HITLER’S WAR
“ Eclipse ”
Hitler recognized that the end of what he envisioned as his lone fight against bolshevism was approaching, and there are clues in the documents as to how long he believed he could postpone it : for example, he had ordered the General Staff to provide the Berlin area with logistics sufficient for three divisions to hold out for twenty days, should the city be surrounded. If open conflict had not broken out between Stalin and the Americans by then, Hitler realized, his gamble had failed ; it would be his “Eclipse,” to use the code name assigned by his victorious enemies to the postwar carve-up of the Reich. By April 15, 1945, the document outlining this plan—captured from the British in the west—had been fully translated and was in the hands of Hitler, Himmler, and the military authorities ; its appended maps revealed that Berlin was to be an enclave far inside the Russian occupation zone, divided like Germany itself into British, American, and Russian zones.
What encouraged Hitler was the fact that the American spearheads, in reaching the Elbe, had already encroached on Stalin’s zone, while the Russians had duly halted at the demarcation line on reaching Saint-Polten in Austria late on April 15. A clash seemed inevitable, and Hitler’s General Staff toadied to this desperate belief. Colonel Gerhard Wessel, the new chief of Foreign Armies East, reported with emphasis on the fifteenth(1) that Russian officers were apprehensive that the Americans were preparing an attack (“We must drench the Americans ‘accidentally’ with our artillery fire to let them taste the lash of the Red Army”); Wessel also disclosed that the British too were adopting a dangerous new propaganda line to subvert German security forces in Slovenia. “Britain is shortly going to start fighting the Soviet Union herself, and with better prospects than the Reich ; Britain has already begun raising Russian units for this purpose.” Over and over during the next two weeks Hitler restated the belief that sustained him : “Perhaps the others”—meaning Britain and the United States—“can be convinced, after all, that there is only one man capable of halting the Bolshevik colossus, and that is me.” This was the real point of fighting an otherwise hopeless battle for Berlin.
Since Roosevelt’s death, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had secretly circulated to German diplomatic channels abroad a fourteen-page memorandum designed for Allied consumption—a forbidding and not wholly inaccurate prophecy of Stalin’s postwar position as the cruel and authoritarian ruler of both a Soviet Union of proven “biological strength” and of three hundred million non-Soviet eastern Europeans too. German technicians and factories captured by Stalin were already working to expand Stalin’s power ; could England, asked the memorandum, afford to abet this menace to her traditional routes to the Middle East and India, particularly once the United States had withdrawn her forces from western Europe as one day she must ?
So far the British had been blinded by their hatred, but the Americans suddenly proved more amenable. On the night of April 17, SS General Fegelein—Himmler’s representative—adroitly informed Hitler that the secret talks between SS General Wolff and Allen Dulles in Switzerland had resulted in principle on terms for an armistice on the Italian front. The Americans were still talking of unconditional surrender, but that was a minor problem if thereby the enemy alliance could be torn asunder. At 3 A.M. the F¸hrer sent for Wolff and congratulated him. “I hear that you and your skill have managed to establish the first official contacts to top Americans.” He asked Wolff not to leave Berlin until the next evening, to give him time to think it over. “I am grateful that you’ve succeeded in opening the first doorway to the West and America. Of course, the terms are very bad—there can be no talk of unconditional surrender, obviously.” But by 5 P.M. his mood had hardened again. Strolling with Wolff, Kaltenbrunner, and Fegelein in the Chancellery garden, Hitler enlarged on his own hopeful theories. “I want the front to hold for eight more weeks. I am waiting for East and West to fall out. We are going to hold the Italian fortress at all costs, and Berlin too.” This was the message Hitler gave Wolff to pass on to General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, Kesselring’s colorless successor as Commander in Chief in Italy.
Hitler took harsh action against every vestige of defeatism. After consultation with Bormann, he ordered the arrest of his handsome former staff surgeon, Dr. Brandt, for sending his wife and family to Bad Liebenstein, where they would fall into American hands ; on April 18, Brandt was summarily condemned to death for the offense.(2) Similar sentences would follow.
