The End

In other parts of Bavaria, too, representatives of the regime were determined to leave the scene with shows of vengeful last-minute murderous violence, as futile as they were horrific. The Nazis, as they knew, were on the way out. But their capacity for taking violent revenge on their political opponents continued. The murder of more than forty people in different parts of the region, with the Americans in some cases only hours away, was prompted by the proclamation over a captured radio transmitter on the outskirts of Munich on the morning of 28 April of the ‘Freedom Action of Bavaria’, a courageous but ultimately counter-productive localized rising against the Nazi regime in its final days. The ‘Action’ was led by three officers in locally stationed Wehrmacht units, Captain Rupprecht Gerngro?, Major Alois Braun and Lieutenant Ottoheinz Leiling. It aimed at impressing the Allies that in Bavaria at least the Nazi regime did not represent the only face of Germany, and sought to achieve the restoration of traditional Bavarian values in the rebuilding of the province. It was unquestionably a brave mistake at this juncture. In encouraging long-standing opponents of the regime in a number of Bavarian towns and villages to open shows of defiance, it was unwittingly signing their death warrant. There was little to be achieved militarily or politically by the rising. Villages, towns and cities were in most cases being handed over through often bold manoeuvring at the appropriate moment by those on the spot. It was inconceivable that an attempted rising, planned and executed in little more than amateurish fashion, could bring an immediate end to the fighting in Bavaria. Instead, it merely served as a provocation for local Nazis still wielding power to take murderous revenge on their opponents, in the process settling some long-standing vendettas.

The Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria, Paul Giesler, now a cornered fanatic, was behind the worst of the violence. Five men in Munich were taken out on his orders and shot. In Altotting, a Catholic pilgrimage centre, the Kreisleiter led an SS squad which shot five people—local opponents for many years—on a list he had rapidly drawn up. When his hit-squad reported the execution of another three in neighbouring Burghausen, he shouted ‘What, only three?’ The worst outrage was in the small mining town of Penzberg, somewhat incongruously situated in beautiful Alpine scenery between Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Local Nazi leaders wanted to blow up the coal mine, heart of the town’s economic life, and the waterworks and bridges in the vicinity. To block the destruction, former Social Democrats and Communists participated in an attempt to take over the coal mine and depose the Nazi town leadership. It was not long, however, before the officer of a nearby Wehrmacht unit had the leaders of the revolt, including the former SPD mayor, arrested. With the deposed Nazi mayor, he then drove to Munich, where Gauleiter Giesler peremptorily gave orders that they were to be shot immediately, without trial. On return to Penzberg, about 6 p.m., the sentences for treason were read out and the executions of the seven prisoners were promptly carried out. A Werwolf squad, around 100 strong, given the task by Giesler of dealing with the ‘politically unreliable’, meanwhile hastened down to Penzberg and that evening hanged a further eight people, among them two women, at different points of the town, placing notices round their necks declaring that they were traitors and in the service of the enemy. The next day, the Americans arrived.¹⁵⁵

In Berlin, hardly any people were aware of the subterranean drama in the bunker. They had far more pressing things on their minds. They desperately wanted peace—‘an end with horror rather than a horror without end’, as the well-worn phrase had it. They had equally desperately wanted the Americans to get to Berlin before the Russians.¹⁵⁶ Even that hope had disappeared. All that was left was fear of what was coming and the desire to survive. The streets were empty, apart from some queues of people outside shops trying to buy the food they needed for a long siege.¹⁵⁷ Most were by now living in cellars ‘like woodlice, creeping into the farthest corners’,¹⁵⁸ constantly hungry as rations dwindled, without heating because of coal shortages, with little or no gas or electricity, having to stand in long queues to collect water in buckets from street pumps. People had the feeling that they were no longer governed. ‘No orders any more, no news, nothing. No swine is bothered about us,’ as one woman expressed it.¹⁵⁹ Without electricity, few by now could receive news by radio. As even the last of the two-page broadsheets that passed for newspapers disappeared, they had to rely upon word of mouth to glean fragments of often inaccurate information.¹⁶⁰ At least they were spared the headlines of the Volkischer Beobachter, still printed in Munich until 28 April and proclaiming in its headlines that ‘Germany Stands Firm and Loyal to the Fuhrer’, ‘The Fuhrer—Defender of Berlin’, or ‘The Fuhrer Inflames Berlin’s Fighting Spirit’.¹⁶¹ Anyone expressing such sentiments on the streets of Berlin was thought to be mad. But bodies hanging with notices round their necks proclaiming them to have been ‘traitors’ were a warning not to speak out recklessly, and still to take extreme care of those still standing behind the fatally wounded regime.¹⁶²

