The End

simply requisitioned it), or, more rarely, of assisting escape or not betraying hiding-places.¹²⁵

Most people, however, it seems reasonable to surmise, simply remained passive—not participating, but also showing no opposition—as the maltreatment and murder occurred beneath their gaze. The bystanders’ own fear of the reactions of the guards to support for the prisoners understandably played a part. With the war so close to its end, few were ready to invite retribution, least of all in the cause of prisoners whose guilt was for the most part taken for granted. But some evidently did risk retribution through signs of sympathy for the prisoners. Fear could not, therefore, have been the sole cause of the prevalent passivity. Even so, it was probably less the case that ‘broad social support… was given to the killing’¹²⁶ than that few were prepared to risk their own well-being by acting against guards ruthlessly wielding power in attempting humanitarian gestures which, they felt, would change nothing towards people with whom they could not identify. That was enough to make them accomplices to murder. The passivity allowed the killing to continue until the guards fled on the approach of the enemy and the prisoners were liberated not by Germans themselves, but by their conquerors.

VII

In the Berlin bunker on 20 April the Nazi grandees, having congratulated Hitler on his birthday, avowed their lasting loyalty and said what for most of them would be their final farewells, were chafing at the bit to depart before the roads out of the capital became blocked. Goebbels apart, hardly any were anxious to join their Leader on the funeral pyre. Whatever their long-standing rhetoric about fighting or dying, when it came down to it they thought predominantly about saving their own skins. Goring’s copious belongings were packed and on their way to Berchtesgaden. He had sent his wife and family to relative safety there some weeks earlier. His ranch at Carinhall, north of Berlin, was now deserted and waiting to be detonated. A few weeks later he was telling Allied interrogators that until late in the day he had thought Germany might be able to fight to a stalemate.¹²⁷ Now he was off—to await an uncertain end, but certainly not self-immolation in the Berlin catacombs.

Speer headed north to Hamburg, though he felt he had not properly said goodbye to the man who had dominated his life for more than a decade, and with whom even now he could not completely break the ties which had bound them together. To remedy this he was to make an arduous (and pointless) fleeting return to the bunker on 23 April. Perhaps he was even now thinking that, once the end had come, all might not be lost for him, and hoped that Hitler would anoint him as his successor.¹²⁸ To Speer’s dismay, Hitler could scarcely bring himself to offer more than a perfunctory goodbye.¹²⁹

Himmler was also on his way north, and set to continue his clandestine dealings with Count Bernadotte in the hope of extracting something out of the disaster for himself even at the end. In his desperation he was even willing to meet a prominent member of the Jewish World Congress and to agree to the release of female Jews from Ravensbruck concentration camp. He was also ready to make a promise he could not have kept even had he wanted to—that no more Jews would be killed. He had ordered the SS to fight to the last, and never to capitulate.¹³⁰ He himself was contemplating doing precisely the opposite of what he had preached.

Bormann, the eminence grise of the regime, must have been aware by now that his leadership of the Party Chancellery had become little more than an empty title. Few Gauleiter were even in a position to receive his directives. He could not leave the bunker. That was clear. But once Hitler was dead, which could not be far off, he had every intention of escaping both his own demise and the clutches of the Russians.

Goebbels, the last of the quartet who, beneath Hitler, had dominated internal politics in the last months and ensured that the regime continued to operate until the end, had, whatever his public rhetoric and notwithstanding his private flights of fantasy, clearly seen what was coming for quite some time. He continued to do all he could to help in the fight to fend off the Soviets. Even on Hitler’s birthday, he laid on Berlin buses to carry soldiers out to the Oder front.¹³¹ But he knew it would be in vain. By then he had had his personal belongings destroyed. The originals of the diaries he had diligently kept for over twenty years were among them. However, he ensured that this daily record of his role alongside Hitler in Germany’s lost but ‘heroic’ fight—what he saw as his lasting legacy for future generations—would be preserved for posterity by sending out three copies into hiding.¹³² He and his wife Magda then made ready to move into the Fuhrer Bunker to join Hitler. They knew that in doing so they were taking the decision to end their lives. They had already decided to kill their six children.¹³³

