by Ian Kershaw
His train, its blinds pulled down, pulled into the capital that night. Triumphant arrivals in Berlin were no more than distant memories. As his car made its way amid the rubble through unlit streets to the Reich Chancellery – now cold and dismal, its pictures, carpets, and tapestries removed to safety in view of the increasing air-raids on Berlin – few inhabitants of the city even knew he had returned; probably still fewer cared.79 Hitler in any case had no wish to see them. The path to his portals was blocked for all but the few who had the requisite papers and passes to satisfy the intense scrutiny of SS guards armed with machine-guns and posted at a series of security checks. Even the Chief of the General Staff had to surrender his weapons and have his briefcase meticulously examined.80
Hitler was completely immersed during the next days in the events on the eastern front. His insistence on the troops standing fast and refusing to concede a metre of territory had proved successful in stemming what could have turned into a rout outside Moscow in December 1941. In the defensive campaigns of 1943 and 1944, it had been in the main costly and counterproductive. Now it was futile and disastrous. It brought daily confrontation with Chief of Staff Guderian. As we noted, Hitler’s rage over the loss of Warsaw and over tactical withdrawals of his generals in East Prussia knew no bounds. Seemingly incapable of acknowledging the objective imbalances in forces and the tactical weaknesses which had left the Vistula front so exposed, he thought he scented betrayal at every point. Frequent rantings about the incompetence or treachery of his generals dragged out the twice-daily military briefings to inordinate length. Guderian reckoned that his trips from General Staff Headquarters at Zossen, south of Berlin, twice a day took up around three hours. A further four to six hours were consumed during the conferences themselves. From the Chief of Staff’s point of view, it was time wasted.81
The regular clashes between Hitler and his one-time admirer Guderian reflected what were by now wholly and irreconcilably conflicting philosophies with no middle-ground between them. For Hitler, capitulation could not be contemplated, even if the price was the total destruction of Germany. For the Chief of Staff, the destruction of Germany must be prevented, even if the price was capitulation – at any rate, in the west. Guderian – and he was far from alone in this – saw the only hope of preventing the complete destruction of Germany as putting everything into blocking the Soviet onslaught and at the same time opening negotiations for an armistice with the West, however poor the bargaining base. Perhaps the West could be persuaded that it was in its own interests to prevent Russian dominance of a post-war Germany by accepting the surrender of the western parts of the country to enable the Reich to defend its eastern borders.
This was the proposition that Guderian outlined on 23 January to Dr Paul Barandon, the Foreign Ministry’s new liaison with the army. It was a faint hope but, as Guderian noted, drowning men clutch at straws. He hoped that Barandon would engineer for him an audience with Ribbentrop, and that the Foreign Minister and he could approach Hitler immediately with a view to ending the war.82 Barandon arranged the interview. Ribben-trop, when Guderian met him two days later, seemed shocked at the prospect of the Russians at the gates of Berlin within a few weeks. But he declared himself a loyal follower of the Führer, knew the latter’s antipathy to any peace feelers, and was unwilling to support Guderian. As Guderian entered the briefing room that evening, he heard Hitler in a loud and agitated voice say: ‘So when the Chief of the General Staff goes to see the Foreign Minister and informs him of the situation in the East with the object of securing an armistice in the West, he is doing neither more nor less than committing high treason!’83 Ribbentrop had, of course, promptly reported to Hitler the content of his talks with Guderian. No action followed. But it was a warning shot across the bows. ‘I forbid most decisively generalizations and conclusions about the overall situation,’ Speer recalled Hitler ranting. ‘That remains my business. Anyone in future claiming to another person that the war is lost will be treated as a traitor to his country with all the consequences for him and his family. I will act without respect for position and standing.’ The head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, from now on sat silently but menacingly in the background during the briefing sessions.84
In fact, despite this outburst – and Ribbentrop’s refusal to entertain Guderian’s suggestion – Hitler was aware in early 1945 of his Foreign Minister’s extremely tentative feelers via Stockholm, Bern, and Madrid to the western Allies to end the war with Germany and join the fight against Bolshevism. He knew, too, of Ribbentrop’s consideration of an alternative suggestion: approaching the Soviet Union to help crush Britain.85 Hitler had first opposed any idea of peace feelers. Then he appeared to change his mind. ‘Nothing will come of it,’ Hitler told Ribbentrop. ‘But if you really want, you can try it.’86 However, not only was there no prospect of either the Soviets or the western Allies showing genuine readiness to enter peace negotiations at this stage; Ribbentrop knew that Hitler had not the slightest wish in pursuing them. A premiss of any peace-talks, as Hitler well realized, would have been his own removal. That in itself was sufficient to make him dismiss in fury any idea of negotiations.87 As the Foreign Minister himself later remarked, Hitler ‘regarded any peace feeler as a sign of weakness’. His soundings, so he said, merely ‘showed that no serious peace talk was possible’ as long as Hitler lived.88
