by Ian Kershaw
75. Hitler and Himmler take a wintry walk on the Obersalzberg in March 1944.
76. The ‘White Rose’ resistance group of Munich students. Christoph Probst with Sophie and Hans Scholl in July 1942. On 22 February the following year, they were sentenced to death and beheaded on the same day for distributing leaflets in Munich University, in the wake of the disaster at Stalingrad, condemning the inhumanity of the Nazi regime.
77. The brilliant tank commander Heinz Guderian. Though he clearly recognized that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophe, he condemned the attempt to assassinate him on 20 July 1944. A day later, Guderian was appointed Chief of the General Staff, retaining the position until his dismissal on 28 March 1945.
78. General Ludwig Beck, who, following his resignation – because of Hitler’s insistence on risking war over Czechoslovakia – as Chief of the General Staff in 1938, became a central figure in the conservative resistance, committing suicide on 20 July 1944 after the failure of the bomb-plot.
79. Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, the driving-force behind the conspiracy to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944, who took upon himself the responsibility both for carrying out the assassination in the Wolf’s Lair and for directing the intended coup d’état in Berlin. On its failure, he was arrested and shot by a firing-squad late that night.
80. Major-General Henning von Tresckow, one of the most courageous figures in the resistance, the inspiration of several plans, hatched within Army Group Centre, to kill Hitler in 1943. Stauffenberg regarded Tresckow as his mentor. This is one of the last photographs of him, taken in 1944. He committed suicide on 21 July on the Eastern Front on learning of the failure of the bomb-plot.
81. Hitler, looking shaken, just after the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944.
82. Hitler’s trousers, shredded by the bomb-blast.
83. Hitler greets Mussolini at Führer Headquarters – the last time they would meet – some three hours after Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded on 20 July 1944. Hitler had to shake hands with his left hand because his right arm had been slightly injured in the blast.
84. Grand-Admiral Dönitz professes the loyalty of the navy in a broadcast shortly after midnight on 21 July 1944, just after Hitler and Göring had spoken to the German people. Listening to Dönitz are Bormann and Jodl
85. An ageing Hitler, pictured at the Berghof in 1944.
86. Wonder Weapons: a V1 flying-bomb is taken to its launch-pad.
87. Wonder-Weapons: a V2 rocket, ready for launch at Cuxhaven.
88. Wonder-Weapons: An American soldier stands alongside a Me 262 on the advance into Germany in April 1945. Hitler had for a long time insisted on having the jet-fighter designed as a bomber. When finally deployed as a fighter, it was far too late to be effective.
89. Scraping the barrel. Ill-equipped men of the ‘German Volkssturm’ – the people’s militia proclaimed by Hitler on 18 October 1944, ordering all able-bodied men between 16 and 60 to take up arms – pictured during a swearing-in ceremony in Berlin in December 1944.
90. The last ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 11 March 1945. Hitler did not appear, leaving it to Göring (flanked by Dönitz on his left, and Keitel on his right) to lay the wreath at the cenotaph on Unter den Linden.
91. Women and children fleeing as the Red Army attacks Danzig in March 1945.
92. Fantasy: In February 1945, with the Red Army within striking distance of Berlin, Hitler ponders the model of the intended postwar rebuilding of his hometown of Linz, designed for him by his architect Hermann Giesler.
93. Reality: Hitler, with his adjutant Julius Schaub, standing in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in March 1945, a few weeks before his suicide.
EPILOGUE
‘Europe has never known such a calamity to her civilisation and nobody can say when she will begin to recover from its effects.’
Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1945
Hitler was dead. Only the last obsequies remained. They would not detain the inhabitants of the bunker for long. The man who, living, had dominated their existence to the last was now merely a corpse to be disposed of as rapidly as possible. With the Russians at the portals of the Reich Chancellery, the bunker inmates had thoughts other than their dead leader on their minds.
Within minutes of the deaths being established, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife of a day and a half, Eva Braun, were wrapped in the blankets that Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, had quickly fetched. The corpses were then lifted from the sofa and carried through the bunker, up twenty-five feet or so of stairs, and into the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Linge, helped by three SS guards, brought out the remains of Hitler, head covered by the blanket, his lower legs protruding. Martin Bormann carried out Eva Braun’s body into the corridor, where Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, relieved him of his burden. Otto Günsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant, and commissioned with overseeing the burning of the bodies, then took over on the stairs and carried Eva Braun up into the garden. He laid the bodies side by side, Eva Braun to Hitler’s right, on a piece of flat, open, sandy ground only about three metres from the door down to the bunker. It was impossible to look around for any more suitable spot. Even this location, close to the bunker door, was extremely hazardous, since an unceasing rain of shells from the Soviet barrage continued to bombard the whole area, including the garden itself. General Hans Krebs, Hitler’s last Chief of the General Staff, Wilhelm Burgdorf, his Wehrmacht adjutant, Joseph Goebbels, newly-appointed Chancellor of what was left of the Reich, and Martin Bormann, now designated Party Minister, had followed the small cortège and joined the extraordinary funeral party witnessing the macabre scene.
