sweating, Goring took his leave of Hitler. He spoke of “extremely urgent tasks in South Germany.” But Hitler merely stared vacantly at Goring’s still massive figure;56 and there is some indication that his contempt for the weaknesses and opportunistic calculations that he now discovered all around him was already predetermining his decision.
At any rate, he gave orders that the Russians, who had advanced as far as the city line, were to be thrown back in a major attack by all available forces. Every man, every tank, every plane, was to be committed, and any unauthorized actions were to be punished with maximum severity. He entrusted SS Obergruppenfuhrer Felix Steiner with the leadership of the offensive. But he himself started the units marching, determined their initial positions, and set up divisions that had long ago ceased to exist. One of the participants later expressed the suspicion that the new chief of staff, General Krebs, unlike Guderian did not bother giving Hitler accurate information, but instead let him occupy himself with “war games” that bore no relationship to reality but that took account of his illusions as well as the nerves of everyone involved.57 A vivid impression of the confusion of those days can be gathered from the notes of Karl Koller, chief of staff of the Luftwaffe:
April 21. Early in the morning Hitler telephones. “Do you know that Berlin is under artillery fire? The center of the city!” “No.” “Don’t you hear that?” “No! I am in the Werder game park.”
Hitler: “Intense excitement in the city over distant artillery fire. It is said to be a heavy caliber railroad battery. The Russians are said to have seized a railroad bridge across the Oder. The Air Force is to locate and attack the battery at once.”
I: “The enemy has no railroad bridge across the Oder. Maybe he has been able to capture a heavy German battery and turn it around. But probably what you are hearing are medium cannon of the Russian field army; by now the enemy should be able to reach the center of the city with them.” Prolonged debate over whether or not the firing comes from a railroad bridge over the Oder and whether artillery of the Russian field army can reach the center of Berlin….
Soon afterwards Hitler in person is again on the phone. He wants exact figures on the current air strikes south of Berlin. I reply that such questions cannot be answered out of hand because communications with the forces no longer function reliably. We have to be content, I say, with the current morning and evening reports, which are automatically sent in; he is most enraged about this.
Afterwards he telephones again and complains that jets did not come yesterday from their fields near Prague. I explain that the airfields are constantly covered by enemy fighters so that our own planes… cannot get away from the fields. Hitler rails. “Then we don’t need the jets any more. The Air Force is superfluous.”
In his vexation Hitler mentions a letter from the industrialist Rochling, and screams: “What that man has written is enough for me! The whole leadership of the Air Force ought to be strung up at once!”
In the evening between eight-thirty and nine he is again on the telephone. “The Reich Marshal is maintaining a private army in Karinhall. Dissolve it at once and… place it under SS Obergruppenfuhrer Steiner”— and he hangs up. While I am still considering what this is supposed to mean, Hitler calls again. “Every available Air Force man in the area between Berlin and the coast as far as Stettin and Hamburg is to be thrown into the attack I have ordered in the northeast of Berlin.”… And there is no answer to my question of where the attack is to take place; he has already hung up….
In a series of telephone calls I try to find out what is going on. Thus I learn from Major Freigang of General Konrad’s staff that he has heard Obergruppenfuhrer Steiner is supposed to lead an attack from the Eberswalde area in a southward direction. But so far only Steiner and one officer have arrived in Schonwalde. Army units for the attack unknown.
