the Elbe, and, especially, in a counter-offensive to the north of Berlin led by SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Felix Steiner’s panzer corps. When he had learnt, on 22 April, that Steiner’s attack had not taken place,143 the pent-up feelings had exploded in a torrential outburst of elemental fury. Hitler admitted openly for the first time that the war was lost. He told his shocked entourage that he was determined to stay in Berlin and take his life at the last moment. He seemed to be abdicating power and responsibility, saying he had no further orders for the Wehrmacht. He even implied that Goring might have to negotiate with the enemy.144 But, astonishingly, he had pulled himself together again, refused to concede a grain of his authority, and exuded as always undiluted optimism in his military briefing just moments after speaking privately about his imminent death and the burning of his body.145 The act, which had slipped for a brief moment, was back in place.
Keitel was sent to Wenck’s headquarters with orders—totally unfeasible, but temporarily cheering up Hitler once more—to march on Berlin. The High Command of the Wehrmacht was now split between Krampnitz, near Potsdam (later moving north, until finally based with Donitz in Plon), and Berchtesgaden. Despite the despairing outburst during his temporary breakdown, Hitler was still in no mood to relinquish control. Goring learnt this when, mistaking the information he had received about Hitler’s eruption as denoting incapacity or unwillingness to lead any longer and assuming, therefore, that on the basis of the long-standing succession law he should take over, he was peremptorily dismissed from all his offices and put under house arrest at the Berghof. Bormann, an arch-enemy for years of the Reich Marshal, could savour a last triumph.
Even now the generals in charge of Berlin’s defence would not contemplate capitulation. When General Kurt von Tippelskirch arrived on 27 April to take over the 21st Army, hastily put together from whatever units could be found, he had a long conversation with Heinrici, with whom he had served in Russia, about the position of Army Group Vistula. They acknowledged that every day brought further immense destruction to what remained of the Reich. Only capitulation could prevent it. Yet such a decision was still impossible, Tippelskirch argued. It would mean acting against the will of the Fuhrer (and Jodl had recently emphasized that negotiations were impossible as long as Hitler lived).146 Moreover, an attempt to capitulate would be unsuccessful. The mass of the soldiers would refuse to obey orders to hand themselves over ‘and start on the road to Siberia’, and would seek to find their own way home. The enemy would then claim the conditions of capitulation had not been met. The war would continue. So would the destruction of the land. The soldiers would be taken prisoner anyway. No good would, therefore, have been served. But ‘the Army Group would bear the disgrace of capitulation and desertion of the Fuhrer’. ‘The fight must therefore go on, with the aim of bringing the armies gradually so far to the west that ultimately they would fall not into Russian but into Anglo-American captivity.’147 In this reasoning, plainly, the interests of the army exceeded all other concerns.
Away from the madhouse in the bunker, the remnants of government were in terminal disarray. Most ministerial staffs (with the big exception of the Propaganda Ministry) had been relocated to southern Germany, beginning in March, leaving no more than skeletal arrangements in Berlin. A number of ministers and their staffs had followed in April, welcoming the opportunity to leave. Berlin was now a government capital without government apparatus. The head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, had left for Berchtesgaden at the end of March. He went on leave, claiming high blood pressure. In fact, he had suffered a severe nervous breakdown. He had for long served little real purpose. The Reich Chancellery’s function had since the previous summer been hardly more than residual, as its powers had drained off to Bormann in the Party Chancellery. In its last days, its acting head was the State Secretary, Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, who was left with the purely theoretical task of coordinating the other ministries and the remainder of the Reich Chancellery civil servants from Berlin. Asked after the end of the war why he had not resigned, Kritzinger seemed scarcely to understand the question. ‘As a long- standing civil servant I was duty-bound in loyalty to the state,’ he answered, expressing shame at its policies towards Jews and Poles. (Even on the morning of 21 April, as Soviet rockets exploded in the government district of Berlin, civil servants continued to ‘work’—doing nothing useful—at their desks.148) When asked further why Lammers continued to do all he could for the war effort, Kritzinger replied: ‘Well, there had to be some sort of organization. Think just of food for the people. That functioned to the end.’ ‘Would it have been better had it not functioned to the end?’ his interrogator retorted. ‘It was war,’ shrugged Kritzinger.149
On the evening of 20 April Kritzinger gave instructions to the ministerial staffs still in Berlin to leave with all haste for the south by road. That proved impossible. A new order was given to leave next day by air. Not enough planes were available. It was then suggested that they should go to the north instead. Exasperated by now, the Finance Minister, Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, who in previous weeks had pressed Goebbels and Speer to take action that would pave the way for the western Allies to come to terms,150 demanded a clear order of the Fuhrer, saying he had no intention of being hanged en route by the SS as a deserter. When, after much trying, Kritzinger managed through Bormann to obtain a ‘recommendation’ from Hitler for the ministers to head north, it was not enough for Krosigk. He now insisted on a written Fuhrer order. Eventually, Kritzinger succeeded in persuading Bormann to get Hitler, for whom this was scarcely the highest priority at the moment, to sign a written order to head for Eutin, far to the north in Schleswig-Holstein. Amid such panicky improvisation, the ministers of a Reich with a long and proud tradition of state service fled the capital and a head of state set on self- destruction.
