The End

off relations with him on 6 May, after which the once mighty and greatly feared police chief, as one prominent member of the Donitz administration later put it, ‘turned himself into a poor petitioner and disappeared without trace’.⁵⁸ He fled in disguise before being captured by the British in north Germany, escaping trial and a certain death sentence by swallowing a poison capsule in custody.

Old survivors from pre-Hitler governments who had served throughout the Third Reich were the Labour Minister, Dr Franz Seldte, the Transport Minister and Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the former Finance Minister, now elevated to chief minister (Leitender Minister) and also placed in charge of foreign affairs. Dr Julius Dorpmuller, Reich Transport Minister since 1937, also continued in office. Speer was brought in to oversee what was optimistically termed ‘reconstruction’. Not least, there was continuity in the military leadership. Donitz’s own replacement as head of the navy was Admiral-General Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. But the crucial positions as chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht and head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff were held, as before, by Field-Marshal Keitel and Colonel-General Jodl, who had made their way north to join Donitz shortly after Hitler’s death.⁵⁹ In the days that followed, Keitel and Jodl, alongside Donitz and Krosigk, were the key players.⁶⁰ The remainder had largely bit-parts.

Forming a cabinet had not been Donitz’s first priority on taking over the government, though he had been keen to appoint a Foreign Minister. He had wanted Hitler’s first Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, but was unable to reach him. Instead, he gave the post to Krosigk, whom he barely knew but had found impressive at a meeting in Plon at the end of April.⁶¹ Krosigk had no obvious qualifications other than the interest he had shown in previous weeks in bombarding Goebbels in particular with wholly unrealistic propositions for seeking a negotiated settlement to the war. He was practically the only choice available to Donitz and carried no especially harmful baggage from the Hitler years.

It was not just in personnel that there was no clean break with the immediate past. The old forms and structures were maintained. The organization of the High Command of the Wehrmacht—as much of it as had survived—continued to function seamlessly. The Nazi Party was neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still hung in government offices. The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting was used even now in the Wehrmacht. And summary courts, with their grisly sentences, were not abolished.⁶² Astonishingly, sailors were still being sentenced by court martial and executed even after the signing of total capitulation.⁶³ Mentalities, too, remained unaltered. Retaining the existence of the Reich by saving what could be saved was a central objective. Ribbentrop, like Himmler, had represented the unacceptable face of the old regime and was excluded by Donitz from the new administration. But a letter from Ribbentrop to the new head of state composed (though in the event, it seems, not sent) on 2 May, probably in the vain hope that he would be invited to join the new administration, was clearly written with a view to influencing policy direction.

The aim, wrote Ribbentrop, must be to give the Reich government under Donitz’s leadership the chance to rule from a free German territory. Because of the difficulty of the ‘unconditional surrender’ demand, the attempt should be made to persuade Eisenhower and Montgomery that taking Schleswig-Holstein would be at a high price in Allied lives, and to imply that the British army would someday need the Germans at its side in the fight against the Soviet Union. He suggested an offer to evacuate gradually the German presence in Scandinavia in return for retention of a Reich government in Schleswig-Holstein. This first step would slowly be extended, leaving behind the formula of unconditional surrender and enabling negotiations to take place with the western Allies that would enable them to present an ‘alibi’ acceptable to the Russians. The programme in foreign policy would be to bring together all Germans in Europe, without subjugation of other peoples and offering freedom of all nations in Europe and cooperation in upholding peace. At home, there would be an ‘evolution in ideological questions’, where these might threaten peace. He saw only two possibilities for the future. The first would be complete occupation, internment of the Reich government, administration of the country by the Allies and, in the foreseeable future, a return to a limited form of democracy under Allied tutelage including Democrats, Communists and Catholics. National Socialism would be eradicated, the Wehrmacht completely demolished, and the German people condemned to slavery for decades. Alternatively, through the attempt at a policy of cooperation with all nations, at least superficially also with Russia, and recognition of a Reich government and its programme under Donitz’s leadership, Germany would remain as a nation, and with it also the National Socialist system and a smaller Wehrmacht, thus paving the way for recovery for the German people.⁶⁴ Ribbentrop, like Himmler, was soon disabused of his hopes of continuing his career. But variants of the ideas advanced in his unsent letter were certainly not absent from the leaders of the new administration.