A good store of petrol had been gathered in the bunker in readiness. Kempka had himself provided, at Günsche’s request, as much as 200 litres. More was stored in the bunker’s machine-room. The petrol was now swiftly poured over the bodies. Nonetheless, as the hail of shells continued, setting the funeral pyre alight with the matches Goebbels supplied proved difficult. Günsche was about to try with a grenade, when Linge managed to find some paper to make a torch. Bormann was finally able to get it burning, and either he or Linge hurled it on to the pyre, immediately retreating to the safety of the doorway. Someone rapidly closed the bunker door, leaving open only a small crevice, through which a ball of fire was seen to erupt around the petrol-soaked bodies. Arms briefly raised in a final ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, the tiny funeral party hurriedly departed underground, away from the danger of the exploding shells. As the flames consumed the bodies in a suitably infernal setting, the end of the leader whose presence had a mere few years earlier electrified millions was witnessed by not a single one even of his closest followers.1
Neither Linge nor Günsche, the two men entrusted by Hitler with the disposal of the bodies, returned to ensure that the task was complete. One of the guards in the Chancellery garden, Hermann Karnau, later testified (though, like a number of the witnesses in the bunker, he gave contradictory versions at different times) that, when he revisited the cremation site, the bodies had been reduced to little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them with his foot.2 Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6p.m. Karnau had shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable bodies (‘zwei verkohlte, zusammensgeschrumpfte Leichen, die nicht mehr zu identifizieren waren’).3 Günsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Führer Escort Squad (Führer-begleitkommando), Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff and Obersturmführer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already thoroughly burnt (‘schon verkohlt’) and were in a ‘shocking state (scheußlichem Zustand)’, torn open – Günsche presumed – in the heavy bombardment of the garden. Reisser’s involvement was not needed. Günsche told him, an hou
r and a half after giving him the order, that Lindloff had already carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30p.m. on 30 April.4
There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery garden.5
When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke, since 1938, a cigar-box containing part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the other as Eva Braun’s. The lower jaw-bone, too, was Hitler’s. It was almost certainly all that they were able to identify of the former Dictator of Germany. The earthly remains of Adolf Hitler, it appears, were contained in a cigar-box.
I
The bunker inmates were now finally free to think of their own survival. Even while the bodies still burned in the Chancellery garden above, they had forgotten their views of self-immolation alongside their leader and were agreeing to do what he had always and explicitly ruled out: seek a last-minute arrangement with the Soviet Union. An emissary was sent out under a white flag to try to engineer a meeting of General Krebs (who, as a former military attaché in Moscow, had the advantage of speaking fluent Russian) with Marshal Zhukov. At 10p.m. that evening, Krebs went over the Soviet lines bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann.
It was an anxious night for those incarcerated in the bunker. And when Krebs returned around 6a.m. next morning it was only to report that the Soviet side insisted upon unconditional surrender and demanded a declaration to that effect by 4p.m. that afternoon, 1 May.6
This was the end. It was time for final preparations – on the sole remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53a.m., a telegram for Dönitz arrived in Plön: ‘Testament in force. I’ll come to you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from publication. Bormann.’7 Earlier that morning, more than nine hours after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker.8 Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in a further telegram – the last to leave the bunker – dictated by Goebbels and arriving at Plön at 3.18p.m. that afternoon.9 Neither the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler’s death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a broadcast at 10.26p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon – it was the previous day – and that his death had taken place in combat ‘at his post in the Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism’. In his proclamation to the Wehrmacht, Dönitz spoke of the Führer’s ‘heroic death’. The Wehrmacht’s report stated that he had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital’.10 The delay in informing Dönitz had plainly been to allow Bormann and Goebbels the final opportunity of a negotiated surrender to the Red Army without consulting the new head of state. The untruth relayed by Dönitz to the Wehrmacht and German people was to prevent a predictable response by the troops, had they been aware of Hitler’s suicide, that the Führer had deserted them at the last.11 This was, in fact, precisely the message which General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander in Berlin, conveyed to his troops when ordering them, in the early hours of 2 May, to cease fighting. ‘On 30.4.45 the Führer took his own life and thereby abandoned those who had sworn him loyalty,’ ran the order. ‘At the Führer’s command you believe that you must still fight for Berlin, although the lack of heavy weaponry and munitions, and the overall situation shows the struggle to be pointless… In agreement with the High Command of the Soviet troops, I therefore demand you end the fighting immediately.’12
By then, the drama in the bunker was finally over. Most of those still entombed below the Reich Chancellery had spent the afternoon and evening of 1 May planning their break-out. Goebbels was not among them. Along with his wife, Magda, he was now making arrangements for their own suicides – and for taking the lives of their six children. In the early evening, Magda summoned Helmut Gustav Kunz, adjutant to the head doctor in the SS medical administration (Sanitätsverwaltung) in the Reich Chancellery, and asked him to give each of the children – Helga, Hilde, Hellmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide, aged between twelve and four – a shot of morphine. It was about 8.40p.m. when Kunz carried out the request. Once they had fallen into a drugged sleep, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s own physician at the end, crushed a phial of prussic acid in the mouth of each of the children.
