by Ian Kershaw
There were indeed some fanatical supporters of Hitler in every military unit to the end, though usually by now in a minority. One officer recalled how, hearing the news that the Führer had ‘fallen’, a single young soldier leapt to his feet, raised his arm and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’, while the others carryed on eating their soup as if nothing had happened.4 There must have been a spectrum of emotions at the news among generals, ranging from relief to sorrow, mingled with a sense of the inevitable. ‘Führer fallen! Terrible, and yet expected,’ noted one former front commander, Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, in his diary.5 When a small group of senior officers, gathered at the field headquarters of the 3rd Panzer Army in Mecklenburg, heard the announcement, there was no sign that any of them was moved.6 Even among senior officers in British captivity, divided opinions on Hitler were voiced when they heard of his death. ‘A tragic personality, surrounded by an incompetent circle of criminals’, ‘a historical figure’ whose achievements would only be recognized in a future age, summarized the overall view, as they debated whether, having sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally, they were now freed from their military oath.7
Among the civilian population, most Germans were too preoccupied with fending off hunger, eking out an existence in the ruins of their homes, avoiding marauding Soviet soldiers, or piecing together broken lives under enemy occupation to pay much attention to the demise of the Führer.8 A mother in Celle was concerned with a practical issue: whether her children should still greet people with ‘Heil Hitler’ now that he was dead. ‘I told them, they could continue to say “Heil Hitler” because Hitler remained the Führer to the last,’ was her judgement. ‘But if that seems odd to them, they should say “good day” or “good morning”.’9 In Göttingen, which had been in Allied hands for three weeks, a woman observed that those who had effusively cheered Hitler a few years earlier now scarcely noticed his end. No one mourned him.10 ‘Hitler is dead and we – we act as if it’s of no concern to us, as if it’s a matter of the most indifferent person in the world,’ wrote a woman in Berlin, a long-standing opponent of National Socialism. ‘What has changed? Nothing! Except, that we have forgotten Herr Hitler during the inferno of the last days.’11
Increasing numbers had come to realize in the last months of the war that Hitler, more than anyone, had been responsible for the misery that had afflicted them. ‘A pity that Hitler hasn’t been sent to Siberia,’ one woman in Hamburg wrote. ‘But the swine was so cowardly as to put a bullet through his head instead.’12 ‘Criminals and gamblers have led us, and we have let them lead us like sheep to the slaughter,’ was the view of one young woman in Berlin, exposed to the tender mercies of Red Army soldiers and not yet aware of Hitler’s death. ‘Now hatred is blazing in the wretched mass of the people. “No tree is high enough for him,” it was said this morning at the water-pump about Adolf.’13 The earlier idolization, the personalized attribution to Hitler of praise and adulation for all that had seemed at one time positive and successful in the Third Reich was already being transformed into demonization of the man on whom all blame for what had gone wrong could be focused.
For ordinary people, concerned only with getting through the misery, Hitler’s death on the face of it changed nothing. The same was true for soldiers in their billets or still serving on the front, and for naval and Luftwaffe crews, some of whom had been drafted into the increasingly desperate fight on land. Indeed, as Grand-Admiral Dönitz took up the reins of office as President of the German Reich, continuity rather than a break with the immediate past seemed on the surface the order of the day. Nevertheless, a fundamental change had actually taken place. It was as if a bankrupt organization had, with the departure of a managing director who refused point-blank to accept realities, been placed in administration, left with the mere task of winding up orders and the process of liquidation.
With Hitler gone, the chief and unyielding barrier to capitulation was removed. When Bormann’s wireless message had informed Dönitz at 6.35 p.m. on 30 April that Hitler had named him as his successor, there was no indication that the Dictator was by then dead. Dönitz had, however, been given immediate full powers to take whatever steps were needed in the current situation.14 He felt an enormous sense of relief that he could act, immediately summoning Keitel, Jodl and Himmler to discuss the situation.15 But remaining unsure, Dönitz telegraphed the bunker in the early hours of 1 May – a telegraph left unmentioned in his memoirs – to profess his unconditional loyalty to the Führer he presumed still alive, declaring his intention to do all possible (while knowing it to be a futile aim)16 to get him out of Berlin and declaring, ambiguously, that he would ‘bring this war to an end as the unique heroic struggle of the German people demands’.17 Only later that morning did Dönitz receive Bormann’s message that the Testament was in force. On this clear news of Hitler’s death, Dönitz now felt finally that his hands were free.18
As long as Hitler had lived, Dönitz had seen himself bound to him as head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht by his oath of military obedience, which the Grand-Admiral saw, like most of his generation who had been schooled as officers, as a sacred commitment. Beyond that, he had totally accepted – as had most leading figures in the military – the ‘leadership principle’ (Führerprinzip) that had been the basis of Hitler’s authority in the Party, then in the state and in his military command, throughout the Third Reich.19 He had consequently, and consistent with his unbending principles, refused all considerations of capitulation and upheld the fanatical continuation of the struggle as long as Hitler was alive. Immediately that he knew Hitler was dead, however, he felt in a position to contemplate a negotiated end to a lost war.20 There could be no plainer illustration of the absolute centrality to the catastrophic continuation of the war not just of the person of the Führer, but of the structures of rule and mentalities that underpinned Hitler’s domination.
