* * *
1 Among Hitler’s remnant books at the Library of Congress is an album with architectural sketches and photographs chronicling Giesler’s various projects in Weimar, including the rebuilding of the Hotel Elephant and the construction of the “Adolf Hitler Square.”
2 There is an extensive Nazi historiography of the Second World War, in particular in Nazi-era schoolbooks, that detail Hitler’s alleged peace initiatives and alleged Polish efforts to “exterminate” German civilians living in Poland.
3 Hedin did not hold a doctorate nor did he have any claim to the aristocratic “von” in his name.
BOOK TEN
A Miracle Deferred
Pious people say, the darkest hour is nearest the dawn.
THOMAS CARLYLE, History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great
ON SUNDAY EVENING, March 11, 1945, Joseph Goebbels called on Hitler, who was working late in his office in the New Reich Chancellery. Goebbels wanted to report on his two-day inspection of the German defenses in East Prussia and to present Hitler with an abridged German translation of Thomas Carlyle’s 1858 biography of Frederick the Great. Hitler himself had just returned from the front, now a mere hundred miles east of Berlin, where he had spent the day visiting emplacements, shaking hands with soldiers, and conferring with generals—all in the presence of propaganda units.
Since coming to power twelve years before, he had fashioned this second Sunday in March, traditionally reserved as a day of national mourning, into National Hero Day, an occasion for flaunting German military muscle—on this date in 1935 he declared his intent to rearm Germany, and in 1941 he triumphantly paraded captured enemy weaponry through the streets of Berlin—but this year there was little to celebrate. Advanced units of the American 101st Airborne Division had seized the railroad bridge at Remagen after the German commander refused to detonate the bridge in order to allow fleeing civilians to cross it. Hitler had five officers executed on the spot, but the damage had been done. The Americans had their first foothold east of the Rhine. That Sunday, they spanned the river with three pontoon bridges.
An antiquarian “history” of Frederick the Great is one of several surviving books Hitler owned on his Prussian hero.
In recognition of the grim news from the front, Hitler set a tone of resoluteness for National Hero Day 1945. “There has never been a great historical state of the past that did not find itself in a similar situation,” he announced in a message to the frontline troops. “Rome in the second war against the Carthaginians, Prussia in the Seven Years’ War against Europe. Those are only two of many examples,” Hitler wrote in his missive. “It is therefore my unalterable decision, and it must be the immovable will of all, not to set a worse example than those before us have done.” The humiliation of 1918 could not be allowed to repeat itself. It could not be forgotten that the Allies were intent on nothing less than the “extermination of the German nation.” The words of Frederick the Great had to be remembered: “Provide resistance and attack the enemy until in the end they grow tired and collapse!”
Hitler had returned to Berlin that evening in noticeably good spirits “emotionally and intellectually,” as Goebbels observed when he called on him in his office. Before Goebbels could give his report on conditions at the front, the conversation focused on a discussion they had begun a few weeks earlier. At the time, Goebbels had mentioned that he had been rereading the biography of Frederick the Great by Thomas Carlyle, and was struck by the courage that the Prussian king had shown in times of adversity. Goebbels and Hitler had talked about the historic stature Frederick had achieved over time, and about their own need to comport themselves in such a manner so that in centuries to come they, too, could serve as “examples of heroic resilience.”
Now Goebbels was giving Hitler a copy of Carlyle’s book, an appropriate gift for the day of national heroism. Visibly pleased, Hitler recalled Carlyle’s theory of “exceptional personalities,” individuals who not only leave their mark on history but also provide inspiration for future leaders. “It must also be our ambition to set an example for our own time,” Hitler said, “so that future generations under similar crises and pressure can look upon us just the way we today are looking upon the heroes of our own past history.”
