treachery.61 But, later, as he was bidding good-bye to his adjutant Julius Schaub, two of his secretaries, the stenographers, and many other persons of his entourage, he seemed calm again. And when Speer, filled with “conflicting feelings” once more flew into encircled, burning Berlin next day to bid him good-bye, he likewise displayed an almost unnatural composure and spoke of his impending death as a release: “It is easy for me.” Hitler remained calm even when Speer confessed that for months he had worked against the orders given him; he seemed rather impressed by Speer’s initiative.62
But the next fit of fury was already in the offing. Indeed, the remaining hours of this life were marked by more and more abrupt changes of mood, from euphoria directly to profoundest depression. The symptoms suggest that these leaps were reflections of a final breakdown, produced by years of abuse of Morell’s mind- distorting drugs. That evening, it is true, Hitler had dismissed his doctor with the words: “I don’t need drugs to see me through.”63 But after Morell’s departure he continued to take the medicines. The equanimity he now achieved was surely, viewed as a whole, not philosophical in origin. Far from submission to his fate, there was always, in his resignation, an undertone of careless contemptuousness. He could be vacant, but not calm. The stenographic minutes of one of the last conferences has preserved the characteristic combination of illusionary exuberance, depression, and contempt:
For me there is no doubt about this: the battle has reached a climax here. If it is really true that differences have arisen among the Allies in San Francisco—and they will arise—then a turning point can come about only if I deliver a blow to the Bolshevistic colossus at one place. Then the others may after all realize that there is only one force that can check the Bolshevistic colossus, and that is I and the party and the present German State.
If fate decides differently, then I would vanish from the stage of world history as an inglorious fugitive. But I would think it a thousand times more cowardly to commit suicide at Obersalzberg than to stand and fall here. I don’t want anyone saying: You as the Leader…
I am the Leader as long as I can really lead. I cannot lead by sitting down somewhere on a mountain…. I did not come into the world solely in order to defend my Berghof.
He then referred with gratification to the enemy’s casualties, which, he said, had “consumed a great part of his strength.” In the house-to-house fighting for Berlin the enemy would be “forced to bleed to death.” He added: “Today I shall lie down slightly reassured, and wish to be awakened only when a Russian tank stands before my sleeping nook.” Then he grieved over all the memories he would be losing in death, and stood up shrugging: “But what does all that matter! Sooner or later everyone has to leave all such nonsense behind.”
On the evening of April 23 Goring wired from Berchtesgaden to ask whether Hitler’s decision to remain in Berlin brought into force the law of June 29, 1941, which appointed him, the Reich Marshal, as successor. The telegram was couched in loyal terms, and Hider had received it calmly. But Goring’s old antagonist, Martin Bormann, succeeded in representing the matter as a kind of
He now had no reserves left. The feelings of impotence, anxiety, and selfpity demanded expression. The pathetic camouflages of the past would no longer serve. All his life he had needed and sought roles to play. Now he was at a loss: the role of the beaten man had never entered his repertory, while the panache of the Wagnerian hero put too great a strain upon his remaining energies. The lack of control that was expressed in the fits, bursts of rage, and spells of uncontrolled sobbing was partly caused by this loss of his roles.
That was once more revealed on the evening of April 26, when General Ritter von Greim, whom he had appointed Goring’s successor as commander in chief of the air force, flew into the encircled city with the pilot Hanna Reitsch. They came because Hitler had insisted on making the appointment in person. He had tears in his eyes, as Hanna Reitsch described it. His head drooped and his face was deathly pale when he spoke of Goring’s “ultimatum.” “Now nothing remains,” he said. “Nothing is spared to me. No loyalty, no honor is left; no disappointment, no treachery has been spared me—and now this on top of it all. Everything is over. Every possible wrong has been inflicted upon me.”
Nevertheless, he still had one hope, a small one, but he elaborated it in interminable soliloquies into one of his phantasmagorical certainties. During the night he summoned Hanna Reitsch and told her that the great cause for which he had lived and fought now seemed lost—unless the army of General Wenck, which was approaching, managed to break through the ring of the besiegers and relieve the city. He gave her a vial of poison. “But I still have hope, dear Hanna. General Wenck’s army is moving up from the south. He must and will drive the Russians back far enough to save our people.”
That same night the first Soviet shells struck the chancellery, and the bunker vibrated under the impact of tumbling walls. In some areas the conquerors had moved to within a half a mile of the chancellery.
The following day, SS Gruppenfuhrer Fegelein, Himmler’s personal representative in the Fuhrer’s headquarters, was picked up in civilian dress, and within the bunker new laments at the steadily spreading treachery were heard. Hitler’s suspicions now turned against everyone. Eva Braun, who was related to the arrested man, since Fegelein had married her sister Gretl, exclaimed: “Poor, poor Adolf, they’ve all deserted you, all betrayed you.” Aside from Eva, only Goebbels and Bormann remained beyond suspicion. They formed that “phalanx of the last” which Goebbels had hailed years before, in one of his paeans to doom. The more Hitler succumbed to his fits of melancholia and his misanthropies, the more closely he drew these few loyal souls around him. Since his return to the chancellery he had spent most of his evenings with them, although occasionally Ley was included. There was evidence of something secret going on, which soon aroused the curiosity of the other bunker inmates.
Years later it became known that Hitler, in meetings between the beginning of February and the middle of April, had embarked on a kind of general retrospective, summing up his life, as it were. In a series of lengthy monologues he once more examined the course he had taken, the premises and goals of his policies, and their prospects and errors. As always, he elaborated his reflections verbosely and chaotically. But on the whole the pages as they stand constitute one of the fundamental documents of his life. They reveal his intellectual energy, though somewhat diminished, and also the old obsessional ideas.
The starting point of his reflections was the still rankling failure of an Anglo-German alliance. Up to early 1941, this senseless mistaken war could have been ended, especially since England had “proved her will to resist in the sky above London” and moreover “had on the credit side of her ledger the shameful defeats of the Italians in North Africa.” Had the war been thus ended, America would have been kept out of European affairs. The “phony” world powers, France and Italy, would have been compelled to renounce their “anachronistic politics of greatness” and instead could have undertaken a “bold policy of friendship with Islam.” England, still the heart of his grand design, would have been able to devote herself “entirely to the welfare of the Empire,” while Germany, secure in the rear, could turn to her true task, “the goal of my life and the reason for the genesis of National Socialism: the extirpation of Bolshevism.”65
Probing for the causes that had ruined this design, he once again encountered the enemy who from the very beginning had blocked his way and whose power he had nevertheless failed to appraise correctly. This was, as he now saw it in retrospect, his most serious mistake: “I had underestimated the overpowering influence of the Jews upon the British under Churchill.” And he complained: “If only fate had sent an aging and calcified England a new Pitt instead of this Yid-ridden half American souse!” Now he hated the arrogant islanders, whom he had courted in vain more than any other of his enemies, and did not conceal his satisfaction that in the days to come they would be departing from history and, in keeping with the law of life, would go to their doom. “The English people will die of hunger or tuberculosis on their damned island.”66
The war against the Soviet Union, he insisted once again, stood above all arbitrary considerations. It had been the principal goal of all his endeavors. Granted, it was possible that it might fail and end in defeat. But not to have undertaken it would have been worse than any defeat, equivalent to an act of treason. “We were condemned to wage war, and our concern could only be to choose the most favorable moment for its start. At the same time it
