Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  A renaissance of National Socialism, he avowed, would eventually emerge from the sacrifice of the soldiers and his own death alongside them. He ended with an exhortation to continue the struggle. He begged the heads of the armed forces to instil the spirit of National Socialism in the troops. His long-standing scapegoat, the officer corps of the army, did not even now go unscathed: ‘May it at some time be part of the concept of honour of the German officer – as is already the case in our navy – that the surrender of a district or a town is impossible and that above all the leaders have to proceed here with a shining example in most loyal fulfilment of their duty unto death.’

  In the second part of his Testament, Hitler went through the charade of nominating a successor government for what was left of the Reich. The tone was vindictive. Göring and Himmler were formally expelled from the party and from all their offices for the damage they had done through negotiating with the enemy ‘without my knowledge and against my wishes’, for attempting to take power in the state, and for disloyalty to his person. Nor was there any place in the new government for Speer. The new head of state and head of the armed forces was Grand Admiral Dönitz – less of a surprise than at first sight, given his specially high standing in Hitler’s eyes in the closing phase of the war, and in view particularly of the responsibility he had already been given a few days earlier for party and state affairs as well as military matters in the northern part of the country. Significantly, however, Dönitz was not to inherit the title of Führer. Instead, the title of Reich President, dropped in 1934 on Hindenburg’s death, was reinvented. Goebbels, who had been pressing for so long for full control over internal affairs, was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed Chancellor of a Reich that scarcely any longer existed. Bormann, another who had proved his loyalty, was made Party Minister. Goebbels – who, together with Bormann, kept bringing Fräulein Junge the names of further ministers for typing in the list – probably engineered the dismissal at this late point of his old adversary Ribbentrop, and his replacement as Foreign Minister by Arthur Seyß-Inquart. Hitler’s favourite general, Schörner, was to be Commander-in-Chief of the Army, while Gauleiter Karl Hanke, still holding out in Breslau, was to take over from Himmler as Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police. The tough Munich Gauleiter, Paul Giesler, was made Interior Minister, with Karl-Otto Saur replacing Speer as Minister for Armaments. The pointless job of Propaganda Minister fell to Goebbels’s State Secretary, Werner Naumann. Old survivors included Schwerin-Krosigk (Finance), Funk (Economics), Thierack (Justice), and Herbert Backe (Agriculture). Hitler commissioned them with continuing the task – ‘the work of coming centuries’ – of building up a National Socialist state. ‘Above all,’ the Political Testament concluded, ‘I charge the leadership of the nation and their subjects with the meticulous observance of the race-laws and the merciless resistance to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.’

  It was turned 4 a.m. when Goebbels, Bormann, Burgdorf, and Krebs signed the Political Testament, and Nicolaus von Below added his signature to the Private Testament.

  Hitler, looking weary, took himself off to rest. He had completed the winding-up order on the Third Reich. Only the final act of self-destruction remained.

  For Fräulein Junge, however, the night’s secretarial duties were not yet over. Soon after Hitler had retired, Goebbels, in a highly emotional state, white-faced, tears running down his cheeks, appeared in the anteroom, where she was finishing her work. He asked her to draft his own coda to Hitler’s will. Hitler, he said, had ordered him to leave Berlin as a member of the new government. But ‘if the Führer is dead, my life is meaningless’, he told her. Of all the Nazi leaders, Goebbels was the one who for weeks had assessed with some realism the military prospects, had repeatedly evoked the imagery of heroism, looking to his own place in the pantheon of Teutonic heroes, and had accordingly brought his wife and children to the bunker to die alongside their adored Leader in a final act of Nibelungentreue. It was, therefore, utterly consistent when he now dictated: ‘For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Führer.’ His wife and children joined him in this refusal. He would, he continued, lose all self-respect – quite apart from the demands of personal loyalty – were he to ‘leave the Führer alone in his hour of greatest need’. Betrayal was in his mind, as in that of his master. ‘In the delirium of treachery, which surrounds the Führer in these critical days of the war,’ he had Fräulein Junge type, ‘there have to be at least a few who stay unconditionally loyal to him even unto death, even if this contradicts a formal, objectively well-founded order which finds expression in his Political Testament.’ Consequently, he – together with his wife and children (who, were they old enough to judge, would be in agreement) – were firmly resolved not to leave the Reich capital ‘and rather at the Führer’s side to end a life which for me personally has no further value if it cannot be used in the service of the Führer and by his side’. It was 5.30 a.m. before this last act in the nocturnal drama closed.

