[b]31: GOETTERDAEMMERUNG: THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH[/b]

 

 

HITLER HAD PLANNED to leave Berlin on April 20, his fifty-sixth birthday, for Obersalzberg and there direct the last stand of the Third Reich in the legendary mountain fastness of Barbarossa. Most of the ministerial offices had already moved south with their· trucks full of state papers and of frantic officials desperate to get out of doomed Berlin. The Fuehrer himself had sent most of the members of his household staff to Berchtesgaden ten days before to prepare his mountain villa, the Berghof, for his coming.

 

He was destined, however, never to see his beloved Alpine retreat again. The end was approaching faster than he had thought possible. The Americans and Russians were driving swiftly to a junction on the Elbe. The British were at the gates of Hamburg and Bremen and threatening to cut off Germany from occupied Denmark. In Italy Bologna had fallen and Alexander's Allied forces were plunging into the valley of the Po. The Russians, having captured Vienna on April 13, were heading up the Danube, and the U.S. Third Army was sweeping down that river to meet them in Hitler's home town of Linz in Austria. Nuremberg, where work had been going on throughout the war on the great auditorium and stadiums which were to mark the ancient town as the capital of the Nazi Party, was besieged and part of the U.S. Seventh Army was sweeping past it toward Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement. In Berlin the thunder of Russian heavy artillery could be heard.

 

"All through the week," Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the puerile Minister of Finance and former Rhodes scholar, who had scooted out of Berlin for the north at the first word of the approaching Bolsheviki, noted in his diary on April 23, "there was nothing but a succession of Job's messengers. Our people seem to be faced with the darkest fate." [1]

 

Hitler had left his headquarters in Rastenburg in East Prussia for the last time on the previous November 20, as the Russians approached, and had remained in Berlin, which he had scarcely seen since the beginning of the war in the East, until December 10, when he had gone to his Western headquarters at Ziegenberg near Bad Nauheim to direct the great gamble in the Ardennes. After its failure he had returned on January 16 to Berlin, where he was to remain until the end, directing his crumbling armies from the underground bunker fifty feet below the ChanceIlery, whose great marble halls were now in ruins from Allied bombing.

 

Physically he was fast deteriorating. A young Army captain who saw him for the first time in February later recalled his appearance.

 

[quote]His head was slightly wobbling. His left arm hung slackly and his hand trembled a good deal. There was an indescribable flickering glow in his eyes, creating a fearsome and wholly unnatural effect. His face and the parts around his eyes gave the impression of total exhaustion. All his movements were those of a senile man. [2][/quote]

 

Since the July 20 attempt on his life he had grown distrustful of everyone, even of his old party stalwarts. "I am lied to on all sides," he fumed to one of his women secretaries in March.

 

[quote]I can rely on no one. They all betray me. The whole business makes me sick ... If anything happens to me, Germany will be left without a leader. I have no successor. Hess is mad, Goering has lost the sympathy of the people. and Himmler would be rejected by the Party -- besides, he [Himmler] is so completely inartistic ... Rack your brains and tell me who my successor is to be ...  [3][/quote]

 

One would have thought that at this stage of history the question of succession was academic, but it was not -- not in this Nazi cuckoo land. Not only the Fuehrer was obsessed by it but the leading candidates to succeed him, as we shall shortly see.

 

Physical wreck though Hitler now was, with a disastrous end staring him in the face as the Russians approached Berlin and the Western Allies overran the Reich, he and a few of his most fanatical followers, Goebbels above all, clung stubbornly to their hopes of being saved at the last minute by a miracle.

 

One fine evening early in April Goebbels had sat up reading to Hitler from one of the Fuehrer's favorite books, Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great. The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the Seven Years' War, when the great King felt himself at the end of his rope and told his ministers that if by February 15 no change for the better in his fortunes occurred he would give up and take poison. This portion of history certainly had its appropriateness and no doubt Goebbels read it in his most dramatic fashion.

 

[quote]"Brave King! [Goebbels read on] Wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds and soon will rise upon you." On February 12 the Czarina died, the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass.[/quote]

 

The Fuehrer's eyes, Goebbels told Krosigk, to whose diary we owe this touching scene, "were filled with tears." [4]

 

With such encouragement -- and from a British source -- they sent for two horoscopes, which were kept in the files of one of Himmler's multitudinous "research" offices. One was the horoscope of the Fuehrer drawn up on January 30, 1933, the day he took office; the other was the horoscope of the Weimar Republic, composed by some unknown astrologer on November 9, 1918, the day of the Republic's birth. Goebbels communicated the results of the re-examination of these two remarkable documents to Krosigk.

 

[quote]An amazing fact has become evident, both horoscopes predicting the outbreak of the war in 1939, the victories until 1941, and the subsequent series of reversals, with the hardest blows during the first months of 1945, particularly during the first half of April. In the second half of April we were to experience a temporary success. Then there would be stagnation until August and peace that same month. For the following three years Germany would have a hard time, but starting in 1948 she would rise again. [5][/quote]

 

Fortified by Carlyle and the "amazing" predictions of the stars, Goebbels on April 6 issued a ringing appeal to the retreating troops:

 

[quote]The Fuehrer has declared that even in this very year a change of fortune shall come ... The true quality of genius is its consciousness and its sure knowledge of coming change. The Fuehrer knows the exact hour of its arrival. Destiny has sent us this man so that we, in this time of great external and internal stress, shall testify to the miracle ... [6][/quote]

 

Scarcely a week later, on the night of April 12, Goebbels convinced himself that "the exact hour" of the miracle had come. It had been a day of further bad news. The Americans had appeared on the Dessau-Berlin autobahn and the High Command had hastily ordered the destruction of its last two remaining powder factories, which were in the vicinity. Henceforth the German soldiers would have to get along with the ammunition at hand. Goebbels had spent the day at the headquarters of General Busse on the Oder front at Kuestrin. The General had assured him that a Russian breakthrough was impossible, that (as Goebbels the next day told Krosigk) he was "holding out until the British kick us in the ass."

 

[quote]In the evening [Goebbels recounted] they had sat together at headquarters and he had developed his thesis that according to historical logic and justice things were bound to change, just as in the Seven Years' War there had been the miracle of the House of Brandenburg.[/quote]

 

"What Czarina will die this time?" an officer asked.

 

Goebbels did not know. But fate, he replied, "holds all sorts of possibilities."

 

When the Propaganda Minister got back to Berlin late that night the center of the capital was in flames from another R.A.F. bombing. The remains of the Chancellery and the Adlon Hotel up the Wilhelmstrasse were burning. At the steps of the Propaganda Ministry, a secretary greeted Goebbels with a piece of urgent news. "Roosevelt," he said, "is dead!"

 

The Minister's face lit up, visible to all in the light of the flames from the Chancellery across the Wilhelmsplatz.

 

"Bring out our best champagne!" Goebbels cried. "And get me the Fuehrer on the telephone!"

 

Hitler was in his deep bunker across the way sitting out the bombing. He picked up the telephone.

 

"My Fuehrer," Goebbels said. "I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday, April the thirteenth. [It was already after midnight.] It is the turning point!"

 

Hitler's reaction to the news was not recorded, though it may be imagined in view of the encouragement he had been receiving from Carlyle and the stars. But that of Goebbels was. "He was," says his secretary, "in ecstasy." [7]

 

The fatuous Count Schwerin von Krosigk too. When Goebbels' State Secretary phoned him that Roosevelt was dead he exclaimed -- at least in his faithful diary:

 

[quote]This was the Angel of History! We felt its wings flutter through the room. Was that not the turn of fortune we awaited so anxiously?[/quote]

 

The next morning Krosigk telephoned Goebbels with his "congratulations" --  he affirms it proudly in his diary -- and, as if this were not enough, followed it with a letter in which he hailed Roosevelt's death, he says, as "a divine judgment ... a gift from God."

 

In this atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, with cabinet ministers long in power and educated in Europe's ancient universities, as Krosigk and Goebbels were, grasping at the readings of the stars and rejoicing amidst the flames of the burning capital in the death of the American President as a sure sign that the Almighty would now rescue the Third Reich at the eleventh hour from impending catastrophe, the last act in Berlin was played out to its final curtain.

 

Eva Braun had arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on April 15. Very few Germans knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationship to Adolf Hitler. For more than twelve years she had been his mistress. Now in April she had come, as Trevor-Roper says, for her wedding and her ceremonial death.

 

She is interesting for her role in the last chapter of this narrative but not interesting in herself; she was not a Pompadour or a Lola Montez. [i] Hitler, although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of her and found relaxation in her unobtrusive company, had always kept her out of sight, refusing to allow her to come to his various headquarters, where he spent almost all of his time during the war years, and rarely permitting her even to come to Berlin. She remained immured at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, passing her time in swimming and skiing, in reading cheap novels and seeing trashy films, in dancing (which Hitler disapproved of) and endlessly grooming herself, pining away for her absent loved one.

 

"She was," says Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer's chauffeur, "the unhappiest woman in Germany. She spent most of her life waiting for Hitler." [8]

 

Field Marshal Keitel described her appearance during an interrogation at Nuremberg.

 

[quote]She was very slender, elegant appearance, quite nice legs -- one could see that -- reticent and retiring and a very, very nice person, dark blond. She stood very much in the background and one saw her very rarely. [9][/quote]

 

The daughter of lower-middle-class Bavarian parents, who at first strenuously opposed her illicit relation with Hitler, even though he was the dictator, she had been employed in the Munich photograph shop of Heinrich Hoffmann, who introduced her to the Fuehrer. This was a year or two after the suicide of Geli Raubal, the niece of Hitler, for whom, as we have seen, he had the one great passionate love of his life. Eva Braun too, it seems, was often driven to despair by her lover, though not for the same reasons as Geli Raubal. Eva, though installed in a suite in Hitler's Alpine villa, couldn't endure the long separations when he was away and twice tried to kill herself in the early years of their friendship. But gradually she accepted her frustrating and ambiguous role -- acknowledged neither as wife nor as mistress -- content to be sole woman companion of the great man and making the most of their rare moments together.

