at best an arcane issue: most of the country was under enemy occupation.¹⁴⁰

Constantly in Hitler’s close proximity, Martin Bormann was more aware than most of the true scale of the disaster closing in on Germany. His frequent letters to his wife, Gerda, show his anxious recognition of the plain realities of the military situation, brought home to him at first hand by the bombing of the Reich Chancellery on 3 February. The day following this heavy raid, he feared (he wrote) that ‘the worst phase of our fortunes is still to come’ and told Gerda frankly ‘how very unpleasant—indeed, if I am completely honest, how desperate the situation really is’. But pretence had to be maintained, and he added: ‘I know that you, like myself, will never lose your faith in ultimate victory.’¹⁴¹ Next day he wrote again, first with scarcely veiled pessimism about the outlook on the western front, but then reverting to a form of fatalistic hope in the future:

Anyone who still grants that we have a chance must be a great optimist! And that is just what we are! I just cannot believe that Destiny could have led our people and our Fuhrer so far along this wonderful road, only to abandon us now and see us disappear for ever. A victory for Bolshevism and Americanism would mean not only the extermination of our race, but also the destruction of everything that its culture and civilisation has created. Instead of the ‘Meistersinger’ we should see jazz triumphant…¹⁴²

Gerda replied: ‘One day, the Reich of our dreams will emerge. Shall we, I wonder, or our children, live to see it?’ Martin interpolated some words in his wife’s letter at this point: ‘I have every hope that we shall!’¹⁴³ In another letter to her, a little later, he added: ‘As I have often emphasized, I have no premonitions of death; on the contrary, my burning desire is to live—and by that I mean to be with you and our children. I would like to muddle on through life, together with you, as many years as possible, and in peace.’¹⁴⁴

Goebbels was, for many Germans, the outward face of the regime in the last months, appearing in public more frequently than any other Nazi leader, visiting troops at the front as well as urging on bombed-out civilians—a constant driving force, in his radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, to ever greater efforts to hold out and fight on. He still worked feverishly to drum up new recruits for the Wehrmacht and, now, to plan the defence of Berlin (for which he saw Bolshevik methods in Leningrad and Moscow as a possible model).¹⁴⁵ He remained among the most utterly fanatical Nazis, widely regarded alongside Himmler as one of ‘the strong men’ of the regime.¹⁴⁶ He urged rapid sentencing by drumhead courts martial and execution to address the ‘miserable mood’ among the 35,000 ‘stragglers’ and deserters recently rounded up, looking to Stalinist methods to restore order and combat sunken morale.¹⁴⁷ His fanaticism led him to advocate the execution of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in response to the bombing of Dresden.¹⁴⁸ He was still a figure of remarkable dynamism, able not just to put on a show for the masses, but also to fire up those in his entourage and continue to represent the face of optimism and defiance. Yet he was among the most clear-sighted of the Nazi leaders. When, in early February, his wife Magda lamented the loss of so many territories that Germany had once conquered and the weakness now unable to prevent the threat to Berlin itself, Goebbels replied: ‘Yes, sweetheart. We’ve had it, bled white, finished. There’s nothing to be done.’¹⁴⁹

Despite such sentiments, he had not conceded defeat. He still saw in late February, so his aide Wilfred von Oven recorded, a slim chance of avoiding complete disaster if Germany were to gain some time, then—a delusion he shared with other leading Nazis—negotiate to let in the western Allies to join in a fight against Bolshevism. But he readily admitted that Hitler did not share this view and still insisted that 1945 would bring the decisive change for the better in Germany’s fortunes.¹⁵⁰ He was sceptical about Hitler’s extraordinary adherence to undiluted optimism.¹⁵¹ But a visit to the Fuhrer bunker was nevertheless invariably an antidote to any fleeting moments of depression. The atmosphere there, increasingly given to flights from reality, usually dissipated his doubts and pandered to his willingness to believe in some near miraculous change in war fortunes.¹⁵² After one visit, in mid-February, he came away enthused by discussions with the architect Hermann Giesler, who had just shown a fascinated Hitler his model of Linz as it was to be after the war. Giesler told Goebbels, as he had indicated to Hitler, that he thought most German towns could be rebuilt within three to five years. Goebbels found himself, as in 1933 at the end of the struggle for power, longing to take part in the work of reconstruction.¹⁵³ He still pressed, as he had long done, for a radicalization of the home front, the dismissal of Goring and Ribbentrop (both of whom he regarded as utter failures and an obstacle to any new initiatives), and a search even at this late stage for a political solution to end the war. But he remained, as always, a faithful acolyte of Hitler, unwilling and unable to take an independent step. He saw Hitler as a stoical disciple of Frederick the Great, fulfilling his duty to the end, ‘a model and an example to us all’.¹⁵⁴ For Goebbels, too, reality and illusion were by this time closely interwoven.

More realistic than other Nazi leaders in his appraisal of the situation was Albert Speer. On 30 January, as it happened the twelfth anniversary of the ‘takeover of power’, he submitted a lengthy memorandum to Hitler