Hitler

by A. N. Wilson

  Far from rebuilding Berlin on this majestic scale, Hitler was to end his days huddled beneath it in a bunker, as Russian field guns pounded the ruins left by the aerial raids of British and American bombers. Hitler’s war left Berlin, and most other German cities, a smouldering heap of rubble.

  Hitler returned to Berlin from East Prussia in November 1944 and he would never leave it again. By the time he came back, the bombing of the city had escalated to nightmare proportions. In fact, Berlin was to suffer bombardment on a scale which few cities or conurbations could ever expect to survive. The new leader of British Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, told the head of the Royal Air Force, Charles Portal, ‘It is my firm belief that we are on the verge of a final showdown.’ That had been in August 1943. On 3 November of the same year he had told Churchill, ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the US Air Force will come in on it.’ More bombs were dropped on Berlin in the following year than fell on the whole of Britain during the entire war: 33,390 tons. By March 1944, 1.5 million Berliners were homeless. About 52,000 civilians were killed by aerial bombing. By the end of the war, Harris had ordered 14,562 sorties over the city and the Americans had indeed ‘come in on it’. Even when it was quite obvious that the bombing was not working, Harris continued to pound the city.

  The Berliners showed astounding resilience. Their natural obedience manifested itself in the fact that even when the Treasury offices were flattened, Berliners continued to pay their taxes, some clambering over the ruins of the Treasury to see if they could find an official to whom they could offer their dues.2 This paralleled the remarkable behaviour of the villagers of Baden in 1945 after they had been occupied by the Americans and the Gestapo had fled to a nearby mountain retreat; the villagers would still stagger up the mountain for the chance to inform the Gestapo of their neighbours’ defeatist attitude.3 ‘We Germans have that marvellous source of strength – the sense of duty – which other peoples do not possess’, as Hitler himself had remarked in happier days.4

  In Berlin, red-eyed, pale, hungry people continued to trudge to work every day after a night of raids and to work for twelve hours in factories and offices. A typical Berliner was Frau Ursula Meyer-Semlies: ‘Goebbels did say we are sitting in a moving train and no one can get out … Can one answer it in one’s conscience, for one’s children, for the future, simply to “throw the rifle into the cornfield”? No we have to keep going until the end.’5 The truth is that while there was a widespread feeling that Hitler and the Nazis had led Germany to its ruin, there was also a sense, among others, that ‘the Fatherland fights on’, and that the Leader would, in spite of everything, rise up like a magician to save them. They had no choice and they behaved with courage.

  Hitler lived at first in the Chancellery and then, when the bombing grew too much, he retired to his underground bunker with Blondi, the German Shepherd bitch given to him by his private secretary, Martin Bormann, in 1942 to take his mind off the failure of the Russian campaign. Blondi – unless you count the Leader’s girlfriend Eva Braun – was Hitler’s last attachment. Little Fuchsl, the English terrier, had consoled him in the trenches. Prinz, Muckl and Wolf, his three German Shepherds, were now presumably either dead, or living out an extreme old age in Berchtesgaden. ‘I should feel like a traitor if I became attached to a dog of any other breed. What extraordinary animals they are! Lively, loyal, bold, courageous and handsome.’ And, he could have added, more obedient than people, with all their complexities of thought and language. Upon Blondi, he lavished the attention and love which only the dog-lover can bestow, presumably loving the bad breath, the slobbering, the ever-present possibility of snarling violence and the hyper-energy of the species. But above all, perhaps, the slavishness.

  Eva Braun, in spite of being Hitler’s mistress, did possess a mind of her own; she liked to smoke cigarettes, despite the Leader’s abhorrence of the habit. Eva hated Blondi, and would kick her under the table. It is not surprising, since Hitler, in common with many dog-lovers, was incapable of showing the same affection for any human being such as that which poured out of him when feeding, or stroking, or staring into the eyes of this smelly near-cousin of the wolf.

  In these early months of 1945, it was clear to everyone except the deranged Leader that the Germans had lost the war. The war which had begun to rescue Eastern Europe from the hands of two repressive tyrannies – Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia – was about to be won by Soviet Russia. Not caring how many of his own men perished in the attempt, Stalin pressed his Red Army onwards to conquer Berlin while the American forces under General Patton slowly lumbered through the Ruhr.