By next morning, 21 April, the government district in the heart of Berlin was being shelled. There was a rumble like distant thunder, but unceasing and growing louder by the hour.¹³⁴ The Soviets were now only about 12 kilometres away to the east. As the encirclement of the city advanced, a unit of the Red Army liberated some 3,000 prisoners—mainly sick women and children—left behind in Sachsenhausen concentration camp when most of the prisoners had been marched off on 20 April.¹³⁵ By 24 April Busse’s 9th Army was caught in a tightening Soviet vice. Colonel-General Heinrici’s warnings of this fate had been ignored by Hitler and his military advisers.¹³⁶ Heinrici would eventually have the dubious distinction of being the last of Hitler’s generals to be dismissed, on the night of 28/9 April, when he finally refused to carry out an utterly impossible order from Keitel and Jodl.¹³⁷ By then his army was breaking up in a westward stampede of soldiers desperate to avoid Soviet captivity. The constant interference in his command by unrealistic orders had ultimately proved too much for him. But there was also a personal grievance: he felt deeply insulted at the way Keitel and Jodl had treated him, ‘unworthy’, he thought, of the manner in which the commander-in-chief of an Army Group should be addressed and ‘unbearable’ for an officer with forty years of service behind him.¹³⁸

Heinrici’s stance even in these last days, and that of Field-Marshal Keitel and General Jodl, said much about Hitler’s generals. When Heinrici objected to Keitel and Jodl about the minimal prospects of the slightest success in what his Army Group Vistula was expected to undertake, he was simply told it was his duty to rescue the Fuhrer. Hitler’s main advisers, he felt, either could not or would not accept the true situation and realize that the battle of Berlin was lost. But Heinrici did not offer his resignation. Instead, as he stated in a description of the battle he compiled less than a month later, ‘the bond of my duty of obedience as a soldier, the impossibility of rejecting orders to save the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht’ meant that he felt unable to refuse ‘without committing treason’. ‘After the OKW had placed “the saving of the Fuhrer” at the head of all orders, this took precedence over other military considerations.’

For Keitel, however, even Hitler’s death would not prevent the continuation of the struggle. If Berlin could not be saved, he suggested to Heinrici, the Army Group should carry on the fight in northern Germany. Heinrici retorted that this was neither economically nor militarily possible. ‘The will to fight on the part of the soldiers was already falling sharply and would collapse altogether with the news of the death of the Fuhrer.’ Keitel answered that this news would therefore have to be delayed as long as possible. Further resistance was necessary in order to enter negotiations with the western enemies. Germany still possessed numerous bargaining counters, such as Denmark, Norway and Bohemia, that would serve as a good basis for negotiation. Heinrici thought Keitel was completely detached from reality, though his awareness of the preparations being made by Donitz in Plon, in line with Hitler’s orders, to continue the fight in the northern half of the country as long as possible made him take the proposition seriously.¹³⁹

On 25 April the Reich was cut in two as American and Soviet troops met at Torgau, on the Elbe. By noon that day Berlin was completely encircled. The city centre now came under increasingly heavy artillery bombardment. Berlin had been declared a fortress, to be defended to the last. The forces to do so were weak indeed, compared with the Soviet behemoth. But Donitz was among the military leaders who took the view that the battle for Berlin was necessary whatever the cost to the civilian population since they would otherwise be deported to Russia without any attempt to prevent their undergoing such a fate.¹⁴⁰ As it was, civilians had to experience the misery, suffering and death that accompanied the relentless destruction of their city. Soviet troops had to fight their way practically block by block. But amid intense and bitter street-fighting they pressed inexorably on towards the epicentre of Nazi rule in the Reich Chancellery.¹⁴¹ They knew Hitler was there.

A combination of near hysteria and outright fatalism had by then caught hold in the bunker. Hitler had placed illusory hopes, not defused by Keitel and Jodl, who knew better but were still fearful of giving him bad news,¹⁴² in the newly and hastily constituted 12th Army under General Walther Wenck, fighting on