One last macabre event remained for the denizens of the Führerbunker. Early on that same day, Goebbels had attempted to negotiate with the Russians, who were having none of it. They had conquered the city at a great loss of life. The Third Reich was destroyed, its leader, as Goebbels informed them, was dead. What was there to negotiate? The Russians insisted on unconditional surrender. Upon hearing this, Goebbels moved decisively. This was the moment for him to join his Führer in a “hero’s death.” Frau Goebbels woke their six children from their beds, told them not to be afraid, that a doctor was going to give them an injection, a kind that was now given to all children and soldiers. It was morphine, which made the children drowsy. Then Frau Goebbels, moving methodically from one child to the next, placed a vile of cyanide in their mouths and crushed it. “My children should die rather than live in shame and scorn,” she had told Traudl Junge. “In a Germany as it will be after the war, there will be no place for our children.” She could not imagine a world without Hitler, without National Socialism. Immediately thereafter Joseph and Magda Goebbels climbed the stairs to the Chancellery garden. Stories of exactly how they died vary, but they either took cyanide together or were shot by Goebbels’s aide. In either case, they were gone. The sorcerer’s apprentice who from the early days of the NSDAP had tirelessly, fanatically promoted the National Socialist cause had come to an ignominious end. Their bodies were hurriedly burned, though not beyond recognition, and left unburied. The Russians found them the next day.
On May 1, a red flag flew over the battered Reichstag, and Russian troops at last reached the devastated Reich Chancellery. They discovered, then entered, the bunker. There they found the bodies of adjutant Burgdorf and General Krebs in the deserted corridor. They, too, had committed suicide. Nothing remained but the shabby wreckage of the Führer’s last headquarters, papers strewn about, furniture overturned, bottles, scraps of food. And ghosts. Although they were later to deny it, the Russians soon discovered Hitler’s corpse. What they did with it remains something of a mystery, though a skull with a bullet hole in the right temple, discovered by Russian troops in the Chancellery garden, resides in a shoebox in a Moscow archive. The Battle of Berlin was over. A tidal wave of rape swept the ruined city. It is estimated that between 95,000 and 130,000 women and girls were raped, some 10,000 of whom died, mostly by suicide. The Russians paid a very high price for their victory: more than 300,000 casualties; the heaviest losses suffered by the Red Army in any battle of the war. Upward of 150,000 Germans perished in the ruined city and its environs, while Hitler waited in vain for the miracle that would save his profoundly evil regime.
The war in Europe did not end on May 1. Hitler had chosen Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz to be his successor, and from his headquarters in Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, the admiral held out for another week in the hope of allowing as many of his countrymen as possible to flee to the West ahead of the Russians. In that time, he flushed the leading Nazis out of his government, although he retained Speer. He was especially eager to rid himself and the country of Himmler, who had moved to Flensburg with a large retinue of chauffeurs, secretaries, and SS guards. Still suffering from the abiding delusion that he would be indispensable to the new post-Hitler government, he was stunned to discover that Dönitz wanted no part of him. Astonished, he contemplated reaching out to General Bernard Montgomery, whose British forces were nearby and closing, in an attempt to negotiate a peace agreement—and to hold on to power. He was dissuaded from that fantastical move by his embarrassed aides. When it became painfully obvious that he was not wanted, that he had been stripped of his power and position, he shaved his mustache, donned the uniform of a simple soldier, and tried to pass as a displaced person. He did not, however, dispose of the rimless spectacles that more than anything else identified him as the Reichsmarschall SS. Still incredulous, he had no intention of taking his own life, no martyr he. But on May 21, he was captured by the British and was passed on for interrogation near Lüneburg. Before he could be questioned properly, he bit into a cyanide capsule he had hidden behind his teeth, and died convulsing on the dusty floor of a British interrogation camp.
In the south, Hermann Göring was freed from house arrest by a passing Luftwaffe unit, and on May 5 he was taken into custody by the Americans. His arrest probably saved his life since Bormann had ordered his execution as a traitor. At first treated as something of a celebrity, he gave an interview to the international press. Eisenhower quickly called a halt to that, and Göring was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Luxembourg, where he was held until he was transferred to Nuremberg to stand trial as a war criminal. He was tried by the Allied Military Tribunal and condemned to death in 1946 along with Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, Seyss-Inquart, Julius Streicher, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hans Frank, and Wilhelm Frick. Robert Ley was also sentenced to death but took his own life before his execution could take place. Walther Funk and Rudolf Hess were given life sentences. Dönitz was condemned to ten years in prison, Speer to a term of twenty years. On the morning Göring was to be hanged, he cheated the hangman by biting into a cyanide capsule he had managed to conceal. Martin Bormann had disappeared in an effort to escape the bunker but was killed in the ruins of the city. His body was not discovered until 2002. Trials of other Nazi criminals would stretch out across decades, tried first by the victorious Allies and then later by German courts.