Goebbels agreed and gave Hitler a case in point. In East Prussia, he had watched Ferdinand Schörner, the forty-five-year-old general commanding the Third Panzer Division, resist a series of Soviet assaults and stabilize a stretch of crumbling front. Yes, Hitler said, he knew Schörner to be an exceptional commander. Goebbels said that Schörner embodied the ruthless determination that it took to win wars. For example, he told Hitler, in order to stem the growing tide of desertions, Schörner immediately hanged anyone caught behind the lines without permission. The trees near the front, Goebbels observed with satisfaction, dangled with the corpses of uniformed German soldiers with placards around their necks that declared I AM A DESERTER. I REFUSED TO PROTECT GERMAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND HAVE THEREFORE BEEN HANGED. Goebbels liked the compelling simplicity of Schörner’s message: At the front, you face the risk of being shot; in the rear, you are sure to be executed.
Hitler’s desk in his New Reich Chancellery office, where he continued to work in the final months of the war. Note books on both sides of his desk.
Hitler agreed. Schörner was a model commander. He would have to promote him at the next opportunity. As often happened with Hitler, a single remark could trigger a series of associations that could occupy him for hours, which was clearly the case on this Sunday night, for he spent the next two hours musing on “examples” of leadership in their own day or, as was becoming increasingly evident in his view, the absence of it. He complained that in recent months his own generals had repeatedly subverted his authority, depleting the eastern front to bolster Berlin for a Soviet assault that he was certain would never come. He had placed Himmler in charge of the eastern armies in the hope of seeing his “loyal Heinrich” instill discipline among the generals, only to watch Himmler turn against him as well; in defiance of Hitler’s explicit orders, and at the ultimate peril to the Reich, Himmler, too, was beginning to reinforce Berlin. This would bring catastrophe, Hitler predicted.
Why not discipline Himmler for this insubordination, Goebbels wondered. It was futile, Hitler said. There were too many ways to subvert authority. In the end, he would be proved right, but by then it would not matter. The war would be lost. Instead, Hitler said he was developing an alternate plan for rescuing the Reich: to divide the enemy politically, to ally himself with one of the parties and force an end to the fighting.
He told Goebbels he had detected fissures among the enemy. The British alliance with the Soviets was clearly one of convenience, even desperation. Initially, he had hoped to ally with the British against the Soviets, but the current political constellation in England made this impossible. “Churchill has run amok, and set himself the single and insane goal of exterminating Germany, even if it means the destruction of England as well,” Hitler told Goebbels. “Thus, we have no choice but to look around for other opportunities.”
Unfortunately, he said, a similar dynamic prevailed in the United States. Roosevelt had driven the Europeans into war in the first place, and was intent on letting them destroy themselves. Thus, Moscow remained the only viable option. “It has to be our goal to drive back the Soviets in the east and extract an exceptionally high toll in blood and equipment. Then the Kremlin might become more flexible with us,” Hitler said. “A separate peace agreement with them would naturally alter the situation with the war radically.” Unlike Churchill or Roosevelt, he said, he did not worry about public opinion. He could alter Soviet policy at will. The solution was clear: Moscow had to be turned. Hitler’s strategy was to fan German hatred of the Anglo-Americans for forcing Europe into war, for bombing German cities into ruin, for laying waste to the Continent, then, with equal force, steel German resolve in the east, bleed the Soviet armies, deliver a series of decisive b
lows that would blunt the Russian advance, then negotiate peace. End the fighting in the east, Hitler said, echoing Schlieffen’s wisdom, and the rest will take care of itself.1 He instructed Goebbels: “Preach revenge against the east and hatred against the west.”
This was the Hitler Goebbels knew: defiant, ruthless, commanding, calculating, visionary. As Goebbels departed Hitler’s office late that night, he passed a clutch of generals waiting in the foyer. They appeared exhausted, weary, defeated. “A tired crowd that is really depressing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary that night, recording his gift of Carlyle’s book. “It is shameful that the Führer was able to find so few respectable colleagues. In this circle, he is the only person of distinction.”
When goebbels handed Hitler the abridged German translation of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, a sprawling twenty-one-hundred-page epic published between 1858 and 1865, he was not only fueling Hitler’s lifelong preoccupation with Frederick the Great but handing him a book by an author whose notions of leadership and history Hitler had long embraced.
