If defeat was indeed inevitable, then it must not simply be accepted and suffered passively. If it could not be prevented, it must be consciously confronted in a ‘heroic’ struggle to the last bullet and the last man. A beacon had to be lit, an example that would inspire future generations; in this way total defeat contained within it the potential for a glorious resurgence.
The theme of heroic downfall planting the seed of a later ‘glorious rebirth’ (as he put it in his testament of 29 April 1945) was one that Hitler returned to throughout his political career. He was eager to adopt a tradition that had begun in Germany in the late eighteenth century with the Romantic rediscovery of the heroic Germanic sagas (which were among Hitler’s favourite reading when he was young). At the time of the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, it can be found in the emotionally charged work of poets who embraced death; it was enacted on stage in Wagner’s operas; it was evoked in the enthusiasm for war shown in 1914 and in the Langemarck myth; it was reflected in the determination of many of the military in 1918 to continue the war regardless of losses; it was there in the debate during the Weimar Republic about a future ‘total war’. Hitler tapped into this theme in his grim evocation of the ‘fallen heroes’, the cult of the dead he had deliberately staged for members of the ‘movement’ who had lost their lives. Hitler had already written in Mein Kampf that nations were not necessarily destroyed by losing wars, but rather only if ‘military defeat is the fitting outcome of their inner corruption, cowardice, lack of resolve, in short of their unworthiness’.8
At the latest since the defeat at Stalingrad Hitler had been pursuing the notion of heroic downfall as a serious political option in the face of the superior power of his enemies. It would ensure Nazism’s enduring glory beyond the end of the war and guarantee him a preeminent historic role after his death. By staging his own downfall in this way he could thus give expression to the idea he had entertained throughout his life of being in essence both a hero and an artist of genius whose importance would become fully apparent to posterity only after his death. To the last, however, his increasing tendency to flee from the reality of war and to raise himself and his imminent death to heroic heights did not rule out efforts to avoid defeat by taking robust advantage of any chance, however slim. As so often in his career, his behaviour was ambivalent: on the one hand, he hung on to political and strategic options to continue the war successfully (although even in his own estimation their feasibility was reducing from one day to the next); at the same time, he was working on an exit strategy that would be a kind of heroic Götterdämmerung designed to transfigure him. There is an unmistakable dual strategy in the way Hitler responded to the weighty challenges facing him, the result of the calculations and considerations of Adolf Hitler, the politician, who never ceased to search for options and alternatives.
At the same time, we clearly see his inability to accept reverses and his tendency to transform the threat of humiliation into megalomaniacal fantasies presaging his own triumph. ‘The best person to have at the controls is someone who has not only burnt his bridges in fact but has come to terms with this personally’, he announced to Goebbels at the beginning of February. ‘Someone who has settled his scores with life tends to win the day.’9 This idea that he was not engaged in a defensive strategy where the enemy determined his ever-diminishing room for manoeuvre was an expression of Hitler’s fundamental need for the greatest possible freedom of action.
After Hitler’s living quarters in the Reich Chancellery had been destroyed by an air raid on 3 February he moved into the large air-raid bunker situated under the Chancellery garden, where he had been spending the nights since his arrival in Berlin. At first he could still use his offices in the Chancellery and it was there that the daily military briefings took place.10
We know from Goebbels’s diaries that since the end of January Hitler had been determined to remain in Berlin and take charge of the city’s defence himself, citing as his example Stalin’s role in the defence of Moscow in the winter of 1941/42. Eva Braun, his partner, who since November had been living with him in the Reich Chancellery, was also unwilling to leave Berlin, as Hitler told Goebbels, describing her attitude as worthy of ‘the greatest respect and admiration’.11 At the end of January Goebbels had already declared to Hitler that Magda was determined to see things out with him in Berlin and to keep her children with her. Although Hitler could not consider this view ‘correct’, he regarded it as ‘admirable’.12
From the beginning of February to the beginning of April, while Hitler’s main focus was the military situation in the West,13 the Red Army was extending the positions it had established in the January offensive. Of the great German counter-offensive that Hitler had announced to Goebbels at the beginning of February nothing remained beyond a limited operation mounted by the Army Group Vistula, whose task in mid-February was to push back from the north the Red Army’s wedge towards Berlin. This attack was preceded on 13 February by a noisy altercation during the military briefing, in the course of which Guderian managed to insist, in the face of opposition from an enraged Hitler, that the novice army group commander, Himmler, should be joined by Walther Wenck, an experienced general. This defeat in the presence of the assembled military leadership was for Hitler an unbearable breach of loyalty; Guderian was suspended.14 As it turned out, even Wenck could do nothing to alter the fact that the army group’s attack had to be abandoned after only a few days because of overwhelming Soviet superiority. From 24 February onwards the Red Army launched an offensive across Pomerania towards the Baltic, which it reached on 1 March near Köslin, thereby cutting off the German divisions still positioned in West Prussia and Gdansk. During February the Red Army also conquered Lower Silesia and by the end of the month had reached the River Neisse.15