On May 8, General Jodl signed the unconditional surrender at Reims; a day later Keitel signed a similar capitulation with the Russians, and Hitler’s war came at last to an end. Much of Europe was in ruins, thousands upon thousands of bewildered, uprooted persons roamed the devastated continent, many finding their way into crowded displaced persons camps. The roll call of the dead began—in Germany, 1,800,000 military dead, 500,000 civilians, and 1,240 missing; in the Soviet Union, 11,000,000 military dead, 2,500,000 POWs killed in German captivity, and 7,000,000 civilians—10 percent of the population. In the slaughterhouse that was Poland, 4,520,000 dead, over 4,000,000 of whom were civilians, 20 percent of the prewar Polish population. Six million Jews perished in what has come to be called the Holocaust. British, French, and American losses were lower, France 810,000, Britain 300,000, and the United States 259,000. Sixty million more were wounded or maimed, either mentally or physically. It was the largest, most destructive war in human history.
* * *
There are many lessons to be drawn from the Nazi experience, lessons about nationalism and racism, about ideological fanaticism and the fragility of democracy, about the dark recesses of human nature that are implicit in the preceding pages, but I would like to close with this thought. On May 9, 1945, the Third Reich ceased to exist. When the last Anglo-American bomb had exploded on Central Europe, and the last Russian shell had detonated, and the German people began emerging from their hiding places to survey the smoking heaps of rubble that had once been Berlin, Dresden, or Hamburg, there must have been a moment, however fleeting, when the grisly reality of all that had happened fell in upon them and they asked themselves the question, How had it ever come to this? It was a question that must also have come to the ghostlike human shells that had suffered the unspeakable agonies of Auschwitz or Buchenwald or Treblinka. It must have come to them in countless ways, in the endless days and nights in boxcars or barracks or prison cells, standing naked on the cusp of mass graves, or in the gas chambers. For the Germans that haunting question, if they dared confront it, was accompanied by an enormous burden of guilt, shame, and horror at what was done in the name of the German people. For them, no less than for the victims of National Socialism whose only crime was to have been a Jew or a Pole or a Russian, there is another legacy, a legacy that must be ours as well. It is a political, but even more a moral imperative: that this must never happen again. Be vigilant about your rights; when the rights of any group, no matter how small or marginal, are threatened, everyone’s liberty is put at risk. Let there never come a time when we must cast about and ask how it ever came to this.
The Beerh
all Putsch defendants, gathered on the steps of Munich courthouse, April 1, 1924.
Heinrich Brüning
Franz von Papen
Kurt von Schleicher, Weimar’s last pre-Hitler chancellors.
Alfred Hugenberg (left), who with Hitler was leader of the Harzburg Front, 1931. Hugenberg was the titular head of the alliance, but Hitler was the dominant force behind the right-wing alliance.
The first meeting of the Hitler cabinet on January 30, 1933. Only three Nazis were included, Göring (front left), Hitler, and Wilhelm Frick, Minister of Education (second row, standing between Göring and Hitler).
Hitler and S.A. leader Ernst Röhm in 1933, when they were still allies. Hitler had him shot in the summer of 1934.
Rabble-rousing Joesph Goebbels speaking at a propaganda rally 1932. Aside from Hitler, Goebbels was the party’s most popular speaker.
Famous image of Hitler bowing to Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg on the Day of Potsdam, February 1933.
Hitler reviewing the S.A. at Nuremberg, 1933 or 1934.
The Reichstag Fire, the morning after, February 1933.
Hitler, the “common man,” working at the groundbreaking of the Autobahn, 1933.
Chief of the S.S. Heinrich Himmler in Russia in the summer of 1941.
Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Security Main Office, Himmler’s second in command and architect of the “Final Solution.”
Reichsmarshal Herman Göring; often seen as jovial and a bon vivant, this photograph captures the malevolence of his character.
Hitler appears to dance with joy at the surrender of France, June 1940, Compiègne, France.
Massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, in Ukraine, 1942. There the Germans murdered 33,000 Jews during a single weekend.
The entrance ramp at Auschwitz, where the women and children were separated from able-bodied men and sent directly to the gas chambers. The men would be worked to death.
Defeated German prisoners marching into captivity, Stalingrad, February 1943.
Young Wehrmacht soldier weeps during the devastating defeat at Kursk, 1943. It was the last German offensive on the Eastern Front.