 

She was now determined to share his end. Like Dr. and Frau Goebbels, she had no desire to live in a Germany without Adolf Hitler. "It would not be fit to live in for a true German," she told Hanna Reitsch, the famed German woman test pilot, in the shelter just before the end. [10] Though Eva Braun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all -- perhaps this is one reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women -- it is obvious that his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.

 

[b]HITLER'S LAST GREAT DECISION[/b]

 

Hitler's birthday on April 20 passed quietly enough, although, as General Karl Koller, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who was present at the celebration in the bunker, noted in his diary, it was a day of further catastrophes on the rapidly disintegrating fronts. All the Old Guard Nazis, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop and Bormann, were there, as well as the surviving military leaders, Doenitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs -- the last-named the new, and last, Chief of the Army General Staff. They offered the Fuehrer birthday congratulations.

 

The warlord was not unusually cast down, despite the situation. He was still confident, as he had told his generals three days before, that "the Russians were going to suffer their bloodiest defeat of all before Berlin." The generals knew better, and at the regular military conference after the birthday party they urged Hitler to leave Berlin for the south. In a day or two, they explained, the Russians would cut off the last escape corridor in that direction. Hitler hesitated; he would not say yes or no. Apparently he could not quite face the appalling fact that the capital of the Third Reich was now about to be captured by the Russians, whose armies, he had announced years before, were as good as destroyed. As a concession to the generals he consented to setting up two separate commands in case the Americans and Russians made their junction on the Elbe. Admiral Doenitz would head that in the north and perhaps Kesselring the one in the south -- he was not quite sure about the latter appointment.

 

That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of the Fuehrer's most trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering, the latter in a motor caravan whose trucks were filled with booty from his fabulous estate, Karinhall. Each of these Old Guard Nazis left convinced that his beloved Leader would soon be dead and that he would succeed him.

 

They never saw him again. Nor did Ribbentrop, who also scurried for safer parts late that night.

 

But Hitler had not yet given up. On the day after his birthday he ordered an all-out counterattack on the Russians in the southern suburbs of Berlin by S.S. General Felix Steiner. Every available soldier in the Berlin area was to be thrown into the attack, including the Luftwaffe ground troops.

 

"Any commander who holds back his forces," Hitler shouted to General Koller, who had remained behind to represent the Air Force, "will forfeit his life in five hours. You yourself will guarantee with you· head that the last man is thrown in." [11]

 

All through the day and far into the next Hitler waited impatiently for the news of Steiner's counterattack. It was a further example of his loss of contact with reality. There was no Steiner attack. It was never attempted. It existed only in the feverish mind of the desperate dictator. When he was finally forced to recognize this the storm broke.

 

April 22 brought the last turning point in Hitler's road to ruin. From early morning until 3 P.M. he had been on the telephone, as he had been the day before, trying to find out from the various command posts how the Steiner counterattack was going. No one knew. General Koller's planes could not locate it, nor could the ground commanders, though it was supposed to be rolling only two or three miles south of the capital. Not even Steiner, though he existed, could be found, let alone his army.

 

The blowup came at the daily military conference in the bunker at 3 P.M. Hitler angrily demanded news of Steiner. Neither Keitel nor Jodl nor anyone else had any. But the generals had other news. The withdrawal of troops from the north of Berlin to support Steiner had so weakened the front there that the Russians had broken through and their tanks were now within the city limits.

 

This was too much for the Supreme Warlord. All the surviving witnesses testify that he completely lost control of himself. He flew into the greatest rage of his life. This was the end, he shrieked. Everyone had deserted him. There was nothing but treason, lies, corruption and cowardice. All was over. Very well, he would stay on in Berlin. He would personally take over the defense of the capital of the Third Reich. The others could leave, if they wished. In this place he would meet his end.

 

The others protested. There was still hope, they said, if the Fuehrer retired to the south, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner's army group in Czechoslovakia and considerable forces of Kesselring were still intact. Doenitz, who had left for the northwest to take over command of the troops there, and Himmler, who, as we shall see, was up to his own game, telephoned to urge the Leader not to remain in Berlin. Even Ribbentrop called up to say he was about to spring a "diplomatic coup" which would save everything. But Hitler had no more faith in them, not even in his "second Bismarck," as he once, in a moment of folly, had called his Foreign Minister. He had made his decision, he said to all. And to show them that it was irrevocable, he called for a secretary and in their presence dictated an announcement that was to be read immediately over the radio. The Fuehrer, it said, would stay in Berlin and defend it to the end.

 

Hitler then sent for Goebbels and invited him, his wife and their six young children to move into the Fuehrerbunker from their badly bombed house in the Wilhelmstrasse garden. He knew that at least this fanatical and faithful follower, and his family, would stick by him to the end. Next Hitler turned to his papers, sorted out those he wished to be destroyed, and turned them over to one of his adjutants, Julius Schaub, who took them up to the garden and burned them.

 

Finally that evening he called in Keitel and Jodl and ordered them to proceed south to take over direct command of the remaining armed forces. Both generals, who had been at Hitler's side throughout the war, have left vivid accounts of their final parting with the Supreme Warlord. [12]

 

When Keitel protested that he would not leave without the Fuehrer, Hitler answered, "You will follow my orders." Keitel, who had never disobeyed an order from the Leader in his life, not even those commanding him to commit the vilest war crimes, said nothing further, but Jodl, less a lackey, did. To this soldier, who, despite his fanatical devotion to the Fuehrer whom he had served so well, still retained some sense of military tradition, the Supreme Warlord was deserting the command of his troops and shirking his responsibility for them at a moment of disaster.

 

"You can't direct anything from here," Jodl said. "If you don't have your Leadership Staff with you how can you lead anything?"

 

"Well, then," Hitler retorted, "Goering can take over the leadership down there."

 

When one of them pointed out that no soldier would fight for the Reich Marshal, Hitler cut in. "What do you mean, fight? There's precious little more fighting to be done!" Even for the mad conqueror the scales at last were falling from the eyes. Or, at least, the gods were giving him moments of lucidity in these last nightmarish days of his life.

 

There were several repercussions to Hitler's outbursts on April 22 and to his final decision to remain in Berlin. When Himmler, who was at Hohenlychen, northwest of Berlin, received a firsthand account on the telephone from Hermann Fegelein, his S.S. liaison officer at headquarters, he exclaimed to his entourage, "Everyone is mad in Berlin! What am I to do?"

 

"You go straight to Berlin," replied one of Himmler's principal aides, Obergruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger, the chief of the S.S. head office. Berger was one of those simple Germans who sincerely believed in National Socialism. He had no idea that his revered chief, Himmler, under the prodding of S.S. General Walter Schellenberg, was already in touch with Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden about surrendering the German armies in the West. "I am going to Berlin," Berger said to Himmler, "and it is your duty to go too."

 

Berger, but not Himmler, went to Berlin that night and his visit is of interest because of his firsthand description of Hitler on the night of his great decision. Russian shells were already bursting near the Chancellery when Berger arrived. To his shock he found the Fuehrer "a broken man -- finished." When he ventured to express his appreciation of Hitler's resolve to remain in Berlin -- "one couldn't desert the people after they had held out so loyally and long," he says he declared -- the very words touched off the Leader again.

 

[quote]All this time [Berger later recounted] the Fuehrer had never uttered a word; then suddenly he shrieked: "Everyone has deceived me! No one has told me the truth! The Armed Forces have lied to me!" ... He went on and on in a loud voice. Then his face went bluish purple. I thought he was going to have a stroke any minute ...[/quote]

 

Berger was also the head of Himmler's Prisoner-of-War Administration, and after the Fuehrer had calmed down they discussed the fate of a group of prominent British, French and American prisoners as well as of such Germans as Halder and Schacht and the former Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, who were being moved southeast to keep them out of the hands of the Americans advancing through Germany. Berger was flying to Bavaria that night to take charge of them. The two men also talked of reports that there had been outbreaks of separatism in Austria and Bavaria. The idea that revolt could break out in his native Austria and in his adopted Bavaria once more convulsed Hitler.

 

[quote]His hand was shaking, his leg was shaking and his head was shaking; and all that he kept saying [Berger reported] was: "Shoot them all! Shoot them all!" [13][/quote]

 

Whether this was an order to shoot all the separatists or all the distinguished prisoners, or both, was not clear to Berger, but apparently to this simple man it meant the whole lot.

 

[b]GOERING AND HIMMLER TRY TO TAKE OVER[/b]

 

General Koller had stayed away from the Fuehrer's military conference on April 22. He had the Luftwaffe to look after, and "besides," he says in his diary, "I should never have been able to tolerate being insulted all day long."

 

General Eckard Christian, his liaison officer at the bunker, had rung him up at 6: 15 P.M. and in a breathless voice had said, "Historical even:s, the most decisive of the war, are taking place here!" A couple of hours later Christian arrived at Air Force headquarters at Wildpark-Werder on the outskirts of Berlin to report to Koller in person. "The Fuehrer has broken down!" Christian, an ardent Nazi who had married one of Hitler's secretaries, gasped, but beyond saying that the Leader had decided to meet his end in Berlin and was burning his papers, he was so incoherent that the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff set out, despite a heavy British bombing that had just begun, to find General Jodl and ascertain just what had happened that day in the bunker.

 

At Krampnitz, between Berlin and Potsdam, where the now Fuehrerless OKW had set up temporary headquarters, he found him, and Jodl told his Air Force friend the whole sad story. He also revealed something which no one else had yet mentioned to Koller and which was to lead to a certain denouement during the next few frantic days.

 

"When it comes to negotiating [for peace]," Hitler had told Keitel and Jodl, "Goering can do better than 1. Goering is much better at those things. He can deal much better with the other side." Jodl now repeated this to Koller. [14]

 

The Air Force General felt that it was his duty to immediately fly to Goering. It would be difficult and also dangerous, in view of the enemy's monitoring, to try to explain this new development in a radio message. If Goering, who had been officially named by Hitler years before as his successor-designate, were to take over peace negotiations, as the Fuehrer had suggested, there was no time to lose. Jodl agreed. At 3: 30 on the morning of April 23 Koller took off in a fighter plane and sped toward Munich.

