There was more to Hitler’s New Year’s speech than his anti-Semitic tirade, such as his hopes about the military situation, but these were of little consequence. It was the anti-Semitism and his rant about the international conspiracy of the Jews that was impossible to ignore.5
Hitler decided to move his headquarters from the Wolf’s Lair back to Berlin on November 20, just before the Ardennes offensive was launched. One evening when he was driven into his bunker by a bombing raid, Nicolaus von Below, his faithful adjutant, found him depressed unlike anything he had seen before. Hitler had finally recognized that the war was lost and said precisely that in this unguarded moment. He blamed the generals he had “spoiled” with decorations and honors. It was always someone else’s fault. Below recalled Hitler using words he would never forget: “We will not capitulate, never. We can go down. But we will take a world with us.”6
Although Hitler had not responded well during the latter part of the war when Goebbels tried to persuade him to speak to the people, Goebbels was surprised to learn the führer was going to do just that on January 30, 1945, the anniversary of his appointment as chancellor.
Hitler’s message was consistent with what he had expressed for decades. This time, with the Soviet army beating at the gates, he again made the comparison with 1918. It was in 1919-20, he said, that National Socialism arose to fight for “defenseless Germany” against the “Jewish-international world conspiracy.” Lenin would have overrun Europe at the time. But then “Jewish-Asiatic Bolshevism” was too weak. They were stopped in Poland and failed in Hungary. “Bolshevik power” could not succeed in Germany, either, “but the Jews began immediately on the systematic internal destruction of our people.” Germany was supposedly saved by his National Socialist movement. Europe, he said, was suffering from a disease, namely the spread of Bolshevism. The Western Allies would not be able to stop it. The “Kremlin Jews” used different tactics here and there, “but the end is always the same.”
He wanted to make German hearts stronger against the “plutocratic-Bolshevik conspiracy of the victors.” There would be no surrender. His appeal was for “total fanaticism,” not just of soldiers but even of women and youth. His plea was that Europe had to win against “Inner-Asia,” which presumably meant “Jewish Bolshevism.” In this moment of grave national danger, he clung to the ideas that had been integral to his life since the early 1920s.7
Although he could hardly expect Germans to arise and wipe out the millions of heavily armed troops about to enter their country, his entreaty suggests the continuity in his thinking: 1945 was a replay of 1919-20. The threat was the same, namely mythical “Jewish Bolshevism.” It had to be stopped again, even in the last minute, just as in the 1920s.
By 1945 Germans were beginning to accept the inevitable. At the same time, the sources on public opinion revealed that many people were prepared to fight on. What was surprising was the “astonishingly positive reception” to Hitler’s New Year’s proclamation for 1945 and his confidence in victory.8 Many people, and not just the dyed-in-the-wool Nazis, were still anxious to interpret events in the most optimistic way possible.
On February 24, Hitler issued a proclamation on the occasion of the annual celebration of the foundation day of the Nazi Party. There was little to praise now, and far more to curse and ridicule. He repeated the supposed vow he took in 1920 to fight “exploitative capitalism and human-destroying Bolshevism.” As always, he portrayed “international Jews” as those who took advantage of both systems. It was in Munich in 1920 with the foundation of the Nazi Party, he said, that he saw this danger clearly, and now Germans were experiencing in the east what the “Jewish plague,” what “Jewish Bolshevism,” was all about. The intention was to destroy the German people with the help of “West European and American pimps,” but the “devilish pact of democratic capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism” could still be beaten. If the will to victory remained steadfast in the entire German nation, there was still hope. He was sure, as he had been twenty-five years earlier, that in the end the German Reich would be victorious.9
As anyone could see, however, Hitler’s world was disintegrating even as he spoke. His hatred of the Jews and other enemies like the Americans, British, and Soviets grew beyond bounds. He even began to show a disdain for the German people for letting him down.
Hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people would die before the end. Quite apart from noncombatant civilians, there were hundreds of thousands in German concentration camps and prisons. The end may have been approaching, but for these people the nightmare was going to get worse.
FINDING MORE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
As the Battle of the Bulge was being fought in the west, the Red Army was preparing a massive assault in the east. The attack would be launched simultaneously along a front of 560 miles (900 kilometers) from Lithuania far to the south. The threat ran from East Prussia, all the way through Poland, and on to Czechoslovakia and Hungary.10
Soviet bombardment began on January 12, and over the next several days the attack picked up. The Wehrmacht could have used the firepower Hitler had withdrawn from the east and sent to the Ardennes, but even that would only have delayed the inevitable.