With Hitler’s earlier orders to split the Reich into northern and southern sectors coming into effect, there were by now effectively six centres of government in Germany: Hitler in his Berlin bunker, his authority real and unchallenged—where it could still reach; the High Command of the Wehrmacht, itself now divided between Krampnitz and Berchtesgaden; parts of the Reich cabinet based in the south and the remainder in the north under Donitz; Goring still presided (until ousted by Hitler on 23 April) over his own remaining Luftwaffe command in Berchtesgaden; while Himmler had what was left of his SS and police power-base in the Lubeck area in the north.151 There was no semblance any longer of a central government of the Reich.
In the provinces, too, or what was left of them under German control, the regime was also imploding— accompanied, inevitably, by untrammelled violence in its very last days. On 20 April the Gau administration in Augsburg was told that the banks would run out of money within a week. Wages and salaries could then no longer be paid. No banknotes had been received from the Reichsbank for a week. The Bavarian Finance Ministry was printing money, but it would not be ready for eight to ten days, and it was itself awaiting a transport of 300 million Reich Marks from Berlin, after which Swabia would be allocated its share.152 Whether that happened is unclear, but Swabia had not much longer to limp on before Augsburg was surrendered to the Americans on 28 April.
Near chaos was reported in late April by the Kreisleiter in the small town of Lindau, on the Bodensee at the western tip of Bavaria close to the Swiss border. Drunken German soldiers were rampaging through the streets and looting property. Huge numbers of refugees and deserters had poured into the town. The Kreisleiter sought permission to restore order by having the first hundred seized and shot. Permission, mercifully, does not appear to have been granted. Lindau survived a few more days before surrendering on 2 May.153
Violence also preceded the capitulation without a fight of Regensburg, the capital of the Upper Palatinate. The tone was set by Gauleiter Ruckdeschel, who had engineered Gauleiter Wachtler’s execution. Ruckdeschel and the Nazi leadership in the city were determined to fight on. In a tense meeting in the city’s velodrome on the evening of 22 April, called by the Kreisleiter, Ruckdeschel declared that the city would be ‘defended to the last stone’. His speech, broadcast locally, merely succeeded in stirring up fear and dismay. The Americans were only a short distance away, and few people were prepared to go down in flames as the enemy took the town. Next morning some women started going round shops, spreading the word that there was to be another meeting that evening in Moltkeplatz, in the city centre, to demand that Regensburg be handed over to the Allies without a fight. Nearly a thousand people, many of them women with children, turned out. As the crowd started to become restless, it was addressed by a prominent member of the cathedral chapter, Domprediger Dr Johann Maier, who, however, was able to say only a few words before he and several others were arrested.
When Ruckdeschel heard what had happened, he ordered that Maier and the other ‘ringleaders’ be hanged. A rapidly summoned drumhead court lost no time in pronouncing the death sentence on Maier and a seventy-year- old warehouse worker, Joseph Zirkl. They were hanged in Moltkeplatz in the early hours of 24 April. The terror apparatus had still functioned. But with the Americans on the doorstep, the town’s military commandant, its head of regional government, the Kreisleiter and the head of police suddenly vanished into the night. Gauleiter Ruckdeschel had also disappeared. The way was all at once clear for emissaries to hand over the city on 27 April, still largely undamaged by the war.154