But entire armies could not be court-martialed for losing heart. Zisterdorf fell to the Russians. On the seventeenth Gauleiter August Eigruber cabled from Linz that “the petroleum fields are in jeopardy”; by the next day General Hans Kreysing’s Eighth Army had already abandoned them precipitately, after prematurely destroying the installations. Himmler reported to Hitler that in Austria the army’s tendency was to retreat everywhere even though “Ivan is obviously both wary and weary of fighting.”
This was Hitler’s second motive for making a last stand in Berlin : to set an example to his generals and thereby restore his personal authority over them. Great slaughter had been inflicted on the Russians, but by early April 18 alarming fissures were appearing in the defenses. On the sixteenth Busse’s Ninth Army had destroyed 211 tanks—and 106 more the next day—on the Oder front ; while General Fritz Graser’s adjacent Fourth Panzer Army had knocked out 93 and 140 tanks on the Neisse front. Busse’s front was still intact, though mauled and buckled by the sheer weight of Zhukov’s onslaught ; at Wriezen in particular a deep wedge had been hammered into the main German line. But southeast of Berlin Marshal Konev’s army group had thrown two bridgeheads across the Neisse on the very first day—in fact just where Hitler had foreseen the Russian Schwerpunkt, though angled differently. Russian tanks were already approaching Cottbus and the Spree River at Spremberg : Konev’s objective, like Zhukov’s, was obviously Berlin and not Prague. This gave Hitler less time than he had thought.
Counterattacks by Heinrici and Sch–rner failed to restore the old battle line. On April 17, Hitler ordered the autobahn bridges blown up and every available aircraft, including the Messerschmitt jets, thrown in to stop the enemy from reaching Cottbus. At his midday conference he proclaimed : “The Russians are in for the bloodiest defeat imaginable before they reach Berlin !” But the failure of the counterattacks unsettled him. He sat brooding far into the night with Eva Braun and his secretaries, trying to convince them and himself that the wedge at Wriezen was just the natural luck of the attacker, but that such luck would not hold for long. Now he had to agree to pull troops out of the German bridgehead east of Frankfurt-on-Oder to strengthen the fortress’s flanks. He began to blame General Heinrici for the sudden plight of the Oder front—calling him “a plodding, irresolute pedant lacking the necessary enthusiasm for the job.”
During the eighteenth a furious battle was fought for Seelow, the high plateau commanding the Russian assault area. By evening it was firmly in Zhukov’s hands, and Hitler learned that only the SS “Nederland” Division—a volunteer unit of Dutch mercenaries—had been thrown into a counterattack. Perhaps this was the cause of his petulant outburst to General Karl Hilpert, the new commander of the Kurland army group, that day : “If the German nation loses this war, that will prove it was unworthy of me.” A further eruption came when he learned that Goebbels had sent five battalions of wholly unsuitable Volkssturm troops to the Oder front—although Hitler had insisted that such troops were only to be used as a last resort in defense of their own towns and villages. There were enough able-bodied airmen and sailors who could have been sent—if only they had had the guns and ammunition.
From now until the end, Hitler slept only fitfully and irregularly. The long days were punctuated by an unending series of ill tidings, each one bringing the end much closer than its predecessor. Restless and pallid, Hitler rambled around the shelter, took brief strolls upstairs, then sat in the telephone exchange or machine room—where he had never set foot before—or visited his dogs in their makeshift kennels behind the lavatories ; he took to sitting in the passageway with one of the puppies on his lap, silently staring at the officers passing in and out of the shelter.
