hour, when he no longer had the power to punish or reward and could no longer enforce his will. Sometimes it seems as if he had the faculty for shattering, in ways hard to understand, the relationship to reality of all those who entered his presence. In the middle of March Gauleiter Forster appeared in the bunker in despair. Eleven hundred Russian tanks were at the gates of Danzig, he reported; the Wehrmacht had only four Tiger tanks. He was determined, he announced in the anterooms, to present “the whole frightful reality of the situation” to Hitler with all candor and “to force a clear decision.” But after only a brief conversation he returned “completely transformed.” The Fuhrer had promised him “new divisions,” he said; he would save Danzig, “and there’s positively no doubt about it.”45
Such incidents also permit another conclusion: of how artificial the system of loyalties in Hitler’s entourage was, how dependent upon the Fuhrer’s continual commitment of his own person. His excessive suspiciousness, which assumed morbid and grotesque forms during the last months, was not without grounds. Even before the Ardennes offensive he had tightened the existing strict rules of secrecy by an unusual measure: the army commanders had to give him a written pledge of silence. On January 1, 1945, the Luftwaffe fighter-plane force, briefly revived by summoning up its last reserves, fell victim to this suspicion. On that day a grand armada of approximately 800 planes launched a surprise low-level attack upon the Allied airfields in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. Within a few hours, with a loss of approximately one hundred of their own planes, they put close to 1,000 enemy aircraft out of action. But on the return flight, thanks to the exaggerated rules of secrecy, they ran into their own antiaircraft fire and lost nearly 200 additional planes.
When Warsaw was lost by mid-January, Hitler Ordered the officers in the sector to be arrested at gunpoint, and had his acting chief of staff subjected to hours of interrogation by Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Chief Muller.
As he came to distrust everyone with whom he now had dealings, he once again reached out to his old fellow fighters, as though they could give him back the daredevil spirit, the radicalism and the faith of the past. His appointment of the gauleiters to the newly created posts of Reich defense commissioners was one such way of reviving old intimacies. Now he also remembered Hermann Esser, the party comrade of his early ventures into politics, pushed into the background some fifteen years before. On February 24, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the party program, he had Esser read a proclamation in Munich, while he himself received a deputation of high party functionaries in Berlin. In his address to them he tried to inspire the group with the idea of a heroic Teutonic struggle to the last man: “Even though my hand trembles,” he assured the group, who had been visibly shocked by the sight of him, “and even if my head should tremble—my heart will never tremble.”46
Two days later the Russians in Pomerania broke through to the Baltic, thus giving the signal for the conquest of Germany. In the West the Allies at the beginning of March overran the west wall along its full extent from Aachen to the Palatinate. On March 6 they captured Cologne and established a bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine at Remagen. Then the Russians opened another grand offensive in Hungary and put Sepp Dietrich’s elite SS units to flight. Almost simultaneously Tito’s partisan armies went over to the attack, while the Western Allies crossed the Rhine at several additional points and advanced tempestuously into the interior of Germany. The war was entering its concluding phase.
Hitler reacted to the general collapse with renewed orders to hold out, with fits of rage and itinerant courts-martial. For the third time he relieved Field Marshal von Rundstedt of his post, had Sepp Dietrich’s units stripped of their armbands with the embroidered divisional name, and on March 28 tersely dismissed his chief of staff, ordering him to take a six-month recuperation leave at once. As the minutes of the conferences demonstrate, he had lost any over-all view and squandered his time in useless bickerings, recriminations, and reminiscences. Nervous and inconsistent meddling only made matters worse. At the end of March, for example, he gave the order to send a reserve unit of twenty-two light tanks to the vicinity of Pirmasens. Then, in response to alarming reports from the Moselle he directed them “to the vicinity of Trier,” then changed the order to “in the direction of Koblenz,” and finally, in response to changing reports from the front, ordered so many changes of direction that no one could possibly make out where the tanks were in actuality.
