Never in my life have I accepted the idea of surrender, and I am one of those men who have worked their way up from nothing. Our present situation, therefore, is nothing new to me. Once upon a time my own situation was entirely different, and far worse. I say this only so that you can grasp why I pursue my goal with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. No matter how much I might be tormented by worries, even if my health were shaken by them—that would still have not the slightest effect on my decision to fight on….”31
In the East, meanwhile, the Red Army had begun its preparations for an offensive on a broad front, and on January 9, 1945, Guderian once more called on Hitler to alert him to the threatening danger. But Hitler would not hear of it; he was thinking only of his own offensive, which had once more restored the possibility of planning and operating. He called all warnings to the contrary “completely idiotic” and ordered the chief of Foreign Armies Intelligence, East, who had furnished Guderian with his information, to be “locked up in a lunatic asylum at once.” The Eastern front had never been buttressed by so many reserves as it was at the moment, Hitler stated. The chief of staff retorted: “The Eastern front is a house of cards. If the front is penetrated at a single point, it will collapse.”
Early in January the troops in the Ardennes made two further attempts to advance to the south. They were thrown back to their starting positions by January 16. But in the meanwhile, on January 12, the first blow of the Russian offensive under Marshal Konev struck at the bridgehead of Baranov and effortlessly crashed through the German lines. A day later the armies of Marshal Zhukov crossed the Vistula on both sides of the Polish capital, while farther north two armies pushed toward East Prussia and the Gulf of Danzig. The entire front between the Baltic and the Carpathians was in motion. A tremendous war machine with infantry superiority of eleven to one, tanks seven to one, and artillery twenty to one, pushing an enormous avalanche of human beings before it, rolled over the scattered German efforts at resistance. By the end of the month Silesia was lost, and the Russians had reached the Oder. The Red Army was only a hundred miles from Berlin. On some nights the inhabitants of the German capital could hear the rumble of heavy artillery.
On January 30, 1945, twelve years after his appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, Hitler delivered his last speech over the radio. Once again he tried to conjure up the peril of the “Asian tidal wave” and appealed in curiously weary and unconvincing phrases to every individual’s spirit of resistance. “However grave the crisis may be at the moment,” he concluded, “in the end it will be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice, and by our abilities. We will overcome this emergency also.”32
On that same day Albert Speer addressed a memorandum to Hitler informing him that the war was lost.
Gotterdammerung
To put the matter briefly, someone who has no heir for his house would do best to have himself burned with everything that is in it—as if on a magnificent pyre.
On January 16, after receiving news of the beginning of the great Soviet offensive, Hitler returned to the chancellery. The vast gray pile, once intended to be the starting point for the reconstruction of the capital, had meanwhile become surrounded by a landscape of craters, ruins, and mountains of rubble. Bombs had damaged many of the wings, blown loose porphyry and marble, and blasted out windows, whose empty frames were boarded up. Only the section in which Hitler’s apartments and offices were located had remained undamaged; in this wing even the windows were scarcely shattered.
Soon the almost continual air raids had forced Hitler to retire so often to the shelter installed twenty-four feet beneath the garden of the chancellery that after a while he decided to move in there. In any case, this withdrawal to the cave fitted in with the traits that were emerging with ever-increasing force: the fear, the suspicion, and the denial of reality. For a few weeks he continued taking his meals in the upper rooms, but in these, too, the curtains were always drawn. Meanwhile, outside, with the fronts cracking everywhere, against a background of burning cities and roads choked with refugees, of ruins and collapsing supplies, unprecedented chaos broke out.
But through it all some guiding energy seemed to be at work, arranging matters, as it were, so that the Third Reich did not just end but went down to destruction. Hitler had repeatedly posed the alternative of world power or doom. A flat, undramatic end would have disavowed his entire previous life and his operatic temperament, his fascination with stunning effects. Early in the thirties, in one of his fantasies about the impending war, he had declared that if the National Socialists did not win, “even as we go down to destruction we will carry half the world into destruction with us.”®33
But there was more than defiance and despair, more than histrionics, in his craving for catastrophe. In fact, Hitler saw disaster as his ultimate chance for survival. The study of history had taught him that only grand downfalls lent themselves to the process of mythmaking. Consequently, he was staking all his remaining strength on staging his departure. When Otto Ernst Remer, the officer who had suppressed the July 20 coup and had been rewarded by being promoted to a general’s rank, asked him at the end of January why he wanted to continue the struggle in spite of admitted defeat, Hitler replied darkly: “From total defeat springs the seed of the new.” He made a similar remark to Bormann about a week later: “A desperate fight retains its eternal value as an example. Think of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans. In any case it does not suit our style to let ourselves be slaughtered like sheep. They may exterminate us, but they will not be able to lead us to the slaughter.”34
This determination lent an obstinate consistency to Hitler’s behavior through the entire final phase and shaped his last conception of how to wage the war: the strategy of grandiose doom. As early as the autumn of 1944, when the Allied armies had advanced to the German border, he had ordered the practice of “scorched earth” for the territory of the Reich and insisted that nothing but a desert should be left to the enemy. But the policy, which at first seemed justified by operational considerations, soon developed into an abstract mania for destruction, totally Without any discernible purpose. Not only industrial plants and supplies were to be demolished, but all facilities essential for the maintenance of life: supplies of food and sewerage systems, amplifying stations, long-distance cables and radio towers, telephone centrals, switching diagrams and stocks of spare parts, municipal registries, and bank-account records. Even those artistic monuments that had survived the air raids were consigned to destruction: the historic buildings, castles, churches, theaters, and opera houses. Hitler’s vandal nature was still there beneath the veneer of cultural respectability. Now that barbarian syndrome emerged undisguised. In one of the last military conferences he joined with Goebbels in regretting that they had not unleashed a revolution in the classical style. Both the seizure of power in 1933 and the annexation of Austria had been marred by the “flaw” of insufficient opposition. Goebbels, who now reverted to his radical beginnings and during these weeks with good reason moved closer to Hitler than ever before, eagerly chimed in that if there had been such opposition they “could have smashed everything to pieces.” Hitler, for his part, regretted his numerous concessions: “Afterwards you rue the fact that you’ve been so kind.”35
In a similar spirit, at the very beginning of the war—according to an account by General Halder—he opposed the opinions of the generals, insisting on the bombing and bombardment of Warsaw when the city was ready for surrender, and extracted aesthetic thrills from the images of destruction: the apocalyptically darkened sky, the walls pulverized by a million tons of bombs, people panic-stricken and wiped out.36 During the campaign in Russia he waited impatiently for the annihilation of Moscow and Leningrad, similarly in the summer of 1944 for the doom of London and Paris, and later he voluptuously pictured the effects an air raid would have upon the canyons of Manhattan. But he had been thwarted in all of this.37 Now he could once again, and almost without check, pursue his primal bent for destruction. That emotional bias matched effortlessly with his special strategy of doom and with his revolutionary hatred for the old world. It provided the slogans of the final phase in an act of extreme selfrevelation. “Under the ruins of our devastated cities the last so-called achievements of the bourgeois nineteenth century have finally been buried,” Goebbels raved. “Together with the
