War and Remembrance (190 page)

Next day the Red Army secured Vienna, and that let some gas out of the balloon. Yet on that very day as Speer and I sat discussing the grave demolition problem in Berlin, the Nazi labor administrator Ley came bubbling up to announce that some German back yard genius had just invented “the Death Ray!” It was as simple and cheap to manufacture as a machine gun. Ley had seen the plans himself, and prominent scientists had analyzed the apparatus for him. This was the big turnabout, if Speer would only start mass-producing the thing at once. With a straight face Speer appointed Ley on the spot “Commissioner of Death Rays,” with full authority to commandeer all German industry in Speer’s name for production of the wonder weapon. Ley went off drivelling happily, and we got back to our painful discussion.

This whole swindle of “wonder weapons” and “secret weapons” was a trial for Speer, and for me once I became his liaison to OKW. Generals, manufacturers, bigwig politicians, and ordinary people would approach me with a nudge and a wink. “Isn’t it about time the Führer unleashed the secret weapon? When will it happen?” My own wife, the daughter of a general and an army wife to the core, pathetically asked me this herself. So far had Goebbels spread this cruel delusion through “leaks” and whispering campaigns, just to keep the bloodshed going and the Nazi cancer flourishing.

By 1945 that cancer had metastasized all through the Fatherland. Party fools and plug-uglies like Ley permeated the state and military structures. The Waffen SS had become a rival army, absorbing the best new troops and equipment. In January Hitler actually appointed Heinrich Himmler to command Army Group Vistula, facing the brunt of the Red Army breakthrough in the north. Of course the result was disaster. Himmler’s idea of generalship was to execute officers who failed to hold hopeless positions he had ordered held. Later he threatened to execute their families, too. The bridges and villages in his area were festooned with the hanging bodies of German soldiers, labelled cowards or deserters.

Naturally, all this National Socialist “inspiration” only reduced further the waning capability of our forces. The Russians quickly broke through Himmler’s front to the Baltic, cutting off much of our German power in East Prussia and Latvia. Only Dönitz’s splendid evacuation by sea, a forgotten rescue much greater than Dunkirk, saved those forces and much of the civilian population. Himmler meanwhile, as has been subsequently revealed, was secretly making his own peace feelers through Sweden, and simultaneously
conducting fantastic negotiations to release surviving Jews for a big ransom.

At last, much too late, Hitler sent General Heinrici to relieve this incompetent brute. Meanwhile, however, Hitler too was showing his true Nazi colors. When the Americans in a brilliant dash captured the Remagen bridge, he flew into a tantrum and ordered four fine officers shot for failing to blow up the bridge in time. One of them, as it happened, was my own brother-in-law. In such circumstances one’s oath of loyalty was quite a burden.

As staff liaison to Speer, I found my loyalty tested to the limit, for I was caught squarely between him and Hitler in the matter of demolition. The Führer was decreeing a “scorched-earth policy” in the face of the advancing enemy, east and west. In Berlin, essential services were to be totally demolished by our own explosives. Everywhere the Wehrmacht in retreat was to blow up bridges, railroads, waterways, highways, and leave a “transportation desert”; we were to flood the coal mines of the Ruhr, dynamite the steel plants, the electric and gas works, the dams, and in effect render Germany uninhabitable for a hundred years. When Speer ventured to object, Hitler simply shouted that the Germans had shown themselves unfit to survive anyway, or some such obdurate and merciless nonsense.

Speer was as dedicated a Nazi as any of them. There was something doglike about his squirming deference to Hitler that always disgusted me; nevertheless he was a master of modern technology, and responsibility for the nation’s war production had forced him to keep his sanity. He knew that the war was lost, and he risked his neck for months to foil Hitler’s demolition orders. Sometimes he wheedled his way out of them by arguing that we would soon need all those bridges and other facilities, to support the Führer’s brilliant plans for counterattacking and regaining the lost territory. At other times he fudged his orders, authorizing a bridge or two blown up and leaving the rest of an area intact.

Unfortunately, this double-dealing backed up to me, because I had to handle the generals who received Hitler’s orders. My job was to induce delays in carrying them out. After the execution of the four Remagen officers, these generals became harder to convince. Then at the situation conferences I had to exaggerate the demolition that had been done, and prevaricate about the rest. I was risking my head, as Speer was. The Führer was so far gone, however, in his dream world, that with luck one could wriggle through each conference by answering a perfunctory question or two.

Besides, I was not alone now in lying to him. These conferences in April had become war games on paper, with no relation to the frightening realities outside the bunker. Hitler pored over the maps, ordered phantom divisions
moved about, commanded big counterattacks, argued over minor withdrawals, just as in the old days, but none of it was actually happening. We were all in a tacit conspiracy to humor him with soothing pretenses. Yet his person continued to command our unswerving loyalty. Jodl and Keitel issued streams of methodical realistic orders to deal with the collapsing situation into which German honor had led us. Of course it could not go on. Reality had to come crashing into the dreamland.

On the twentieth of April, during the lugubrious little birthday party for Hitler, Jodl told me that I was to leave at once and set up a skeleton OKW North in conjunction with Dönitz’s staff. Our land communications were about to be cut in two by the juncture at the Elbe of the Americans and the Russians. Our military orientation therefore had to shift at a right angle; instead of facing west and east, we would now have a northern and a southern “front”! Words cannot convey the gloomy eeriness of all this at the time. So I missed the historic blowup at the situation conference on the twenty-second, which led to Hitler’s decision to die in Berlin, instead of flying to Obersalzberg to carry on the war from the southern redoubt.