 

At noon he arrived on the Obersalzberg and delivered his news to the Reich Marshal. Goering, who had been looking forward, to put it mildly, to the day when he might succeed Hitler, was more circumspect than might have been expected. He did not want to lay himself open, he said, to the machinations of his "deadly enemy," Bormann, a precaution which, as it turned out, was well founded. He perspired under his dilemma. "If I act now," he told his advisers, "I may be stamped as a traitor; if I don't act, I'll be accused of having failed to do something in the hour of disaster."

 

Goering sent for Hans Lammers, the State Secretary of the Reich Chancellery, who was in Berchtesgaden, for legal advice and also fetched from his safe a copy of the Fuehrer's decree of June 29, 1941. The decree was quite clear. It stipulated that if Hitler died Goering was to be his successor and that if the Fuehrer were incapacitated Goering was to act as his deputy. All agreed that by remaining in Berlin to die, cut off in his last hours from both the military commands and the government offices, Hitler was incapacitated from governing and that it was Goering's clear duty under the decree to take over.

 

Nevertheless the Reich Marshal drafted his telegram to Hitler with great care. He wanted to make sure of the delegation of authority.

 

[quote]MY FUEHRER!

 

In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o'clock tonight, I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider the conditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of our country and our people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all.

 

Your loyal

Hermann Goering[/quote]

 

That very evening several hundred miles away Heinrich Himmler was meeting with Count Bernadotte in the Swedish consulate at Luebeck on the Baltic. Der treue Heinrich -- the loyal Heinrich, as Hitler had often fondly referred to him -- was not asking for the powers of succession; he was already assuming them.

 

"The Fuehrer's great life," he told the Swedish count, "is drawing to a close." In a day or two, he said, Hitler would be dead. Whereupon Himmler urged Bernadotte to communicate to General Eisenhower immediately Germany's willingness to surrender to the West. In the East, Himmler added, the war would be continued until the Western Powers themselves had taken over the front against the Russians -- such was the naivete, or stupidity, or both, of this S.S. chieftain who now claimed for himself the dictatorship of the Third Reich. When Bernadotte asked that Himmler put in writing his offer to surrender, a letter was hastily drafted by candlelight -- for an R.A.F. bombing that night had shut off the electricity in Luebeck and driven the conferees to the cellar. Himmler signed it. [15]

 

Both Goering and Himmler had acted prematurely, as they quickly found out. Although Hitler was cut off from all but a scanty radio communication with his armies and his ministries -- for the Russians had nearly completed their encirclement of the capital by the evening of the twenty-third -- he was now to demonstrate that he could rule Germany by the power of his personality and prestige alone and quell "treason," even by the most eminent of his followers, by a mere word over his creaky wireless transmitter suspended from a balloon above the bunker.

 

Albert Speer and a remarkable lady witness whose dramatic appearance in the last act of the drama in Berlin will shortly be noted have described Hitler's reaction to Goering's telegram. Speer had flown into the besieged capital on the night of April 23, landing in a cub plane on the eastern end of the East-West Axis -- the broad avenue which led through the Tiergarten --  at the Brandenburg Gate, a block from the Chancellery. Having learned that Hitler had decided to remain in Berlin to the end, which could not be far off, Speer had come to say his farewell to the Leader and to confess to him that his "conflict between personal loyalty and public duty," as he puts it, had forced him to sabotage the Fuehrer's scorched-earth policy. He fully expected to be arrested for "treason" and probably shot, and no doubt he would have been had the dictator known of Speer's effort two months before to kill him and all the others who had escaped Stauffenberg's bomb.

 

The brilliant architect and Armament Minister, though he had always prided himself on being apolitical, had had, like some other Germans, a late -- a too late-awakening. When he had finally realized that his beloved Fuehrer was determined through his scorched-earth decrees to destroy the German people he had decided to murder him. His plan was to introduce poison gas into the ventilation system in the bunker in Berlin during a full-dress military conference. Since not only the generals but invariably Goering, Himmler and Goebbels now attended these, Speer hoped to wipe out the entire Nazi leadership of the Third Reich as well as the High Command. He procured his gas, inspected the air-conditioning system and then discovered, he says, that the air-intake pipe in the garden was protected by a twelve-foot-high chimney, recently installed on Hitler's personal orders to discourage sabotage, and that it would be impossible to inject his gas into it without being interrupted by the S.S. guards in the garden. So he abandoned his project and Hitler once again escaped assassination.

 

Now on the evening of April 23 Speer made a full confession of his insubordination in refusing to carry out the wanton destruction of Germany's remaining installations. To his surprise Hitler showed no resentment or anger. Perhaps the Fuehrer was touched by the candor and courage of his young friend -- Speer had just turned forty -- for whom he had long had a deep affection and whom he regarded as a "fellow artist." Hitler, as Keitel also noted, seemed strangely serene that evening, as though having made up his mind to die in this place within a few days had brought a peace of mind and spirit. But it was the calm not only after the storm -- of the previous day -- but before the storm.

 

For Goering's telegram had meanwhile arrived in the Chancellery and after being held up by Bormann, who saw his opportunity at last, was presented to the Fuehrer by this master of intrigue as an "ultimatum" and as a treasonous attempt to "usurp" the Leader's power.

 

"Hitler was highly enraged," says Speer, "and expressed himself very strongly about Goering. He said he had known for some time that Goering had failed, that he was corrupt and a drug addict" -- a statement which "extremely shook" the young architect, since he wondered why Hitler had employed such a man in so high a post so long. Speer was also puzzled when Hitler calmed down and added, "Well, let Goering negotiate the capitulation all the same. It doesn't matter anyway who does it." [16] But this mood lasted only a few moments.

 

Before the discussion was finished, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, dictated a telegram informing Goering that he had committed "high treason," for which the penalty was death, but that because of his long service to the Nazi Party and State his life would be spared if he immediately resigned all his offices. He was ordered to answer with one word: Yes or No. This did not satisfy the wormlike Bormann. On his own hook he got off a radiogram to the S.S. headquarters in Berchtesgaden ordering the immediate arrest of Goering, his staff and Lammers for "high treason." Before dawn the next day the Number Two man of the Third Reich, the most arrogant -- and opulent -- of the Nazi princes, the only Reich Marshal in German history and the Commander in Chief of the Air Force, found himself a prisoner of the S.S.

 

Three days later, on the evening of April 26, Hitler expressed himself even more strongly on the subject of Goering than he had in the presence of Speer.

 

[b]THE LAST TWO VISITORS TO THE BUNKER[/b]

 

Two more interesting visitors had meanwhile arrived in the madhouse of the Fuehrer's bunker: Hanna Reitsch, the crack woman test pilot who, among other qualities, had a capacity for monumental hatred, especially of Goering, and General Ritter von Greim, who on April 24 had been summoned from Munich to appear personally before the Supreme Warlord and had done so, though the plane in which he and Reitsch flew the last lap on the evening of the twenty-sixth had been torn over the Tiergarten by Russian antiaircraft shells and Greim's foot had been shattered.

 

Hitler came into the surgery, where a physician was dressing the general's wound.

 

[quote]HITLER: Do you know why I have called you?

 

GREIM: No, my Fuehrer.

 

HITLER: Because Hermann Goering has betrayed and deserted both me and his Fatherland. Behind my back he has established contact with the enemy. His action was a mark of cowardice. Against my orders he has gone to save himself at Berchtesgaden. From there he sent me a disrespectful telegram. It was ...[/quote]

 

At this point, says Hanna Reitsch, who was present, the Fuehrer's face began to twitch and his breath came in explosive puffs.

 

[quote]HITLER: ... an ultimatum! A crass ultimatum! Now nothing remains. Nothing is spared me. No allegiances are kept, no honor lived up to, no disappointments that I have not had, no betrayals that I have not experienced, and now this above all else! Nothing remains. Every wrong has already been done me.

 

I immediately had Goering arrested as a traitor to the Reich, took from him all his offices, and removed him from all organizations. That is why I have called you. [17][/quote]

 

Then and there he named the startled General lying wounded on his cot the new Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe -- a promotion he could have made by radio, which would have spared Greim a crippled foot and left him at headquarters, the only place from which what was left of the Air Force could be directed. Three days later Hitler ordered Greim, who by now, like Fraulein Reitsch, expected and indeed desired to die in the bunker at the side of the Leader, to depart in order to deal with a new case of "treachery." For "treason," as we have seen, was not confined among the leaders of the Third Reich to Hermann Goering.

 

During those three days Hanna Reitsch had ample opportunity to observe the lunatic life in the underground madhouse -- indeed, she participated in it. Since she was as emotionally unstable as her distinguished host, the account she has left of it is lurid and melodramatic, and yet it is probably largely true and even fairly accurate, for it has been checked against other eyewitness reports, and is thus of importance for the closing chapter of this history.

 

Late on the night of her arrival with General von Greim -- it was April 26 -- Russian shells began falling on the Chancellery and the thud of the explosions and the sound of crashing walls above increased the tension in the bunker. Hitler took the aviatrix aside.

 

"My Fuehrer, why do you stay?" she said. "Why do you deprive Germany of your life? ... The Fuehrer must live so that Germany can live. The people demand it."

 

"No, Hanna," she says the Fuehrer replied. "If I die it is for the honor of our country, it is because as a soldier I must obey my own command that I would defend Berlin to the last."

 

[quote]My dear girl [he continued], I did not intend it so. I believed firmly that Berlin would be saved on the banks of the Oder ... When our best efforts failed I was the most horror-struck of all. Then when the encirclement of the city began ... I believed that by staying all the troops of the land would take example from my act and come to the rescue of the city ... But, my Hanna, I still have hope. The army of General Wenck is moving up from the south. He must and will drive the Russians back long enough to save our people. Then we will fall back to hold again. [18][/quote]

 

That was one mood of Hitler that evening; he still had hope in General Wenck's relieving Berlin. But a few moments later, as the Russian bombardment of the Chancellery reached great intensity, he was in despair again. He handed Reitsch a vial of poison for herself and one for Greim.

