The End

I

Only two or three years earlier, Hitler’s death would have stunned the nation. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union plunged Germany into a long, attritional and ultimately unwinnable war, the sense of loss would have been immeasurable in every corner of the country. The reactions to Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt in July 1944 show that even then, if Hitler had been killed, the shock waves would have been enormous. By the evening of 1 May 1945, however, when the news of Hitler’s death was broadcast, few tears were shed.

There were of course exceptions. The crew of a minesweeper were said to have been close to tears when they heard the announcement, seeing it as the ‘final heroic tones’ of a long war.¹ An NCO based near Prague recorded the lengthy silence and feelings of dismay that greeted the news in his unit, noting that the death of the Fuhrer was regarded positively as a ‘heroic gesture’ by the soldiers—‘at least by the majority’, he added.² Whether the assessment was accurate cannot be known. It is equally impossible to ascertain the common reaction among the soldiers to the proclamation issued on 3 May by the most Nazified of all generals, Field-Marshal Schorner, to his Army Group Centre, largely located now in Bohemia. Schorner described Hitler as ‘a martyr to his idea and his belief and as a soldier of the European mission’ who had died fighting against Bolshevism ‘to his last breath’.³ Probably, it seems fair to surmise, most soldiers, wherever they were based, were concerned less with the death of the Fuhrer than with their own struggle to escape falling into the clutches of the Red Army.

There were indeed some fanatical supporters of Hitler in every military unit to the end, though usually by now in a minority. One officer recalled how, hearing the news that the Fuhrer had ‘fallen’, a single young soldier leapt to his feet, raised his arm and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’, while the others carryed on eating their soup as if nothing had happened.⁴ There must have been a spectrum of emotions at the news among generals, ranging from relief to sorrow, mingled with a sense of the inevitable. ‘Fuhrer fallen! Terrible, and yet expected,’ noted one former front commander, Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, in his diary.⁵ When a small group of senior officers, gathered at the field headquarters of the 3rd Panzer Army in Mecklenburg, heard the announcement, there was no sign that any of them was moved.⁶ Even among senior officers in British captivity, divided opinions on Hitler were voiced when they heard of his death. ‘A tragic personality, surrounded by an incompetent circle of criminals’, ‘a historical figure’ whose achievements would only be recognized in a future age, summarized the overall view, as they debated whether, having sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally, they were now freed from their military oath.⁷

Among the civilian population, most Germans were too preoccupied with fending off hunger, eking out an existence in the ruins of their homes, avoiding marauding Soviet soldiers, or piecing together broken lives under enemy occupation to pay much attention to the demise of the Fuhrer.⁸ A mother in Celle was concerned with a practical issue: whether her children should still greet people with ‘Heil Hitler’ now that he was dead. ‘I told them, they could continue to say “Heil Hitler” because Hitler remained the Fuhrer to the last,’ was her judgement. ‘But if that seems odd to them, they should say “good day” or “good morning”.’⁹ In Gottingen, which had been in Allied hands for three weeks, a woman observed that those who had effusively cheered Hitler a few years earlier now scarcely noticed his end. No one mourned him.¹⁰ ‘Hitler is dead and we—we act as if it’s of no concern to us, as if it’s a matter of the most indifferent person in the world,’ wrote a woman in Berlin, a long-standing opponent of National Socialism. ‘What has changed? Nothing! Except, that we have forgotten Herr Hitler during the inferno of the last days.’¹¹

Increasing numbers had come to realize in the last months of the war that Hitler, more than anyone, had been responsible for the misery that had afflicted them. ‘A pity that Hitler hasn’t been sent to Siberia,’ one woman in Hamburg wrote. ‘But the swine was so cowardly as to put a bullet through his head instead.’¹² ‘Criminals and gamblers have led us, and we have let them lead us like sheep to the slaughter,’ was the view of one young woman in Berlin, exposed to the tender mercies of Red Army soldiers and not yet aware of Hitler’s death. ‘Now hatred is blazing in the wretched mass of the people. “No tree is high enough for him,” it was said this morning at the water-pump about Adolf.’¹³ The earlier idolization, the personalized attribution to Hitler of praise and adulation for all that had seemed at one time positive and successful in the Third Reich was already being transformed into demonization of the man on whom all blame for what had gone wrong could be focused.