  On both its borders, Germany was now overwhelmed. Berlin had become a surreal inferno, with almost 3 million of its inhabitants trapped in the cellars of the vast flak towers (anti-aircraft emplacements) or in bunkers or, if their homes possessed cellars, underground at home. Hitler followed suit by retreating to his elaborately constructed complex of tunnels and rooms beneath the Chancellery and the other government buildings. He emerged into Berlin only twice after January 1945 – once to attend a meeting of Gauleiters on the outskirts of the city, and once to visit General Theodor Busse to discuss the by now hopeless defence of the River Oder. On both occasions, the blinds of the car were kept firmly closed. He did not wish to set eyes upon the ruin he had created. He never once visited a bomb-site.

  When his narcotic-fuelled moods in the Bunker allowed him to be happy, he would continue to discuss the rebuilding of Berlin with Speer. He also possessed a huge architectural model of Linz, the scene of his youth, where he and Kubizek had first heard Wagner’s Rienzi and where ‘it’ had all begun. Fully uniformed, Hitler would sit beside this fantasy-version of Linz staring admiringly at the miniature wooden streets and towers. It worried him that the dream tower was a little too tall. ‘It must not eclipse the spire of the cathedral at Ulm’, he told anyone who would listen. ‘In the tower I want a carillon to play – not every day but on special days – a theme from Bruckner’s Fourth – the Romantic symphony.’ He had come to love Bruckner more and more, especially the Seventh Symphony. ‘Brahms was praised to the heavens by Jewry, a creature of salons, a theatrical figure with his flowing hair and beard and his hands poised above the keyboard. Bruckner, on the other hand, a shrunken little man, would probably have been too shy to play in such society.’6

  The architectural dreams were symptomatic of the fact that Hitler was now totally insane, removed from reality. As the bunker rocked with explosions, caused by the guns, Hitler telephoned General Karl Koller to complain of the noise, and told him to stop the firing. He refused to believe Koller when told that these were Russian guns that were now within range of the city centre.

  When the noise over the roof became too much, or when the true progress of the war was brought to the Leader’s attention, he would react, as he had reacted to so much in life during the last few years, with outbursts of petulant and uncontrollable rage. At the end of April Hitler gave orders that the 950 bridges in Berlin all be destroyed, which would have cut off all electricity and supplies from the hundreds of thousands of people still trapped in the centre. Albert Speer, the architect who received the order, disobeyed it. Speer, who had done so much to promote Hitler and his myth, designing the great rallies at Nuremberg and encouraging Hitler in his megalomaniac dreams, now began to think of ways of killing him, and the other occupants of the bunker, by feeding poison gas through a ventilator shaft. When he investigated the possibilities of this scheme he discovered that the Leader, paranoid about his own experience of being gassed during the previous war, had blocked up the shaft with a concrete chimney breast.

  Everyone trapped in that bunker – Blondi, the secretaries, the valet, the Leader, Eva Braun, the dwarfish Goebbels, his tragically majestic wife and their six children – were now obliged to see the grisly drama to its end. In the carpeted study with its maps and atlases, and its portrait of Frederick the Great hanging on the wall, Dr Goebbels would read aloud to the Leader, when the thun
der of gunfire permitted it, from the Life of Frederick the Great by the unmatchable Scottish historian-prophet Thomas Carlyle. How much Carlyle, with his boundless capacity for scorn and his humorous contempt for any kind of pretension, would have despised these two men. Goebbels read the scene where Frederick’s arch-enemy, the Russian Empress Elizabeth, died in the ‘Miracle of the House of Brandenburg’, allowing the Prussians to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. History seemed to repeat itself when President Roosevelt died on 12 April. It was Hitler’s Brandenburg miracle and for a day or two he was exultant.