As long as the roads out of Berlin had remained open, thousands—many of them pale, worn-out women and their exhausted children—tried to escape to the west, on foot, in horse-drawn wagons, pushing wheelbarrows and prams containing remnants of their last few possessions.¹⁶³ Then the last escape routes were shut off. There was now nothing to do but wait in dread in cellars, wanting the end but fearing what it meant.¹⁶⁴ In the last week of April, the worst fears of many Berliners started to be realized as soldiers of the Red Army arrived.

In the bunker, too, the end was near. The final act in the drama had begun. The regime’s ruthlessness in its own death-agonies struck home within the small bunker community itself when Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, the dissolute and brutal Hermann Fegelein, an SS leader close to Himmler, tried to flee and, after being dragged back was summarily sentenced to death and executed. Fegelein was no more than a substitute for the real arch-traitor in Hitler’s eyes in the last days of his life: Heinrich Himmler. The Reichsfuhrer-SS had, it seems, like Goring, taken news of Hitler’s outburst on 22 April as an effective abdication. He had finally cast off the caution which had dogged him throughout his dealings with Bernadotte and offered to capitulate in the west (though not in the east). This, for Hitler, was the ultimate betrayal. In his last volcanic explosion of rage, he had Himmler, too, thrown out of the Party and ordered his arrest.¹⁶⁵ But his reach no longer stretched far enough to have the Reichsfuhrer-SS, in the north of the country, brought back to Berlin and subjected to a final disgrace and fearsome execution.

With Himmler’s betrayal, it seemed as if the fight had gone out of Hitler. In the last act of the drama, he married Eva Braun, his partner of many years, who had decided to end her life alongside him, and drew up his Testament. In its political section it included the names of the ministers in the successor government. Donitz, his fanatical support throughout recognized—also in sending sailors to fight in Berlin’s last battle—was to become Reich President. Goebbels, Bormann, Hanke, Saur, Giesler and Schorner, diehards all of them, were rewarded for their loyalty and zealotry. There was no place for Speer. The task done, and the Soviets almost literally at the gates, all that was left was for Hitler and Eva Braun to make the last preparations to commit suicide. In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Hitler shot himself and Eva Braun took poison. Donitz, up in Plon in Schleswig-Holstein, did not learn of Hitler’s death until next morning—not long after he had sent a message, presuming him to be still alive, professing his continued unconditional loyalty. The Wehrmacht and the German people—those who were listening—were not informed until the late evening of 1 May that Hitler had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital’, a propaganda lie to the last.¹⁶⁶ Joseph and Magda Goebbels had committed suicide that day, after poisoning their six children. The following day, 2 May, the German troops in Berlin were ordered to cease fighting. The Soviet ‘hammer and sickle’ flag fluttered from the Reichstag.

The war was still not over. Outside Berlin, fighting continued. But with Hitler’s death, the insuperable obstacle to capitulation was removed. What had been impossible as long as he was alive became immediately realizable as soon as he was dead. Nothing demonstrates more plainly the extent to which he personally had held together the regime. The bonds with his ‘charismatic community’ and the fragmented structures of rule that had existed throughout the Third Reich and guaranteed his own unchallengeable power had allowed it, at terrible cost to the German people, to continue to operate until the Russians were at the very portals of the Reich Chancellery.

9. Liquidation

Since the western enemies continue their support of the Soviets, the fight against the Anglo-Americans according to the order of the Grand-Admiral carries on.

Head of naval operations staff, 4 May 1945