For ordinary people, concerned only with getting through the misery, Hitler’s death on the face of it changed nothing. The same was true for soldiers in their billets or still serving on the front, and for naval and Luftwaffe crews, some of whom had been drafted into the increasingly desperate fight on land. Indeed, as Grand-Admiral Donitz took up the reins of office as President of the German Reich, continuity rather than a break with the immediate past seemed on the surface the order of the day. Nevertheless, a fundamental change had actually taken place. It was as if a bankrupt organization had, with the departure of a managing director who refused point-blank to accept realities, been placed in administration, left with the mere task of winding up orders and the process of liquidation.

With Hitler gone, the chief and unyielding barrier to capitulation was removed. When Bormann’s wireless message had informed Donitz at 6.35 p.m. on 30 April that Hitler had named him as his successor, there was no indication that the Dictator was by then dead. Donitz had, however, been given immediate full powers to take whatever steps were needed in the current situation.¹⁴ He felt an enormous sense of relief that he could act, immediately summoning Keitel, Jodl and Himmler to discuss the situation.¹⁵ But remaining unsure, Donitz telegraphed the bunker in the early hours of 1 May—a telegraph left unmentioned in his memoirs—to profess his unconditional loyalty to the Fuhrer he presumed still alive, declaring his intention to do all possible (while knowing it to be a futile aim)¹⁶ to get him out of Berlin and declaring, ambiguously, that he would ‘bring this war to an end as the unique heroic struggle of the German people demands’.¹⁷ Only later that morning did Donitz receive Bormann’s message that the Testament was in force. On this clear news of Hitler’s death, Donitz now felt finally that his hands were free.¹⁸

As long as Hitler had lived, Donitz had seen himself bound to him as head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht by his oath of military obedience, which the Grand-Admiral saw, like most of his generation who had been schooled as officers, as a sacred commitment. Beyond that, he had totally accepted—as had most leading figures in the military—the ‘leadership principle’ (Fuhrerprinzip) that had been the basis of Hitler’s authority in the Party, then in the state and in his military command, throughout the Third Reich.¹⁹ He had consequently, and consistent with his unbending principles, refused all considerations of capitulation and upheld the fanatical continuation of the struggle as long as Hitler was alive. Immediately that he knew Hitler was dead, however, he felt in a position to contemplate a negotiated end to a lost war.²⁰ There could be no plainer illustration of the absolute centrality to the catastrophic continuation of the war not just of the person of the Fuhrer, but of the structures of rule and mentalities that underpinned Hitler’s domination.

Even now there was a process of liquidation of the war, not an immediate end. Donitz’s proclaimed aim, on 1 May, ‘to rescue the German people from destruction through Bolshevism’, denoted an attempt to give meaning to the continued fight in the east while looking to a negotiated end in the west.²¹ All at once, therefore, the question of capitulation—though not in the east—was a real and urgent one. Could general capitulation be avoided, even now? Could the western powers, even at this stage, through partial capitulations, be persuaded to join forces with the Wehrmacht to fight Bolshevism? Could some terms favourable to sustaining the Reich as a political unity be attained? Could a deal be struck that would save the German troops on the eastern front from Soviet captivity? The end was plainly imminent. But whereas Hitler had ruled out capitulation totally and was prepared to take everything into the abyss with him, the new Donitz administration concerned itself from the beginning with the type of surrender that, it thought, could potentially be negotiated and still stave off the worst— submission to Bolshevism. And whereas Hitler, at least until the visibly crumbling days before his death, had been able to depend upon residual loyalties backed by a high dosage of terror and repression to hold the fading regime together, Donitz could rely upon neither personal standing nor the backing of a mass Party or huge police apparatus, and was left with little at his disposal beyond the shrinking framework of military leadership, a restricted intelligence network and the residues of ministerial bureaucracy. ‘Who is this Herr Donitz?’, General of the Waffen- SS, Obergruppenfuhrer Felix Steiner contemptuously asked on hearing that the Grand-Admiral was to be the new