After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (3 page)

Hitler’s dark yet compelling personality, which had held millions under its dominion, was now a mere shadow of its former self. Wolf Heisendorf, a personal assistant to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who remained with his master in the Führer Bunker, observed:

By 30 April it was obvious to everyone that further defence of Berlin was hopeless. Germany was split into several parts by Anglo-American and Russian armies – the hoped-for clash between them had never in fact materialised. Our Army High Command no longer existed as a meaningful force – its resources were scattered in all directions by the rapid advance of our opponents. The machinery of government had virtually collapsed. Our last resort had been to pull out one of our armies [General Walther Wenck’s 12th] from its defence of the Elbe (turning its back on the American troops on the far side of the river) and instead push it towards Berlin. But by the 30th it was clear that these men were unable to reach the capital. In such circumstances, to try to hold out any longer against the well-equipped Russian forces of Marshal Zhukov was utterly pointless.

Heisendorf recalled the chaotic attempts to evacuate government ministries from the threatened city.

As the Red Army neared Berlin there was utter panic. Those heads of departments who could flee did so, scattering in all directions, and leaving their staff largely to fend for themselves. Hitler’s own orders were disregarded. One head of the Propaganda Ministry jammed the boot of his car so full of secret documents that the catch would not close properly. As his car accelerated a mass of paper flew up in the air behind him. As the bureaucratic vestiges of our Ministry disintegrated it all seemed like a bad farce.

At Rheims in northern France, the headquarters of the Western Allies, the fate of Hitler’s capital was followed with sombre expectation. ‘Berlin is near the end,’ SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force) liaison officer Colonel Richard Wilberforce wrote simply in his diary on 30 April.

Berlin – the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich – was indeed tottering. The Red Army had fought its way to the centre of the city and the Führer’s domain had shrunk to a few square miles of government buildings. But for some in the wider Third Reich, even at this late, desperate stage of the war, the Nazi doctrine remained intact. On the same day Hildegard Holzwark, a German from the Sudetenland who had welcomed Hitler as a liberator after he annexed that part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, wrote in her diary:

Tomorrow is the first of May – workers’ day, a national holiday for the German people. Will there be anyone celebrating it this year? – I doubt it. It is heartbreakingly sad to face such a bitter end to our war. For six long years we held out. And there was real value to our struggle, despite our defeat. It is hard to sum up all these war experiences.

Artillery fire from the front line draws closer and closer. And yet, for the time being, I feel insulated from the fighting. A while ago I was afflicted by such fear. I just hold out for the chance that in the Sudetenland the Americans will come before the Russians. And I can only clutch on to one hope, that the western powers will not let Europe fall completely under the sway of Bolshevism. We Germans were for a long time the bulwark against this threat. But we cannot maintain it any longer – everything is now in a state of collapse.

It seems that our remaining troops lack the resolve to maintain the struggle. Discipline has broken down and everything is chaotic – such is the effect of the losses we have borne. Our people’s will to resist has been broken; we have lost our self-belief. In Berlin there is bitter street fighting. The Führer stands there, virtually alone. I fear for his life.

But in truth, little had been epic in the decision to defend Berlin to the last. Rather than being the product of cold-blooded calculation, or fanatical belief, it had come about through the German leader’s utter collapse in a military briefing some eight days earlier.

At 3.30 p.m. on 22 April the day’s situation conference had begun with bad news: the Russians had reached Berlin’s northern suburbs. Hitler looked haggard and agitated and he twice left the room to go to his own private quarters. Then the Führer was told that a counter-attack from SS General Felix Steiner that he had waited all morning for had not in fact taken place. At this point something snapped. Hitler ordered everyone out of the briefing room except Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (the head of the German armed forces), General Alfred Jodl (the chief of staff), General Hans Krebs (chief of staff of the German army), Lieutenant General Wilhelm Burgdorf (Hitler’s adjutant), Martin Bormann (secretary of the Nazi Party) and the stenographer Gerhard Herrgeswell. There followed a violent tirade, clearly audible to all those outside the room, in which he screamed that he had been betrayed by those he most trusted. And then he slumped back in his chair.