 

"Hanna," he said, "you belong to those who will die with me ... I do not wish that one of us falls to the Russians alive, nor do I wish our bodies to be found by them ... Eva and I will have our bodies burned. You will devise your own method."

 

Hanna took the vial of poison to Greim and they decided that "should the end really come" they would swallow the poison and then, to make sure, pull a pin from a heavy grenade and hold it tightly to their bodies.

 

A day and a half later, on the twenty-eighth, Hitler's hopes seem to have risen again -- or at least his delusions. He radioed Keitel:

 

"I expect the relief of Berlin. What is Heinrici's army doing? Where is Wenck? What is happening to the Ninth Army? When will Wenck and Ninth Army join?" [19]

 

Reitsch describes the Supreme Warlord that day, striding

 

[quote]about the shelter, waving a road map that was fast disintegrating from the sweat of his hands and planning Wenck's campaign with anyone who happened to be listening.[/quote]

 

But Wenck's "campaign," like the Steiner "attack" of a week before, existed only in the Fuehrer's imagination. Wenck's army had already been liquidated, as had the Ninth Army. Heinrici's army, to the north of Berlin, was beating a hasty retreat westward so that it might be captured by the Western Allies instead of by the Russians.

 

All through April 28 the desperate men in the bunker waited for news of the counterattacks of these three armies, especially that of Wenck. Russian spearheads were now but a few blocks from the Chancellery and advancing slowly toward it up several streets from the east and north and through the nearby Tiergarten from the west. When no news of the relieving forces came, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, began to expect new treacheries. At 8 P.M. Bormann got out a radiogram to Doenitz.

 

[quote]Instead of urging the troops forward to our rescue, the men in authority are silent. Treachery seems to have replaced loyalty! We remain here. The Chancellery is already in ruins.[/quote]

 

Later that night Bormann sent another message to Doenitz.

 

[quote]Schoerner, Wenck and others must prove their loyalty to the Fuehrer by coming to the Fuehrer's aid as soon as possible. [20][/quote]

 

Bormann was now speaking for himself. Hitler had made up his mind to die in a day or two, but Bormann wanted to live. He might not succeed the Fuehrer but he wanted to continue to pull the strings behind the scenes for whoever did.

 

Finally, that night Admiral Voss got out a message to Doenitz saying that all radio connection with the Army had broken down and urgently requesting the Navy to send over the naval wave length some news of what was happening in the outside world. Very shortly some news came, not from the Navy but from the listening post in the Propaganda Ministry, and it was shattering for Adolf Hitler.

 

Besides Bormann there was another Nazi official in the bunker who wanted to live. This was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's representative at court and typical of the type of German who rose to prominence under Hitler's rule. A former groom and then a jockey and quite illiterate, he was a protege of the notorious Christian Weber, one of Hitler's oldest party cronies and himself a horse fancier, who by fraudulence had amassed a fortune and a great racing stable after 1933. Fegelein, with Weber's help, had climbed quite high in the Third Reich. He was a general in the Waffen S.S. and in 1944, shortly after being appointed Himmler's liaison officer at Fuehrer headquarters, he had further advanced his position at court by marrying Eva Braun's sister, Gretl. All the surviving S.S. chiefs agree that, in alliance with Bormann, Fegelein lost no time in betraying his own S.S. chief, Himmler, to Hitler. But disreputable, illiterate and ignorant though he was, Fegelein seems to have been possessed of a simon -- pure instinct for survival. He knew a sinking ship when he saw one.

 

On April 26 he quietly left the bunker. By the next afternoon Hitler had noticed his disappearance. The Fuehrer's easily aroused suspicions were kindled and he sent out an armed S.S. search party to try to find the man. He was found, in civilian clothes, resting in his home in the Charlottenburg district, which the Russians were about to overrun. Brought back to the Chancellery, he was stripped of his S.S. rank of Obergruppenfuehrer and placed under arrest. Fegelein's attempt at desertion made Hitler immediately suspicious of Himmler. What was the S.S. chief up to, now that he had deliberately absented himself from Berlin? There had been no news since his liaison officer, Fegelein, had quit his post. It now came.

 

April 28, as we have seen, had been a trying day in the bunker. The Russians were getting close. The expected news of Wenck's counterattack, or of any counterattack, had not come through. Desperately the besieged had asked, through the Navy's radio, for news of developments outside the encircled city.

 

The radio listening post of the Propaganda Ministry had picked up from a broadcast of the BBC in London one piece of news of what was happening outside Berlin. It was a Reuter dispatch from Stockholm and it was so sensational, so incredible, that one of Goebbels' assistants, Heinz Lorenz, had scampered across the shell-torn square late on the evening of April 28 to the bunker with copies of it for his Minister and for the Fuehrer.

 

The dispatch, says Reitsch, struck "a deathblow to the entire assembly. Men and women alike screamed with rage, fear and desperation, all mixed into one emotional spasm." Hitler's spasm was the worst. "He raged," says the aviatrix, "like a madman."

 

Heinrich Himmler -- der treue Heinrich -- had also deserted the sinking ship of state. The Reuter dispatch told of his secret negotiations with Count Bernadotte and his offer to surrender the German armies in the West to Eisenhower.

 

To Hitler, who had never doubted Himmler's absolute loyalty, this was the heaviest blow of all. "His color," says Reitsch, "rose to a heated red and his face was virtually unrecognizable ... After the lengthy outburst Hitler sank into a stupor and for a time the entire bunker was silent." Goering at least had asked the Leader's permission to take over. But the "treue" S.S. chief and Reichsfuehrer had not bothered to ask; he had treasonably contacted the enemy without saying a word. This, Hitler told his followers when he had somewhat recovered, was the worst act of treachery he had ever known.

 

This blow -- coupled with the news received a few minutes later that the Russians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, but a block away, and would probably storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, thirty hours hence -- was the signal for the end. It forced Hitler to make immediately the last decisions of his life. By dawn he had married Eva Braun, drawn up his last will and testament, dispatched Greim and Hanna Reitsch to rally the Luftwaffe for an all-out bombing of the Russian forces approaching the Chancellery, and ordered them also to arrest Himmler as a traitor.

 

"A traitor must never succeed me as Fuehrer!" Hanna says he told them. "You must get out to insure that he will not."

 

Hitler could not wait to begin his revenge against Himmler. He had the S.S. chief's liaison man, Fegelein, in his hands. The former jockey and present S.S. General was now brought out of the guardhouse, closely questioned as to Himmler's "betrayal," accused of having been an accomplice in it, and on the Fuehrer's orders taken up to the Chancellery garden and shot. The fact that Fegelein was married to Eva Braun's sister did not help him. Eva made no effort to save her brother-in-law's life.

 

"Poor, poor Adolf," she whimpered to Hanna Reitsch, "deserted by everyone, betrayed by all. Better that ten thousand others die than that he be lost to Germany."

 

He was lost to Germany but in those final hours he was won by Eva Braun. Sometime between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M. on April 29, as a crowning award for her loyalty to the end, he accorded his mistress's wish and formally married her. He had always said that marriage would interfere with his complete dedication to leading first his party to power and then his nation to the heights. Now that there was no more leading to do and his life was at an end, he could safely enter into a marriage which could last only a few hours.

 

Goebbels rounded up a municipal councilor, one Walter Wagner, who was fighting in a unit of the Volkssturm not many blocks away, and this surprised official performed the ceremony in the small conference room of the bunker. The marriage document survives and gives part of the picture of what one of the Fuehrer's secretaries described as the "death marriage.'' Hitler asked that "in view of war developments the publication of the banns be done orally and all other delays be avoided." [b][size=120]The bride- and groom-to-be swore they were "of complete Aryan descent" and had "no hereditary disease to exclude their marriage." On the eve of death the dictator insisted on sticking to form. Only in the spaces given to the name of his father (born Schicklgruber) and his mother and the date of their marriage did Hitler leave a blank.[/b][/size] His bride started to sign her name "Eva Braun," but stopped, crossed out the "B" and wrote "Eva Hitler, born Braun." Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses.

 

After the brief ceremony there was a macabre wedding breakfast in the Fuehrer's private apartment. Champagne was brought out and even Fraulein Manzialy, Hitler's vegetarian cook, was invited, along with his secretaries, the remaining generals, Krebs and Burgdorf, Bormann and Dr. and Frau Goebbels, to share in the wedding celebration. For a time the talk gravitated to the good old times and the party comrades of better days. Hitler spoke fondly of the occasion on which he had been best man at the Goebbels wedding. As was his custom, even to the very last, the bridegroom talked on and on, reviewing the high points in his dramatic life. Now it was ended, he said, and so was National Socialism. It would be a release for him to die, since he had been betrayed by his oldest friends and supporters. The wedding party was plunged into gloom and some of the guests stole away in tears. Hitler finally slipped away himself. In an adjoining room he summoned one of his secretaries, Frau Gertrude Junge, and began to dictate his last will and testament.

 

[b]HITLER'S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT[/b]

 

These two documents survive, as Hitler meant them to, and like others of his papers they are significant to this narrative. They confirm that the man who had ruled over Germany with an iron hand for more than twelve years, and over most of Europe for four, had learned nothing from his experience; not even his reverses and shattering final failure had taught him anything. Indeed, in the last hours of his life he reverted to the young man he had been in the gutter days in Vienna and in the early rowdy beer hall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for all the ills of the world, spinning his half-baked theories about the universe, and whining that fate once more had cheated Germany of victory and conquest. In this valedictory to the German nation and to the world which was also meant to be a last, conclusive appeal to history, Adolf Hitler dredged up all the empty claptrap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaph of a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and destroyed.

 

The "Political Testament," as he called it, was divided into two parts, the first consisting of his appeal to posterity, the second of his specific directions for the future.

 

[quote]More than thirty years have passed since I made my modest contribution as a volunteer in the First World War, which was forced upon the Reich.

 

In these three decades, love and loyalty to my people alone have guided me in all my thoughts, actions and life. They gave me power to make the most difficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man ...

 

It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests.

