The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  All through April 28 the desperate men in the bunker waited for news of the counterattacks of these three armies, especially that of Wenck. Russian spearheads were now but a few blocks from the Chancellery and advancing slowly toward it up several streets from the east and north and through the nearby Tiergarten from the west. When no news of the relieving forces came, Hitler, prompted by Bormann, began to expect new treacheries. At 8 P.M. Bormann got out a radiogram to Doenitz.

  Instead of urging the troops forward to our rescue, the men in authority are silent. Treachery seems to have replaced loyalty! We remain here. The Chancellery is already in ruins.

  Later that night Bormann sent another message to Doenitz.

  Schoerner, Wenck and others must prove their loyalty to the Fuehrer by coming to the Fuehrer’s aid as soon as possible.20

  Bormann was now speaking for himself. Hitler had made up his mind to die in a day or two, but Bormann wanted to live. He might not succeed the Fuehrer but he wanted to continue to pull the strings behind the scenes for whoever did.

  Finally, that night Admiral Voss got out a message to Doenitz saying that all radio connection with the Army had broken down and urgently requesting the Navy to send over the naval wave length some news of what was happening in the outside world. Very shortly some news came, not from the Navy but from the listening post in the Propaganda Ministry, and it was shattering for Adolf Hitler.

  Besides Bormann there was another Nazi official in the bunker who wanted to live. This was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s representative at court and typical of the type of German who rose to prominence under Hitler’s rule. A former groom and then a jockey and quite illiterate, he was a protégé of the notorious Christian Weber, one of Hitler’s oldest party cronies and himself a horse fancier, who by fraudulence had amassed a fortune and a great racing stable after 1933. Fegelein, with Weber’s help, had climbed quite high in the Third Reich. He was a general in the Waffen S.S. and in 1944, shortly after being appointed Himmler’s liaison officer at Fuehrer headquarters, he had further advanced his position at court by marrying Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl. All the surviving S.S. chiefs agree that, in alliance with Bormann, Fegelein lost no time in betraying his own S.S. chief, Himmler, to Hitler. But disreputable, illiterate and ignorant though he was, Fegelein seems to have been possessed of a simon-pure instinct for survival. He knew a sinking ship when he saw one.

  On April 26 he quietly left the bunker. By the next afternoon Hitler had noticed his disappearance. The Fuehrer’s easily aroused suspicions were kindled and he sent out an armed S.S. search party to try to find the man. He was found, in civilian clothes, resting in his home in the Charlottenburg district, which the Russians were about to overrun. Brought back to the Chancellery, he was stripped of his S.S. rank of Obergruppenfuehrer and placed under arrest. Fegelein’s attempt at desertion made Hitler immediately suspicious of Himmler. What was the S.S. chief up to, now that he had deliberately absented himself from Berlin? There had been no news since his liaison officer, Fegelein, had quit his post. It now came.

  April 28, as we have seen, had been a trying day in the bunker. The Russians were getting close. The expected news of Wenck’s counter attack, or of any counterattack, had not come through. Desperately the besieged had asked, through the Navy’s radio, for news of developments outside the encircled city.

  The radio listening post of the Propaganda Ministry had picked up from a broadcast of the BBC in London one piece of news of what was happening outside Berlin. It was a Reuter dispatch from Stockholm and it was so sensational, so incredible, that one of Goebbels’ assistants, Heinz Lorenz, had scampered across the shell-torn square late on the evening of April 28 to the bunker with copies of it for his Minister and for the Fuehrer.

  The dispatch, says Reitsch, struck “a deathblow to the entire assembly. Men and women alike screamed with rage, fear and desperation, all mixed into one emotional spasm.” Hitler’s spasm was the worst. “He raged,” says the aviatrix, “like a madman.”

  Heinrich Himmler—der treue Heinrich—had also deserted the sinking ship of state. The Reuter dispatch told of his secret negotiations with Count Bernadotte and his offer to surrender the German armies in the West to Eisenhower.

  To Hitler, who had never doubted Himmler’s absolute loyalty, this was the heaviest blow of all. “His color,” says Reitsch, “rose to a heated red and his face was virtually unrecognizable … After the lengthy outburst Hitler sank into a stupor and for a time the entire bunker was silent.” Goering at least had asked the Leader’s permission to take over. But the “treue” S.S. chief and Reichsfuehrer had not bothered to ask; he had treasonably contacted the enemy without saying a word. This, Hitler told his followers when he had somewhat recovered, was the worst act of treachery he had ever known.

