After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (4 page)

And yet it was hope bought at a price. The Anglo-Soviet alliance was a partnership of expediency. Britain entered the war in September 1939 to protect Poland in the same month the Soviet Union stabbed that country in the back. Between 1939 and 1941 Stalin administered eastern Poland with a brutal ruthlessness that rivalled, and at times surpassed, the atrocities of the Nazis in the other half of the country. In the longer term, as the German war machine was rolled back, Poland would be a source of friction between the United Kingdom and Russia. And in April 1945 Britain’s diplomatic options were limited – the entire country was now occupied by a resurgent Red Army.

Then there was the United States of America. American involvement in the Grand Alliance was once again a product of Hitler’s foreign policy. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor – drawing the United States into a long Pacific conflict. Faced with such a prospect, President Franklin Roosevelt was unlikely to persuade the nation to enter a European war against Nazi Germany as well. Remarkably, Hitler forced his hand. Five days after Pearl Harbor, with his armies in retreat from Moscow in terrible winter weather, the Führer declared war on America.

This quite incredible decision doomed Germany to eventual defeat in the war. It is hard to find an explanation for it other than as the product of Hitler’s growing megalomania. Four days later he appointed himself leader of the German army, although his military experience in the First World War had not taken him beyond the rank of corporal.

Hitler thereby brought the Grand Alliance into being. As the war continued and he demanded fanatical obedience from the German people and utterly refused to compromise or negotiate with his foes, he ensured that the Alliance held firm. Now, a wreck of his former self, entombed in Berlin and surrounded by his Russian enemies, a simple yet paramount question was forming – what would happen to the Alliance after Hitler’s death?

Hitler’s oratory, his sway over an audience, was always one of his greatest strengths. Its wane in the twilight of his rule – and the pathos of his terrible outburst in the bunker – was disconcerting to those accustomed it. But even at the end, Hitler retained remnants of his political instinct and charisma. SS General Felix Steiner’s failure to obey the Führer’s command on 22 April to attack numerically superior Red Army forces had precipitated the Nazi leader’s dramatic collapse. Steiner’s army group – depleted and outnumbered by the Russians – was unable to perform the military role Hitler demanded.

This may well have been recognition from Steiner of practical reality – that the resources of men, equipment and resolve necessary to carry out this order were no longer available. But it may also have carried the vestiges of treachery, as the Führer had claimed. Earlier that month, Steiner held secret discussions in Berlin with SS comrades Richard Hildebrandt and Otto Ohlendorf. Their intention was to create a new German government and procure a separate peace with the Western Allies. Steiner hoped it would be led by Himmler and that Hitler would simply be pushed aside. Steiner wanted to encourage the Anglo-American forces to advance to the River Elbe without opposition in return for a tacit agreement that they would halt there, allowing Germany to continue its struggle against the Russians in the east. The chances of such a deal were slight, but the Nazi position was desperate enough to risk exploring it. Accordingly, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, left Hitler on 20 April, headed to northern Germany and within a matter of days, on his own initiative, attempted to open talks with Britain and America. With Hitler remaining in Berlin, it probably suited Steiner to simply abandon him there. His inaction did not stem from military weakness alone, but was an act of deliberate disobedience. The Führer – always the political bloodhound even at this critically late stage of the war – may well have sensed it.

As Germany’s military fortunes declined, members of the SS hierarchy – a bastion of Nazi ideology – began to contemplate different policies to those of their leader. The warning signs had been there for months. One of them was Himmler’s decision, without Hitler’s authorisation, to train an army of anti-Bolshevik Russians, led by General Andrei Vlasov. Hitler, who loathed the Slavs and was hidebound by his racism, could not countenance ever using Russians, even those who renounced Stalin’s regime, in any military capacity whatsoever. Yet Himmler – once his devoted disciple in such prejudice – now struck out on a path of his own. By February 1945 two full-strength divisions had been formed; the first of these was subsequently thrown into combat against the Red Army – Russian against Russian – on the Oder front in the east.