 

I have made too many offers for the limitation and control of armaments. which posterity will not for all time be able to disregard, for responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be placed on me. Further, I have never wished that after the appalling First World War there should be a second one against either England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its helpers.[/quote]

 

Hitler then repeated the lie that three days before the attack on Poland he had proposed to the British government a reasonable solution of the Polish-German problem.

 

[quote]It was rejected only because the ruling clique in England wanted war, partly for commercial reasons, partly because it was influenced by propaganda put out by the international Jewry.[/quote]

 

Next he placed "sole responsibility" not only for the millions of deaths suffered on the battlefields and in the bombed cities but for his own massacre of the Jews -- on the Jews. Then he turned to the reasons for his decision to remain in Berlin to the last.

 

[quote]After six years of war, which in spite of all setbacks will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a nation, I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of this state ... I wish to share my fate with that which millions of others have also taken upon themselves by staying in this town. Further, I shall not fall in the hands of the enemy, who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical masses.

 

I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin and there to choose death voluntarily at that moment when I believe that the position of the Fuehrer and the Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained. I die with a joyful heart in my knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in history of our youth which bears my name.[/quote]

 

There followed an exhortation to all Germans "not to give up the struggle." He had finally forced himself to recognize, though, that National Socialism was finished for the moment, but he assured his fellow Germans that from the sacrifices of the soldiers and of himself

 

[quote]the seed has been sown that will grow one day ... to the glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement of a truly united nation.[/quote]

 

Hitler could not die without first hurling one last insult at the Army and especially at its officer corps, whom he held chiefly responsible for the disaster. Though he confessed that Nazism was dead, at least for the moment, he nevertheless adjured the commanders of the three armed services

 

[quote]to strengthen with every possible means the spirit of resistance of our soldiers in the National Socialist belief, with special emphasis on the fact that I myself, as the founder and creator of this movement, prefer death to cowardly resignation or even to capitulation.[/quote]

 

Then the jibe at the Army officer caste:

 

[quote]May it be in the future a point of honor with the German Army officers, as it already is in our Navy, that the surrender of a district or town is out of the question and that, above everything else, the commanders must set a shining example of faithful devotion to duty unto death.[/quote]

 

It was Hitler's insistence that "a district or town" must be held "unto death," as at Stalingrad, which had helped bring about military disaster. But in this, as in other things, he had learned nothing.

 

The second part of the Political Testament dealt with the question of succession. Though the Third Reich was going up in flames and explosions, Hitler could not bear to die without naming his successor and dictating the exact composition of the government which that successor must appoint. First he had to eliminate his would-be successors.

 

[quote]Before my death, I expel former Reich Marshal Hermann Goering from the party and withdraw from him al1 the rights that were conferred on him by the decree of June 20, 1941 ... In his place I appoint Admiral Doenitz as President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

 

Before my death, I expel the fanner Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. and the Minister of Interior Heinrich Himmler from the party and from all his state offices.[/quote]

 

The leaders of the Army, the Air Force and the S.S., he believed, had betrayed him, had cheated him of victory. So his only possible choice of successor had to be the leader of the Navy, which had been too small to playa major role in Hitler's war of conquest. This was a final jibe at the Army, which had done most of the fighting and lost most of the men killed in the war. There was also a last parting denunciation of the two men who had been, with Goebbels, his most intimate collaborators since the early days of the party.

 

[quote]Apart altogether from their disloyalty to me, Goering and Himmler have brought irreparable shame on the whole nation by secretly negotiating with the enemy without my knowledge and against my will, and also by illegally attempting to seize control of the State.[/quote]

 

Having expelled the traitors and named his successor, Hitler then proceeded to tell Doenitz whom he must have in his new government. They were all "honorable men," he said, "who will fulfill the task of continuing the war with all means." Goebbels was to be the Chancellor and Bormann the "Party Minister" -- a new post. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling and, most recently, the butcher governor of Holland, was to be Foreign Minister. Speer, like Ribbentrop, was dropped. But Count Schwerin von Krosigk, who had been Minister of Finance continuously since his appointment by Papen in 1932, was to retain that post. This man was a fool, but it must be admitted that he had a genius for survival.

 

Hitler not only named his successor's government. He imparted one last typical directive to it.

 

[quote]Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry. [21][/quote]

 

With that the Supreme German Warlord was finished. The time was now 4 A.M. on Sunday, April 29. Hitler called in Goebbels, Bormann and Generals Krebs and Burgdorf to witness his signing of the document, and to affix their own signatures. He then quickly dictated his personal will. In this the Man of Destiny reverted to his lower-middle-class origins in Austria, explaining why he had married and why he and his bride were killing themselves, and disposing of his property, which he hoped would be enough to support his surviving relatives in a modest way. At least Hitler had not used his power to amass a vast private fortune, as had Goering.

 

[quote]Although during the years of struggle I believed that I could not undertake the responsibility of marriage, now, before the end of my life, I have decided to take as my wife the woman who, after many years of true friendship, came to this city, already almost besieged, of her own free will in order to share my fate.

 

She will go to her death with me at her own wish as my wife. This will compensate us both for what we lost through my work in the service of my people.

 

My possessions, insofar as they are worth anything, belong to the party, or, if this no longer exists, to the State. If the State too is destroyed, there is no need for any further instructions on my part. The paintings in the collections bought by me during the years were never assembled for private purposes but solely for the establishment of a picture gallery in my home town of Linz on the Danube.[/quote]

 

Bormann, as executor, was asked

 

[quote]to hand over to my relatives everything that is of value as a personal memento or is necessary for maintaining a petty-bourgeois [kleinen buergerlichen] standard of living ... [ii]

 

My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation. It is our wish that our bodies be burned immediately in the place where I have performed the greater part of my daily work during the twelve years of service to my people.[/quote]

 

Exhausted by the dictation of his farewell messages, Hitler went to bed as dawn was breaking over Berlin on this last Sabbath of his life. A pall of smoke hung over the city. Buildings crashed in flames as the Russians fired their artillery at point-blank range. They were now not far from the Wilhelmstrasse and the Chancellery.

 

While Hitler slept, Goebbels and Bormann made haste. In his Political Testament, which they had signed as witnesses, the Fuehrer had specifically ordered them to leave the capital and join the new government. Bormann was more than willing to obey. For all his devotion to the Leader, he did not intend to share his death, if he could avoid it. The only thing in life he wanted was power behind the scenes, and Doenitz might still offer him this. That is, if Goering, on learning of the Fuehrer's death, did not try to usurp the throne. To make sure that he did not, Bormann now got out a radio message to the S.S. headquarters at Berchtesgaden.

 

[quote]If Berlin and we should fallm the traitors of April 23 must be exterminated. Men, do your duty! Your life and honor depend on it! [22][/quote]

 

This was an order to murder Goering and his Air Force staff, whom Bormann had already placed under S.S. arrest.

 

Dr. Goebbels, like Eva Braun but unlike Bormann, had no desire to live in a Germany from which his revered Fuehrer had departed. He had hitched his star to Hitler, to whom alone he owed his sensational rise in life. He had been the chief prophet and propagandist of the Nazi movement. It was he who, next to Hitler, had created its myths. To perpetuate those myths not only the Leader but his most loyal follower, the only one of the Old Guard who had not betrayed him, must die a sacrificial death. He too must give an example that would be remembered down the ages and help one day to rekindle the fires of National Socialism.

 

Such seem to have been his thoughts when, after Hitler retired, Goebbels repaired to his little room in the bunker to write his own valedictory to present and future generations. He entitled it "Appendix to the Fuehrer's Political Testament."

 

[quote]The Fuehrer has ordered me to leave Berlin ... and take part as a leading member in the government appointed by him.

 

For the first time in my life I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Fuehrer. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and personal loyalty forbid us to abandon the Fuehrer in his hour of greatest need, I would otherwise appear for the rest of my life as a dishonorable traitor and a common scoundrel and would lose my self-respect as well as the respect of my fellow citizens ...

 

In the nightmare of treason which surrounds the Fuehrer in these most critical days of the war, there must be someone at least who will stay with him unconditionally until death ...

 

I believe I am thereby doing the best service to the future of the German people. In the hard times to come, examples will be more important than men ...

 

For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to be able to speak for themselves and who, if they were old enough, would unreservedly agree with this decision, I express my unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it falls, but rather, at the side of the Fuehrer, to end a life that for me personally will have no further value if I cannot spend it at the service of the Fuehrer and at his side. [23][/quote]

 

Dr. Goebbels finished writing his piece at half past five on the morning of April 29. Daylight was breaking over Berlin, but the sun was obscured by the smoke of battle. In the electric light of the bunker much remained to be done. The first consideration was how to get the Fuehrer's last will and testament out through the nearby Russian lines so that it could be delivered to Doenitz and others and preserved for posterity.

 

Three messengers were chosen to take copies of the precious documents out: Major Willi Johannmeier, Hitler's military adjutant; Wilhelm Zander, an 5.S. officer and adviser to Bormann; and Heinz Lorenz, the Propaganda Ministry official who had brought the shattering news of Himmler's treachery the night before. Johannmeier, a much decorated officer, was to lead the party through the Red Army's lines. He himself was then to deliver his copy of the papers to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner, whose army group still held out intact in the Bohemian mountains and whom Hitler had named as the new Commander in Chief of the Army. General Burgdorf enclosed a covering letter informing Schoerner that Hitler had written his Testament "today under the shattering news of Himmler's treachery. It is his unalterahle decision." Zander and Lorenz were to take their copies to Doenitz. Zander was given a covering note from Bormann.

 

[quote]DEAR GRAND ADMIRAL:

 

Since all divisions have failed to arrive and our position seems hopeless. the Fuehrer dictated last night the attached political Testament. Heil Hitler.[/quote]

 

The three messengers set out on their dangerous mission at noon, edging their way westward through the Tiergarten and Charlottenburg to Pichelsdorf at the head of the Havel lake, where a Hitler Youth battalion held the bridge in anticipation of the arrival of Wenck's ghost army. To get that far they had successfully slipped through three Russian rings; at the Victory Column in the middle of the Tiergarten, at the Zoo Station just beyond the park, and on the approaches to Pichelsdorf. They still had many other lines to penetrate, and much adventure lay ahead of them,  [iii] and though they eventually got through it was much too late for their messages to be of any use to Doenitz and Schoerner, who never saw them.