  VI

  The mood in the bunker now sank to zero-level. Despair was now written on everyone’s face. All knew it was only a matter of hours before Hitler killed himself, and wondered what the future held for them after his death. There was much talk of the best methods of committing suicide. Secretaries, adjutants, and any others who wanted them had by now been given the brass-cased ampoules containing prussic acid supplied by Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, the SS surgeon who had joined the ‘court’ the previous October. Hitler’s paranoia stretched now to doubts about the capsules. He had shown his alsatian bitch Blondi more affection in recent years than any human being, probably including even Eva Braun. Now, as the end approached, he had the poison tested on Blondi. Professor Werner Haase was summoned from his duties in the nearby public air-raid shelter beneath the New Reich Chancellery building nearby. Shortly before the afternoon briefing on 29 April, aided by Hitler’s dog-attendant, Sergeant Fritz Tornow, he forced open the dog’s jaws and crushed the prussic acid capsule with a pair of pliers. The dog slumped in an instant motionless to the ground. Hitler was not present. However, he entered the room immediately afterwards. He glanced for a few seconds at the dead dog. Then, his face like a mask, he left without saying anything and shut himself in his room.

  The bunker community had by this time dwindled still further. Three emissaries – Bormann’s adjutant, SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Zander, Hitler’s army adjutant Major Willi Johannmeier, and Acting Press Chief Heinz Lorenz – had left that morning as couriers on a perilous, and fruitless, mission to deliver copies of the Testament to Dönitz, Schörner, and the Nazi Party’s headquarters, the ‘Brown House’ in Munich. By this time, normal telephone communications had finally broken down, though naval and party telegraph wires remained usable, with difficulty, to the end. But dispatch runners brought reports that Soviet troops had brought up their lines to a mere 400–500 metres from the Reich Chancellery. The Berlin Commandant General Weidling informed Hitler that they had begun a concentrated attack on the ‘Citadel’; resistance could only be sustained for a short time. Three young officers, Major Bernd von Loringhoven (Krebs’s adjutant), his friend Gerhard Boldt (the Chief of Staff’s orderly), and Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf Weiß (General Burgdorf’s adjutant), decided to try a last chance to escape from their predestined tomb. They put it to Krebs that they should break out in the attempt to reach Wenck. He agreed; so, following the midday conference, did Hitler. As he shook hands wearily with them, he said: ‘Give my regards to Wenck. Tell him to hurry or it will be too late.’

  That afternoon, Below too, who had been a member of Hitler’s ‘household’ since 1937, decided to try his luck. He asked if Hitler would permit him to attempt to get through to the west. Hitler readily agreed. Below left late that night, bearing a letter from Hitler to Keitel which, from Below’s memory of it (the letter itself was destroyed), repeated his praise for the navy, his attribution of blame for the Luftwaffe’s failure e
xclusively to Göring, and his condemnation of the General Staff together with the disloyalty and betrayal which had for so long undermined his efforts. He could not believe, he said, that the sacrifices of the German people had been in vain. The aim had still to be the winning of territory in the East.

  By this time, Hitler had learned that Mussolini had been captured and executed by Italian partisans. Whether he was told the details – how Mussolini had been hanged upside down in a square in Milan, together with his mistress Clara Petacci, and stoned by a mob – is uncertain. If he did learn the full gory tale, it could have done no more than confirm his anxiety to take his own life before it was too late, and to prevent his body from being seized by his enemies. During the late-evening briefing, General Weidling had told Hitler that the Russians would reach the Reich Chancellery no later than 1 May. There was little time remaining.

