decision. Hitler, he was told, was raving that the S.S. had left him in the lurch.
Gottlieb Berger was with him, as well as Gebhardt. The message touched Himmler’s loyalty on the raw, and Schellenberg, who had now gone north to join Bernadotte, was not there to protect him with his subtle advice.
‘Everyone in Berlin is mad’, he cried. ‘I still have my escort battalion — 600 men, most of them wounded or convalescent. What am I to do?’
Berger, a simple man, said outright that the Reichsfuhrer should go with his remaining forces to Berlin and join the Fuhrer. Himmler knew that Schellenberg would oppose this. He telephoned the Bunker again and, after discussion, compromised by agreeing to meet Fegelein at Nauen, a half-way point to Berlin, where the matter could be discussed more fully. This was action of a sort. Had he not said at lunch to Schellenberg before he had gone, ‘I must act one way or the other. What do you suggest?’
Himmler and Gebhardt in two separate cars; Gebhardt wanted to go to Berlin to be confirmed personally by Hitler in a new appointment of some value in the approaching times, that of head of the German Red Cross. For Himmler, Berlin was a place to be avoided, though he still wanted to court the affections of Hitler by offering to send him his escort to die as martyrs among the rubble. But Fegelein failed to meet him at Nauen; he never arrived. The two cars waited at the cross-roads in the darkness of the Sunday night for two hours, while Himmler nursed his uncertainties. Eventually they agreed that Gebhardt should continue the journey to see Hitler in Berlin, taking with him a message from Himmler, who would meanwhile return to the shelter of the nursing-home. So loyalty was satisfied. Gebhardt was received by Hitler late that night and confirmed in his appointment, while Hitler accepted Himmler’s generous offer of the blood of his men. It was very simple. Gebhardt asked if there were any message he might take from the Fuhrer to Himmler. ‘Yes,’ said Hitler, ‘give him my love.’
He was followed by Berger, who was about to fly south to keep watch for Himmler on the behaviour of Kaltenbrunner. Berger’s simple loyalty was expressed so tactlessly that he had to witness another paroxysm of the Fuhrer’s rage — the shouting, the face flushed purple, the trembling limbs, the semi-paralysis of the left side of his body. It was an experience he was not to forget as he flew south along with many others, officials, staff officers, members of the household and secretariat, all hurrying from Berlin with the sound of the Russian guns in their ears. Everyone who possibly could was getting out of the capital through the narrowing territory which still offered an escape-route to the south.
Himmler retired to the comparative safety of Hohenlychen, and turned his mind once more from the Fuhrer to Bernadotte. According to Schellenberg, Himmler had sent him north with a definite message of surrender to the Western Powers offered in his own name. Schellenberg eventually met Bernadotte at Flensburg the following day, 23 April, the day on which Goebbels announced on the radio that Hitler would lead the defence of Berlin and Goring in Obersalzberg was pondering over the best form of words for the message he was to send Hitler, offering to take over the total leadership of the Reich.
It was arranged that Bernadotte and Himmler should meet that night in Lubeck. The conference began by candlelight in the Swedish consulate; the electricity supply had failed, and an air-raid delayed the discussions. They went down to the public air-raid shelter, where Himmler, Minister of the Interior and commander of the Gestapo and the S.S., talked unrecognized to the small group of Germans who came in from the street for protection against the attack. Bernadotte watched him. ‘He struck me as being utterly exhausted and at a nervous extremity’, he wrote subsequently. ‘He looked as if he were mustering all his will power to preserve outward calm.’
When they went upstairs sometime after midnight, Himmler gave his view of the situation. Hitler might already be dead; the capital in any case could not last much longer, and it was only a matter of days before Hitler would be gone. ‘I admit that Germany is defeated’, declared Himmler. Bernadotte has left a record of the next part of their conversation:
HIMMLER: In the situation that has now arisen I consider my hands free. In order to save as great a part of Germany as possible from a Russian invasion I am willing to capitulate on the Western front in order to enable the Western Allies to advance rapidly towards the East. But I am not prepared to capitulate on the Eastern front. I have always been, and I shall always remain, a sworn enemy of Bolshevism. At the beginning of the World War, I fought tooth and nail against the Russo-German pact. Are you willing to forward a communique on these lines to the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, so that he can inform the Western Powers of my proposal?