This was equally plain to Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister was approached by Göring at the end of January, disconsolate at events in the east and despairing of Germany’s military chances. Göring was prepared, he said, to use his Swedish contacts to put out feelers to Britain and sought the help of Goebbels in persuading Hitler that, since any overtures from Ribbentrop (regarded with utter contempt by the Reich Marshal as well as the Propaganda Minister) were doomed to failure, he should try this avenue. Goebbels was not encouraging. Privately, he was unwilling to push the case with Hitler since he ran the risk of losing the Führer’s confidence which, he added pointedly, ‘is indeed the entire basis of my work’. In any case, Göring could only act, he noted, with Hitler’s approval ‘and the Führer won’t grant him such approval’. Göring thought Hitler too intransigent, and wondered whether he wanted a political solution at all. He did, replied Goebbels, but ‘the Führer does not see such a possibility existing at present.’89
Hitler’s lingering hopes, as ever, were in a split in the alliance against him. If Britain and the USA wanted to prevent a bolshevization of Europe, he told Goebbels, they would have to turn to Germany for help. The coalition had to break; it was a matter of holding out until the moment arrived.90 Goebbels privately thought Hitler too optimistic.91
Jodl and Göring played to this illusion, however, at the military briefing on 27 January. However gloomy his attitude had been when speaking to Goebbels, in Hitler’s presence Göring sang a different tune. The Soviet advance had unquestionably dashed British plans, he and Jodl reckoned. Göring thought that if things went much further they could expect a telegram from the British saying they were prepared to join forces to prevent a Soviet occupation of Germany. Hitler suggested the National Committee of Free Germany, the ‘traitors’ organization’ based in Moscow and linked with General Seydlitz, from the 6th Army lost at Stalingrad, could come in useful. He had told Ribbentrop, he said, to filter a story to the British that the Soviets had trained up 200,000 Communists under the leadership of German officers, ready to march. The prospect of a Russian-led national government in Germany would be certain to stir up anxiety in Britain, he averred. The British did not enter the war to see ‘the East come to the Atlantic’, Göring added. Hitler commented: ‘English newspapers are already writing bitterly: what’s the point of the war?’92
He nevertheless saw no opening for overtures to his western enemies, when Goebbels tentatively broached the issue. In discussions with his Propaganda Minister on successive days at the end of January, appearing drained with fatigue, he reflected on the failure of the intended alliance with Britain. This
might have been possible, he thought, had Chamberlain remained Prime Minister. But it had been totally vitiated by Churchill, ‘the actual father of the war’.93 On the other hand, he continued to express admiration for Stalin’s brutal realism as a revolutionary who knew exactly what he wanted and had learnt his method of atrocities from Ghengis Khan. Here, too, Hitler dismissed any prospect of negotiations.94 He berated, as always, the failings of his generals. He referred, as he had so frequently done, to the way crises in the Party before 1933 had been overcome, and how he was determined to withstand the crises of the war. ‘He wanted,’ he declared to Goebbels, ‘to prove himself worthy of the great examples from history.’ Should he succeed in transforming Germany’s fortunes, thought the Propaganda Minister, without a trace of cynicism, he would be the man not only of the century, but of the millennium.95
Goebbels continued to find Hitler over-optimistic about the chances of staving off the Soviet advance.96 Indeed, however pessimistic or fatalistic he was in dark moments, Hitler was as yet far from ready to give up the fight. He spoke of his aims in the forthcoming offensive in Hungary. Once he was again in possession of Hungarian oil, he would pour in additional divisions from Germany to liberate Upper Silesia. The whole operation would take around two months. The air of unreality did not escape Goebbels. It would take a great deal of luck to succeed, he noted.97
Goebbels had been ‘astonished’ that Hitler, after showing such repeated reluctance for two years to speak in public, had so readily taken up a suggestion to broadcast to the nation on 30 January, the twelfth anniversary of the ‘seizure of power’.98 Hitler presumably felt that at such a point of national crisis, with the enemy already deep inside the Reich, not to have spoken on such an important date in the Nazi calendar would have sent out the worst possible signals to the German people. It was imperative that he strengthen the will to fight, most of all on Germany’s shrinking borders.
At any rate, his recorded speech, broadcast at 10p.m. that evening, amounted to little more than an attempt to stiffen morale, to appeal to fighting spirit, to demand the most extreme sacrifice in ‘the most serious crisis for Europe in many centuries’, and to emphasize his own will to fight on and refusal to contemplate anything other than victory. He referred, inevitably, to a ‘Jewish-international world conspiracy’, to ‘Kremlin Jews’, the ‘spectre of asiatic Bolshevism’, and of a ‘storm-flood from inner Asia’. But the military disasters of the previous fortnight were not touched upon with a single word. And only a single sentence mentioned ‘the horrible fate now taking place in the east, and eradicating people in their tens and hundreds of thousands in villages, in the marches, in the country, and in towns’, which would eventually ‘be fought off and mastered’,99 The speech could have appealed to few beyond remaining diehards. Only two of a group of soldiers listening to the speech on the radio at their post in Bamberg rose to their feet and stood with outstretched right arms in the Nazi salute as the national anthem brought the broadcast to an end. The rest stayed sitting, and were soon voicing their criticism.100 Goebbels professed himself satisfied with the speech and reckoned it had a significant impact on the German public.101 Probably more realistic in its assessment of what proved to be the last time the German people heard Hitler’s voice was a local SD report from southern Germany: ‘Propaganda has not managed to strengthen belief in a positive change. Even the Führer’s speech on 30 January was unable to remove the loudly voiced doubts (die lauten Zweifel).’102 The once-revered Leader had little credibility left.