In the meantime things were moving again on the western front. On 9 February the German army surrendered its bridgehead on the left bank at Colmar on the Upper Rhine; the Americans and French were now positioned on the Rhine from the Swiss border northwards to Strasbourg.16 On 8 February British, Canadian, and American forces began their offensive in the northern part of the western front; by 10 March they had managed to push the German army back across the Rhine between the Dutch border and Koblenz and on 7 March the US First Army captured an intact bridge over the Rhine at Remagen and established a bridgehead on the eastern side of the river.17 Hitler’s response to this sudden advance was to fly into a violent rage and immediately set up a ‘flying drumhead court martial’, which two days later sentenced five officers alleged to be responsible to death, four of whom were immediately executed. Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, who on 9 March had been appointed by Hitler to succeed von Rundstedt as commander-in-chief in the West, had the verdict announced to the lower ranks to serve as a warning.18 By 25 March the German army was forced to pull back to the east bank all its divisions that were still west of the Rhine and yet it was still not able to hold a defensive line. On 22 March the Americans had already crossed the river at Oppenheim and the British followed by crossing at Wesel on 24 March.19
At the beginning of March the offensive in Hungary led by SS General Sepp Dietrich began. Hitler’s aim was to recapture the Hungarian oilfields, but by the middle of the month progress had been halted.20 On 16 March the Soviet counter-offensive began in west Hungary, pushing rapidly towards Bratislava and Vienna.21 Hitler used this deterioration in the German situation as an excuse to dismiss his self-assured chief of the general staff, Guderian, at the end of March.22
As Hitler’s attempts to put out feelers to the West had been fruitless, he was now concerned to create the impression among those around him that he intended to seek a political solution in the East. Thus at the beginning of March he told Goebbels that he saw negotiations with Stalin as likely to yield greater opportunities to ‘continue the struggle with Britain with maximum ferocity’.23
Himmler had fallen from favour with Hitler after the defeat of his Army Group Vistula in Pomerania24 and had retreated to
the SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen, claiming to be ill. He was unaware of this change of direction on Hitler’s part and, as Goebbels learned when visiting him, was still supporting the view that it would be in the West rather than in the East that ‘sooner or later a political opportunity will develop to turn [the war] in our favour’.25 Goebbels did not inform Himmler that this was no longer Hitler’s view; rather, he calmly contemplated the collapse in the standing of the man who, only a few months before, had been the second most powerful in the Reich.
On 11 March Hitler explained his point of view to Goebbels: a separate peace with the Soviet Union would ‘not of course fulfil our aims of 1941’, but he nevertheless hoped to be in a position to share Poland with Stalin, to bring Hungary and Croatia under German sovereignty, and to gain ‘operational freedom in the west’. Even Goebbels, however, was convinced after this conversation that these ideas were completely unrealistic.26
On 21 March Hitler, according to Goebbels ‘somewhat in despair’ about military developments, declared to him that the enemy coalition would ‘inevitably break up’; it was simply a case of whether this happened ‘before we’re finished or only after we’re finished’. According to Hitler, the end of the enemy coalition would come ‘from Stalin rather than from Churchill or Roosevelt’. Yet the following day, when Goebbels suggested establishing contact with the Soviet Union via Sweden, Hitler’s response was negative. Later, in early April, Goebbels discovered the Foreign Ministry had been involved in initiatives in Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain to find out how far the two enemy camps were willing to negotiate, although these moves had not yielded any concrete results.27
Although Goebbels’s diaries make it clear that he spoke to Göring, Speer, and Himmler (but not to Bormann) about the imminent defeat and the possibilities of averting it by political means, all four were waiting for a decisive signal from Hitler; the option of seeing him as a group, and pressing for an end to the war (in the same way that they had decided in summer 1944 to act in concert to advocate total war) was something that they evidently did not consider. Crucial reasons for not doing so were not only the complete collapse of the system of government into a polycracy, for this made it more difficult for leading representatives of the regime to act together, but also Hitler’s unequivocal and openly declared view that he reserved for himself any issue of bringing the war to an end by negotiation and would regard independent initiatives as treason. It is typical of Goebbels’s modus operandi that he did not seek solidarity with the other leading players, but instead aimed in these final months of the war to use his personal influence to undermine the positions of Göring, Speer, Himmler, and Bormann with Hitler.28
Hitler had little interest in these power struggles. He was moving increasingly towards the option of going out with an almighty bang. On 18 March Speer handed Hitler a memorandum stating that the war was lost. It was ‘certain’ that in four to eight weeks the German economy would finally collapse. When the enemy advanced into the Reich steps must be taken to prevent the destruction of industry and essential services, and of so many bridges that the transport network would collapse.29
Hitler, however, was heading in a completely different direction. On 19 March he issued the so-called Nero Order, which provided for the destruction of all ‘military, transport, communications, industrial, and supply installations, as well as any material assets on Reich soil’ that might be valuable to the enemy. As far as the civilian sector was concerned, he placed this orgy of destruction in the hands of the Gauleiters as Reich Defence Commissioners – a clear repudiation of the armaments minister.30 In a personal conversation Hitler is supposed to have expounded to Speer why it was unnecessary to consider how the German nation would survive in the future: it had shown itself inferior to the ‘stronger nation in the east’ and the war had left behind only ‘those of inferior quality’. We admittedly have only Speer’s own notes as evidence for these statements.31
In two highly charged discussions at the end of March Speer did, however, succeed in persuading Hitler to issue a further order that mitigated the Nero Order in some vital respects. The focus was no longer on destruction but on a temporary ‘paralysing’ of infrastructure and industry (which should keep going until the last possible moment). This new order also made Speer responsible for the implementation of all these measures.32 In the plan for implementation, which he did not show to Hitler, Speer reinstated the instructions he had issued before the Nero Order to preserve industries and vital services.33 The conflict resulted in an irreparable rupture in the personal relationship between Hitler and his armaments minister.