Even now there was a process of liquidation of the war, not an immediate end. Dönitz’s proclaimed aim, on 1 May, ‘to rescue the German people from destruction through Bolshevism’, denoted an attempt to give meaning to the continued fight in the east while looking to a negotiated end in the west.21 All at once, therefore, the question of capitulation – though not in the east – was a real and urgent one. Could general capitulation be avoided, even now? Could the western powers, even at this stage, through partial capitulations, be persuaded to join forces with the Wehrmacht to fight Bolshevism? Could some terms favourable to sustaining the Reich as a political unity be attained? Could a deal be struck that would save the German troops on the eastern front from Soviet captivity? The end was plainly imminent. But whereas Hitler had ruled out capitulation totally and was prepared to take everything into the abyss with him, the new Dönitz administration concerned itself from the beginning with the type of surrender that, it thought, could potentially be negotiated and still stave off the worst – submission to Bolshevism. And whereas Hitler, at least until the visibly crumbling days before his death, had been able to depend upon residual loyalties backed by a high dosage of terror and repression to hold the fading regime together, Dönitz could rely upon neither personal standing nor the backing of a mass Party or huge police apparatus, and was left with little at his disposal beyond the shrinking framework of military leadership, a restricted intelligence network and the residues of ministerial bureaucracy. ‘Who is this Herr Dönitz?’, General of the Waffen-SS, Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner contemptuously asked on hearing that the Grand-Admiral was to be the new head of state. ‘My forces and I are not bound by oath to him. I will negotiate on my own footing with the English at my rear.’22
Of the quartet beneath Hitler – and leaving aside military leadership – on whom the governance of the Reich since the previous July had heavily rested, only Speer, though omitted from Hitler’s ministerial list in favour of his arch-rival Saur, was retained in the Dönitz administration. As Economics Minister, he was, however, in charge of little but economic ruins. Goebbels, the
designated Reich Chancellor in the ministerial list drawn up by Hitler, was alone among the quadrumvirate in acting in accord with the Führer’s imperative of going down with the Reich in a ‘heroic’ end. And even Goebbels had entertained the prospect of a localized capitulation after Hitler’s death, committing suicide after trying and failing, together with Bormann, to negotiate an arrangement with Marshal Zhukov in Berlin. Bormann, the nominated Party Minister, was disinclined – like most others in Hitler’s entourage – to end his life in a Berlin catacomb and fled from the bunker as soon as he could, supposedly on his way to join Dönitz in Plön. He managed to go only a short distance from the ruins of the Reich Chancellery before swallowing a poison capsule to end his life in the early hours of 2 May to avoid capture by the Soviets. Himmler, in disgrace after being stripped by Hitler of all his powers following his ‘treachery’, was initially hopeful of finding a position under Dönitz and playing a prominent role in the coming combined struggle against Bolshevism of the western powers in unison with the Reich, but was refused office in the new administration.
Dönitz, as previous chapters have indicated, had proved himself one of the most fanatical Wehrmacht commanders in his backing of Hitler’s determination to fight on to the last. ‘I know you don’t believe me, but I must again tell you my innermost conviction,’ he informed a colleague in March. ‘The Führer is always right.’23 His unswerving loyalty to Hitler had earned him the appellation ‘Hitler Youth Quex’, named after the ‘hero’ of the well-known propaganda film.24 A sign of his undiluted support had been to dispatch more than 10,000 sailors, equipped only with light arms, to Berlin on 25 April to serve in the futile struggle for the Reich capital.25 By then, Dönitz was already acting as Hitler’s delegate, with plenipotentiary powers over Party and state (though not over the Wehrmacht in its entirety) in northern Germany. At Himmler’s ‘treachery’ at the end of April, Dönitz was relied upon by Hitler to act ‘with lightning speed and hardness of steel against all traitors in the north German area, without exception’.26 Hitler, who had long regarded most army generals with little more than contempt, valued Dönitz highly and acknowledged his unwavering support by singling out the navy for praise in its sense of honour, refusal to surrender and fulfilment of duty unto death when composing his Testament.27 Hitler’s nomination of Dönitz to be his successor as head of state – though with the reconstituted title of Reich President, in abeyance since 1934, and not Führer – did not, then, come to those in high positions in the regime as the surprise that it was to those further from the centre of power, or that it might appear to be in distant retrospect.28
In any case, Hitler was short of options. Göring, the designated successor for more than a decade and, until his disgrace, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, had been dismissed from all his offices following his ‘betrayal’ on 23 April and was in Berchtesgaden under house arrest. Whether he could have commanded authority over all the armed forces is in any case by this time extremely doubtful. Himmler’s only significant experience of military command had been as chief of the Replacement Army since July 1944 and then, in early 1945, a sobering one as a brief and unsuccessful Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula. He had also been peremptorily dismissed from all offices in Hitler’s thunderous rage at the end of April. Keitel was no more than the subservient executor of Hitler’s orders and held in contempt by many within the Wehrmacht. The only army general in whom Hitler had any confidence at the end was Field-Marshal Schörner. But he was still a front commander, leading the beleaguered Army Group Centre fighting in the former Czechoslovakia. Though much admired by Hitler, Schörner was heartily disliked by many other generals and, even had he been available, would have been unthinkable as head of state. That left Dönitz.
