head of state. ‘My forces and I are not bound by oath to him. I will negotiate on my own footing with the English at my rear.’22
Of the quartet beneath Hitler—and leaving aside military leadership—on whom the governance of the Reich since the previous July had heavily rested, only Speer, though omitted from Hitler’s ministerial list in favour of his arch-rival Saur, was retained in the Donitz administration. As Economics Minister, he was, however, in charge of little but economic ruins. Goebbels, the designated Reich Chancellor in the ministerial list drawn up by Hitler, was alone among the quadrumvirate in acting in accord with the Fuhrer’s imperative of going down with the Reich in a ‘heroic’ end. And even Goebbels had entertained the prospect of a localized capitulation after Hitler’s death, committing suicide after trying and failing, together with Bormann, to negotiate an arrangement with Marshal Zhukov in Berlin. Bormann, the nominated Party Minister, was disinclined—like most others in Hitler’s entourage—to end his life in a Berlin catacomb and fled from the bunker as soon as he could, supposedly on his way to join Donitz in Plon. He managed to go only a short distance from the ruins of the Reich Chancellery before swallowing a poison capsule to end his life in the early hours of 2 May to avoid capture by the Soviets. Himmler, in disgrace after being stripped by Hitler of all his powers following his ‘treachery’, was initially hopeful of finding a position under Donitz and playing a prominent role in the coming combined struggle against Bolshevism of the western powers in unison with the Reich, but was refused office in the new administration.
Donitz, as previous chapters have indicated, had proved himself one of the most fanatical Wehrmacht commanders in his backing of Hitler’s determination to fight on to the last. ‘I know you don’t believe me, but I must again tell you my innermost conviction,’ he informed a colleague in March. ‘The Fuhrer is always right.’23 His unswerving loyalty to Hitler had earned him the appellation ‘Hitler Youth Quex’, named after the ‘hero’ of the well-known propaganda film.24 A sign of his undiluted support had been to dispatch more than 10,000 sailors, equipped only with light arms, to Berlin on 25 April to serve in the futile struggle for the Reich capital.25 By then, Donitz was already acting as Hitler’s delegate, with plenipotentiary powers over Party and state (though not over the Wehrmacht in its entirety) in northern Germany. At Himmler’s ‘treachery’ at the end of April, Donitz was relied upon by Hitler to act ‘with lightning speed and hardness of steel against all traitors in the north German area, without exception’.26 Hitler, who had long regarded most army generals with little more than contempt, valued Donitz highly and acknowledged his unwavering support by singling out the navy for praise in its sense of honour, refusal to surrender and fulfilment of duty unto death when composing his Testament.27 Hitler’s nomination of Donitz to be his successor as head of state— though with the reconstituted title of Reich President, in abeyance since 1934, and not Fuhrer—did not, then, come to those in high positions in the regime as the surprise that it was to those further from the centre of power, or that it might appear to be in distant retrospect.28
In any case, Hitler was short of options. Goring, the designated successor for more than a decade and, until his disgrace, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, had been dismissed from all his offices following his ‘betrayal’ on 23 April and was in Berchtesgaden under house arrest. Whether he could have commanded authority over all the armed forces is in any case by this time extremely doubtful. Himmler’s only significant experience of military command had been as chief of the Replacement Army since July 1944 and then, in early 1945, a sobering one as a brief and unsuccessful Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula. He had also been peremptorily dismissed from all offices in Hitler’s thunderous rage at the end of April. Keitel was no more than the subservient executor of Hitler’s orders and held in contempt by many within the Wehrmacht. The only army general in whom Hitler had any confidence at the end was Field-Marshal Schorner. But he was still a front commander, leading the beleaguered Army Group Centre fighting in the former Czechoslovakia. Though much admired by Hitler, Schorner was heartily disliked by many other generals and, even had he been available, would have been unthinkable as head of state. That left Donitz.