In proceeding as he did, Speer could be confident that a ‘scorched earth’ policy inside Reich territory was generally rejected by industry, workers, regional administrations, and also by local Party branches, as it would have jeopardized the very existence of the German nation. Even without Speer’s intervention, therefore, it would have been virtually impossible for Hitler to implement a policy of total destruction. The Nero Order makes it clear, however, that contrary to his public and internal declarations, Hitler had to a great extent given up hope of a final turn in the war.
In March he made his last public appearances. Not least because he wished to avoid taking part in that year’s ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, he set out on 11 March for the River Oder on a ‘journey to the front’; the newsreels and press gave extensive reports of his visit to the officers of an army corps and also to various military establishments, while Göring laid the customary wreath at the memorial in Unter den Linden in Berlin.34 On 20 March, in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler along with Reich Youth Leader Axmann, received twenty members of the Hitler Youth who had been decorated with the Iron Cross for their service at the front. The surviving newsreels show him moving along the line of boys, his collar turned up, shaking hands and patting heads nervously. These are the last recordings of Hitler on film.
At the end of March Goebbels attempted to persuade him to make another speech; although he reluctantly agreed, it was never made.35 ‘The Führer seems to have a fear of the microphone that I can’t understand at all’, Goebbels’s noted.36
On 1 April the Western Allied forces had succeeded in surrounding the Ruhr region along with the remainder of Army Group B. Meanwhile, Montgomery’s forces (21st Army Group) drove on towards north Germany, the American 12th Army Group marched westwards towards Leipzig and Dresden, and the 6th Army Group, composed of American and French troops, turned southwards to occupy southern Germany. Prominent German cities – Frankfurt, Aschaffenburg, Kassel, Würzburg – were capitulating almost daily.37 Even on 7 April Hitler was trying to respond to the situation in the West by a comprehensive ‘adjustment of the structure of command in the western theatre of war’.38
On 12 April President Roosevelt died. The news seems to have given Hitler hope for a brief moment that the miracle for which he had waited for so long had now come; the President’s death would rescue him from a crushing defeat, just as Frederick the Great had been saved from a crushing defeat in 1762 by the demise of Czarina Elisabeth. The news created a mood of euphoria in those around him, and yet after only a short time it became clear that Roosevelt’s death would not result in any fundamental change in American policy.39
On 15 April Hitler issued instructions in the event of the army’s area of operations being split in two as a result of the juncture of the forces of the Western Allies and the Red Army.40 These instructions reveal that he was still keeping his options open as to whether he would base himself in the south or in the north (in other words in Berchtesgaden or Berlin). If he remained in Berlin, supreme command in the south was to be transferred to Kesselring, and if he moved to Berchtesgaden Dönitz was to take charge of the north.
At the same time as dealing with the army command in the north and south, Hitler issued a proclamation that was to be passed on to the troops on the eastern front at the start of the major Russian assault on Berlin. It appeared in the newspapers on 17 April. Threats com
bined with calls to hold fast were once again issued to motivate the soldiers to risk their lives. Hitler painted a drastic picture of the consequences of allowing the Russians to advance further: ‘Old men and children will be murdered and women and girls will be turned into soldiers’ whores. Everyone else will be marched off to Siberia.’ On the other hand: ‘The Bolsheviks will suffer the fate of the Asians of old, that is they must and will bleed to death at the gates of the capital of the German Reich.’ Troops should deal summarily with defeatist superiors: ‘Anyone who orders you to retreat, unless you know him well, must be arrested at once and if necessary killed on the spot, whatever his rank may be.’41
Meanwhile, the Red Army had been using the time since February to consolidate its position on the River Oder and at the bridgeheads on the western bank of the river, and to prepare for the decisive battle for Berlin.42 The Soviet major offensive finally began on 16 April.43 The 1st White Russian front did not, however, manage to destroy the German 9th Army units east of Berlin and quickly occupy the city, as originally planned; instead, after extraordinarily fierce fighting around the Seelow Heights, the German troops were pushed back towards the capital, where they joined with units of the Volkssturm to defend it block by block.
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