Dönitz: The Last Führer (68 page)

And he came to the most breathtaking deception; it was only through ‘hard endurance’ that they could profit from the military and political possibilities to hand. Of the military possibilities, nothing could be said ‘without disclosing our immediate intentions to the enemy’; of the political possibilities: ‘I should like to say: the blindness of Europe will be torn away one day, bringing psychological help for Germany and with it political possibilities. If we give ourselves up beforehand it is too late for these possibilities. Then we are dead and they are no use any more.’

This passage sounds as if it was lifted straight from Hitler’s lips, for Field Marshal Kesselring was briefed by Hitler in the same sense on the
next day, April 12th; Kesselring gained the impression that Hitler still expected to be saved; he talked of a coming great victory against the Russians on the Oder, of a new Army he was raising to defeat the western allies, of new secret weapons, and of the coming split between their eastern and western enemies.
²¹³
It was to this last ‘political possibility’ that Hitler and Goebbels really clung. Hitler spent long periods sitting staring at a portrait of Frederick the Great which went everywhere with him, dwelling on that moment in the Seven Years’ War known as the ‘miracle of the house of Brandenburg’; this was when Frederick, in an impossible position, ringed by enemies and in despair, was saved by the sudden death of the Tsarina of Russia and a subsequent untying of the alliances against him. Goebbels had taken to reading Hitler extracts from Carlyle’s biography of the Prussian hero.

Later that evening, April 12th, a monitored BBC news flash revealed that President Roosevelt had died. Goebbels rang through ecstatically to the Chancellery bunker: ‘
Mein Führer
, this is the miracle of the house of Brandenburg … this is the turning point …’
²¹⁴
Hitler seized on the news hysterically, summoning Speer and Dönitz so that he could tell them himself. ‘Who was right! The war is not lost,’ his words tumbled out in excitement, ‘Read this! Roosevelt is dead.’
²¹⁵
According to Dönitz’s adjutant, Lüdde-Neurath, his chief was not impressed. ‘Dönitz replied soberly that in his opinion a favourable outcome for Germany was not to be expected for the time being.’
²¹⁶
This hardly accords with Dönitz’s usual contortions to keep in the Führer’s good books, nor with the views on the current situation expressed in his decree only the day before; indeed, if Lüdde-Neurath’s account is correct it suggests he employed conscious deception in the decree. There is no reason to accept this however. Lüdde-Neurath’s memories, like all others from this period, reveal quite naturally a rather more selective instinct than most recollections.

Returning now to the decree to the Navy of April 11th, Dönitz, having dispensed in the first part with the rationale of the continuing struggle, turned to more basic verities; he demanded that all Flag Officers and Commanders ‘clearly and plainly tread the path of soldierly duty’, and that all act ruthlessly against any Commander not so doing. If a Commander believed he lacked the spiritual power to do his duty he was to declare it immediately, whereupon he would be reduced to the ranks so as not to be burdened with the tasks of leadership. Thus Dönitz came to what was for him surely the blood-reasoning that overrode analysis:

He then produced a sentence which encapsulates the extraordinary gap between the world he inhabited and, for example, Speer’s: ‘We must be clear that we have to be the exponents of the will to life of our
Vollk
.’ Finally he concluded there were no situations which could not be improved by heroic bearing; it was certain that the opposite signified ‘dissolution, chaos and inextinguishable shame’.

The striking remark, surely, was his preceding appeal to the judgement of posterity—‘the same goes for each individual’—for it applied above all to Dönitz himself. Rarely indeed are individuals tested to the extent and under the pressures that he was tested in these final weeks of the war. And interpretation of the result, as revealed in these April decrees, provides a key to understanding his character that can be applied backwards to the whole of his career.

Interpretations will differ; ‘the honour of the flag’, ‘victory or death’ are powerful ideas for which countless numbers have given their lives throughout history. And of course Dönitz had always argued and continued to argue to the end that it was no part of a soldier’s duty to question his orders or decide whether there was a purpose in fighting, therefore no part of his duty—certainly not in the Führer system—to question the Führer’s orders and the purpose on which they were based. Here is the nub of interpretation for it was the Führer and the Führer system to which he was nailing his colours, and the severity of his ordeal was caused by the fact that he was being tested as a man in a system which relegated men to ‘no more than a part, a member and a functionary of the
State’. The words come from the declaration of the German resistance to Hitler, most of whose leaders had been wiped out by this time; this went on to describe the main features of the system as ‘the formation of an authoritarian political will, which imposed itself by means of propaganda and violence’.
²¹⁷

It is evident that Dönitz had selected himself as one of the chief exponents of the system by his encouragement and support for Hitler. Leaving aside any comment on the system or whether he supported it for personal ambition or through emotional commitment, it is evident that the judgement of posterity which he sought must be recorded in the context of the system, that is of an ‘authoritarian political will which imposed itself by propaganda and violence’. Such a system automatically denies principles of loyalty and honour—for who is to tell whether these too are not propaganda? Anyone as close to the Führer and his principal lieutenants for as long as Dönitz who remained unable or unwilling to distinguish between propaganda and closer approximations to the truth must by the same token have been unable to distinguish between loyalty and treason, honour and dishonour; this may have been his misfortune and it may be posterity’s judgement, for it seems to accord with what he was doing—had been doing for some time; stripped of fine words, he was harnessing the natural idealism of his young men for a plainly lost cause and sending them out to die to please a tyrant whose egomania was so monstrous he was prepared to sacrifice the entire nation for himself—a precise inversion of what he was demanding from his people.