As a pioneer of the great leader theory, Carlyle believed that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” He despised representational government. “Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work, beyond that same canceling of itself,” Carlyle once observed. Imperious leaders were to be revered, studied, and emulated, no matter how flawed. “One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company,” Carlyle wrote. “We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something.” Carlyle hated Irishmen and Jews and once authored a racist tract he belligerently titled “An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.”
A critic once claimed that Carlyle had spent seven “miserable” years trying to make Frederick “presentable” to a European public. In fact, Carlyle reveled in the enterprise. He expressed nothing but admiration for this eighteenth-century despot who “left the world all bankrupt,” in “bottomless abysses of destruction,” with his enemies “in quite ruinous circumstances.” He was fascinated by the king’s “quiet stoicism,” his “great consciousness and some conscious pride,” and, in particular, his eyes, “potent brilliant eyes,” which were at once “vigilant and penetrating,” and emanated “a lambent outer radiance springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man.” Carlyle found Frederick “miraculous,” a man who tottered repeatedly on the brink of disaster, even once contemplated suicide in the face of overwhelming odds, and yet had “defended a little Prussia against all Europe, year after year, for seven long years, till Europe had had enough, and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage.” William Butler Yeats once called Carlyle “the chief inspirer of self-educated men.”
Carlyle’s lyrical blend of brutality and sentimentality spoke to Hitler’s own toxic emotional constitution. Carlyle’s works occupied shelf space in Hitler’s first bookcase in his Thiersch Street apartment, and may have inspired Hitler to fashion himself as the “drummer”—Trommler—of the early Nazi movement, a designation that Carlyle similarly assigns to the young regent in chapter six of book one of his Frederick biography, when his “Fred” reveals his nascent martial spirit by taking a drum in hand and banging away much to his father’s delight. “The paternal heart ran over with glad fondness, invoking Heaven to confirm the omen,” Carlyle writes, noting that the man who began his career as a “drummer” went on to conquer a continent.
“It is wondrous when the English historian Carlyle emphasizes that Frederick the Great, so help him God, lived a life devoted solely to the service of his people,” Hitler said in the closing remarks of his 1924 trial. He continued to invoke Carlyle for the rest of his life. “There is much to be said about leaders, and it is certain that a leader is of tremendous importance for a people, but of equal importance is the people itself,” Hitler said in May 1927, while addressing a group of Nazi Party leaders. “Carlyle wrote that Frederick the Great was not only a great monarch but also that the Prussian people deserved a great monarch. The people also have to be worthy.”
Hitler invoked this same Carlylian notion two decades later, as his Reich began to crumble. “If the German people must acquiesce in this war, then they were too weak,” Hitler declared on August 4, 1944, two months after the Allies had splashed ashore at Normandy to breach his Fortress Europe, and “they would not have passed their test before history and would be destined to nothing other than destruction.” In March 1945, with the obliteration of his Reich inevitable, Hitler issued his infamous “Nero Order,” which called for the destruction of Germany’s public infrastructure, invoking the same Carlylian logic. “It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival,” Hitler told Albert Speer. “For the nation has proved itself weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.”
On that Sunday night in mid-March, when Hitler spoke of “exceptional men” and of comporting oneself for posterity, he was clearly echoing his readings of Carlyle, just as he was when he outlined his intentions for a political solution to the looming military catastrophe. As a lifelong student of Carlyle, Hitler could not have missed the parallels between his own situation and Carlyle’s depiction of the darkest hour of the Prussian king:
Since December 9th, Frederick is in Breslau, in some remainder of his ruined Palace there; and is represented to us, in Books, as sitting amid ruins; no prospect ahead of him but ruin. Withdrawn from Society; looking fixedly on the gloomiest future. Sees hardly anybody; speaks, except on matters of business, nothing.