Later that evening, as Wilhelm Mohnke, commandant of the ‘Citadel’, gave orders for the mass break-out from the bunker, Goebbels instructed his adjutant, Günther Schwägermann, to take care of the burning of his and Magda’s bodies. He gave him the silver-framed signed photograph of Hitler that for so many years had stood on his desk as a memento. Then he and his wife, after saying their brief farewells, climbed the stairs to the Chancellery garden, and bit on the prussic acid capsules. An SS orderly fired two shots into the bodies to make sure.13 Far less petrol was available for the unceremonious cremation than had been saved for burning the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops had little difficulty in identifying the corpses when they entered the Chancellery garden next day.14
Krebs, Burgdorf, and Franz Schädle, head of Hitler’s escort squad, also chose to end their lives in the bunker before the Russians arrived. The rest of the company sought their luck late that evening in the mass escape, undertaken in groups. The underground railway tunnel brought them to Friedrichstraße station, a few hundred yards to the north of the ruined Reich Chancellery. But once on the surface, in the burning hell of Berlin, with shells falling all around, confusion took over. The groups found themselves split up in the chaos. Individuals took what chances they could. A few, including the secretaries Gerda Christian, Traudl Junge, and Else Krüger, managed, remarkably, to make their way through to the west. Most, among them Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, fell into Soviet hands and years of misery and maltreatment in Moscow prisons. Most of the others were killed seeking a route to safety, or took the last decision left to them. Prominent among the latter were Hitler’s constant right hand during the war years, Martin Bormann, and his doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger. Both had given up their hopes of escape and, rather than fall into Soviet hands, had swallowed poison in the early hours of 2 May 1945 in Berlin’s Invalidenstraße.15
II
Outside Berlin, the winding-up orders on the Third Reich were meanwhile in the process of being served. However, they were carried out by the new Dönitz regime – based in Flensburg in the north of Schleswig-Holstein – with great reluctance, and only under the evident compulsion of the hopeless military situation. At the end of the First World War, disastrous though the defeat had been, it had proved possible to save the existence of the Reich and the German army. The basis for the hopes of national rebirth had been laid. Dönitz held to the illusion that this much might be achieved a second time.16 Even at this late hour, he was hoping through the offer of partial capitulation to the west to avoid total and unconditional surrender on all fronts, at the same time sustaining, with western backing, the German Reich to form, alongside the western powers, a common front against Bolshevism. For this, he needed to gain time – also to allow withdrawal to the west of as many as possible of the Wehrmacht troops still engaged in bitter fighting against the Red Army. He was ready to sanction, therefore, the German capitulation in northern Italy on 2 May, which had already been agreed be
tween Himmler’s former right-hand man Karl Wolff and OSS chief Allen Dulles on the day before Hitler’s suicide. He also reluctantly conceded on 4 May a further partial capitulation involving German troops in north-west Germany, Holland, and Denmark. In the south, where the Americans reached Munich on the day of Hitler’s death, Innsbruck on 3 May, and Linz – Hitler’s home town – four days later, Kesselring negotiated the surrender of the German divisions in the northern Alps on the 5th and in Austria on 7 May.17 Dönitz did not, however, include in the partial capitulation the German troops further east, still fighting in Yugoslavia.18
The Grand Admiral’s hopes of rescuing the remnants of Hitler’s Reich were visible in his choice of cabinet. Though he rejected Himmler’s overtures for inclusion, and turned his back, too, on Ribbentrop, he retained several members of Hitler’s cabinet, among them Albert Speer, while foreign affairs and the direction of the cabinet were placed in the hands of the long-standing finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who, it was presumed, would appear unsullied by the worst crimes of Nazism. He made no changes in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s mainstays, Keitel and Jodl, were left in post. The Nazi Party was neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still adorned the walls of government offices in Flensburg. One of the few concessions that Dönitz made was the reintroduction of the military salute in the Wehrmacht to replace the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting. But military courts continued to hand out death-sentences even as the last rites on the Third Reich were being pronounced.19