It is unclear whether reports of such recruitment were deliberately concealed from Hitler, or that he chose instead to ignore them and act as if such formations did not exist. The soldiers of the 1st Vlasov Division remained on active service, and would play a remarkable role at the war’s very end. The existence of this force showed the beginnings of Himmler’s estrangement from Hitler’s war policy, which in the last days of the Reich would lead him to undermine the authority of his political master.

On 22 April 1945 Hitler and his immediate entourage retreated into the massive bunker complex by the Reich Chancellery, where they commenced a bizarre underground existence. The complex had two levels: the ante-bunker, and – connected to it by a circular staircase – the deeper Führer Bunker. The Führer Bunker consisted of about twenty small, sparsely furnished rooms. The corridor in front of Hitler’s private apartment boasted an upholstered bench and a few old armchairs. Next to it was the conference room – where military or situation conferences took place, and where up to twenty people would crowd around the map table in a small space measuring 3.5 × 3 metres. Hitler was the only person able to sit.

Hitler’s two private rooms, a study and a bedroom, were also sparsely furnished. A Dutch still-life hung over the sofa in his study, and above his desk, in an oval frame, was a picture of Frederick the Great. At the end of the Seven Years War Frederick – exhausted and on the verge of defeat – had been saved by a miracle when, in 1762, the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth had changed the course of the conflict. Hearing of the death of the American president Franklin Roosevelt on 12 April 1945, the Führer hoped for a similar miracle to rescue him from his own predicament. In each of the rooms, naked light bulbs hung from the ceilings. The harsh light, the constantly humming diesel engines that powered the ventilation system, the cramped quarters and inlaid concrete created an oppressive and disorientating atmosphere, which the rapidly worsening events only accentuated.

Hitler’s Germany had been invaded by an Allied coalition, but Russian soldiers were now poised to encircle and take Berlin. At the Big Three conference at Yalta in February 1945 the Allied powers had drawn up a political map for post-war Europe. Germany was to be divided into four zones: three for the Western Allies, including newly liberated France, whose armies were fighting with the Americans, and the fourth for the Soviet Union. The Soviet zone of eastern Germany included Berlin. The city itself would be split into four separate administrative areas – British, American, French and Russian – but it rested within territory entirely controlled by the Soviet Union. At the time these arrangements were drawn up, Russian armies were already on the Oder, only 50 miles from Berlin. At the conference, it seemed likely that the German capital would be taken by the Russians.

Allied policy was to fight first and make the necessary political realignments afterwards. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, clung to the belief that even at this late stage the Allies might fall out as the Western powers realised the Soviet danger as Stalin’s forces spread Bolshevism over eastern Europe. ‘It is well-known that Russians invariably call everything that isn’t “communist”, “fascist”,’ Goebbels wrote after the conclusion of Yalta – well aware, from his own experience, that any dictatorship muzzled its political opponents. He noted that the Russians ‘under the guise of “a struggle against fascism” would exterminate all forces opposing bolshevization in any country [over which] they held influence’. Goebbels hoped that such heartless realpolitik would repel the Western democracies. He was particularly drawn to Poland.

Goebbels felt not a shred of sympathy for that country, callously remarking that the suffering of the Poles was the result of failing to accept Germany’s ‘extremely reasonable terms’ in 1939 – but he believed it a likely cause of rupture between the Allies. He recalled how in April 1943 German forces had uncovered the Katyn grave site near Smolensk and found more than 14,000 Polish officers murdered there. The Soviet Union claimed that this atrocity had been carried out by the Germans, but the evidence pointed elsewhere. It seemed likely that the killings were the work of Russia in the spring of 1940 and Goebbels had a propaganda field day – inviting a host of neutral observers to view the site. Stalin remained exceptionally sensitive over the issue, and when the Polish government-in-exile in London grew sceptical of his version of events, he broke off diplomatic relations with them. The Western Allies discouraged press speculation about the massacre and expressed solidarity with the Soviet view, but in private questioned their ally’s version of events.