The Grand-Admiral, who made no secret even after the war of the mutual respect between him and Hitler, claimed in an early post-war interrogation that he was chosen as the senior member of the armed forces with the necessary authority ‘to put in effect the capitulation’. Since Hitler could not end the war, he asserted, someone else had to do it. ‘This war could only be finished by a soldier who had the necessary authority with the armed forces. The point was to insure that the Army would obey, when told to capitulate…. The Fuhrer knew that I had the authority.’29 Years later, Donitz added a gloss: ‘I assumed that Hitler had nominated me because he wished to clear the way to enable an officer of the Armed Forces to put an end to the war. That this assumption was incorrect I did not find out until the winter of 1945–46 in Nuremberg, when for the first time I heard the provisions of Hitler’s will, in which he demanded that the struggle be continued.’30 Whether Donitz at the time understood that the reason for his appointment was to enable him to bring about a capitulation is highly doubtful. Nothing in Hitler’s stance during the last days, or in his dealings with Donitz, implied that he was handing over power to seek the capitulation which he himself could not undertake.31 That would have been totally out of character for Hitler, whose entire ‘career’ had been based on the imperative that there would be no ‘cowardly’ capitulation as in 1918, and who had on a number of occasions expressed the view that the German people did not deserve to survive him. On the contrary: Hitler saw in Donitz precisely the military leader whose fanaticism was needed in order to continue the fight to the bitter end.32
Donitz did, in fact, immediately deviate from Hitler’s expressed wish that the struggle should on no account be abandoned,33 and began to explore avenues towards negotiating an end to the war short of complete and unconditional surrender on all fronts. But this was almost certainly not a result of misunderstanding the reason for his appointment as head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. It was simply the need to bow to military and political reality now that Hitler was dead. The end was near; most of the Reich was under enemy occupation; the population was war-weary in the extreme; loyalties were fragmenting rapidly; and the Wehrmacht was largely destroyed, its remnants on the verge of total defeat.34 There was little alternative from Donitz’s point of view, now burdened with responsibility not just for the navy but for the entire Reich, to try even at this late stage to negotiate an end which would be less than total disaster.
In a post-war interrogation several months later, Field-Marshal Keitel claimed that ‘as soon as Hitler was dead, more or less the principal point was this: if somebody else has the responsibility, then the only thing to do was to seek an immediate armistice and attempt to save whatever can be saved’.35 This was disingenuous. No immediate armistice was sought. Donitz, who later asserted that his government programme was clear, that he wanted to end the war as quickly as possible but above all to save as many lives as he could,36 chose rather to prolong the fight for the time being on both eastern and western fronts in an attempt to buy time to bring back the troops from the east. He had also not altogether given up hopes of splitting the coalition and winning the western powers for a continued war against Bolshevism. In so doing, he did enable hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a far smaller number of civilians to avoid Soviet captivity. But he added a further week of death and suffering to the immense human cost of the war.
II
For those civilians imminently exposed to the prospect of Soviet conquest, the mortal fear and dread was completely unaltered by Hitler’s death. Many, in any case, lacking radio, newspapers and post did not hear the news for days.37 One macabre way the deep anxiety manifested itself was in an epidemic of suicides in the closing weeks of the Third Reich, which continued into May as complete military defeat and enemy occupation loomed.38
Among the Nazi regime’s rulers, suicide could be seen and portrayed as heroic self-sacrifice, eminently preferable to the ‘cowardice’ of capitulation. This was, of course, how Hitler’s own death was advertised.39 For military leaders, too, death at one’s own hand was seen as a manly way out rather than yiel0ding and offering to surrender. In extreme cases, like that of Goebbels, there was the sense that after Germany’s defeat there was nothing for him, his wife or his children to live for. His life, stated Goebbels at the end, had ‘no further value if it cannot be used in the service of the Fuhrer and by his side’. His wife, Magda, thought along the same lines, giving as justification for taking her own life and those of her children that ‘the world to come after the Fuhrer and National Socialism will no longer be worth living in’.40
More prosaically, and for many, no doubt, the prime motive, Nazi leaders feared retribution at the hands of the victors, particularly the Russians. ‘I do not wish to fall into the hands of enemies who, for the amusement of