He had news that separatist movements were stirring in W¸rttemberg, Bavaria, and Austria. Late on April 19, Saur reported back to Hitler from the south, where he had conferred two days earlier with Gauleiter Hofer and SS General Kammler on the possibility of establishing an “Alpine Redoubt.” In one of the Chancellery’s few remaining rooms, Saur laid the unpalatable news squarely on the line : there was not enough time left to start large-scale arms production in the Alps ; the most they could count on would be small factories for re-machining captured ammunition to fit German weapons. It was an uninspiring end to the armaments empire Speer had created. As Hitler accompanied Saur to the exit, he talked nostalgically of Speer’s deceased predecessor. “Who knows—if Todt hadn’t been killed, the war might have gone very differently !” He gave the stocky arms expert his hand, and he prophesied : “Within the next twenty-four hours we shall have won or lost the war.”
This echoed the latest dispatch of Heinrici’s army group : at M¸ncheberg, due east of Berlin, and at Wriezen, farther north, the Russians had finally broken through into open country between 5 and 6 P.M. Immense tank forces were pouring through the two breaches ; at M¸ncheberg alone tank-killer squads and aircraft destroyed 60 tanks during the next few hours, while the Ninth Army’s total that day was 226 Russian tanks knocked out. “The battle,” Heinrici’s army group reported that evening, “is about to be decided.” A stabbing headache assailed Hitler as this news reached his bunker. He weakly called for a servant to fetch Dr. Morell, and at his behest the physician crudely drained a quantity of blood from Hitler’s right arm until it blocked the hypodermic needle and Morell had to force a somewhat larger needle into the veins. The servant blanched as the blood ran into a beaker, but wisecracked : “Mein F¸hrer, all we need do now is mix the blood with some fat and we could put it on sale as F¸hrer blood sausage !” Hitler repeated the unpleasant witticism to Eva Braun and the secretaries over tea that evening.
Midnight would bring his fifty-sixth birthday. Bormann wanly observed in his diary that it was “not exactly a birthday situation.” Hitler had asked his staff to refrain from ceremony, but Eva Braun cajoled him into stepping into the anteroom and shaking hands with the adjutants who had gathered there. Saur had brought a perfect scale-model of a 350-millimeter mortar for Hitler’s collection. Hitler spoke for a while with Goebbels and Ley about his determination to defend the Alpine Redoubt and Bohemia-Moravia in the south, and Norway in the north ; then he retired to drink tea with Eva in his low-ceilinged drawing room-cum-study.
All night after that he lay awake, until the knocking of Heinz Linge, his valet, told him it was morning. General Burgdorf, the chief Wehrmacht adjutant, was outside the door. He shouted that during the night the Russians had broken through Sch–rner’s army group on both sides of Spremberg ; the Fourth Panzer Army was trying to repair the breaches by a counterattack. Hitler merely said, “Linge, I haven’t slept yet. Wake me an hour later than usual, at 2 P.M.”
When he awoke Berlin was under heavy air attack—a birthday bombardment that continued all day. His eyes were stinging, but the pain subsided after Linge administered cocaine eyedrops.(3) Morell gave him a glucose injection, then Hitler fondled a puppy for a while before lunching with Eva and the two duty-secretaries, Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder. There was no conversation. After lunch they picked their way along the duckboards into the Voss Bunker, to steal another look at the model of Linz ; he identified to them the house where he had spent his youth.
Wrapped in a gray coat with its collar turned up, he climbed the spiral staircase to the Chancellery garden followed by Goebbels. The Berlin air was thick with the dust and smoke from a hundred fires. A short line of fresh-faced Hitler Youths awaited decoration for bravery against enemy tanks on the Oder front. The once well-tended lawns and paths were now pocked with holes and craters and strewn with branches and empty canisters. The perimeter wall was punctuated by dugouts and piles of bazookas at the ready. Near the music room a small parade of troops from the Kurland battlefield awaited inspection. Himmler saluted, and Hitler—stooping and shuffling—passed along the line. They crowded around in a semicircle. He apologized for not being able to speak very loudly, but he did promise that victory would be theirs and that they could tell their children that they had been there when it was finally won.
