Allies, and they arranged at once for Stalin to be informed. A reply was sent that surrender could only be acceptable if it were offered to all the Allies simultaneously.
Winocaur, who was one of the men in charge of British press relations at the conference, knew nothing of this background at the time, but felt that Eden’s momentous statement to the delegates should be passed on to the press. After some hesitation, entirely on his own initiative, he gave the news overnight to his friend Paul Scott Rankine of Reuters on the strict understanding that the source should not be revealed. Rankine sent a press cable to London breaking the news in an exclusive statement soon after one o’clock in the morning of 28 April.
While Schellenberg was during the morning of 28 April successfully calming Himmler with the aid of his favourite astrologer, the Allied press was pouring out the news of the Reichsfuhrer’s independent attempt at negotiations. Completely unaware of this, Himmler attended a military conference in Rheinsberg convened by Keitel. At this meeting Himmler presided, which showed that he regarded himself as Hitler’s deputy and successor.
In the late afternoon Bernadotte heard the news of the negotiations on the clandestine radio, and realized that Himmler was finished as a negotiator. Doenitz also heard the report and telephoned enquiries to Himmler, who immediately denied the story as it had been put in the broadcast, but added that he had no intention of issuing any public statement himself. According to Schellenberg, he then spent part of the day deciding how best to order the evacuation of German troops from Norway and Denmark.
It was not until nine o‘clock that night that a monitor report on a broadcast put out by the B.B.C. gave Himmler away to the Fuhrer in the bowels of the Bunker. According to one observer, Hitler’s ‘colour rose to a heated red, and his face became virtually unrecognizable’.8 Then he began to rage at this treacherous betrayal by the man he had trusted most of all. The men and women hemmed in the Bunker were convulsed with emotion, and ‘everyone looked to his poison’. Himmler’s arrest was ordered; he followed Goring into the limbo of the dispossessed. ‘A traitor must never succeed as Fuhrer’, screamed Hitler.9 He took his revenge on the only associate of Himmler he had in his power. This was Fegelein, the brother-in-law of the woman he was about to marry and Himmler’s unfaithful subordinate at Hitler’s headquarters. He had tried to desert, but he was dragged back, taken upstairs into the Chancellery garden and shot around midnight on the barest suspicion that he had known something of Himmler’s treachery.
Hitler ordered Goring’s successor as head of the Luftwaffe, Field-Marshal von Greim, to leave the Bunker and fly during the night under Russian fire to Doenitz’s headquarters, which were now at Ploen. Greim, who had been wounded in the foot during his hazardous flight into Berlin in a light aircraft, flew north in the same ’plane piloted by Hanna Reitsch, who was a dedicated Nazi. They took off from the avenue leading up to the Brandenburg Gate. This strange pair did not arrive at Ploen, which was on the Baltic coast some 200 miles north-west of Berlin, until the afternoon of 29 April, having landed in the early hours of the morning at Rechlin.
At Ploen they found an uneasy balance of power in force between Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the northern armies, and Himmler, Commander of the S.S. and the police. According to Schwerin von Krosigk, Doenitz and Himmler had talked the matter over and agreed that each of them was ready to serve under the Fuhrer’s acknowledged successor. Doenitz imagined this must be Himmler, and so, for that matter, did the Reichsfuhrer himself.
During 29 April no official statement reached Doenitz that Himmler had been dispossessed of his rank and power by Hitler, although an ambiguous signal arrived from Bormann at 3.15 on the morning of 30 April: Doenitz was to ‘proceed at once and mercilessly against all traitors’. Only Greim had received a definite instruction to arrest Himmler, an order which he was powerless to carry out unaided by Doenitz, who was still certain Himmler would at any moment become his Fuhrer. There is no record of when Greim met Doenitz or what exactly he said to him. Neither of them knew that Hitler’s testament was already composed and signed, or that Doenitz was to be appointed Fuhrer with Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Breslau, as Reichsfuhrer S.S. and Paul Giesler, Gauleiter of Munich, as Minister of the Interior.