In my operational analysis of the battle for Berlin, I describe in detail the events of the twenty-second, turning on the phantom “Steiner attack.” For once Hitler could not be put off with soothing lies, because Russian shells were falling on the Chancellery and shaking the bunker. He had ordered a big counterattack from the southern suburbs under SS General Steiner. The staff had assured him, with the usual wealth of mendacious detail, that the attack was on. Well, then, he demanded, where was Steiner? Why weren’t the Russians being driven back?

When he was at last brought face to face with the truth that there was no Steiner attack, Hitler threw a fit of rage so horrible that nobody present could write or talk coherently about it thereafter. It seems to have been the last eruption of a dying volcano; a frightening explosion that left the man a dull burned-out shell, as I myself later saw; a three-hour screaming fit about the betrayal, treachery, and incompetence all around him that had frustrated his genius, lost the war, and destroyed Germany. Then and there he made his decision for suicide. Nothing could alter it. The result was a big exodus next day from the bunker. Jodl and Keitel went northwest to meet up with Dönitz, and most of the Nazi entourage scuttled off westward into one hole or another.
Sauve qui peut!

I saw Hitler once more, on the twenty-fourth. Things were becoming very confused in this period. I received a peremptory summons by telex
from Bormann, the repulsive toad who was Hitler’s shadow and appointments secretary, to report to the Chancellery. The Russians had the city surrounded, the air was thick with their fighters, their artillery made rings of bright fire, but with luck one could still fly over their lines at night and land near the Chancellery on the East-West Axis boulevard, which had been marked with red lanterns. Not caring much what happened to me, I found a young Luftwaffe pilot who regarded the thing as a sporting challenge. He got hold of a small Stork reconnaissance plane, and flew me in there and out again. I will never forget coming in over the Brandenburg Tor in the green glare of Russian star shells. That pilot is now, incidentally, a well-known newspaper publisher in Munich.

Hitler received me in his private chambers. He questioned me closely about Dönitz’s headquarters at Plön, the efficiency of his staff, the communications with the south, and the state of Dönitz’s spirits. Perhaps he was making up his mind about the succession. It was after one in the morning, and I was desperately weary, but he was wound up, and he talked on and on. His eyes were glazed, his face doughy white with purple streaks. He hunched down in an armchair, rolling a stubby pencil in his left hand.

Glowering at me from under his eyebrows, he disclosed that Speer, that very cay, had confessed to him the sabotage of his demolition orders in the past months. “You are implicated, and you deserve to be treated accordingly,” he said, in a nasty snarling tone full of the old menace. For an unpleasant moment I thought I had been summoned to be shot, as had happened to many of my comrades-in-arms, and I wondered whether Speer was still alive. Hitler went on, “However, I’ve forgiven Speer because of his service to the Reich. I forgive you because, contrary to the nature of your whole damned breed, and despite the lapses that have not once escaped me, you have on the whole been a loyal general.”

This led into the threadbare tirade on how the German General Staff had lost the war. Hitler could not converse at all. He had certain monologues which at a cue he would play out again and again, like phonograph records or an actor’s repertoire. That is why, though he had a sharp mind and a certain coarse wit, all the memoirs quite truly describe his company as stupefyingly boring.

Beginning with the assertion that he had been betrayed, let down, and doublecrossed by us ever since 1939, this soliloquy reviewed the entire war in astonishing detail, rehashing his favorite grievances against the military, from Brauchitsch and Haider to Manstein and Guderian, the whole tragic procession that had taken the blame for his blunders. His grand strategy for the war, as he described it, could not possibly have failed except for the incompetence and treachery of our General Staff. In every disagreement he had been proved right and the generals wrong; the invasion of Poland, the
attack on France, the hold-or-die order in Russia in December 1941, and all the smaller tactical disputes and disappointments he treasured in his unusual memory, right down to the Steiner attack.

That is my final impression of “Hitler as Military Leader” — a maundering paranoiac in an underground shelter in Berlin which shuddered under the blast of Russian shells, explaining for the thousandth time how our nation’s catastrophe had been everybody else’s fault but his; how he, its absolute ruler who had run the war first to last, had never made a mistake.

In the document that turned up after the war as his last Will and Testament, he blamed the Jews. In this tirade he blamed our General Staff. But to the last, one thing remained perfectly clear to him: Adolf Hitler himself had never made a mistake.

My long labor draws to a close. I have, I believe, in the course of my operational analysis, given this strange historic figure due credit for his positive qualities. All writings about him tend to end in contradiction because the authors write of “Hitler” as though he were one person. But there was more than one Hitler.

The early Hitler, as I have written, was undeniably “the soul of Germany.” He fully expressed our people’s vigorous yearning for a place in the sun, and for a healthy German culture uncontaminated by the poisons of Asiatic communism, Western materialism, and the weak negative aspects of Judeo-Christian morality exposed by Friedrich Nietzsche. His domestic policies brought prosperity and tranquillity. His foreign policies brought diplomatic victories over the world’s strongest nations, our recent conquerors. When he led us to war, against the forebodings of our General Staff because we were far from ready, our nation won magnificent military triumphs. I have acknowledged his flair for adventurist opportunities in military strategy. None of this can be denied.

But at Stalingrad the later Hitler was born. This was another person, an insane monster. He more and more revealed himself as such, as adversity stripped away the glamour of the early Hitler, the protean masks he devised fell off one by one, and he dwindled to the broken jabberer I last glimpsed in the bunker.