I telephone the Fuhrer bunker, finally reaching General Krebs at 10:30 P.M., and ask for more precise information about the planned attack…. Hitler breaks into the conversation. Suddenly his excited voice sounds on the phone: “Do you still have doubts about my order? I think I expressed myself clearly enough.” At 11:30 P.M. another call from Hitler. He asks about the Air Force’s measures for Steiner’s attack. I report on this, emphasizing that the troops are altogether unused to battle, and have neither been trained nor equipped for ground fighting, moreover lack heavy arms. He gives me a brief lecture on the situation….”58
It is necessary to know this background to grasp the fictitious nature of the Steiner offensive, on which Hitler was placing such far-reaching hopes. “You will see,” he retorted to Koller, “the Russians will suffer the greatest defeat, the bloodiest defeat in their history at the gates of the city of Berlin.” During the entire following morning he waited nervously, and in increasing despair, for a report on the course of operations. At three o’clock, at the beginning of the conference, no report from Steiner had yet arrived, but it now became apparent that his orders of the previous day had so confused and opened the front that the Red Army was able to break through the outer defensive ring in the northern part of Berlin and penetrate the city with its tank spearheads. The Steiner offensive never took place.
In the afternoon the storm burst that made the conference of April 22 memorable. After a brief, brooding silence, as if still dazed by his utter disappointment, Hitler began to rage. He embarked on what amounted to a general denunciation of the cowardice, baseness, and faithlessness of the world. His voice, which in past weeks had dropped almost to a whisper, once more regained some of its former strength. Alerted by his screams, those living in the bunker crowded into the stairways and hallways while Hitler shouted that he had been betrayed. He cursed the army and spoke of corruption, weakness, lies. For years he had been surrounded by traitors and failures. He shook his fists furiously while he spoke; tears ran down his cheeks; and as always in the disastrous disenchantments of his life, everything collapsed along with the one hysterically magnified expectation. This was the end, he said. He could no longer go on. Death alone remained. He would meet death here in the city. Those who wanted to could go south; he himself would stick it out in Berlin. He rejected the protests and pleas of those around him, who regained their capacity for speech only after Hitler fell silent in exhaustion. He would not permit them to drag him around any farther; he should never have left the Wolf’s Lair. Telephoned attempts at persuasion by Himmler and Donitz had no effect. He refused to listen to Ribbentrop. Instead, he declared once more that he would remain in Berlin and meet his death on the steps of the chancellery. According to one of the witnesses he repeated that phrase ten or twenty times. After he had dictated a radio message announcing (and thus making irrevocable) his decision that he personally had taken over the defense of the city, he ended the conference. It was eight o’clock in the evening. All the participants were shaken and exhausted.59
Subsequently, in Hitler’s private rooms, the arguments were revived in a smaller circle. Hitler had sent for Goebbels and proposed that he and his family move into the Fuhrer’s bunker. Then he began gathering his personal papers and ordered the documents to be burned. Next, he commanded Generals Keitel and Jodi to go to Berchtesgaden. He refused their request for operational orders. When they renewed their objections, he declared emphatically: “I shall never leave Berlin—never!” For a moment each of the generals, independently of one another, considered whether they should forcibly remove Hitler from the bunker and take him to the “Alpine redoubt,” but quickly realized that the idea was impracticable. Keitel thereupon left for the headquarters of General Wenck’s army, thirty-seven miles south of Berlin, an army that once more was to be the focus of exaggerated hopes in the few remaining days; Jodi, only a few hours later, gave the following account:
Hitler has… made the decision to stay in Berlin, lead the defense, and shoot himself at the last moment. He said he could not fight for physical reasons, and in any case would not personally fight because he could not risk being wounded and falling into the enemy’s hands. We all emphatically tried to dissuade him, and proposed that the troops be shifted from the west to the fighting in the East. He answered that everything was falling apart anyhow, he couldn’t do it; the Reich Marshal could try. Someone remarked that none of the soldiers would fight for the Reich Marshal. To that Hitler said: “What do you mean, fight? There isn’t much fighting left to do.”60
At last he seemed to be bowing to the inevitable. The tremendous consciousness of mission that had accompanied him from early on, and had only occasionally been obscured but never shaken, now yielded to resignation. “He has lost his faith,” Eva Braun wrote to a woman friend. Only once in the course of the evening, when SS Obergruppenfuhrer Berger mentioned the people that had “endured so loyally and so long,” did Hitler relapse into the agitation of the afternoon. “With face flushed purple,” he shouted something about lies and