The rapid advance of the Soviet forces was startling. By the end of January, Konev and Zhukov were stretched along the river Oder—at one point only forty-eight miles from Berlin. The Soviets began making shocking discoveries. On January 27, a Russian soldier appeared on the grounds of the camp at Monowitz, one of the larger camps in the Auschwitz complex. A division of Soviets arrived an hour later. By the afternoon, the Red Army had found the Auschwitz main camp, as well as Birkenau. Fighting broke out with German units still there after everyone who could travel had already left, and 231 Red Army soldiers died in liberating the camp. At the time the Red Army arrived, there were only around seventy-six hundred mostly sick and infirm prisoners alive there.11
Yulia Pozdnyakova, a member of the Red Army, was among those assigned to help the doctors ministering to the prisoners. She recalled the stench of death and the physical evidence of how many people were murdered. She was struck by the thousands of shoes she came across in one building. She looked through the remains and papers trying to figure out what had happened: “I felt somehow guilty that I was touching all these things. The ghosts of the dead were all around us. It was hard to sleep at night.” When they returned to their camp late in the day, they washed and scrubbed themselves, as if they had been in hell itself.12
Konev himself did not bother to visit the camp, as the Americans would do of the camps they liberated. The Soviets did not publicize what they found at Auschwitz until much later. There was nothing about the camp in American newspapers until after the war.
A census of the Nazi concentration camp empire on January 14, 1945, showed 511, 537 men and 202, 674 women still alive.13 There were rudimentary plans already worked out to evacuate all who could travel, but these “evacuations” were rightly named by anyone who survived them as “death marches.” All prisoners were weak even before they began. There was little food and poor clothing, and to make matters worse, the marches took place during the depths of the winter in 1944-45.
We have no written record of when Himmler ordered the evacuations. There must have been centrally directed instructions because all the main concentration camps, most of their sub-camps, and even many prisons were evacuated at about the same time. The guards did not simply try to escape and leave their prisoners behind.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau they accelerated the killing until November 1944, when the “special commando” of prisoners who serviced the gas chambers and crematoriums were murdered. The camp began to be evacuated in August 1944, and through mid-January 1945 the Nazis moved out approximately sixty-five thousand, including nearly all the remaining Poles, Russians, and Czechs.
We can only partially reconstruct the reasoning behind the decision to move thousands of already weak people. A December 21, 1944, document signed by Fritz Bracht, the ga
uleiter and commissar of defense of the Reich in Upper Silesia, stated that all civilians, especially the “working population,” had to be moved to the west in five “treks.” The Bracht order suggests the aim was not to kill all prisoners but to preserve them within the German sphere of influence.14
The last roll call held at Auschwitz (including Birkenau) was on January 17, 1945, and almost immediately afterward fifty-eight thousand left, most of them on foot.15 Survivors of these marches later testified that conditions were, if anything, worse than they had been in the camps. The treatment of the Jews remained terrible, but all were not shot out of hand. At Auschwitz, Jews and other prisoners unable to travel were left behind and, contrary to their own expectations, not killed.16
If Hitler’s wishes or orders had been followed, none of these “enemies” would have survived. Himmler’s views vacillated between wanting to kill them all and keeping some alive, particularly the Jews. He entertained the possibility that they and certain other nationalities might be used in negotiations for money or for essential war goods.17
Buchenwald’s camp commandant decided on evacuation when he heard how close the Americans were. On April 8 he demanded that the camp be cleared within the hour. Well-led prisoner resistance subverted this order, which would have cost thousands of lives. On April 10 guards rounded up Russian, Polish, and Czech prisoners who had just arrived and led them away. The next day the SS took flight, and the camp’s 21,400 prisoners were liberated.18
Hitler was enraged to learn that Buchenwald prisoners had supposedly pillaged the nearby town of Weimar. On or about April 15, he ordered yet again that no concentration camp be surrendered before it was evacuated or all prisoners liquidated.19 A written Hitler order to this effect has not been found, but something akin to one, addressed also to Dachau and Flossenbürg, ran as follows: “Surrender is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner may fall into enemy hands alive. The prisoners behaved brutally against the civil population of Buchenwald.”20
These death marches were one of the most horrific aspects of the Third Reich. Some scholars have suggested that “at least” one-third of the 700,000 or so prisoners in the camps at the beginning of 1945 died as a direct result or perished later.21 These almost certainly do not include additional tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners, many of them Jews, who were working as forced laborers. We have no accurate statistics on the number of survivors found in the camps.
STALIN’S DETERMINATION TO BE FIRST IN BERLIN
Who would fill the void left by the Third Reich in Europe? At Yalta the Allies had agreed on the division of Germany into zones, but the more territory any of them liberated, the greater political clout they would have in the postwar world. However, the Anglo-Americans, especially General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as supreme commander, were concerned about sparing as many of their troops as possible. Such a reservation never crossed Stalin’s mind.