BERNADOTTE: It is in my opinion quite impossible to carry out a surrender on the Western front and to continue to fight on the Eastern front. It can be looked upon as quite certain that England and America will not make any separate settlement.
HIMMLER: I am well aware how extremely difficult this is, but all the same I want to make the attempt to save millions of Germans from Russian occupation.
BERNADOTTE: I am not willing to forward your communique to the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs unless you promise that Denmark and Norway shall be included in the surrender.
At the end of their discussions, Bernadotte asked Himmler what he would do if his proposals were rejected.
‘In that event’, he replied. ‘I shall take over the command of the Eastern Front and be killed in battle.’
Himmler set down his proposals in a letter for which Bernadotte had asked so that he might have them in writing to hand to Gunther, the Swedish Minister. The letter was carefully drafted by candlelight. This day, said Himmler as he handed the letter to Bernadotte, was the most bitter in his life. Schellenberg and Bernadotte then prepared to return to Flensburg, leaving Himmler to ponder (as Schellenberg told Bernadotte later) whether he should shake hands or not with the Allied Supreme Commander, or merely offer him a formal bow.5
In the Bunker, Hitler had received Goring’s carefully worded signal as a brutal affront. He called him a traitor and dispossessed him of his rank and offices, ordering his arrest by the S.S. in the south. This sudden defection by Goring, as Hitler was led to see it by Bormann, who was still anxious to destroy his rivals even during these last moments of the regime, left wide open the problem of a successor. Though he knew nothing of this, Himmler regarded himself by now as the only possible claimant. 6 Hitler is recorded as saying in March that Himmler was not on sufficiently good terms with the Party to succeed him, and ‘was anyway useless, since he is so inartistic’, a view that echoes the opinion of Goebbels. Himmler, however, was already dreaming of the shadow government with which he might continue as head of state under the Western Allies, and most of the remaining Nazi ministers and war leaders, including Doenitz, Speer and Schwerin von Krosigk, feared that Himmler would usurp the succession.
The next three days, 24 to 26 April, were days of waiting. Fearing that he might be cut off by the Russians at Hohenlychen, Himmler moved to Schwerin, where Doenitz had set up his headquarters for the defence of the north. Each day the front closing round Berlin moved forward on the map like ink seeping through blotting paper, but Hitler stayed on in the Bunker directing forces which were no longer capable of either attack or resistance.
On 27 April, Schellenberg received a message that sent him hurrying to meet Bernadotte at Odense airport in Jutland, where he arrived late because of the bad weather; he had gathered in any case that Himmler’s proposals had not been well received in Britain and America, but had decided not to pass this on in case Himmler might relapse once again into faint-heartedness. Bernadotte offered to drive with him to Lubeck to see the Reichsfuhrer. As soon as Himmler heard that his offer had not been eagerly received, he ordered Schellenberg to report to him. With all his subtle plans in a state of collapse, Schellenberg drove south in fear of his life. He took the strange precaution of telephoning Hamburg and arranging to take the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff with him to this dangerous interview. It always calmed Himmler to have his horoscope read.
But it needed more than an astrologer to know what the fates were preparing for Himmler on the other side of the world. The story of the leak to the international press of Himmler’s discussions with Count Bernadotte has only recently been told in a detailed statement by Jack Winocaur, at that time director of the British Information Services in Washington.7 Winocaur was on the staff attending the three-month session of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, starting in April 1945 at San Francisco. The British delegation included Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary, who at a private delegation meeting on 27 April is reported by Winocaur to have said quite casually: ‘By the way … we’ve heard from Stockholm that Himmler has made an offer through Bernadotte to surrender Germany unconditionally to the Americans and ourselves. Of course, we are letting the Russians know about it.’ The British and American Ministers in Washington had reported the offer during the early hours of 25 April to Churchill and Truman, both of whom regarded it as an attempt by Germany to split the