  Nevertheless, Hitler undertook one last attempt to ascertain the possibilities of relief, even at this late hour. With nothing heard throughout the day of Wenck’s progress (or lack of it), he cabled five questions to Jodl in the most recent OKW headquarters in Dobbin at eleven o’clock that evening, asking in the tersest fashion where Wenck’s spearheads were, when the attack would come, where the 9th Army was, where Holste’s troops were, and when their attack might be expected.

  Keitel’s reply arrived shortly before 3 a.m. on 30 April: Wenck’s army was still engaged south of the Schwielow Lake, outside Potsdam, and unable to continue its attack on Berlin. The 9th Army was encircled. The Korps Holste had been forced on to the defensive. Keitel added, below the report: ‘Attacks on Berlin not advanced anywhere.’ It was now plain beyond any equivocation: there would be no relief of the Reich capital.

  Hitler had, in fact, already given up. Before 2 a.m. he had said goodbye to a gathering of around twenty to twenty-five servants and guards. He mentioned Himmler’s treachery and told them that he had decided to take his own life rather than be captured by the Russians and put on show like an exhibit in a museum. He shook hands with each of them, thanked them for their service, released them from their oath to him, and hoped they would find their way to the British or Americans rather than fall into Russian hands. He then went through the same farewell ceremony with the two doctors, Haase and Schenck, and the nurses and assistants, who had served in the emergency hospital established below the New Reich Chancellery.

  At dawn, Soviet artillery opened up intensive bombardment of the Reich Chancellery and neighbouring buildings. Hitler inquired soon afterwards of the commandant of the ‘Citadel’, SS-Brigadeführer Mohnke, how long he could hold out. He was told for one to two days at most. In the last briefing, in the late morning, Berlin’s commandant, General Weidling, was even more pessimistic. Munition was fast running out; air-supplies had dried up and any replenishment was out of the question; morale was at rock-bottom; the fighting was now in a very small area of the city. The battle for Berlin would in all probability, he concluded, be over that evening. After a long silence, Hitler, in a tired voice, asked Mohnke’s view. The ‘Citadel’ commandant concurred. Hitler wearily levered himself out of his chair. Weidling pressed him for a decision on whether, in the event of a total ammunitions failure, the remaining troops could attempt to break out. Hitler spoke briefly with Krebs, then gave permission – which he confirmed in writing – for a break-out to be attempted in small numbers. As before, he rejected emphatically a capitulation of the capital.

  He sent for Bormann. It was by now around noon. He told him the time had come; he would shoot himself that afternoon. Eva Braun would also commit suicide. Their bodies were to be burnt. He then summoned his personal adjutant, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche. He did not want to be put on display in some waxworks in Moscow, he said. He commissioned Günsche with making the arrangements for the cremation, and for ensuring that it was carried out according to his instructions. Hitler was calm and collected. Günsche, less calm, immediately rushed to telephone Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, to obtain as much petrol as was available. He impressed upon him the urgency. The Soviets could reach the Chancellery garden at any time.

  Hitler took lunch as usual around 1 p.m. with his secretaries, Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, and his dietician Fräulein Manziarly. Eva Braun was not present. Hitler was composed, giving no hint that his death was imminent. Some time after the meal had ended, Günsche told the secretaries that Hitler wished to say farewell to them. They joined Martin Bormann, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, General Burgdorf and General Krebs, and others from the ‘inner circle’ of the bunker community. Looking more stooped than ever, Hitler, dressed as usual in his uniform jacket and black trousers, appeared alongside Eva Braun, who was wearing a blue dress with white trimmings. He held out his hand to each of them, muttered a few words, and, within a few minutes and without further formalities, returned to his study.

  Eva Braun went into Magda Goebbels’s room with her. Magda, on whom three days earlier Hitler had pinned his own Golden Party Badge – a signal token of esteem for one of his most fervent admirers – was in a tearful state. She was conscious not only that this was the end for the Führer she revered but that within hours she would be taking, as well as her own life, the lives of her six children, still playing happily in the corridors of the bunker. Highly agitated, Magda immediately reappeared, asking Günsche if she could speak to Hitler again. Hitler somewhat begrudgingly agreed and went in to see Magda. It was said that she begged him a last time to leave Berlin. The response was predictable and unemotional. Inside a minute, Hitler had retreated behind the doors of his study for the last time. Eva Braun followed him almost immediately. It was shortly before half-past three.