Women, children, and old men were expected to defend Berlin and other cities against the onrushing Soviets.
Proud recipient of the Iron Cross, March 1945, for his actions against Russian tanks in Berlin. He was twelve years old.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of this book has consumed more than five years. I owe much to friends, family, and colleagues for their intellectual counsel and unflagging support when, at times, it seemed the book would never be finished. I could name many, in Britain, Germany, and the U.S., but some deserve special mention.
Bruce Kuklick and Jonathan Steinberg, good friends and excellent critics, were always there with sound advice, goodwill, and encouragement. Over the years the many long discussions with Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich in Berlin have been an inspiration, and along the way, Hans Mommsen and Gerald Feldman remained solid sources of supportive criticism. I can’t quite believe that they are gone.
My agent, John Wright, believed in this project from beginning. He is all an agent should be and more. His insights into the manuscript were of great importance, and his unflagging sense of humor has lightened many a sober day spent with Hitler and the Nazis. John also led me to Bob Bender, my editor at Simon & Schuster, who has been a paragon of patience and who always offered encouragement and sound advice.
But my deepest gratitude I owe to my wife, Kristen Stromberg Childers. She read the pages of the manuscript as the printer spewed them out and offered a careful chapter-by-chapter reading that proved indispensable. I don’t know what I would do without her. Finally, this book is also for my children, Nick, Ava, James, and Tim; they are my inspiration.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© KRISTEN STROMBERG CHILDERS
THOMAS CHILDERS recently retired as the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of several books on modern German history and the Second World War. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Research Grant, and a West European Studies Research Grant from Harvard University. In addition to teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Childers has held visiting professorships at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, Smith College, and Swarthmore College, and he has lectured in London, Oxford, Berlin, Munich, and other universities in the United States and Europe.
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NOTES
Chapter 1: The Serpent’s Egg
“almost pathologically sensitive about anything concerning the body”: Franz Jetzinger, Hitler’s Youth, London, 1958; August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, new expanded edition and translation (Barnsley, UK, 2011), p. 163.
“a bolt from the blue”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (American edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 20.
no chance that he could study painting or architecture: Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), pp. 52–54.
with grief as eighteen-year-old Adolf: Eduard Bloch, “My Patient Hitler,” Collier’s Weekly, March 15–22, 1941; and his interview with the OSS, in Hitler Source Book. See also Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Edeljude. Das Leben des Armenarztes Eduard Bloch (Munich, 2008).
He would tolerate no dissent: Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 78.
did not include mingling or interacting with them: Ibid., pp. 163–64.
not . . . on the brink of starvation or in desperate straits: Jetzinger, Hitler’s Youth, pp. 117, 131–34.
employed to great effect in Nazi propaganda: Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich, 1997), pp. 96–97.
Hitler seemed calm and at peace: Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 94.
“by whom he was persecuted”: Ibid., p. 157.
“ought to be blown up”: Ibid., p. 160.
would not see him again for thirty years: After Hitler disappeared from their Vienna apartment, Kubizek did not meet him again until 1938 when Germany absorbed Austria and Hitler returned to his hometown in glory. Ibid., pp. 246–59.
He had hit rock bottom: Hamann, Hitlers Wien, pp. 208–9, 226–27; Jetzinger, Hitler’s Youth, pp. 131–32; Bradley F. Smith, Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood and Youth (Stanford, CA, 1967), pp. 123–24.
Carrying luggage and shoveling snow: He understood the plight of the working class, he claimed imaginatively in a 1934 speech, because “I myself was a laboring man for years in the building trade and had to earn my own bread.” Hitler’s address delivered at the First Congress of German Workers on May 10, 1933, in Norman H. Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, vol. I (New York, 1969), p. 862. See also Jetzinger, Hitler’s
Youth, 131–32; Reinhold Hanisch, “I Was Hitler’s Buddy,” New Republic, April 5, 12, 19, 1939, pp. 193–99, 270–72, 297–300.
found on the library shelves: Hamann, Hitlers Wien, pp. 285–88.
more than a modicum of comfort: Jetzinger, Hitler’s Youth, pp. 132–42.
to be consoled by Hanisch: Hanisch, “I Was Hitler’s Buddy”; Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 69.
a fin de siècle cultural flowering: See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York, 1979).
“to help . . . eliminate Jewry”: Quoted in Hamann, Hitlers Wien. For her treatment of Schönerer and Lueger, see p. 337 ff.
the country’s political lexicon: Ibid., p. 334.
“must not become greater Jerusalem”: Lueger quoted in Volker Ullrich, Hitler’s Ascent, 1889–1939 (New York, 2016), p. 44.
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