Already on 2 May, Donitz laid down his aims. The only policy was to try to negotiate a series of partial surrenders in the west, while continuing the fight in the east, at least until as many Germans as possible, soldiers and civilians, could be rescued from the clutches of the Soviets. ‘The military situation is hopeless,’ the minutes of the first meeting of his administration began. ‘In the current situation the main aim of the government has to be to save as many German people as possible from destruction through Bolshevism. In so far as the Anglo-Saxons oppose this aim, they must also be combated.’ In the east, therefore, ‘continuation of the struggle with all available means’ was required, while ending the war against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ was ‘desirable’ to avoid further sacrifice. This was blocked, however, Donitz went on, by the Allied demand for unconditional total surrender, which would mean at a stroke handing over millions of soldiers and civilians to the Russians. The aim was, therefore, capitulation only to the western powers. But since their political conditions made this impossible, it had to be attempted through ‘partial actions’ at the level of the Army Groups, utilizing existing contacts.⁶⁵

IV

Developments in the Netherlands appeared to hold out some hope. Even in mid-April, the German authorities there had been uncompromising in their determination to stave off the Allies. The biggest danger to the Netherlands was the deliberate inundation of the countryside. The Wehrmacht had flooded 16,000 hectares in coastal areas in July 1944 in an attempt to hinder the Allied advance.⁶⁶ The prospect now was that this dire tactic would be extended. At a meeting with leaders of the Dutch Underground Movement, Reich Commissar Sey?-Inquart had threatened destruction of locks and dykes in western Holland, which would have made ‘the country uninhabitable during a number of years for several million people’, and, had it been carried out, would have inordinately exacerbated the famine of the previous winter. The Allied response had been that, should this happen, Sey? and Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Netherlands, would be treated as war criminals.⁶⁷

With defeat certain and imminent, this reaction evidently concentrated German minds. As soon as Hitler was dead, the stance changed. Sey?, as Donitz and his colleagues noted, now successfully engaged in talks with Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, to alleviate the food crisis in the Netherlands. Even so, Sey? himself reported on 3 May that a partial capitulation would be difficult to achieve. Smith had offered discussions about possible armistice negotiations, but Sey?, on the instructions of Blaskowitz, had refused, awaiting a directive from Donitz. Meanwhile, the fight for ‘Fortress Holland’ was to be continued. However, there was to be ‘no flooding of the land’. An ‘honourable transition’—surrender by any other name—would, it was thought, bring ‘a small credit’ to the German administration.⁶⁸

During the morning of 2 May Donitz had already been confronted with the unexpected news of the surrender of Army Group C in Italy.⁶⁹ Moves to engineer a capitulation in Italy dated back to March, to the clandestine meetings in Switzerland, mentioned in Chapter 7, between Himmler’s former right-hand man, SS- Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff, and the head of the American intelligence services, the OSS, in central Europe, Allen Dulles. Cautious steps towards a capitulation had quickened throughout April as the military situation in Italy had worsened. The German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Heinrich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, remained anxious that news of the continued dealings between Wolff and Dulles should not leak out. Even at this stage, German generals were fearful of the dire consequences should they be seen to be implicated in treasonable activities. Vietinghoff also argued—justifying his hesitancy, though by the end of April a dubious proposition—that Goebbels would create out of any disclosure of the capitulation soundings a new ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend, and deflect blame from the Reich leadership on to the ‘traitors’ in Italy who had prevented a last-minute change in war fortunes.⁷⁰

There were other difficulties. The likelihood, as it seemed, that Hitler would be flown out of Berlin to