  This blow—coupled with the news received a few minutes later that the Russians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, but a block away, and would probably storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, thirty hours hence—was the signal for the end. It forced Hitler to make immediately the last decisions of his life. By dawn he had married Eva Braun, drawn up his last will and testament, dispatched Greim and Hanna Reitsch to rally the Luftwaffe for an all-out bombing of the Russian forces approaching the Chancellery, and ordered them also to arrest Himmler as a traitor.

  “A traitor must never succeed me as Fuehrer!” Hanna says he told them. “You must get out to insure that he will not.”

  Hitler could not wait to begin his revenge against Himmler. He had the S.S. chief’s liaison man, Fegelein, in his hands. The former jockey and present S.S. General was now brought out of the guardhouse, closely questioned as to Himmler’s “betrayal,” accused of having been an accomplice in it, and on the Fuehrer’s orders taken up to the Chancellery garden and shot. The fact that Fegelein was married to Eva Braun’s sister did not help him. Eva made no effort to save her brother-in-law’s life.

  “Poor, poor Adolf,” she whimpered to Hanna Reitsch, “deserted by everyone, betrayed by all. Better that ten thousand others die than that he be lost to Germany.”

  He was lost to Germany but in those final hours he was won by Eva Braun. Sometime between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M. on April 29, as a crowning award for her loyalty to the end, he accorded his mistress’s wish and formally married her. He had always said that marriage would interfere with his complete dedication to leading first his party to power and then his nation to the heights. Now that there was no more leading to do and his life was at an end, he could safely enter into a marriage which could last only a few hours.

  Goebbels rounded up a municipal councilor, one Walter Wagner, who was fighting in a unit of the Volkssturm not many blocks away, and this surprised official performed the ceremony in the small conference room of the bunker. The marriage document survives and gives part of the picture of what one of the Fuehrer’s secretaries described as the “death marriage.” Hitler asked that “in view of war developments the publication of the banns be done orally and all other delays be avoided.” The bride- and groom-to-be swore they were “of complete Aryan descent” and had “no hereditary disease to exclude their marriage.” On the eve of death the dictator insisted on sticking to form. Only in the spaces given to the name of his father (born Schicklgruber) and his mother and the date of their marriage did Hitler leave a blank. His bride started to sign her name “Eva Braun,” but stopped, crossed out the “B” and wrote “Eva Hitler, born Braun.” Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses.

  After the brief ceremony there was a macabre wedding breakfast in the Fuehrer’s private apartment. Champagne was brought out and even Fräulein Manzialy, Hitler’s vegetarian cook, was invited, along with his secretaries, the remaining generals, Krebs and Burgdorf, Bormann and Dr. and Frau Goebbels, to share in the wedding celebration. For a time the talk gravitated to the good old times and the party comrades of better days. Hitler spoke fondly of the occasion on which he had been best man at the Goebbels wedding. As was his custom, even to the very la
st, the bridegroom talked on and on, reviewing the high points in his dramatic life. Now it was ended, he said, and so was National Socialism. It would be a release for him to die, since he had been betrayed by his oldest friends and supporters. The wedding party was plunged into gloom and some of the guests stole away in tears. Hitler finally slipped away himself. In an adjoining room he summoned one of his secretaries, Frau Gertrude Junge, and began to dictate his last will and testament.

  HITLER’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  These two documents survive, as Hitler meant them to, and like others of his papers they are significant to this narrative. They confirm that the man who had ruled over Germany with an iron hand for more than twelve years, and over most of Europe for four, had learned nothing from his experience; not even his reverses and shattering final failure had taught him anything. Indeed, in the last hours of his life he reverted to the young man he had been in the gutter days in Vienna and in the early rowdy beer hall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for all the ills of the world, spinning his half-baked theories about the universe, and whining that fate once more had cheated Germany of victory and conquest. In this valedictory to the German nation and to the world which was also meant to be a last, conclusive appeal to history, Adolf Hitler dredged up all the empty claptrap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaph of a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and destroyed.

  The “Political Testament,” as he called it, was divided into two parts, the first consisting of his appeal to posterity, the second of his specific directions for the future.

  More than thirty years have passed since I made my modest contribution as a volunteer in the First World War, which was forced upon the Reich.

  In these three decades, love and loyalty to my people alone have guided me in all my thoughts, actions and life. They gave me power to make the most difficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man …

  It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests.

  I have made too many offers for the limitation and control of armaments, which posterity will not for all time be able to disregard, for responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be placed on me. Further, I have never wished that after the appalling First World War there should be a second one against either England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its helpers.

  Hitler then repeated the lie that three days before the attack on Poland he had proposed to the British government a reasonable solution of the Polish–German problem.

  It was rejected only because the ruling clique in England wanted war, partly for commercial reasons, partly because it was influenced by propaganda put out by the international Jewry.

