The End

outlining the armaments situation for February and March. He pointed out the dire consequences from the loss of Upper Silesia, hitherto Germany’s last intact coal-producing area. He provided figures demonstrating the dramatic fall over the previous year of weapons and munitions production. At the current levels of coal and raw steel capacity, it was, he wrote, impossible to sustain the German economy for long. Collapse could only be delayed for a few months. After the loss of Upper Silesia, the armaments industry was no longer remotely in a position to cover the demand for weaponry to replace losses at the front. Speer concluded his memorandum in underlined bold type: ‘The material superiority of the enemy can accordingly no longer be countered by the bravery of our soldiers.’¹⁵⁵

Goebbels drew the logical conclusion from the memorandum—which he recognized as showing ‘things as they really are’—that Speer was indicating the need to try to find a political way out of the war. But he saw no prospect of that.¹⁵⁶ He was right to be pessimistic. Hitler forbade Speer to give his memorandum to anyone else—somewhat belatedly, since Goebbels and others had already seen it—and, referring specifically to its conclusions, told him coldly that he alone was entitled to draw conclusions from the armaments situation.¹⁵⁷ That was an end to the matter, as Speer acknowledged.

Hitler’s authority was still intact.¹⁵⁸ In sustaining his unchallengeable leadership position, he could thank, now as before, in no small part his provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter. Although he had to insist in early February that the Gauleiter blindly follow orders from Berlin and stop the tendency ‘to govern in their own way’— actually a tendency that grew, rather than diminished, in the last weeks of the war—he was soon afterwards lavishing praise on them for their utter dependency in controlling matters of civil defence.¹⁵⁹ Most of them, like Gauleiter Albert Forster of Danzig-West Prussia, had probably given up hope of a positive outcome to the war for Germany.¹⁶⁰ But whatever their private feelings and the secret hopes some of them cherished of escaping the tightening vice, they remained a group of outright loyalists.

Summoned to what turned out to be their last meeting with Hitler, in the Reich Chancellery on 24 February 1945, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Party Programme, the Gauleiter—minus Koch and Hanke, unable to leave East Prussia and Breslau respectively—initially shared criticisms and complaints with each other, not least about Bormann. But they were ‘all still full of belief in victory’, at least on the surface. In truth, they were anxious about betraying any defeatist sentiment. Karl Wahl, Gauleiter of Swabia, had the feeling, so he wrote later, that ‘they all lived on the moon’.¹⁶¹ When Hitler finally arrived, they were shocked at his appearance—that of an old, ill, physical wreck of a man, whose left arm shook the whole time. Tears came into Wahl’s eyes at the sight of such a decrepit individual; for him, it was ‘the end of the world’.¹⁶²

Hitler had begun the meeting by shaking hands with each individual Gauleiter for what seemed an age, looking them in the eye as he did so. But his speech, an hour and a half long, was a disappointment. He spoke at great length, as he had done so often, about the past—the First World War, his entry into politics, the growth of the Party, the triumph of 1933, the reshaping of Germany thereafter—but hardly touched upon what they had come to hear: how Germany stood in the war. What he had to say about the impact of new U-boats and jet-planes was less than convincing. The much-vaunted ‘miracle weapons’ were not even mentioned. It seemed a far cry from the old Hitler. But after the formal proceedings, he relaxed visibly in their company over a simple meal until, their own conversations petering out, they all found themselves listening, as ever, to a monologue. Hitler spoke now with a verve earlier lacking about the certainty that ‘the alliance of madness’ ranged against Germany would break up into two irreconcilable fronts, and of the dangers for the west in a pyrrhic victory that would raise Bolshevism to a dominant position in Europe. ‘Our depressed mood evaporates,’ recalled one Gauleiter, Rudolf Jordan, Party boss of Magdeburg-Anhalt. ‘The disappointment of the last hours has vanished. We experience the old Hitler.’ They were left in no doubt: he would fight on to the bitter end.¹⁶³

That much was clear, as it always had been. There could be no talk of defeat, no talk of surrender. It was good to have burnt one’s bridges.¹⁶⁴ On the evening of 12 February the communique from the Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had met for a week in crucial deliberation to determine the post-war shape of Europe, was read in Berlin. The communique stipulated that Germany would be divided and demilitarized, the Nazi Party abolished, and war criminals put on trial. There could now be no lingering doubt for Nazi leaders that Germany’s fate was sealed; there would be no negotiated end to the war; ‘unconditional surrender’ meant just that.¹⁶⁵ For Hitler, it simply confirmed what he already knew. ‘I’ve always said: “there can be no question of a capitulation!”’ was his response to Yalta. ‘History does not repeat itself!’¹⁶⁶

7. Crumbling Foundations

Is there nobody there who will restrain the madman and call a halt? Are they still generals? No, they are shitbags, cowardly poltroons. They are cowards! Not the ordinary soldier.

Diary entry of an officer in the west, 7 April 1945¹

I

By March 1945, Allies were closing in east and west for the kill as the Reich’s military weakness was fully exposed.² The eastern front was reinforced at the expense of the west, but the troops were invariably already battle-weary and, increasingly, ill-trained young recruits. The huge losses could simply no longer be made good. The fighting strength of divisions had fallen drastically. The greatly weakened, though still tenaciously fighting, German forces faced an impossible task in trying to halt the Red Army, once it had regrouped and consolidated its supply lines after the big advance of January. In the west, the Ardennes offensive had inflicted a temporary shock rather than a major reversal on the western Allies. They soon regathered and prepared for the assault on the western frontiers of the Reich, against a Wehrmacht whose impoverished resources were incapable, despite its tough rearguard action, of repelling immensely superior might. The task was rendered completely hopeless through the near total impotence of the Luftwaffe, whose limited capability in the west had been cut back in order to supply—wholly ineffectively—the eastern front.

After the disasters of January, the Army High Command did all it could to reinforce the front in Pomerania and along the Oder. Army Group Vistula, commanded by Himmler and comprising twenty-five infantry and eight panzer divisions, defended an extensive sector running from Elbing in the east to the Oder, little more than 80 kilometres north-east of Berlin. The whole of its southern flank, however, faced the Red Army, impatient to press northwards towards the Baltic coast. Once a weak German counter-offensive in mid-February had fairly easily been parried, the loss of Pomerania—allowing the Soviets to secure their northern flank for the coming assault on Berlin —swiftly became unstoppable. On 4 March, the Red Army reached the Baltic coast between Koslin and Kolberg. The coastal town of Kolberg was a vital strategic stronghold. The spectacular colour film Kolberg (referred to in an earlier chapter), which Goebbels had commissioned, depicted the town’s heroic defence against Napoleon’s forces.³ This time there was, however, to be no heroic defence. Kolberg was besieged on 7 March and declared by Hitler a ‘fortress’ to be held at all costs. The town commandant held out only until the civilians—including around 60,000 refugees, many of them wounded—could be shipped away by the navy,⁴ then left himself over the sea on 18 March, along with the town’s remaining defence force.⁵

Other Pomeranian strongholds were lost soon afterwards. By 20 March, after days of bitter fighting, Stettin’s harbour and wharves had been wrecked and could no longer be used by the German navy, though German troops held onto a bridgehead and the city itself, now largely deserted, fell to the Soviets only towards the end of April. Gotenhafen (Gdynia) held out until 28 March and the key city of Danzig till 30 March, enabling the navy to ferry many desperate refugees and wounded civilians and soldiers to safety. By this time, German forces in Pomerania had been broken, then crushed. What remained of them, around 100,000 men, retreated to the long thin Hela