Now the strategy of doom reached the stage of realization. Rather than a calculated scheme of self- destruction, it was a chain reaction of reckless responses, outbursts of rage, and fits of hysterical weeping. Hitler’s heart was trembling after all. And yet at almost every juncture we can detect a craving (for catastrophe. In order to create an atmosphere of maximum intransigence, Hitler had as early as February issued instructions to the Propaganda Ministry to attack the Allied statesmen in such a way and to insult them so personally “that they will no longer have any possibility of making an offer to the German people.”47 With nothing but burned bridges behind him, he entered the last stage of the fight. A series of commands, the first of which was issued on March 19 (the “Nero Command”), ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial and food- supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.”
Preparations were at once made in the Ruhr for demolition of the mines and pitheads, for blocking canals by the sinking of cement-laden barges and for evacuation of the population into the interior, Thuringia, and the vicinity of the central Elbe. The abandoned cities, as Gauleiter Florian of Dusseldorf was slated to proclaim, were to be set afire. A so-called flag order made it clear that surrender was not to be thought of: all male persons were to be taken from houses showing a white flag and shot at once. An order to the commanders dated the end of March called for “the most fanatical struggle against the now mobile enemy. No consideration for the population can be taken.”48 In curious contrast were the efforts to safeguard the art treasures that had been looted from all over the continent, or Hitler’s preoccupation with the model of the city of Linz. These were last, futile stirrings of the lost dream of a state dedicated to beauty.
With the end drawing near, the mythologizing tendencies became increasingly dominant. Germany, embattled on all sides, was stylized into the image of the solitary hero. Idealized contempt for life and glorification of death by violence had long been deeply impressed upon the German mentality. Now that spirit was once again invoked. The fortresses and defense perimeters that Hitler had ordered to be established throughout the country and inflexibly held, symbolizing in miniature the idea of the forlorn hope that Germany as a whole represented. “There is only one thing I still want: the end, the end!” It was surely not accidental that Martin Bormann, in his last preserved letter from the chancellery written in early April, 1945, should have reminded his wife of the doom of “those old boys the Nibelungs in King Etzel’s [Attila’s] hall.” We may surmise that the assiduous secretary had also taken over this notion from his master.49
Goebbels, on his part, could exult once more when Wurzburg, Dresden, and Potsdam were leveled to the ground. For these acts of senseless barbarism sustained Hitler’s prediction that the democracies would ultimately be the losers, since they would have to betray their principles. Nor was that the only gratification. For these air raids were entirely in tune with Hitler’s own passion for destruction. In his proclamation of February 24 Hitler had actually voiced his regret that the Berghof on Obersalzberg had hitherto been spared by bombs. Not long after, the attack came. Three hundred and eighteen four-motored Lancaster bombers transformed the site, according to the report of an eyewitness, into a “moon landscape.”
The surmise that Hitler wanted to keep himself secure from the processes of doom he was so zealously sponsoring is probably mistaken. It is much more likely that despite all the shipwreck those weeks and days were irradiated by complex feelings of fulfillment. The suicidal impulse that had accompanied him throughout his life and predisposed him to take maximum risks, was at last reaching its goal. Once again he stood with his back to the wall, but now the game was up; there were no stakes left to double. In this end there was an element of excited onanism that alone explains the still considerable power of will summoned up by this “cake-gobbling human wreck,” as one member of his intimate entourage called the Hitler of the final weeks.
But the program for doom now encountered an unexpected block. Albert Speer, who had come close to being Hitler’s friend and had been his partner in past architectural enthusiasms, in the fall of 1944 began using his authority as Armaments Minister to counter Hitler’s destructive orders. Speer made his opposition felt in the occupied countries and in the German border areas as well. In taking this course, he was by no means free of scruples. Increasingly disenchanted though he had become, he was still conscious of owing a great deal to Hitler, whose personal liking for him had determined his whole career, and given him generous opportunities to develop his art, influence, fame, power. But when Speer was put in charge of the destruction of industries, his sense of responsibility, peculiarly colored by objective as well as romantic motivations, ultimately proved stronger than