 

The three messengers were not the only persons to depart from the bunker that day. At noon on April 29, Hitler, who had now been restored to a period of calm, held his customary war conference to discuss the military situation, just as he had daily at this hour for nearly six years -- and just as if the end of the road had not been reached. General Krebs reported that the Russians had advanced farther toward the Chancellery during the night and early morning. The supply of ammunition of the city's defenders, such as they were, was getting low. There was still no news from Wenck's rescue army. Three military adjutants, who now found little to do and who did not want to join the Leader in self-inflicted death, asked if they could leave the bunker in order to try to find out what had happened to Wenck. Hitler granted them permission and instructed them to urge General Wenck to get a move on. During the afternoon the three officers left.

 

They were soon joined by a fourth, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, who had been a junior member of the inner circle since the beginning of the war. Below too did not believe in suicide and felt that there was no longer any useful employment in the Chancellery shelter. He asked the permission of the Fuehrer to leave and it was granted. Hitler was being most reasonable this day. It also occurred to him that he could utilize the Air Force colonel to carry out one last message. This was to be to General Keitel, whom Bormann already suspected of treason, and it would contain the warlord's final blast at the Army, which, he felt, had let him down.

 

No doubt the news at the evening situation conference at 10 P.M. increased the Fuehrer's already monumental bitterness at the Army. General Weidling, who commanded the courageous but ragged overage Volkssturm and underage Hitler Youth troops being sacrificed in encircled Berlin to prolong Hitler's life a few days, reported that the Russians had pushed ahead along the Saarlandstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse almost to the Air Ministry, which was only a stone's throw from the Chancellery. The enemy would reach the Chancellery, he said, by May 1 at the latest -- in a day or two, that is.

 

This was the end. Even Hitler, who up until now had been directing nonexistent armies supposed to be coming to the relief of the capital, saw that -- at last. He dictated his final message and asked Below to deliver it to Keitel. He informed his Chief of OKW that the defense of Berlin was now at an end, that he was killing himself rather than surrender, that Goering and Himmler had betrayed him, and that he had named Admiral Doenitz as his successor.

 

He had one last word to say about the armed forces which, despite his leadership, had brought Germany to defeat. The Navy, he said, had performed superbly. The Luftwaffe had fought bravely and only Goering was responsible for its losing its initial supremacy in the war. As for the Army, the common soldiers had fought well and courageously, but the generals had failed them -- and him.

 

[quote]The people and the armed forces [he continued] have given their all in this long and hard struggle. The sacrifice has been enormous. But my trust has been misused by many people. Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined resistance throughout the war.

 

It was therefore not granted to me to lead the people to victory. The Army General Staff cannot be compared with the General Staff in the First World War. Its achievements were far behind those of the fighting front.[/quote]

 

At least the Supreme Nazi Warlord was remaining true to character to the very end. The great victories had been due to him. The defeats and final failure had been due to others -- to their "disloyalty and betrayal."

 

And then the parting valediction -- the last recorded written words of this mad genius's life.

 

[quote]The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people. [iv][/quote]

 

The last sentence was straight out of Mein Kampf. Hitler had begun his political life with the obsession that "territory in the East" must be won for the favored German people, and he was ending his life with it. All the millions of German dead, all the millions of German homes crushed under the bombs, even the destruction of the German nation had not convinced him that the robbing of the lands of the Slavic peoples to the East was -- morals aside -- a futile Teutonic dream.

 

[b]THE DEATH OF HITLER AND HIS BRIDE[/b]

 

During the afternoon of April 29 one of the last pieces of news to reach the bunker from the outside world came in. Mussolini, Hitler's fellow fascist dictator and partner in aggression, had met his end and it had been shared by his mistress, Clara Petacci.

 

They had been caught by Italian partisans on April 26 while trying to escape from Como into Switzerland, and executed two days later. On the Saturday night of April 28 the bodies were brought to Milan in a truck and dumped on the piazza. The next day they were strung up by the heels from lampposts and later cut down so that throughout the rest of the Sabbath day they lay in the gutter, where vengeful Italians reviled them. On May Day Benito Mussolini was buried beside his mistress in the paupers' plot in the Cimitero Maggiore in Milan. In such a macabre climax of degradation Il Duce and Fascism passed into history.

 

It is not known how many of the details of the Duce's shabby end were communicated to the Fuehrer. One can only speculate that if he heard many of them he was only strengthened in his resolve not to allow himself or his bride to be made a "spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical masses," -- as he had just written in his Testament -- not their live selves or their bodies.

 

Shortly after receiving the news of Mussolini's death Hitler began to make the final preparations for his. He had his favorite Alsatian dog, Blondi, poisoned and two other dogs in the household shot. Then he called in his two remaining women secretaries and handed them capsules of poison to use if they wished to when the barbarian Russians broke in. He was sorry, he said, not to be able to give them a better farewell gift, and he expressed his appreciation for their long and loyal service.

 

Evening had now come, the last of Adolf Hitler's life. He instructed Frau Junge, one of his secretaries, to destroy the remaining papers in his files and he sent out word that no one in the bunker was to go to bed until further orders. This was interpreted by all as meaning that he judged the time had come to make his farewells. But it was not until long after midnight, at about 2:30 A.M. of April 30, as several witnesses recall, that the Fuehrer emerged from his private quarters and appeared in the general dining passage, where some twenty persons, mostly the women members of his entourage, were assembled. He walked down the line shaking hands with each and mumbling a few words that were inaudible. There was a heavy film of moisture on his eyes and, as Frau Junge remembered, "they seemed to be looking far away, beyond the walls of the bunker."

 

After he retired, a curious thing happened. The tension which had been building up to an almost unendurable point in the bunker broke, and several persons went to the canteen -- to dance. The weird party soon became so noisy that word was sent from the Fuehrer's quarters requesting more quiet. The Russians might come in a few hours and kill them all -- though most of them were already thinking of how they could escape -- but in the meantime for a brief spell, now that the Fuehrer's strict control of their lives was over, they would seek pleasure where and how they could find it. The sense of relief among these people seems to have been enormous and they danced on through the night.

 

Not Bormann. This murky man still had work to do. His own prospects for survival seemed to be diminishing. There might not be a long enough interval between the Fuehrer's death and the arrival of the Russians in which he could escape to Doenitz. If not, while the Fuehrer still lived and thus clothed his orders with authority, Bormann could at least exact further revenge on the "traitors." He dispatched during this last night a further message to Doenitz.

 

[quote]DOENITZ!

 

Our impression grows daily stronger that the divisions in the Berlin theater have been standing idle for several days. All the reports we receive are controlled, suppressed, or distorted by Keitel ... The Fuehrer orders you to proceed at once, and mercilessly, against all traitors.[/quote]

 

And then, though he knew that Hitler's death was only hours away, he added a postscript, "The Fuehrer is alive, and is conducting the defense of Berlin."

 

But Berlin was no longer defensible. The Russians already had occupied almost all of the city. It was now merely a question of the defense of the Chancellery. It too was doomed, as Hitler and Bormann learned at the situation conference at noon on April 30, the last that was ever to take place. The Russians had reached the eastern end of the Tiergarten and broken into the Potsdamerplatz. They were just a block away. The hour for Adolf Hitler to carry out his resolve had come.

 

His bride apparently had no appetite for lunch that day and Hitler took his repast with his two secretaries and with his vegetarian cook, who perhaps did not realize that she had prepared his last meal. While they were finishing their lunch at about 2:30 P.M., Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer's chauffeur, who was in charge of the ChanceIlery garage, received an order to deliver immediately 200 liters of gasoline in jerricans to the Chancellery garden. Kempka had some difficulty in rounding up so much fuel but he managed to collect some 180 liters and with the help of three men carried it to the emergency exit of the bunker. [24]

 

While the oil to provide the fire for the Viking funeral was being collected, Hitler, having done with his last meal, fetched Eva Braun for another and final farewell to his most intimate collaborators: Dr. Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, the secretaries and Fraulein Manzialy, the cook. Frau Goebbels did not appear. This formidable and beautiful blond woman had, like Eva Braun, found it easy to make the decision to die with her husband, but the prospect of killing her six young children, who had been playing merrily in the underground shelter these last days without an inkling of what was in store for them, unnerved her.

 

"My dear Hanna," she had said to Fraulein Reitsch two or three evenings before, "when the end comes you must help me if I become weak about the children ... They belong to the Third Reich and to the Fuehrer, and if these two cease to exist there can be no further place for them. My greatest fear is that at the last moment I will be too weak." Alone in her little room she was now striving to overcome her greatest fear. [v]

 

Hitler and Eva Braun had no such problem. They had only their own lives to take. They finished their farewells and retired to their rooms. Outside in the passageway, Dr. Goebbels, Bormann and a few others waited. In a few moments a revolver shot was heard. They waited for a second one, but there was only silence. After a decent interval they quietly entered the Fuehrer's quarters. They found the body of Adolf Hitler sprawled on the sofa dripping blood. He had shot himself in the mouth. At his side lay Eva Braun. Two revolvers had tumbled to the floor, but the bride had not used hers. She had swallowed poison.

 

It was 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday, and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become Chancellor of Germany and had instituted the Third Reich. It would survive him but a week.

 

The Viking funeral followed. There were no words spoken; the only sound was the roar of Russian shells exploding in the garden of the Chancellery and on the shattered walls around it. Hitler's valet, S.S. Sturmbannfuehrer Heinz Linge, and an orderly carried out the Fuehrer's body, wrapped in an Army field-gray blanket, which concealed the shattered face. Kempka identified it in his own mind by the black trousers and shoes which protruded from the blanket and which the warlord always wore with his field-gray jacket. Eva Braun's death had been cleaner, there was no blood, and Bormann carried out her body just as it was to the passage, where he turned it over to Kempka.