The Grand-Admiral, who made no secret even after the war of the mutual respect between him and Hitler, claimed in an early post-war interrogation that he was chosen as the senior member of the armed forces with the necessary authority ‘to put in effect the capitulation’. Since Hitler could not end the war, he asserted, someone else had to do it. ‘This war could only be finished by a soldier who had the necessary authority with the armed forces. The point was to insure that the Army would obey, when told to capitulate…. The Führer knew that I had the authority.’29 Years later, Dönitz added a gloss: ‘I assumed that Hitler had nominated me because he wished to clear the way to enable an officer of the Armed Forces to put an end to the war. That this assumption was incorrect I did not find out until the winter of 1945–46 in Nuremberg, when for the first time I heard the provisions of Hitler’s will, in which he demanded that the struggle be continued.’30 Whether Dönitz at the time understood that the reason for his appointment was to enable him to bring about a capitulation is highly doubtful. Nothing in Hitler’s stance during the last days, or in his dealings with Dönitz, implied that he was handing over power to seek the capitulation which he himself could not undertake.31 That would have been totally out of character for Hitler, whose entire ‘career’ had been based on the imperative that there would be no ‘cowardly’ capitulation as in 1918, and who had on a number of occasions expressed the view that the German people did not deserve to survive him. On the contrary: Hitler saw in Dönitz precisely the military leader whose fanaticism was needed in order to continue the fight to the bitter end.32
Dönitz did, in fact, immediately deviate from Hitler’s expressed wish that the struggle should on no account be abandoned,33 and began to explore avenues towards negotiating an end to the war short of complete and unconditional surrender on all fronts. But this was almost certainly not a result of misunderstanding the reason for his appointment as head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. It was simply the need to bow to military and political reality now that Hitler was dead. The end was near; most of the Reich was under enemy occupation; the population was war-weary in the extreme; loyalties were fragmenting rapidly; and the Wehrmacht was largely destroyed, its remnants on the verge of total defeat.34 There was little alternative from Dönitz’s point of view, now burdened with responsibility not just for the navy but for the entire Reich, to try even at this late stage to negotiate an end which would be less than total disaster.
In a post-war interrogation several months later, Field-Marshal Keitel claimed that ‘as soon as Hitler was dead, more or less the principal point was this: if somebody else has the responsibility, then the only thing to do was to seek an immediate armistice and attempt to save whatever can be saved’.35 This was disingenuous. No immediate armistice was sought. Dönitz, who later asserted that his government programme was clear, that he wanted to end the war as quickly as possible but above all to save as many lives as he could,36 chose rather to prolong the fight for the time being on both eastern and western fronts in an attempt to buy time to bring back the troops from the east. He had also not altogether given up hopes of splitting the coalition and winning the western powers for a continued war against Bolshevism. In so doing, he did enable hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a far smaller number of civilians to avoid Soviet captivity. But he added a further week of death and suffering to the immense human cost of the war.
II
For those civilians imminently exposed to the prospect of Soviet conquest, the mortal fear and dread was completely unaltered by Hitler’s death. Many, in any case, lacking radio, newspapers and post did not hear the news for days.37 One macabre way the deep anxiety manifested itself was in an epidemic of suicides in the closing weeks of the Third Reich, which continued into May as complete military defeat and enemy occupation loomed.38
Among the Nazi regime’s rulers, suicide could be seen and portrayed as heroic self-sacrifice, eminently preferable to the ‘cowardice’ of capitulation. This was, of course, how Hitler’s own death was advertised.39 For military leaders, too, death at one’s own hand was seen as a manly way out rather than yiel0ding and offering to surrender. In extreme cases, like that of Goebbels, there was the sense that after Germany’s defeat there was nothing f
or him, his wife or his children to live for. His life, stated Goebbels at the end, had ‘no further value if it cannot be used in the service of the Führer and by his side’. His wife, Magda, thought along the same lines, giving as justification for taking her own life and those of her children that ‘the world to come after the Führer and National Socialism will no longer be worth living in’.40
More prosaically, and for many, no doubt, the prime motive, Nazi leaders feared retribution at the hands of the victors, particularly the Russians. ‘I do not wish to fall into the hands of enemies who, for the amusement of their whipped-up masses, will need a spectacle arranged by Jews,’ was Hitler’s own inimitable way of expressing this fear.41 While most were prepared to take their chance, and disappeared into hiding, or simply stayed where they were and waited to be arrested, a fair number of other leading Nazis and military leaders felt suicide was their only option. Bormann trying to flee from Berlin, and Himmler, Ley and Göring in Allied custody, were among those choosing to end their own lives, along with 8 out of 41 Gauleiter and 7 from 47 of the Higher SS and Police Leaders, 53 out of 554 army generals, 14 of 98 Luftwaffe generals and 11 from 53 admirals.42