At about 4 P.M. that afternoon, April 20, 1945, he retraced his steps into the shelter, having seen the sky for the last time.
Before the main war conference began, he allowed his principal ministers in singly to proffer formal birthday greetings. Ribbentrop stayed about ten minutes, the others—G–ring, D–nitz, Keitel, and Jodl—rather less. Keitel dropped a broad hint that it was time for Hitler to leave Berlin, but Hitler interrupted : “Keitel, I know what I want—I am going to fight in front of Berlin, fight in Berlin, and fight behind Berlin !” With this Clemenceau-like utterance he extended his trembling hand to the field marshal and sent for the next well-wisher.
The main conference began immediately. Both north and south of Berlin the Russians had indeed decided the battle, and armored spearheads were dashing westward. Unless Sch–rner’s counterattack succeeded, the last main road out of Berlin to the south would be cut off in a matter of hours. G–ring echoed Keitel’s feeling that it was time for a far-reaching military decision on the future of Berlin. General Koller pointed out that the truckloads of OKW equipment and documents would have to leave Berlin for the south immediately—certainly there was neither the fuel nor the fighter escort for the OKW to evacuate Berlin by air. Hitler authorized an immediate splitting of the command : D–nitz and part of the OKW staff were to leave for northern Germany ; another part were to leave at once for the south. He gave the impression that he would in due course follow. Bormann left the room at once to organize sufficient armored transport and omnibuses for the transfer. G–ring—whose own truckloads of property were already at Karinhall waiting for the word to go—inquired, “Mein F¸hrer, do you have any objection to my leaving for Berchtesgaden now ?” Hitler was dumbfounded that G–ring could so casually desert him but did not betray his disappointment ; he frigidly granted G–ring’s plea.
At 6 P.M. Spremberg fell to the Russians ; they were now only a few miles from the vital autobahn from Berlin to the south. At 9:30 P.M., as a new air raid started, Hitler sent for the two older secretaries with whom he had lunched. Christa Schroeder wrote a few days after :
Pale, tired, and listless, he met us in his tiny shelter study where we had eaten our meals or had tea with him of late. He said that the situation had changed for the worse over the last four days. “I find myself compelled to split up my staff, and as you are the more senior you go first. A car is leaving for the south in one hour. You can each take two suitcases, Martin Bormann will tell you the rest.” I asked to stay in Berlin, so that my younger colleague could go as her mother lived in Munich. He replied, “No, I’m going to start a resistance movement and I’ll need you two for that. You mean the most to me. If worse comes to worst, the younger ones will always get through—Frau Christian at any rate—and if one of the young ones doesn’t make it, that’s just Fate.” He put out his hand to stop any further argument. He noticed how downcast we were, and tried to console us. “We’ll see you soon, I’m coming down myself in a few days’ time !” Absolutely numbed, my colleague and I left his room, to pack the two suitcases permitted us in the Voss Bunker where we four secretaries had shared a bedroom for some time. The hall outside was packed with pedestrians who had taken refuge from the air raid outside. In the midst of our packing the phone rang. I answered it—it was the Chief. In a toneless voice he said, “Girls, we’re cut off”—we were going to drive down through Bohemia—“your car won’t get through there now. You’ll have to fly at dawn.” But soon after he phoned again. “Girls, you’ll have to hurry. The plane’s leaving as soon as the all clear sounds.” His voice sounded melancholy and dull and he stopped in mid-sentence. I said something, but although he still had not hung up, he made no reply.