That same day, 30 January, Speer had a memorandum passed to Hitler. It told him that the war economy and armaments production were at an end. Following the loss of Upper Silesia, there was no possibility of meeting the needs of the front in munitions, weapons, and tanks. The material superiority of the enemy can, accordingly, no longer be compensated for by the bravery of our soldiers.’ Hitler’s cold response made plain that he did not take kindly to receiving such reports that smacked of defeatism, He forbade Speer to pass the memorandum to anyone, adding that conclusions from the armaments position were his alone to draw.103 Short of the miracle for which he was still waiting, it must nevertheless have been obvious to Hitler, as to all those around him, that Germany could last out neither economically nor militarily for much longer.
Speer, long after the events, posed the question why even at this point Hitler was not faced with any joint action from those with regular contact to him to demand an explanation of how he intended to bring the war to an end. (He gave no hint of what might have followed from such an unlikely scenario.) Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and even in some ways Goebbels had, after all, been among the Nazi leaders who at one time or another had broached the question of peace overtures to the enemy, which Hitler had repeatedly dismissed out of hand. Now the end was near, and Germany was facing not just military defeat but total destruction. ‘Surely something must happen,’ Speer whispered to Dönitz during a briefing in early February, when further disasters were reported. Dönitz replied coolly that he was there only to represent the navy. The Führer would know what he was doing.104
The reply provided at the same time an answer to the question Speer raised many years later. There was no prospect of any united front against Hitler even now, and even among those who saw with crystal clarity the abyss looming before them. The aftermath of the plot against him the previous year had left none of his entourage in the slightest doubt of the ruthlessness with which he would turn on anyone seen as a threat. But the impossibility of any combined front against Hitler did not rest alone, or even primarily, on fear. The innermost structure of the regime had long depended upon the way Hitler could play off his paladins against each other. Their deep divisions and animosities were reconciled only in their unquestioning loyalty and adherence to the Leader, from whom all remaining shreds of power and authority were still drawn. The Führer cult was still far from dead in this inner part of the ‘charismatic community’. Keitel, Jodl, and Dönitz, among the highest ranks of the military leaders, were still wholly bound to Hitler, their loyalty unshaken, their admiration undiluted. Göring, his prestige at rock-bottom, had long since lost all energy to undertake anything against Hitler, and certainly lacked the will to do so. The same was true of Ribbentrop, who was in any case devoid of friends within the Nazi hierarchy and held by most in contempt as well as loathing. Goebbels, Labour Front leader Robert Ley, and, not least, the Party leader in closest proximity to Hitler, Martin Bormann, were among the most radical supporters of his uncompromising line and remained wholly loyal. Speer, for his part, was – whatever his post-war feelings – one of the least likely to lead a fronde against Hitler, confront him with an ultimatum, or serve as focal point of a combined approach to put pressure on him. The scenario contemplated by Speer long after the events was, therefore, utterly inconceivable. The ‘charismatic community’ was compelled by its inner logic to follow the Leader on whom it had always depended – even when he was visibly taking it to perdition.
IV
The government quarter of Berlin, like much of the rest of the city, was already a dismal and depressing sight even before, in broad daylight on 3 February, a huge American fleet of bombers unleashed a new hail of destruction from the skies in the heaviest raid of the war on the Reich capital. The old Reich Chancellery, the neo-Baroque palace dating back to Bismarck’s time, was ruined. The façade remained intact, but beyond one wing the building was now little more than an empty shell. The new Reich Chancellery, designed by Speer, also suffered a number of direct hits.105 Bormann’s headquarters in the Party Chancellery were severely damaged, and other buildings at the hub of the Nazi empire were demolished fully or in part. The whole area was a mass of rubble. Bomb craters pitted the Chancellery garden. For a time there was a complete power-failure, and water was available only from a water-cart standing in front of the Reich Chancellery.106 But unlike most of the population in the bombed-out districts of Berlin and elsewhere, at least the leaders of the Third Reich could still fi
nd alternative shelter and accommodation, however modest by their standards.
His apartments in the Reich Chancellery largely gutted by incendiaries, Hitler now moved underground for much of the time, shuffling down the seemingly unending stone steps, flanked by bare concrete walls, that led to the claustrophobic, labyrinthine subterranean world of the Führer Bunker, a two-storey construction deep below the garden of the Reich Chancellery.107 The enormous bunker complex had been deepened in 1943 – extending an earlier bunker (originally meant for possible future use as an air-raid shelter) dating from 1936 – and heavily reinforced during Hitler’s stay at his western headquarters.108 The complex was completely self-contained, with its own heating, lighting, and water-pumps run from a diesel generator.109 Hitler had slept there since returning to Berlin.110 From now on, it would provide a macabre domicile for the remaining weeks of his life.