At Yalta he acted as the conquering generalissimo and staked his claims to nearly all of Eastern Europe. Getting his hands on the spoils was another matter and, he believed, involved beating the Anglo-American forces to Berlin. By early 1945 the Americans and British were making strides, and Stalin’s suspicions of the intentions of the West, which never went away, were inflamed. Would the Anglo-Americans try to take Berlin, or even worse, link up with Germans in an anti-Soviet campaign? Stalin had spoken to the troops only rarely during the war, but tried to inspire them on February 23, 1945, the anniversary of the founding of the Red Army—credited to the great Lenin. He outlined the tremendous scope of their victories, urged them on to finish the task, and claimed that since the beginning of the year, 350,000 Germans had been taken prisoner and 800,000 killed.22
The Western Allies had had considerable success themselves since the beginning of 1945. From the end of February to the end of March, they took 300,000 prisoners.23 On March 23-24 the Allies crossed the Rhine in strength, and thereafter German efforts to hold the line were spotty, strenuous in some places but hardly worthy of note elsewhere.24 The Rhine-Ruhr region had been encircled by April 1 in a pincer movement that trapped twenty-one divisions, or 320,000 troops. That was a greater loss than the Russians inflicted at Stalingrad. Attempts to break out of the “Ruhr pocket” were fruitless.25
To keep up morale and defend against the mythical stab in the back of 1918, the Gestapo began shooting Germans for any signs of defeatism. They hanged people in the street for a mere hint of resistance. Hitler did not need to be terrorizing his own people. Rather, at this point in the war, he required many more soldiers than he could possibly muster to fend off the Allied advance on all fronts.26
The Soviets engaged in shadowboxing about Berlin. General Eisenhower wanted it, but not if it was going to cost a lot of casualties. To calm Stalin’s suspicions and coordinate operations, he sent him a telegram on March 28 outlining his plans. He said that after the great Anglo-American success in the Ruhr, he would aim in the direction of Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden, south of Berlin, and also swing to the south toward Regensburg-Linz, cutting off what he felt would be the area where Hitler might make a last stand. His forces would stop at the Elbe River, forty miles short of Berlin, as agreed already with the Soviets.27
Eisenhower’s subordinate officers—particularly Montgomery—desperately wanted to push on and craved the prize of Berlin. Churchill was furious, as he was worried that, having cleared Europe of the Nazis’ tyranny, the Communists would now take their place. Eisenhower awaited Stalin’s answer. The Soviet leader was pleased with the news about Berlin, not that he took it at face value.
On April 1 he disingenuously informed Eisenhower that “Berlin has lost its former strategic importance,” so the Soviet Union would forsake its conquest and commit only secondary forces there. That was a lie: he was actively preparing to attack Berlin with everything he had. He falsely said the main Soviet blow was likely to come in the second half of May (when it was to come in mid-April) and that the Red Army would drive to meet up with the Western forces at Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden, and not head toward Berlin to the north.
Stalin had grave doubts about the West and knew from his spies that the Americans were conducting negotiations with high Nazi officials in Bern, Switzerland. Indeed, in February, the SS general Karl Wolff contacted Allen Dulles of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services about the possibility of a German surrender in Italy. Wolff met Dulles on March 8 and again on March 19. Churchill saw immediately that if the Soviets got wind of these meetings—as indeed they already had—they would assume the worst. The British ambassador in Moscow, under instructions from Churchill, informed the Soviet government on March 21, but that only made things worse.28
FDR sent a personal note to Stalin on March 25 saying there was no thought of reaching a separate peace with Germany or ending the war short of unconditional surrender. He said the Bern talks simply opened contact with “competent German military officers for a conference to discuss details of a surrender” of Italy, but thus far no success could be reported.29
Stalin, already well into planning the final assault on Berlin himself, replied on March 29 and again on April 3. He said he was well informed that the Allies had concluded an agreement with the Germans whereby in return for easing the terms of an armistice, the Wehrmacht would open the front and let the Allies move forward. The accusatory tone—which was also used in exchanges with the British on the Bern negotiations—astonished Roosevelt, who could not have seen the irony of the following passage, an uncanny reflection of Stalin’s own state of mind: “Finally I would say this, it would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life, material and treasure involved.”30
Stalin said the negotiations were designed to make it possible for the Allies “to advance into the heart of Germany almost without resistance.” Churchill wrote to FDR on April 5 that Stalin’s ac
cusations made it imperative for Anglo-American forces to move as far to the east as possible. He ended his letter by stating they could not allow themselves to seem afraid of the Soviets and look like they could be “bullied into submission.” He wanted to stand up to the insults. “I believe this is the best chance of saving the future.”31
Stalin certainly had his eye on the future as well. On April 1 he had gathered his most senior military leaders, including Zhukov and Konev, at the Kremlin. An intelligence report, which was read to them, said the Anglo-Americans in Bern were trying to negotiate a separate peace. Although the Allies supposedly rejected a deal with General Wolff, the Soviets still thought it possible the Germans would let the Western Allies through to Berlin. Not only Stalin but his military leaders were convinced the Anglo-Americans were capable of such duplicity.32
Stalin asked the Kremlin gathering provocatively: “Well, who is going to take Berlin, we or the Allies?”33 He presented them with a strategic plan. No matter what the condition of their armies, they had to be ready to strike to reach the Elbe River, west of Berlin, within twelve to fourteen days. Zhukov and Konev were aware the Germans would fight as bitterly as the Red Army had done when its back was against the wall at Moscow. Moreover, the Soviet route to Berlin was obvious. Leaders of the Red Army knew it was being heavily fortified. Word about Soviet atrocities was already well known, and Wehrmacht soldiers would fight to the death to keep the Red Army at bay.
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler Page 64