Carlyle observes that by late 1761, Frederick’s empire is on the verge of ruin with the great forces of continental Europe—Austria, France, and Russia—assembled against him with overwhelming odds. German cities are occupied or in ruins. In a letter dated January 18, 1762, to the Marquis d’Argens, Frederick contemplates suicide—he speaks of a “little Glass Tube” that will end it all—and seeks solace in the hope of some unforeseen turn of events. “If Fortune continues to pursue me, doubtless I shall sink,” Frederick writes. “It is only she that can extricate me from the situation I am in. I escape out of it by looking at the Universe on the great scale, like an observer from some distant Planet; all then seems to me so infinitely small, and I almost pity my enemies for giving themselves such trouble about so very little.”
Frederick goes on to say that he finds refuge in his books. “I read a great deal,” he writes. “I devour my Books, and that brings useful alleviation. But for my Books, I think hypochondria would have had me in bedlam before now. In fine, dear Marquis, we live in troublous times and in desperate situations.”
Frederick concludes the letter with a description of himself as a “Stage Hero; always in danger, always on the point of perishing.” He hopes only that “the conclusion will come; and if the end of the piece be lucky, we will forget the rest.”
Then comes sudden and unexpected news from Petersburg. The day after Frederick pens this despairing missive, he learns that his sworn enemy, the tsarina Elizabeth, is dead, victim to an illness as unanticipated as it is fatal. “[T]hat the implacable Imperial Woman, INFAME CATIN DU NORD, is verily dead. Dead; and does not hate me any more,” Frederick jubilates. “Deliverance, Peace and Victory lie in the word!” Better still, Elizabeth is succeeded by her nephew, Peter, who as chance should have it, is an unapologetic Germanophile who “has long been privately a sworn friend and admirer of the king; and hastens, not too SLOWLY as the king had feared, but far the reverse, to make it known to all mankind.”2 Peter III sunders Russia’s alliances with Austria and France, withdraws the Russian armies from the battlefields, and dispatches an envoy to Berlin. Prussia is saved. The miracle of the House of Brandenburg has come to pass. Carlyle observes, “Frederick is difficult to kill.”
Huddled amid the ruins of Berlin—with the Ministry of Propaganda across the street a gutted shell, the adjacent old Reich Chance
llery damaged by bombs, and the vast walls of the New Reich Chancellery stripped of tapestries and paintings, its library evacuated of books in anticipation of destruction—Hitler may well have taken delusional comfort in the pages of Carlyle on that Sunday night, or at least at some point in the weeks that followed. Hitler’s preoccupation with the beleaguered but ultimately triumphant Prussian king is also evidenced by the portrait of Frederick that he had hung on the wall of his bunker suite. His choice of paintings was telling. Among the several Frederick portraits that he owned—reproduced in a bound volume, Catalogue of Adolf Hitler’s Private Gallery, among his books at the Library of Congress—he selected a work by Anton Graff, an eighteenth-century artist whom Max Osborn had praised for the “psychological and luminous concentration” he brought to his subjects’ eyes. The painting shows Friedrich in his later years, gray-haired and mellow, well “beyond his troublous times and desperate situations,” the beneficiary of the sort of unexpected turn of events that Hitler was awaiting, and that seemed to present itself in the second week of April.
On Thursday, April 12, circumstance seemed to collude in this delusional end game. While resting at his private retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, Franklin Roosevelt suffered a massivebrain embolism anddied.
When word of roosevelt’s death reached the Führerbunker, jubilation swept the subterranean space. There are numerous accounts of how Hitler received the news, but the general consensus seems to follow that given by Albert Speer. “When I arrived in the bunker,” he remembered, “Hitler caught sight of me and rushed to me with a degree of animation rare in him in those days. He held a newspaper clipping in his hand. ‘Here, read it! Here! Here we have the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost. Read it! Roosevelt is dead!’” Hitler told Speer that this was proof that Providence was watching over him. Goebbels was beside himself with jubilation. He told Speer that history was repeating itself, that the miracle of Brandenburg had again come to pass. As with Frederick the Great, salvation had come at the last moment.
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