The isolation of Hitler in Berlin was now complete. His final craving for vengeance against Goring and Himmler, the men who had served him in their own way for the best part of two decades, was frustrated by the confusion that surrounded the last days of his life. While Goring was kept in nominal confinement in the south by an embarrassed unit of S.S. men, Himmler remained free in the north, a political buccaneer who did not even know until after Hitler’s death that his authority had been swept from beneath his feet. With his remaining staff, his escort of S.S. men, and his fleet of cars, he moved in uneasy orbit round the Grand Admiral’s headquarters at Ploen with no particular duties to occupy his time except the maintenance of his position and the salvage of his power.10 It was not until late in the afternoon of 30 April that Doenitz learned in a signal sent by Bormann from the Bunker in Berlin of his unwanted elevation to Fuhrer of a Germany on the verge of disintegration. Bormann’s signal was worded evasively and did not even reveal that Hitler had died by his own hand at 3.30 that afternoon: Doenitz merely knew that he, and not Himmler, had been nominated Hitler’s successor: ‘In place of the former Reich Marshal Goring the Fuhrer appoints you, Herr Grand Admiral, as his successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires.’
Doenitz, surprised and alarmed, sent a loyal message back to the Leader he did not know was dead. ‘If Fate… compels me to rule the Reich as your appointed successor, I shall continue this war to an end worthy of the unique, heroic struggle of the German people’, he said in the stifled language of loyalty. One of the three copies of Hitler’s testament, signed at four o’clock in the morning of the previous day and witnessed by both Goebbels, the new Reich Chancellor, and Bormann, was already on its way. A special messenger had left the Bunker at noon on 29 April, but was, in fact, never to reach Doenitz at Ploen.
Meanwhile, Bormann and Goebbels, without any reference to their new Fuhrer, were trying during the night of 30 April to make favourable terms with the Russian commanders. Bormann sent another evasive signal to Doenitz saying he would try to join him at Ploen and adding that ‘the testament is in force’. It was Goebbels who finally sent Doenitz an explicit signal at 3.15 in the afternoon of 1 May, telling him of Hitler’s death twenty-four hours after it had happened. He named the principal ministers in the new government, but made no mention of Himmler, or of the fact that he and his wife were preparing to die that night after killing their sleeping children.
Himmler no longer found himself welcome at Ploen. His exclusion from any form of office was a severe shock to him, and Doenitz did not hide his disapproval of Himmler’s attempts to negotiate with the Allies. Schellenberg travelled through the night of 30 April along the roads blocked with army transport and refugees only to find Himmler at his new headquarters at the castle of Kalkhorst, near Travemunde. He had just gone to bed. It was then four o‘clock in the morning of 1 May. He learned from Brandt what had happened and of Himmler’s despair after a late-night conference with Doenitz, during which he had proposed himself as second Minister of State.11 Doenitz had evaded this offer, though he was still afraid Himmler might use his police escort to regain his lost power. Himmler, says Schellenberg, was ‘playing with the idea of resigning, and even talking of suicide’.
At breakfast the following morning he was ‘nervous and distracted’, and in the afternoon they went together to Ploen. Schellenberg by now was solely concerned to please Bernadotte. He planned to use Himmler’s remaining influence to secure from Doenitz a peaceful solution to the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries. By this means he felt he would earn the gratitude of the Allies and secure his own future when he took refuge in Sweden. Himmler, anxious to be present at the conferences called by Doenitz, was prepared to support the peaceful withdrawal of German forces from Norway. He also admitted to Doenitz that he had in fact been attempting to secure peace through Sweden. This finally discredited him in the eyes of the Grand Admiral.12
May Day saw the beginning of the surrender of Germany. Mohnke, the commander of Himmler’s S.S. regiment which he had sent to cordon Berlin, was captured by the Russians while attempting to escape from the Bunker; at ten o’clock that night a broadcast from Berlin proclaimed officially that Hitler was dead. Kesselring surrendered in north Italy and, on 2 May Doenitz began the first stages of his own surrender to Montgomery without any further consultation with Himmler. Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, in spite of the order he had received, opened up the city to the British forces.
Meanwhile Himmler maintained the facade of power, and it was still formidable. Accompanied by his escort of S.S. men, he moved around in his Mercedes like some medieval warlord. While he was preparing to follow Doenitz on 1 May to Flensburg, on the borders of Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, he received an unexpected offer from Leon Degrelle, the renegade commander of the Belgian and French fascists enrolled in the