Hitler had always resolutely claimed that the war was not lost and the fight would continue until the very end. Now he decided that he would die in Berlin. Stenographer Gerhard Herrgeswell was dumbfounded by this – the Führer had never previously acknowledged the possibility of failure, always closing matters with the resolute phrase: ‘We will fight to the end of the Third Reich.’ Struggling to find an explanation for this about-turn, he believed Hitler had suffered a form of breakdown: ‘He said that he had lost his faith – and that he wanted to end it all, that he would die in the German capital,’ Herrgeswell recalled. ‘He repeated this fatalistic lament between ten and twenty times, with slight variations: “I die here”, “I die at the Chancellery” or “I have to die here in Berlin”.’

Others concurred. When General Burgdorf left the room, he also told his staff officer, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, that Hitler had suffered a breakdown. According to one report, ‘Hitler’s face went purple, and he could not put his left foot on the ground properly. Throughout that night he suffered a nervous collapse and kept raving that he would meet his end in Berlin.’ Learning that SS units north-east of the city (at Eberswalde on the Finow Canal, 15 miles from Berlin’s centre), the so-called Steiner group, had not responded to his orders to attack the Russians threw him over the edge. He realised that the will to resist was no longer there.

Those around him were astonished. Before this extraordinary outburst no decision to stay in Berlin had been made; indeed, his closest supporters believed Hitler’s plan was to leave the German capital and fly to his Bavarian retreat, the Berchtesgaden, and first Field Marshal Keitel and then Party Secretary Martin Bormann attempted to get the Führer to change his mind. They failed.

Their leader had suffered some form of psychological collapse. He could now offer little beyond the despairing utterance – ‘You will have to go to south Germany and form a government. Göring will be my successor. He will negotiate.’ Whether this was an order or a prophetic utterance was totally unclear to those around him.

If the military briefing was a complete shock to those who witnessed it, Hitler’s physical and mental decline had begun months earlier. Wolf Heisendorf, personal assistant to Propaganda Minister Goebbels, observed:

It was clear to all of us that the Führer’s days were numbered. He seemed broken, physically and emotionally – some even speculated that he had suffered a stroke. But whatever had occurred, he now appeared a sick, broken old man. In such a state, he was unable to broadcast live on the radio and the few speeches that he did deliver had to be pre-recorded and then re-edited. His voice changed completely – its range and depth replaced by a dull monotone. And the content of the speeches, which no-one was allowed to alter (even Goebbels could only make minor adjustments) caused consternation within the Propaganda Ministry. Their historical analogies – the Carthaginians at Cannae, or Frederick the Great and the Seven Years War – seemed increasingly absurd with the Russians at the gates of Berlin.

And yet, however much Hitler’s condition had deteriorated, he remained the central reason why the Grand Alliance had been formed. The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, detested Nazism and his rivalry with the Führer was very much a personal one. The leader of the Third Reich was the symbol of a system that Churchill loathed, even before its worst excesses were widely known. On 22 June 1941, the day that Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill broadcast to the nation, declaiming: ‘Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder.’ In a war cabinet meeting of 6 July 1942 he was scarcely less vehement, denouncing him as ‘the mainspring of evil’, and adding that if he fell into British hands ‘we shall certainly put him to death’. Among the three great powers of the Alliance, Churchill’s struggle had been the longest, as a minister in the cabinet of Neville Chamberlain from the declaration of war against Germany in September 1939 and as prime minister from May 1940, when the United Kingdom stood alone against the Nazi hegemony in Europe.

As Britain resisted the might of Germany in the dark days of 1940, the Soviet Union had established a non-aggression pact with Hitler and was supplying the Nazi war machine with vital industrial equipment. This pact, formalised between the two foreign ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, allowed both powers to extend their areas of influence. Germany overwhelmed western Europe in a lightning campaign; Russia occupied the Baltic states, defeated Finland and seized territory from her, and also grabbed land from Romania. The two countries had invaded hapless Poland together – Germany from the west, the Soviet Union from the east – and divided the country between them.