The Russians had now reached Baruth just ten miles south of OKW and OKH headquarters at Zossen, south of Berlin, and still more tanks were pouring through the big gap between the Fourth Panzer and Ninth armies. Sch–rner’s counterattack had begun, but when Hitler called on Heinrici to attack, in order to close this gap, the army group commander demurred, demanding permission to pull back the Ninth Army’s right flank instead, as it seemed in danger of encirclement. But Heinrici could give Hitler no assurances that this would not cost the flank corps its entire artillery, so Hitler—after hours of deliberation—ordered the line held where it was. Heinrici dramatically telephoned the General Staff half an hour after midnight to protest that Hitler’s order was “unrealizable and hopeless.” “I ought to declare : ‘Mein F¸hrer, as the order is against your interests I request you to relieve me of my command ... then I can go into battle as an ordinary Volkssturm man with a gun in my hand !’ ” General Krebs drily pointed out : “The F¸hrer expects you to make a supreme effort to plug the gaps as far east as possible, using everything you can scrape together, regardless of Berlin’s later defense.” Again Hitler ordered every available jet to attack the Russians south of Berlin.
In fact General Heinrici had already decided to “override” Hitler’s order to stand fast. The Ninth Army, he felt, should withdraw westward while it still could. Thus the breach which must eventually seal Berlin’s fate—and Hitler’s too if he stayed for the capital’s defense—was further widened. But at the time Hitler believed that his orders were being obeyed. That night he resolved not to leave Berlin.
Cramped with his two remaining secretaries in his study he had explained, “I’d feel like some Tibetan lama, turning a useless, empty prayer wheel. I must force the decision here in Berlin or go down fighting.” Hardly anybody arrived for the night conference—most of his staff, like his secretaries, were packing feverishly. Kreb’s operations officer brought the grim news that the breach in the Fourth Panzer Army had widened still farther. Hitler calmly blamed this on that army’s “betrayal.” The general challenged him. “Mein F¸hrer, you often talk of your betrayal by your commanders and troops. Do you really believe so much has been betrayed ?” Hitler cast him a pitying look. “All our defeats in the east are solely the result of treachery”—and he spoke with deep conviction. At 1 A.M., Hitler dismissed the two stenographers, Kurt Peschel and Hans Jonuschat, so that they too could catch that night’s plane south. As the general also departed, Ambassador Walther Hewel stuck his head around the door. “Mein F¸hrer, do you have any orders for me yet ?” Hitler shook his head. Ribbentrop’s representative exclaimed, “Mein F¸hrer, the zero hour is about to strike ! If you still plan to achieve anything by political means, it’s high time now !” Hitler replied with an exhausted air, “Politics ? I’m through with politics. It sickens me. When I’m dead you’ll have more than enough politics to contend with.”
Outside, the all clear was just sounding. Puttkamer—his naval adjutant since 1935—was leaving, evacuating too General Schmundt’s dangerous diaries in a suitcase ; Saur joined him on the plane, with orders to organize in the Alps what arms production he could. About eighty other staff members and their families flew south that night. But in the early hours Martin Bormann cabled to the Berghof : “Wolf [i.e., Hitler] is staying here, because if anybody can master the situation here, it is only he.”
The next morning, April 21, 1945, there was a hammering on Hitler’s bedroom door. Linge shouted that Russian artillery had begun pouring shells into the heart of Berlin. Hitler shaved rapidly—“I can’t stand anybody else hovering near my throat with an open razor,” he used to say—and stepped into his study. General Burgdorf announced that the Russians had evidently brought up a heavy battery by rail across the Oder. Hitler telephoned orders to the OKL to identify and attack the battery at once ; General Koller assured him : “The Russians have no railway bridges across the Oder. Perhaps they have captured and turned around one of our heavy batteries.” Soon after, Koller came on the phone again ; the offending Russian battery had been spotted from the observation post atop the towering antiaircraft bunker at the zoo. It was just eight miles away—at Marzahn.