  For the next few minutes, Goebbels, Bormann, Axmann (who had arrived too late to say his own farewell to Hitler) and the remaining members of the bunker community waited. Günsche stood on guard outside Hitler’s room. The only noise was the drone of the diesel ventilator. In the upstairs part of the bunker, Traudl Junge chatted with the Goebbels children as they ate their lunch.

  After waiting ten minutes or so, still without a sound from Hitler’s room, Linge took the initiative. He took Bormann with him and cautiously opened the door. In the cramped study, Hitler and Eva Braun sat alongside each other on the small sofa. Eva Braun was slumped to Hitler’s left. A strong whiff of bitter almonds – the distinctive smell of prussic acid – drifted up from her body. Hitler’s head drooped lifelessly. Blood dripped from a bullet-hole in his right temple. His 7.65mm. Walther pistol lay by his foot.

  1. Adolf Hitler (top row, centre) in his Leonding school photo, 1899.

  2. Klara Hitler, the mother of Adolf.

  3. Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father.

  4. Karl Lueger, Bürgermeister of Vienna, admired by Hitler for his antisemitic agitation.

  5. August Kubizek, Hitler’s boyhood friend in Linz and Vienna.

  6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, greeting the proclamation of war, 2 August 1914. Hitler circled.

  7. Hitler (right) with fellow dispatch messengers Ernst Schmidt and Anton Bachmann and his dog ‘Foxl’ at Fournes, April 1915.

  8. German soldiers in a trench on the Western Front during a lull in the fighting.

  9. Armed members of the KPD from the Neuhausen district of Munich during a ‘Red Army’ parade in the city, 22 April 1919.

  10. Counter-revolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich, beginning of May 1919.

  11. Anton Drexler, founder in 1919 of the DAP (German Workers’ Party).

  12. Ernst Röhm, the ‘machine-gun king’, whose access to weapons and contacts in the Bavarian army were important to Hitler in the early 1920s.

  13. Hitler’s DAP membership card, contradicting his claim to be the seventh member of the party.

  14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld in Munich at the first Party Rally of the NSDAP, 28 January 1923.

  15. ‘Hitler speaks!’ NSDAP mass meeting, Zirkus Krone, Munich, 1923.

  16. Paramilitary organizations during the church service a
t the ‘German Day’ in Nuremberg, 2 September 1923.

  17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, and Friedrich Weber (centre, behind Hitler, Christian Weber) during the march-past of the SA and other paramilitary groups to mark the laying of the war memorial foundation stone, Munich, 4 November 1923.

  18. The putsch: armed SA men (centre, holding the old Reich flag, Heinrich Himmler, right, with fur collar, Ernst Röhm) manning a barricade outside the War Ministry in Ludwigstraße, Munich, 9 November 1923.

  19. The putsch: armed putschists from the area around Munich, 9 November 1923.

  20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists: left to right, Heinz Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Brückner, Ernst Röhm, Robert Wagner.

  21. Hitler posing for a photograph, hurriedly taken by Hoffman because of the cold, at the gate to the town of Landsberg am Lech, immediately after his release from imprisonment.

  22. Hitler in Landsberg, postcard, 1924.

  23. The image: Hitler in Bavarian costume (rejected), 1925/6.

  24. The image: Hitler in a raincoat (accepted), 1925/6.

  25. The image: Hitler with his alsatian, Wolf, 1925 (rejected, from a broken plate).

  26. The Party Rally, Weimar, 3–4 July 1926: Hitler, standing in a car in light-coloured raincoat, taking the march-past of the SA, whose banner carries the slogan: ‘Death to Marxism’. Immediately to Hitler’s right is Wilhelm Frick and, beneath him, facing the camera, Julius Streicher.