 

[quote]Frau Hitler [the chauffeur later recounted] wore a dark dress ... I could not recognize any injuries to the body.[/quote]

 

The corpses were carried up to the garden and during a lull in the bombardment placed in a shell hole and ignited with gasoline. The mourners, headed by Goebbels and Bormann, withdrew to the shelter of the emergency exit and as the flames mounted stood at attention and raised their right hands in a farewell Nazi salute. It was a brief ceremony, for Red Army shells began to spatter the garden again and the survivors retired to the safety of the bunker, leaving the gasoline-fed flames to complete the work of eradicating the last earthly remains of Adolf Hitler and his wife. [vi] For Bormann and Goebbels, there were still tasks to perform in the Third Reich, now bereft of its founder and dictator, though they were not the same tasks.

 

There had not yet been time for the messengers to reach Doenitz with the Fuehrer's testament appointing him as his successor. The admiral would now have to be informed by radio. But even at this point, with power slipped from his hands, Bormann hesitated. It was difficult to one who had savored it to give it up so abruptly. Finally he got off a message.

 

[quote]GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ:

 

In place of the former Reich Marshal Goering the Fuehrer appoints you as his successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires.[/quote]

 

There was not a word that Hitler was dead.

 

The Admiral, who was in command of all German forces in the north and had moved his headquarters to Ploen in Schleswig, was flabbergasted at the news. Unlike the party leaders, he had no desire to succeed Hitler; the thought had never entered his sailor's head. Two days before, believing that Himmler would inherit the succession, he had gone to the S.S. chief and offered him his support. But since it would never have occurred to him to disobey an order of the Fuehrer, he sent the following reply, in the belief that Adolf Hitler was still alive.

 

[quote]MY FUEHRER!

 

My loyalty to you will be unconditional. I shall do everything possible to relieve you in Berlin. If fate nevertheless 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.

 

GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ[/quote]

 

That night Bormann and Goebbels had a fresh idea. They decided to try to negotiate with the Russians. General Krebs, the Chief of the Army General Staff, who had remained in the bunker, had once been the assistant military attache in Moscow, spoke Russian, and on one famous occasion had even been embraced by Stalin at the Moscow railway station. Perhaps he could get something out of the Bolsheviks; specifically, what Goebbels and Bormann wanted was a safe-conduct for themselves so that they could take their appointed places in the new Doenitz government. In return for this they were prepared to surrender Berlin.

 

General Krebs set out shortly after midnight of April 30 -- May 1 to see General Chuikov, [vii] the Soviet commander of the troops fighting in Berlin. One of the German officers accompanying him has recorded the opening of their conversation.

 

[quote]KREBS: Today is the First of May, a great holiday for our two nations. [viii]

 

CHUIKOV: We have a great holiday today. How things are with you over there it is hard to say. [25][/quote]

 

The Russian General demanded the unconditional surrender of everyone in the Fuehrer's bunker as well as of the remaining German troops in Berlin.

 

It took Krebs some time to carry out his mission, and when he had not returned by 11 A.M. on May 1 the impatient Bormann dispatched another radio message to Doenitz.

 

[quote]The Testament is in force. I will join you as soon as possible. Till then, I recommend that publication be held up.[/quote]

 

This was still ambiguous. Bormann simply could not be straightforward enough to say that the Fuehrer was dead. He wanted to get out to be the first to inform Doenitz of the momentous news and thereby help to insure his favor with the new Commander in Chief. But Goebbels, who with his wife and children was about to die, had no such reason for not telling the Admiral the simple truth. At 3:15 P.M. he got off his own message to Doenitz -- the last radio communication ever to leave the beleaguered bunker in Berlin.

 

[quote]GRAND ADMIRAL DOENITZ

 

MOST SECRET

 

The Fuehrer died yesterday at 1530 hours [3:30 P.M.]. Testament of April 29 appoints you as Reich President ... [There follow the names of the principal cabinet appointments.]

 

By order of the Fuehrer the Testament has been sent out of Berlin to you ... Bormann intends to go to you today and to inform you of the situation. Time and form of announcement to the press and to the troops is left to you. Confirm receipt.

 

GOEBBELS[/quote]

 

Goebbels did not think it necessary to inform the new Leader of his own intentions. Early in the evening of May I, he carried them out. The first act was to poison the six children. Their playing was halted and they were given lethal injections, apparently by the same physician who the day before had poisoned the Fuehrer's dogs. Then Goebbels called his adjutant, S.S. Hauptsturmfuehrer Guenther Schwaegermann, and instructed him to fetch some gasoline.

 

"Schwaegermann," he told him, "this is the worst treachery of all. The generals have betrayed the Fuehrer. Everything is lost. I shall die, together with my wife and family." He did not mention, even to his adjutant, that he had just had his children murdered. "You will burn our bodies. Can you do that?"

 

Schwaegermann assured him he could and sent two orderlies to procure the gasoline. A few minutes later, at about 8:30 P.M., just as it was getting dark outside, Dr. and Frau Goebbels walked through the bunker, bade goodbye to those who happened to be in the corridor, and mounted the stairs to the garden. There, at their request, an S.S. orderly dispatched them with two shots in the back of the head. Four cans of gasoline were poured over their bodies and ser on fire, but the cremation was not well done. [26] The survivors in the bunker were anxious to join the mass escape which was just getting under way and there was no time to waste on burning those already dead. The Russians found the charred bodies of the Propaganda Minister and his wife the next day and immediately identified them.

 

By 9 o'clock on the evening of May 1, the Fuehrerbunker had been set on fire and some five or six hundred survivors of the Fuehrer's entourage, mostly S.S. men, were milling about in the shelter of the New Chancellery  -- like chickens with their heads off, as one of them, the Fuehrer's tailor, later recalled -- preparatory to the great breakout. The plan was to go by foot along the subway tracks from the station below the Wilhelmsplatz, opposite the Chancellery, to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof and there cross the River Spree and sift through the Russian lines immediately to the north of it. A good many got through; some did not, among them Martin Bormann.

 

When General Krebs had finally returned to the bunker that afternoon with General Chuikov's demand for unconditional surrender Hitler's party secretary had decided that his only chance for survival lay in joining the mass exodus. His group attempted to follow a German tank, but according to Kempka, who was with him, it received a direct hit from a Russian shell and Bormann was almost certainly killed. Artur Axmann, the Hitler Youth leader, who had deserted his battalion of boys at the Pichelsdorf Bridge to save his neck, was also present and later deposed that he had seen Bormann's body lying under the bridge where the Invalidenstrasse crosses the railroad tracks. There was moonlight on his face and Axmann could see no sign of wounds. His presumption was that Bormann had swallowed his capsule of poison when he saw that his chances of getting through the Russian lines were nil.

 

Generals Krebs and Burgdorf did not join in the mass attempt to escape. It is believed that they shot themselves in the cellar of the New Chancellery.

 

[b]THE END OF THE THIRD REICH[/b]

 

The Third Reich survived the death of its founder by seven days.

 

A little after 10 o'clock on the evening of the first of May, while the bodies of Dr. and Frau Goebbels were burning in the Chancellery garden and the inhabitants of the bunker were herding together for their escape through a subway tunnel in Berlin, the Hamburg radio interrupted the playing of a recording of Bruckner's solemn Seventh Symphony. There was a roll of military drums and then an announcer spoke.

 

[quote][b][/size]120]Our Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism,[/b][/size] fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Fuehrer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor. The Grand Admiral and successor of the Fuehrer now speaks to the German people.[/quote]

 

The Third Reich was expiring, as it had begun, with a shabby lie. Aside from the fact that Hitler had not died that afternoon but the previous one, which was not important, he had not fallen fighting "to the last breath," but the broadcasting of this falsehood was necessary if the inheritors of his mantle were to perpetuate a legend and also if they were to hold control of the troops who were still offering resistance and who would surely have felt betrayed if they had known the truth.

 

Doenitz himself repeated the lie when he went on the air at 10:20 P.M. and spoke of the "hero's death" of the Fuehrer. Actually at that moment he did not know how Hitler had met his end. Goebbels had radioed only that he had "died" on the previous afternoon. But this did not inhibit the Admiral either on this point or on others, for he did his best to muddy the confused minds of the German people in the hour of their disaster.

 

[quote]It is my first task [he said] to save Germany from destruction by the advancing Bolshevik enemy. For this aim alone the military struggle continues. As far and as long as the achievement of this aim is impeded by the British and Americans, we shall be forced to carry on our defensive fight against them as well. Under such conditions, however, [b][size=120]the Anglo-Americans will continue the war not for their own peoples but solely for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.[/b][/size]  [/quote]

 

After this silly distortion, the Admiral, who is not recorded as having protested Hitler's decision to make the Bolshevik nation Germany's ally in 1939 so that a war could be fought against England and later America, assured the German people in concluding his broadcast that "God will not forsake us after so much suffering and sacrifice."

 

These were empty words. Doenitz knew that German resistance was at an end. On April 29, the day before Hitler took his life, the German armies in Italy had surrendered unconditionally, an event whose news, because of the breakdown in communications, was spared the Fuehrer, which must have made his last hours more bearable than they otherwise would have been. On May 4 the German High Command surrendered to Montgomery all German forces in northwest Germany, Denmark and Holland. The next day Kesselring's Army Group G, comprising the German First and Nineteenth armies north of the Alps, capitulated.

 

On that day, May 5, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg, the new Commander in Chief of the German Navy, arrived at General Eisenhower's headquarters at Reims to negotiate a surrender. The German aim, as the last papers of OKW make clear,27 was to stall for a few days in order to have time to move as many German troops and refugees as possible from the path of the Russians so that they could surrender to the Western Allies. General Jodl arrived at Reims the next day to help his Navy colleague draw out the proceedings. But it was in vain. Eisenhower saw through the game.

 

[quote]I told General Smith [he later recounted] to inform Jodl that unless they instantly ceased all pretense and delay I would close the entire Allied front and would, by force, prevent any more German refugees from entering our lines. I would brook no further delay. [28][/quote]

 

At 1:30 A.M. on May 7 Doenitz, after being informed by Jodl of Eisenhower's demands, radioed the German General from his new headquarters at Flensburg on the Danish frontier full powers to sign the document of unconditional surrender. The game was up.