That Dönitz was a perfect exponent of his system is evident from his next secret decree, issued on April 19th. It concerned an idea close to Hitler’s heart, the promotion of petty officers and men who proved themselves leaders by their ‘inner bearing and firmness’ in difficult situations. And he gave an example:

There were more men like this in the Navy, he went on; he expected
all senior officers to take prompt and active measures to advance them.

By April 19th ‘Koralle’ was almost a ghost camp. Dönitz had ordered the evacuation of the headquarters staff to a new command post at Plön in the north during March, since the expected Russian breakthrough from the Oder towards Berlin must endanger ‘Koralle’. He remained with a small personal and communications staff in order to keep in touch with Hitler, whom he visited in the bunker every day; since the opening of a tremendous Russian offensive on the 16th, however, he had put his staff on an hour’s readiness to move, and that evening feeling suddenly uneasy, he ordered evacuation. They left shortly before midnight, a small convoy on the road for Berlin, and in the early hours of the 20th set up a makeshift command post in his house in Dahlem—just as Marshal Zhukov’s tanks, breaking out of the Oder bridgehead, rolled past his abandoned headquarters.

Later he and Lüdde-Neurath were driven to the Chancellery as they had been every day that week, past the empty windows of burned-out blocks, threading through rubble, around anti-tank barricades manned by youths of Goebbels’ newly-recruited
Volkssturm
, slowing for crowds of refugees heading listlessly westwards with bicycles and handcarts or prams with a few belongings. Groups of women and a few girls with wan, tired faces queued outside food shops listening to the thunder of the Russian guns and the shell bursts in the centre of the city. Goebbels had sought to stiffen resistance with tales of Red Army atrocities, and for once had not embroidered the truth; it had been necessary to tone it down. Today was April 20th, Hitler’s birthday and a public holiday; the women’s eyes reflected fear for the immediate future.

The façade of the new Reichschancellery still stood; inside, the grand marbled and columned reception halls were bare; timber joists and partitions shut off areas damaged by bombs, but great cracks were visible in the ceilings and windows whose panes had been blown out were blanked with cardboard; thin light from others filtered through masonry dust. From outside the multiple shock of bombs was added to the noise of the Russian bombardment as the city came under another daylight raid. Passing through check-points manned by SS guards armed with machine guns, Dönitz and Lüdde-Neurath came to the wrought-iron stairway leading down to the Führer bunker. Lüdde-Neurath records that he reached the bottom just as Hitler emerged from his private quarters. It
was his 56th birthday; he looked an old man, ‘broken, washed-up, stooped, feeble and irritable’.
²¹⁹

All members of the higher leadership were present that afternoon to pay their birthday respects; Hitler received them one after another in order of seniority in his small living room; what passed between him and Dönitz is not known, although afterwards at the daily situation conference, when he was urged by most of those present to leave Berlin before it was too late to fly south to continue the fight from the
Berghof
he charged Dönitz with the defence of North Germany; for it was apparent that the country was about to be cut in two by the meeting of the US and Russian armies in the centre.

The next day, as Lüdde-Neurath prepared the move to the northern headquarters, Dönitz visited the Chancellery bunker again. It was assumed there that everyone would be flying south to the
Berghof
at any moment since the Red Army was closing a ring around the city; time was running out fast and Dönitz was advised to leave; he gained Hitler’s permission to do so. What was said, what his feelings were as he took his last leave of the Führer he had served with undeviating loyalty is not known. Speer described Hitler in these last days as almost senile with dragging footsteps and a quavering voice, whose once immaculately kept uniform was ‘stained by the food he had eaten with a shaking hand’.
²²⁰
The increased shaking and trembling of the left side of his body, especially his hand and arm, was remarked by Gerhardt Boldt, who described his movements as ever more shambling, his posture more bent.
²²¹
To Speer he gave the impression of someone whose purpose had been destroyed, who was going through his routine by habit. Did Dönitz still regard him as
brav und würdig
, the only statesman of stature in Europe? After the capitulation he told his US interrogator that Hitler was a man with an abundance of good heart; ‘his mistake was perhaps that he was too noble’, too loyal to colleagues ‘who had not deserved it’.
²²²
Perhaps he had to believe something like this.

Was he moved now by the sight of what Hitler had become, was he reinforced in his hatred of the enemy who had done this to his war-father? Or was he, perhaps, simply relieved that he could go away and be his own master in the north? Did Hitler attempt to act up for the last time to the role of wise and imperturbable elder statesman expected by his devoted
Herr Grossadmiral
?