  But when Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday occurred, on 20 April, the Allies had not behaved as the Russians had behaved in Carlyle’s book. They had not sued for peace and conceded a German triumph. Goebbels broadcast to the world by radio his customary annual eulogy, while underground, as the roof and walls shook with bombardment, the quivering and furious Hitler exclaimed, ‘You will see – the Russians are about to suffer the bloodiest defeat of their history at the gates of Berlin.’ By now over 52,000 Berliners had been killed by the air raids alone and it was only a matter of days before the Red Army conquered their capital.

  Göring sent him a telegram asking if it was his wish that he, Göring, should take over as Leader in the event of Berlin being surrounded. He proposed making peace with the enemy. This act of impertinent treachery was greeted by paroxysms of anger on Hitler’s part. Then, on 28 April, Hitler heard the news that even the faithful Himmler had been in conversation with the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte to broker a peace between Germany and her enemies. He ordered that Himmler should be stripped of all his titles and arrested.

  But by then he knew that the end had come. A local magistrate, serving in a nearby militia unit, with the curiously appropriate name of Walter Wagner, was brought to the bunker to marry the Leader to Eva Braun. When she signed the register, Eva initially began to write her maiden name and then corrected the B to an H as she realized she was now called Frau Hitler.

  She was not to have this privilege for long. On 28 April, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci had been captured by the Italian Communists in the small northern hamlet of Mezzagra, and shot. Their bodies were taken to Milan, where they were strung upside down. A baying mob pulled down the dead Clara’s knickers.

  Hitler was determined that he and Eva should provide no such spectacle for the mob. Nor would he allow the Russians to take him to Moscow for a ‘show trial staged by Jews’. He charged his manservant, Heinz Linge, his chauffeur, Erich Kempka, and his pilot, Hans Baur, with the task of incinerating the bodies of himself and his wife. After lunch on 30 April, he took leave of his staff.

  Blondi had been the first to die. Hitler tested a cyanide capsule on her to see that it would work. Eva also took poison. Accounts differ as to whether Hitler died by also taking poison or whether he died of a gunshot. The SS guards outside his room testified that they heard a single shot. When they went in, they found Eva dead and the Leader, also dead, hunched beside her, his face covered with blood.

  Kempka and Bormann carried the bodies outside and, with Russian shells splintering the concrete about their ears, they soused the corpses with petrol. Goebbels was standing by with a box of matches at the ready. That evening they did their best to put the charred, but not completely incinerated, remains into a shell hole and cover it with earth.

  Goebbels next attempted to get hold of the Russians and to negotiate a separate peace, cutting out the British and the Americans. It came to nothing, and so the next day there followed the gruesome murder of all six of his children – his wife Magda crunching their jaws over cyanide capsules. Although she had made them drowsy with drugged cocoa, some force was needed to murder her daughter Helga. Next followed the suicides of Magda and Joseph Goebbels themselves.

  On 1 May, Radio Hamburg announced that Hitler was dead. ‘He died for Germany in his command post at the Reich Chancellery, fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism.’7

  A week later, General Jodl signed an act of surrender in Eisenhower’s war room at Reims. Stalin refused to accept this since it was not made in the presence of the Russians. The next day, Field Marshal Keitel, head of the German Armed Forces, was flown to Tempelhof Airport and, in one of the few buildings in Berlin left standing, he made an act of unconditional surrender to Marshal Zhukov and representatives of the French, the British and the Americans. But everyone knew that, as the Radio Hamburg broadcast had said, the true battle had been against Communist Russia, and that Stalin was the true victor of the war.

  TWELVE

  Final Verdict

  Hitler was the Enlightenment’s cloven hoof. From the time of Voltaire, it had been assumed by enlightened Europeans that if only the human race could throw off the outmoded thought-processes of religion and espouse a scientific outlook, the human race would become free. Thomas Carlyle, himself a child of the Enlightenment, and a religious doubter, knew that this was too simple a reading of the past. Reviewing the eighteenth century, he saw the great sceptic David Hume as only half a man. Even when belief in a personal God has been discarded, there remained, as Immanuel Kant knew, a reverence for the starry heavens above us and the moral law within. An attempt to forget these primary truths meant that the human race would always come unstuck. And that, surely, is what Carlyle would have thought of the Hitler story – that it exemplified more than anything else the futility of the ‘modern’ or ‘scientific’ outlook on life.