Throughout the day, as the rain of shells on Berlin continued, a growing sense of isolation gripped Hitler’s bunker. Koller was unable to brief Hitler on the Luftwaffe operations south of the city because of communications failures. Nothing had been heard from General Helmuth Weidling’s Fifty-sixth Panzer Corps, due east of the city, since 8 P.M. the previous evening. According to one incredible report, Weidling himself had fled with his staff to the Olympic village west of Berlin ; his arrest was ordered. The jets had been prevented by enemy fighter patrols from operating from Prague airfields against the Russian spearheads south of Berlin. Hitler angrily phoned Koller. “Then the jets are quite useless, the Luftwaffe is quite superfluous !” Infuriated by a Saar industrialist’s letter with further disclosures about the Luftwaffe, Hitler again angrily called up Koller. “The entire Luftwaffe command ought to be strung up !” and he slammed the phone down. Heinrici—ordered to report in person to the shelter that day—asked to be excused as he was “completely overburdened.” He successfully avoided having to look his F¸hrer in the eye ever again.
During the afternoon Hitler began planning a last attempt at plugging the widening breach torn in Heinrici’s front between Eberswalde and Werneuchen, northeast of Berlin. An ad hoc battle group under the bullet-headed SS General Felix Steiner must—like a sliding door—push south during the night from Eberswalde to Werneuchen ; if Steiner succeeded, Zhukov’s advanced forces north of Berlin would be cut off. But north of Eberswalde the Soviet Marshal Rokossovski had now breached the Oder front sector held by General von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army, and Hitler’s detailed order to Steiner, issued about 5 P.M., had an hysterical undertone :
Any officers failing to accept this order without reservations are to be arrested and shot at once. You will account with your life for the execution of this order. The fate of the German capital depends on the success of your mission.
Krebs repeated this to the over-busy Heinrici by telephone, but Heinrici was also preoccupied with salvaging his right flank—the Ninth Army’s flank corps—from Russian encirclement at F¸rstenwalde. “All I can manage now is to pull it back south of the string of lakes southeast of Berlin,” Heinrici warned. This was tantamount to abandoning Berlin. As for the Steiner attack, if the F¸hrer insisted on it, then Heinrici asked to be replaced as Steiner’s superior.
Hitler insisted, but did not replace him ; perhaps Krebs did not report the conversation to him, for Hitler now pinned all his hopes on Steiner’s attack. At 9 P.M. he learned that a battalion of the “Hermann G–ring” Division was still defending the Reichsmarschall’s abandoned stately home at Karinhall. He ordered the force handed to Steiner, and when Koller plaintively telephoned at 10:30 P.M. to ask where Steiner was, the F¸hrer snatched the phone from Krebs’s hand and rasped, “The Luftwaffe is to transfer every man available for ground fighting in the north to Steiner. Any commander holding men back will have breathed his last breath within five hours.... You yourself will pay with your life unless every last man is thrown in.” Krebs confirmed this. “Everybody into the attack from Eberswalde to the south !”—and then hung up.
What orders Heinrici now issued to Steiner we do not know. But even Steiner was no fool, and to attack Zhukov’s flank with a motley collection of demoralized, ill-armed, and undermunitioned troops would be courting disaster. He stalled while ostensibly girding himself for the attack.
The SS general’s inactivity—to put the best possible interpretation on it—was the last straw for Hitler after Sepp Dietrich’s fiasco in Hungary. In the narrow confines of his bunker, the F¸hrer suffered an apparent nervous breakdown on April 22, as the Russians closed in from the east, north, and south on Berlin’s outer ring of defense. Little now stood between Berlin and a seemingly inevitable defeat. Although crippled by 90 percent power failures, Daimler-Benz, Alkett, and the other arms factories were still sending their remaining tanks and assault guns straight to the nearest front line. But fuel and ammunition were running out, and there was already heavy street fighting in the suburbs. The Russians were in K–penick and approaching Spandau. By evening they might well be fighting in the government quarter itself. This was the military position as Krebs finally secured Hitler’s authorization for the garrison at Frankfurt-on-Oder to abandon that city to the enemy as well.