On 22 June 1941 Hitler breached the non-aggression pact, ordering a surprise invasion of his former ally. The onslaught required months of preparation and yet it caught the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, completely off guard. He could not believe that Germany would attack him while Britain still resisted to the west. The colonisation of the east was part of the Führer’s personal vision – set out in his book
Mein Kampf –
which showed his detestation of the Slavs, whom he regarded as an inferior people. Hitler wanted to create
Lebensraum –
living space – for the German master race by subjugating most of European Russia. He also loathed Bolshevism, but while his attack on Russia was proclaimed as a crusade against communism, at heart it was a brutal race war. Neither side had signed up to the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the German onslaught unleashed one of the most destructive conflagrations in human history.

The Soviet leader was politically astute but also chronically suspicious. He had gambled on more time – to re-equip and retrain the Red Army and relocate Russian industries to the east, and when he received warnings from British intelligence that a German invasion was imminent, he imagined it a Western plot to embroil him in a war. Stalin’s failure to anticipate a breach of the pact was the greatest blunder of his entire leadership, and in the dark days of 1941, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht surged hundreds of miles into Russia, winning a series of devastating victories against a reeling Red Army, his country was brought to the brink of defeat.

But Stalin and the Soviet Union held firm – and despite sustaining losses that no Western democracy could ever have contemplated, turned the tables on the German war machine. The Führer’s previously invincible forces were repulsed from Moscow, destroyed at Stalingrad, and defeated once again at Kursk – the last major offensive they would launch in the east. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army launched Operation Bagration – their most complete military success against the German army – and that autumn finally liberated all of their territories that had fallen under the sway of the Nazis. The Red Army – now consisting of a colossal 8 million men – fought its way into eastern Europe, dispatching Hitler’s former allies Romania and Hungary, liberating much of Yugoslavia, and occupying Poland and eastern Germany. In sheer numerical strength, Russia was the strongest military power in the Alliance, and its armies dominated central and eastern Europe.

These events had been initiated by Hitler and always held a grave risk. At the height of his power and influence, the Führer had carried most of his party with him and many of his generals too (although a considerable number still held strong reservations), but it was highly unlikely that anyone else in Nazi Germany would have embarked upon such a hazardous course. By opening up a war on two fronts, Hitler was gambling on defeating the Soviet Union quickly. Were he to fail, he was dooming Germany to a battle of attrition against a country of vastly superior manpower and resources.

Hitler created the war in the east – and as a result brought the Soviet Union into a most unlikely alliance with the two Western imperialist and capitalist powers – Britain and America – that were its ideological enemies. It was common hatred of Hitler – and his brutal Nazi state – which overrode their enormous differences.

In the summer of 1941 Britain stood alone. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a remarkable opportunity and it was to Churchill’s considerable credit that he seized it, despite his loathing of Bolshevism. It was a mark of great statesmanship that he formed an alliance with a country whose political system he so distrusted. Britain had entered the war in partnership with France, but France had been defeated and occupied and most of Europe was now under Nazi sway. With America not yet willing to commit itself to a European war, Churchill saw it was vital that Russia and Britain join forces if the Third Reich was ever to be defeated. In the short term, the most that Britain could do was offer the Soviets material aid, through the Arctic convoy route to Murmansk and Archangel. The Arctic convoys – menaced by German U-boats and the Luftwaffe – suffered considerable losses, but Churchill insisted that they be maintained, despite the objections of the Admiralty, because they gave substance and succour to the Anglo-Soviet alliance. Churchill’s courageous and powerful rhetoric after the evacuation from Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain inspired the nation, and will always rank as one of his greatest achievements, but his embrace of the Soviet Union in 1941 matched it. In a desperate situation, there was hope once more.