  Richard Wagner is viewed with suspicion by many who see him as a forerunner of his admirer Adolf Hitler. Some of the same taint by association clings to Thomas Carlyle, that witty philosopher-historian, whose immense biography Frederick the Great beguiled some of Hitler’s last hours. But Carlyle was no Fascist and he can survive the disapproval of those who have not even taken the trouble to read him.

  You can see, however, why they – the non-Carlyle readers – believe him to have been one of the early exponents of that dark form of political cynicism. In his book Heroes and Hero-Worship, Carlyle saw history as punctuated by the arrival of these Great Men. ‘The Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.’ The heroes he chose included Mahomet, and Dante and Oliver Cromwell, all serious beings, who had an intense awareness of mankind’s moral imperatives.

  His last hero is Napoleon, whom he imagined sitting in exile on the island of St Helena unable to understand why he did not win. ‘France is great, and all-great; and, at bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an appendage of France … So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how in fact – HERE AM I! He cannot understand it; inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his programme of it.’1

  What Carlyle concluded at the end of his surveys of ‘Heroes’ was that Napoleon had gone too far, that Napoleon-Nature was not the same as real Nature, and that there had been a moral fittingness about his ultimate defeat. What can be said of Napoleon can be said with infinitely more vigour of Hitler. The German dictator was not overcome ultimately because he defied Churchill, or defied the Red Army, but because he defied reality itself.

  Hitler suffered just as strongly, to the very end, from a Napoleonic feeling of bafflement that things had not gone his way. ‘I am beginning to doubt whether the German people is worthy of my great ideals’,2 was one of Hitler’s ways of describing the difference between his plans for the world, and the way it failed to conform to them.

  Speer believed that Hitler was ‘one of those inexplicable historical phenomena which emerge at rare intervals among mankind. His person determined the fate of the nation. He alone placed it and kept it on the path which has led it to this dreadful ending. The nation was spellbound by him as a people has rarely been in the whole of history.’3

  There is plenty of evidence for the spellbinding nature of Hitler the public orator, Hitler the great national Leader in his heyday. Ever since his death, humanity has been trying to make sense of it. Why?
Why him? Why the Germans?

  There is no one answer to the questions which arise from this bloody and horrible period of European history. For some, there will be a Hegelian or Marxist inevitability about the rise of National Socialism because of the appalling economic situation at the end of the First World War. Others, seeking among the gloomy Rhine-waters of Wagnerian music, the Satanic risks of the Faust legend, the fantastical cruelties of the Brothers Grimm or the weirder landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, will try to suggest that Hitler trod in a discernible succession to a whole sinister Germanic tradition, just as they will try to find in his anti-Jewish ravings an ancestry in the sermons of Martin Luther.

  In the end, Hitler is a mystery who cannot be plumbed, whether you use the tool of the economist, the political analyst or the psychiatrist. But two things are perhaps worth saying in conclusion. They are apparently contradictory things. Perhaps Hegel would think them a thesis and an antithesis. They are that Hitler was both very ordinary and completely extraordinary.

  He was ordinary in the things he believed and in most of the things he believed he was a pioneer of the modern age. This is something which most people find extremely hard to stomach. They want to make him into a Demon King. Ever since he died by his own hand in the bunker, the civilized world has been on the run from his dangerous ideas. His belief that race ‘explained’ everything – one of the only ‘old-fashioned’ beliefs in the Hitlerian creed – has been replaced by the belief, now all but universal throughout the civilized world, that discriminating between peoples on racial grounds is a wickedness. Yet one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reasons for returning to Germany, where he intuitively knew that he would die a martyr’s death, was because, when living in New York where he could have stayed as an academic, he went with a friend to a restaurant and was not served because the friend was black. It is easy to treat history as a pantomime with heroes and villains, and to heap all our guilt about our own beliefs, or those of our grandparents, on to a few maniacs strutting about with swastikas on their arms. But the truth is that Hitler, in his racial discrimination, was simply being normal. The United States and the British Empire were both racist through and through. Nor, even, did Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy figure in the Western powers’ reason for going to war with him.