The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (220 page)

H
ITLER HAD PLANNED
to leave Berlin on April 20, his fifty-sixth birthday, for Obersalzberg and there direct the last stand of the Third Reich in the legendary mountain fastness of Barbarossa. Most of the ministerial offices had already moved south with their trucks full of state papers and of frantic officials desperate to get out of doomed Berlin. The Fuehrer himself had sent most of the members of his household staff to Berchtesgaden ten days before to prepare his mountain villa, the Berghof, for his coming.

He was destined, however, never to see his beloved Alpine retreat again. The end was approaching faster than he had thought possible. The Americans and Russians were driving swiftly to a junction on the Elbe. The British were at the gates of
Hamburg
and
Bremen
and threatening to cut off Germany from occupied Denmark. In Italy
Bologna
had fallen and
Alexander
’s Allied forces were plunging into the valley of the Po. The Russians, having captured Vienna on April 13, were heading up the Danube, and the U.S.
Third
Army was sweeping down that river to meet them in Hitler’s home town of
Linz
in
Austria
.
Nuremberg
, where work had been going on throughout the war on the great auditorium and stadiums which were to mark the ancient town as the capital of the Nazi Party, was besieged and part of the U.S.
Seventh
Army was sweeping past it toward
Munich
, the birthplace of the Nazi movement. In Berlin the thunder of Russian heavy artillery could be heard.

“All through the week,” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the puerile Minister of Finance and former Rhodes scholar, who had scooted out of Berlin for the north at the first word of the approaching Bolsheviki, noted in his diary on April 23, “there was nothing but a succession of Job’s messengers. Our people seem to be faced with the darkest fate.”
¹

Hitler had left his headquarters in Rastenburg in East Prussia for the last time on the previous November 20, as the Russians approached, and had remained in Berlin, which he had scarcely seen since the beginning
of the war in the East, until December 10, when he had gone to his Western headquarters at
Ziegenberg
near
Bad Nauheim
to direct the great gamble in the Ardennes. After its failure he had returned on January 16 to Berlin, where he was to remain until the end, directing his crumbling armies from the underground bunker fifty feet below the Chancellery, whose great marble halls were now in ruins from Allied bombing.

Physically he was fast deteriorating. A young Army captain who saw him for the first time in February later recalled his appearance.

Since the July 20 attempt on his life he had grown distrustful of everyone, even of his old party stalwarts. “I am lied to on all sides,” he fumed to one of his women secretaries in March.

   One would have thought that at this stage of history the question of succession was academic, but it was not—not in this Nazi cuckoo land. Not only the Fuehrer was obsessed by it but the leading candidates to succeed him, as we shall shortly see.

Physical wreck though Hitler now was, with a disastrous end staring him in the face as the Russians approached Berlin and the Western Allies overran the Reich, he and a few of his most fanatical followers, Goebbels above all, clung stubbornly to their hopes of being saved at the last minute by a miracle.

One fine evening early in April Goebbels had sat up reading to Hitler from one of the Fuehrer’s favorite books,
Carlyle
’s
History of Frederick the Great.
The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the
Seven Years’ War
, when the great King felt himself at the end of his rope and told his ministers that if by February 15 no change for the better in his fortunes occurred he would give up and take poison. This portion of history certainly had its appropriateness and no doubt Goebbels read it in his most dramatic fashion.

The Fuehrer’s eyes, Goebbels told Krosigk, to whose diary we owe this touching scene, “were filled with tears.”
⁴

With such encouragement—and from a British source—they sent for two horoscopes, which were kept in the files of one of
Himmler
’s multitudinous “research” offices. One was the horoscope of the Fuehrer drawn up on January 30, 1933, the day he took office; the other was the horoscope of the Weimar Republic, composed by some unknown astrologer on November 9, 1918, the day of the Republic’s birth. Goebbels communicated the results of the re-examination of these two remarkable documents to Krosigk.

Fortified by Carlyle and the “amazing” predictions of the stars, Goebbels on April 6 issued a ringing appeal to the retreating troops:

Scarcely a week later, on the night of April 12, Goebbels convinced himself that “the exact hour” of the miracle had come. It had been a day of further bad news. The Americans had appeared on the Dessau–Berlin autobahn and the High Command had hastily ordered the destruction of its last two remaining powder factories, which were in the vicinity. Henceforth the German soldiers would have to get along with the ammunition at hand. Goebbels had spent the day at the headquarters of
General Busse
on the Oder front at
Kuestrin
. The General had assured him that a Russian breakthrough was impossible, that (as Goebbels the next day told Krosigk) he was “holding out until the British kick us in the ass.”

“What Czarina will die this time?” an officer asked. Goebbels did not know. But fate, he replied, “holds all sorts of possibilities.”

When the Propaganda Minister got back to Berlin late that night the center of the capital was in flames from another R.A.F. bombing. The remains of the Chancellery and the
Adlon Hotel
up the Wilhelmstrasse were burning. At the steps of the
Propaganda Ministry
, a secretary greeted Goebbels with a piece of urgent news. “Roosevelt,” he said, “is dead!”