  Next he placed “sole responsibility” not only for the millions of deaths suffered on the battlefields and in the bombed cities but for his own massacre of the Jews—on the Jews. Then he turned to the reasons for his decision to remain in Berlin to the last.

  After six years of war, which in spite of all setbacks will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a nation, I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of this state … I wish to share my fate with that which millions of others have also taken upon themselves by staying in this town. Further, I shall not fall in the hands of the enemy, who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical masses.

  I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin and there to choose death voluntarily at that moment when I believe that the position of the Fuehrer and the Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained. I die with a joyful heart in my knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in history of our youth which bears my name.

  There followed an exhortation to all Germans “not to give up the struggle.” He had finally forced himself to recognize, though, that National Socialism was finished for the moment, but he assured his fellow Germans that from the sacrifices of the soldiers and of himself

  the seed has been sown that will grow one day … to the glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement of a truly united nation.

  Hitler could not die without first hurling one last insult at the Army and especially at its officer corps, whom he held chiefly responsible for the disaster. Though he confessed that Nazism was dead, at least for the moment, he nevertheless adjured the commanders of the three armed services

  to strengthen with every possible means the spirit of resistance of our soldiers in the National Socialist belief, with special emphasis on the fact that I myself, as the founder and creator of this movement, prefer death to cowardly resignation or even to capitulation.

  Then the jibe at the Army officer caste:

  May it be in the future a point of honor with the German Army officers, as it already is in our Navy, that the surrender of a district or town is out of the question and that, above everything else, the commanders must set a shining example of faithful devotion to duty unto death.

  It was Hitler’s insistence that “a district or town” must be held “unto death,” as at Stalingrad, which had helped bring about military disaster. But in this, as in other things, he had learned nothing.

  The second part of the Political Testament dealt with the question of succession. Though the Third Reich was going up in flames and explosions, Hitler could not bear to die without naming his successor and dictating the exact composition of the government which that successor must appoint. First he had to eliminate his would-be successors.

  Before my death, I expel former Reich Marshal Hermann Goering from the party and withdraw from him all the rights that were conferred on him by the decree of June 20, 1941 … In his place I appoint Admiral Doenitz as President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

  Before my death, I expel the former Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. and the Minister of Interior Heinrich Himmler from the party and from all his state offices.

  The leaders of the Army, the Air Force and the S.S., he believed, had betrayed him, had cheated him of victory. So his only possible choice of successor had to be the leader of the Navy, which had been too small to play a major role in Hitler’s war of conquest. This was a final jibe at the Army, which had done most of the fighting and lost most of the men killed in the war. There was also a last parting denunciation of the two men who had been, with Goebbels, his most intimate collaborators since the early days of the party.

  Apart altogether from their disloyalty to me, Goering and Himmler have brought irreparable shame on the whole nation by secretly negotiating with the enemy without my knowledge and against my will, and also by illegally attempting to seize control of the State.

  Having expelled the traitors and named his successor, Hitler then proceeded to tell Doenitz whom he must have in his new government. They were all “honorable men,” he said, “who will fulfill the task of continuing the war with all means.” Goebbels was to be the Chancellor and Bormann the “Party Minister”—a new post. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling and, most recently, the butcher governor of Holland, was to be Foreign Minister. Speer, like Ribbentrop, was dropped. But Count Schwerin von Krosigk, who had been Minister of Finance continuously since his appointment by Papen in 1932, was to retain that post. This man was a fool, but it must be admitted that he had a genius for survival.

  Hitler not only named his successor’s government. He imparted one last typical directive to it.

  Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.21

  With that the Supreme German Warlord wa
s finished. The time was now 4 A.M. on Sunday, April 29. Hitler called in Goebbels, Bormann and Generals Krebs and Burgdorf to witness his signing of the document, and to affix their own signatures. He then quickly dictated his personal will. In this the Man of Destiny reverted to his lower-middle-class origins in Austria, explaining why he had married and why he and his bride were killing themselves, and disposing of his property, which he hoped would be enough to support his surviving relatives in a modest way. At least Hitler had not used his power to amass a vast private fortune, as had Goering.

  Although during the years of struggle I believed that I could not undertake the responsibility of marriage, now, before the end of my life, I have decided to take as my wife the woman who, after many years of true friendship, came to this city, already almost besieged, of her own free will in order to share my fate.

  She will go to her death with me at her own wish as my wife. This will compensate us both for what we lost through my work in the service of my people.

  My possessions, insofar as they are worth anything, belong to the party, or, if this no longer exists, to the State. If the State too is destroyed, there is no need for any further instructions on my part. The paintings in the collections bought by me during the years were never assembled for private purposes but solely for the establishment of a picture gallery in my home town of Linz on the Danube.