Goebbels’ Nazi regime was capable of plenty of killing of its own. In August 1944 the Polish uprising in Warsaw was crushed by the SS with savage force. Stalin – well aware that the rising was led by opponents of his own puppet regime, the Lublin Poles – ordered his advancing armies to halt outside the city. The Red Army waited until the revolt was utterly destroyed before resuming its advance. Stalin denied American and British planes access to his airfields to drop supplies to assist the insurgents. The Soviet leader’s cynical indifference to the suffering within the city did not bode well for the Yalta accord.

In February 1945 the Grand Alliance put an optimistic gloss on their joint communication over Poland’s future. In reality it was an uneasy compromise and President Roosevelt, ill and tired, had left the proceedings early, before its provisions were fully hammered out. The devil was in the detail, and loose wording allowed each power to interpret matters differently. Roosevelt and Churchill believed they had secured a reasonable settlement over the form of the Polish government. Goebbels doubted that. He saw such aspirations – that the Soviet leader would set up a fair and representative government within the country – as utterly naive: ‘Stalin is firmly determined … to negotiate with no-one over the Polish question,’ Goebbels observed bluntly, but with a degree of insight. ‘The only choice for the Poles is either to be exterminated by force or bow to the Kremlin.’

Once the Western Allies realised this, tensions with the Soviet Union would inevitably rise and Goebbels clung to this hope in his retreat to the depths of the Führer Bunker. His assistant, Wolf Heisendorf, recalled frankly:

After the Russians broke into Berlin Goebbels fell into deep depression. He realized that death was inevitable, and yet – amidst the wreckage of all his dreams – remnants of his former policy were fleetingly grasped. Each day Goebbels gathered what material he could from foreign press and radio reports. There was one theme – that a conflict between the Soviet Union and Britain and America might suddenly erupt.

Heisendorf, seeking insight into his master’s attempts to maintain a grasp of the situation, continued:

I read these résumés many times. For Goebbels, the first touchstone would be Poland; the second, the meeting on the Elbe of Russian and American troops. The possibility that the Grand Alliance opposing him might disintegrate did after all have some basis. With keen political instincts alert to the seeds of any dissension, Goebbels could only desperately hope it might appear in time to save Germany’s fortunes.

In March 1945 the Alliance did indeed fall under strain. On 7 March American troops seized the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen in a daring
coup de main.
Four days later, they began preliminary negotiations in Switzerland with the SS leader Karl Wolf about a possible German surrender in Italy. It was uncertain whether Wolf had Hitler’s backing – although Himmler had given his cautious support – and discussions were held in strict secrecy. The Western Allies correctly informed the Russians that they were taking place, but then unwisely, and tactlessly, refused a Soviet request to send a representative to them.

This played to Stalin’s suspicion that the West was engineering a secret peace with Germany, to enable the Nazis to continue the fight in the east. Over the next month the telegrams between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin saw some of the most unhappy and mistrustful exchanges of the war. On 3 April the Soviet leader stated that either the American president was lying or he was being deliberately deceived by his advisers. Stalin himself had played a part in the sudden frosting of relations, for in response to the perceived slight of the Swiss negotiations with Wolf he began discussions of his own with a Polish nationalist group – offering them the chance to join an enlarged pro-communist government – and then promptly arrested them on charges of sabotage, a sequence of events acknowledged by Russia only in early May. All the Western powers knew in mid March was that this group of sixteen Poles had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.

As suspicions grew, the possibility arose that Anglo-American and Russian armies would make a dash for Berlin at the same time. The military situation gave Stalin the initiative. Two Russian Fronts (the Soviet equivalent of an American or British army group) – the 1st Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian – were on the Oder river, only 50 miles from the German capital. In fierce fighting, Red Army troops were also moving into Czechoslovakia and eastern Austria, and it was clear that the Russians would soon capture Vienna. In the west, British and American armies had crossed the Rhine on a broad front, and were advancing into Germany at speed. The Anglo-American forces were farther from Berlin than their Russian allies, but Germans might offer less resistance to them. Churchill and his commander in north-west Europe, Field Marshal Montgomery, urged that an attempt on Berlin be made.