 

In a little red schoolhouse at Reims, where Eisenhower had made his headquarters, Germany surrendered unconditionally at 2:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945. The capitulation was signed for the Allies by General Walter Bedell Smith, with General Ivan Susloparov affixing his signature as witness for Russia and General Francois Sevez for France. Admiral Friedeburg and General Jodl signed for Germany.

 

Jodl asked permission to say a word and it was granted.

 

[quote]With this signature the German people and the German Armed Forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the hands of the victors ... In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.[/quote]

 

There was no response from the Allied side. But perhaps Jodl recalled another occasion when the roles were reversed just five years before. Then a French general, in signing France's unconditional surrender at Compiegne, had made a similar plea -- in vain, as it turned out.

 

The guns in Europe ceased firing and the bombs ceased dropping at midnight on May 8-9, 1945, and a strange but welcome silence settled over the Continent for the first time since September 1, 1939. In the intervening five years, eight months and seven days millions of men and women had been slaughtered on a hundred battlefields and in a thousand bombed towns, and millions more done to death in the Nazi gas chambers or on the edge of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen pits in Russia and Poland -- as the result of Adolf Hitler's lust for German conquest. A greater part of most of Europe's ancient cities lay in ruins, and from their rubble, as the weather warmed, there was the stench of the countless unburied dead.

 

No more would the streets of Germany echo to the jack boot of the goose-stepping storm troopers or the lusty yells of the brown-shirted masses or the shouts of the Fuehrer blaring from the loudspeakers.

 

After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness to all but a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for them too, the Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as we have seen, this great nation and this resourceful but so easily misled people to heights of power and conquest they had never before experienced and now it had dissolved with a suddenness and a completeness that had few, if any, parallels in history.

 

In 1918, after the last defeat, the Kaiser had fled, the monarchy had tumbled, but the other traditional institutions supporting the State had remained, a government chosen by the people had continued to function, as did the nucleus of a German Army and a General Staff. But in the spring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist. There was no longer any German authority on any level. The millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors were prisoners of war in their own land. The millions of civilians were governed, down to the villages, by the conquering enemy troops, on whom they depended not only for law and order but throughout that summer and bitter winter of 1945 for food and fuel to keep them alive. Such was the state to which the follies of Adolf Hitler -- and their own folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm -- had brought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returned to Germany that fall.

 

The people were there, and the land -- the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.

 

But the Third Reich had passed into history.

 

________________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. "For all writers of history," Speer told Trevor-Roper, "Eva Braun is going to be a  disappointment," to which the historian adds: " -- and for readers of history too."  (Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 92.)

 

ii. Who these relatives were Hitler did not say, but from what he told his secretaries  he had in mind his sister. Paula, and his mother-in-law.

 

iii. Trevor-Roper, in The Last Days of Hitler, has given a graphic account of their  adventures. But for an indiscretion of Heinz Lorenz, the farewell messages of Hitler  and Goebbels might never have become known. Major Johannmeier eventually  buried his copy of the documents in the garden of his home at Iserlohn in Westphalia.  Zander hid his copy in a trunk which he left in the Bavarian village of Tegernsee.  Changing his name and assuming a disguise, he attempted to begin a new life under  the name of Wilhelm Paustin. But Lorenz, a journalist by profession, was too  garrulous to keep his secret very well and a chance indiscretion led to the discovery  of his copy and to the exposure of the other two messengers.

 

iv. Colonel Below destroyed the message when he learned of Hitler's death while he  was still making his way toward the Allied Western armies. He has reconstructed it  from memory. See Trevor-Roper, op. cit., pp. 194-95.

 

v. The children and their ages were: Hela,12; Hilda,11; Helmut, 9; Holde, 7; Hedda,  5; Heide, 3.

 

 vi. The bones were never found, and this gave rise to rumors after the war that Hitler  had survived. But the separate interrogation of several eyewitnesses by British and  American intelligence officers leaves no doubt about the matter. Kempka has given  a plausible explanation as to why the charred bones were never found. "The traces  were wiped out," he told his interrogators, "by the uninterrupted Russian artillery  fire."

 

vii. Not Marshal Zhukov, as most accounts have had it.

viii. May 1 was the traditional Labor Day in Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[b]A BRIEF EPILOGUE[/b]

 

 

I WENT BACK that autumn to the once proud land, where I had spent most of the brief years of the Third Reich. It was difficult to recognize. ] have described that return in another place. [29] It remains here merely to record the fate of the remaining characters who have figured prominently in these pages.

 

 

Doenitz's rump government, which had been set up at Flensburg on the Danish border, was dissolved by the Allies on May 23, 1945, and all its members were arrested. Heinrich Himmler had been dismissed from the government on May 6, on the eve of the surrender at Reims, in a move which the Admiral calculated might win him favor with the Allies. The former S.S. chief, who had held so long the power of life and death over Europe's millions, and who had often exercised it, wandered about in the vicinity of Flensburg until May 21, when he set out with eleven S.S. officers to try to pass through the British and American lines to his native Bavaria. Himmler -- it must have galled him -- had shaved off his mustache, tied a black patch over his left eye and donned an Army private's uniform. The party was stopped the first day at a British control point between Hamburg and Bremerhaven. After questioning, Himmler confessed his identity to a British Army captain, who hauled him away to Second Army headquarters at Lueneburg. There he was stripped and searched and made to change into a British Army uniform to avert any possibility that he might be concealing poison in his clothes. But the search was not thorough. Himmler kept his vial of potassium cyanide concealed in a cavity of his gums. When a second British intelligence officer arrived from Montgomery's headquarters on May 23 and instructed a medical officer to examine the prisoner's mouth, Himmler bit on his vial and was dead in twelve minutes, despite frantic efforts to keep him alive by pumping his stomach and administering emetics.

 

 

The remaining intimate collaborators of Hitler lived a bit longer. I went down to Nuremberg to see them. I had often watched them in their hour of glory and power at the annual party rallies in this town. In the dock before the International Military Tribunal they looked different. There had been quite a metamorphosis. Attired in rather shabby clothes, slumped in their seats fidgeting nervously, they no longer resembled the arrogant leaders of old. They seemed to be a drab assortment of mediocrities. It seemed difficult to grasp that such men, when last you had seen them, had wielded such monstrous power, that such as they could conquer a great nation and most of Europe.

 

 

There were twenty-one of them [i] in the dock: Goering, eighty pounds lighter than when last I had seen him, in a faded Luftwaffe uniform without insignia and obviously pleased that he had been given the Number One place in the dock -- a sort of belated recognition of his place in the Nazi hierarchy now that Hitler was dead; Rudolf Hess, who had been the Number Three man before his flight to England, his face now emaciated, his deep-set eyes staring vacantly into space, feigning amnesia but leaving no doubt that he was a broken man; Ribbentrop, at last shorn of his arrogance and his pompousness, looking pale, bent and beaten; Keitel, who had lost his jauntiness; Rosenberg, the muddled party "philosopher," whom the events which had brought him to this place appeared to have awakened to reality at last.

 

 

Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter of Nuremberg, was there. This sadist and pornographer, whom I had once seen striding through the streets of the old town brandishing a whip, seemed to have wilted. A bald, decrepit-looking old man, he sat perspiring profusely, glaring at the judges and convincing himself -- so a guard later told me -- that they were all Jews. There was Fritz Sauckel, the boss of slave labor in the Third Reich, his narrow little slit eyes giving him a porcine appearance. He seemed nervous, swaying to and fro. Next to him was Baldur von Schirach, the first Hitler Youth Leader and later Gauleiter of Vienna, more American by blood than German and looking like a contrite college boy who has been kicked out of school for some folly. There was Walther Funk, the shifty-eyed nonentity who had succeeded Schacht. And there was Dr. Schacht himself, who had spent the last months of the Third Reich as a prisoner of his once revered Fuehrer in a concentration camp, fearing execution any day, and who now bristled with indignation that the Allies should try him as a war criminal. Franz von Papen, more responsible than any other individual in Germany for Hitler's coming to power, had been rounded up and made a defendant. He seemed much aged, but the look of the old fox, who had escaped from so many tight fixes, was still imprinted on his wizened face.

 

 

Neurath, Hitler's first Foreign Minister, a German of the old school, with few convictions and little integrity, seemed utterly broken. Not Speer, who made the most straightforward impression of all and who during the long trial spoke honestly and with no attempt to shirk his responsibility and his guilt. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling, was in the dock, as were Jodl and the two Grand Admirals, Raeder and Doenitz -- the latter, the successor to the Fuehrer, looking in his store suit for all the world like a shoe clerk. There was Kaltenbrunner, the bloody successor of "Hangman Heydrich," who on the stand would deny all his crimes; and Hans Frank, the Nazi Inquisitor in Poland, who would admit some of his, having become in the end contrite and, as he said, having discovered God, whose forgiveness he begged; and Frick, as colorless on the brink of death as he had been in life. And finaIly Hans Fritzsche, who had made a career as a radio commentator because his voice resembled that of Goebbels, who had made him an official in the Propaganda Ministry. No one in the courtroom, including Fritzsche, seemed to know why he was there -- he was too small a fry -- unless it were as a ghost for Goebbels, and he was acquitted.

 

 

So were Schacht and Papen. All three later drew stiff prison sentences from German denazification courts though, in the end, they served very little time.

 

 

Seven defendants at Nuremberg drew prison sentences: Hess, Raeder and Funk for life, Speer and Schirach for twenty years, Neurath for fifteen, Doenitz for ten. The others were sentenced to death.

 

 

At eleven minutes past 1 A.M. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentrop mounted the gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison, and he was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl.

 

 

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.

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Notes:

 

 

i. Dr. Robert Ley, head of the Arbeitsfront, who was to have been a defendant, had hanged himself in his cell before the trial began. He had made a noose from rags tom from a towel, which he had tied to a toilet pipe.

 

 

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