The Minister’s face lit up, visible to all in the light of the flames from the Chancellery across the Wilhelmsplatz.

“Bring out our best champagne!” Goebbels cried. “And get me the Fuehrer on the telephone!”

Hitler was in his deep bunker across the way sitting out the bombing. He picked up the telephone.

“My Fuehrer,” Goebbels said. “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday, April the t
hirt
eenth. [It was already after midnight.] It is the turning point!”

Hitler’s reaction to the news was not recorded, though it may be imagined in view of the encouragement he had been receiving from Carlyle and the stars. But that of Goebbels was. “He was,” says his secretary, “in ecstasy.”
⁷

The fatuous Count Schwerin von Krosigk too. When Goebbels’ State Secretary phoned him that Roosevelt was dead he exclaimed—at least in his faithful diary:

   The next morning Krosigk telephoned Goebbels with
his
“congratulations”—he affirms it proudly in his diary—and, as if this were not enough, followed it with a letter in which he hailed Roosevelt’s death, he says, as “a divine judgment … a gift from God.”

   In this atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, with cabinet ministers long in power and educated in Europe’s ancient universities, as Krosigk and Goebbels were, grasping at the readings of the stars and rejoicing amidst the flames of the burning capital in the death of the American President as a sure sign that the Almighty would now rescue the Third Reich at the eleventh hour from impending catastrophe, the last act in Berlin was played out to its final curtain.

Eva Braun
had arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on April 15. Very few Germans knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationship to
Adolf Hitler. For more than twelve years she had been his mistress. Now in April she had come, as Trevor-Roper says, for her wedding and her ceremonial death.

She is interesting for her role in the last chapter of this narrative but not interesting in herself; she was not a Pompadour or a Lola Montez.
^*
Hitler, although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of her and found relaxation in her unobtrusive company, had always kept her out of sight, refusing to allow her to come to his various headquarters, where he spent almost all of his time during the war years, and rarely permitting her even to come to Berlin. She remained immured at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, passing her time in swimming and skiing, in reading cheap novels and seeing trashy films, in dancing (which Hitler disapproved of) and endlessly grooming herself, pining away for her absent loved one.

“She was,” says
Erich Kempka
, the Fuehrer’s chauffeur, “the unhappiest woman in Germany. She spent most of her life waiting for Hitler.”
⁸

Field Marshal Keitel described her appearance during an interrogation at
Nuremberg
.

The daughter of lower-middle-class Bavarian parents, who at first strenuously opposed her illicit relation with Hitler, even though he was the dictator, she had been employed in the Munich photograph shop of
Heinrich Hoffmann
, who introduced her to the Fuehrer. This was a year or two after the suicide of Geli Raubal, the niece of Hitler, for whom, as we have seen, he had the one great passionate love of his life. Eva Braun too, it seems, was often driven to despair by her lover, though not for the same reasons as Geli Raubal. Eva, though installed in a suite in Hitler’s Alpine villa, couldn’t endure the long separations when he was away and twice tried to kill herself in the early years of their friendship. But gradually she accepted her frustrating and ambiguous role—acknowledged neither as wife nor as mistress—content to be sole woman companion of the great man and making the most of their rare moments together.

She was now determined to share his end. Like Dr. and Frau Goebbels, she had no desire to live in a Germany without Adolf Hitler. “It would not be fit to live in for a true German,” she told Hanna Reitsch, the famed German woman test pilot, in the shelter just before the end.
¹⁰
Though Eva Braun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all—perhaps this is one reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women—it is obvious that his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.

Hitler’s birthday on April 20 passed quietly enough, although, as General Karl Koller, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who was present at the celebration in the bunker, noted in his diary, it was a day of further catastrophes on the rapidly disintegrating fronts. All the Old Guard Nazis, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop and
Bormann
, were there, as well as the surviving military leaders, Doenitz, Keitel,
Jodl
and
Krebs
—the last-named the new, and last, Chief of the Army General Staff. They offered the Fuehrer birthday congratulations.

The warlord was not unusually cast down, despite the situation. He was still confident, as he had told his generals three days before, that “the Russians were going to suffer their bloodiest defeat of all before Berlin.” The generals knew better, and at the regular military conference after the birthday party they urged Hitler to leave Berlin for the south. In a day or two, they explained, the Russians would cut off the last escape corridor in that direction. Hitler hesitated; he would not say yes or no. Apparently he could not quite face the appalling fact that the capital of the Third Reich was now about to be captured by the Russians, whose armies, he had announced years before, were as good as destroyed. As a concession to the generals he consented to setting up two separate commands in case the Americans and Russians made their junction on the Elbe. Admiral Doenitz would head that in the north and perhaps
Kesselring
the one in the south—he was not quite sure about the latter appointment.