The war conference on April 22 began routinely at about 3 P.M. First Goebbels telephoned, and later Ribbentrop ; but then Hitler asked about the operation which had obviously been in the foreground of his mind all night—Steiner’s counterattack in the north. An SS authority assured him the attack had begun well, but Hitler mistrustfully asked the Luftwaffe to check ; within the hour General Koller came on the phone with word that Steiner had not yet begun his attack and would not begin before nightfall. This betrayal and deceit by the SS, of all people, shook Hitler to the core.(4) He asked if the Luftwaffe troops had duly come under Steiner’s command ; General Christian replied that they had still not received any orders from Steiner. Hitler straightened up and purpled. He suspected a fait accompli, to force him to leave Berlin. His eyes bulged. “That’s it,” he shouted. “How am I supposed to direct the war in such circumstances ! The war’s lost ! But if you gentlemen imagine I’ll leave Berlin now, then you’ve another thing coming. I’d sooner put a bullet in my brains !” Everybody stared. Hitler abruptly stalked out, while the adjutant Otto G¸nsche started after him, calling out, “But, mein F¸hrer. . . .” Walther Hewel telephoned Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in extreme agitation : “The F¸hrer’s had a nervous breakdown—he’s going to shoot himself !”
Hitler ordered a telephone call put through to Goebbels. When the propaganda minister’s voice came on the line, he dictated to him an announcement : “I have decided to stay to the end of the battle in Berlin.” He ordered Goebbels to bring his family to the shelter and sent for Julius Schaub, his lifelong factotum. By the time Schaub hobbled in, Hitler had recovered some of his composure. “Schaub—we must destroy all the documents here at once. Get some gasoline.” He fumbled with his ring of safe keys, handed them to Schaub, and went into the tiny bedroom. While Schaub opened the small safe at the foot of the bed and stuffed its contents into a brown suitcase on the bed, Hitler took his lightweight 6.35-millimeter Walther pistol from his trouser pocket and exchanged it for the more lethal 7.65-millimeter Walther from the bedside table. The bulging suitcase was carried upstairs ; from the upstairs safes more suitcases were filled, and then emptied into a crater in the garden. For a while Hitler stood with Schaub, watching his collection of memoirs, memoranda, and secret letters from world statesmen consumed by the flames. “Richelieu once said, give me five lines one man has penned !” Hitler lamented afterward. “What I have lost ! My dearest memories ! But what’s the point—sooner or later you’ve got to get rid of all that stuff.” He indicated that Schaub must leave for Munich and the Berghof and destroy the papers there too.(5) But first there was something he wanted to dictate—evidently something for posterity.
Hitler’s anguished staff realized that he intended to remain in Berlin and brave the coming storm. “I have been betrayed by those I trusted most,” he declaimed. “I’m going to stay here in Berlin, the capital of our crusade against bolshevism, and direct its defense myself.” Goebbels, Bormann, Keitel, and Jodl begged him to reconsider. D–nitz and Himmler telephoned. Ribbentrop arrived, but was not even given a hearing. Keitel cornered Hitler alone but was interrupted almost at once. “I know what you’re going to say : It’s time to take a Ganzer Entschluss ! I’ve taken it already. I’m going to defend Berlin to the bitter end. Either I restore my command here in the capital—assuming Wenck keeps the Americans off my back and throws them back over the Elbe—or I go down here in Berlin with my troops fighting for the symbol of the Reich.” He felt that if he had stayed in East Prussia in November, the Russians would never have got through there. That was why, he disclosed to the furious field marshal, he had just ordered his decision to stay in Berlin announced to the people ; he could not change his mind now.
Jodl joined the argument and pointed out that if at the last moment Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, the German army would be leaderless. (He also candidly explained that given the F¸hrer’s trembling hands he was too infirm to handle a rifle or bazooka in the street fighting and that in any case there was the danger that he might be captured.) Hitler called Martin Bormann in, and ordered him, Keitel, and Jodl to fly to Berchtesgaden that night to continue the war with G–ring as acting F¸hrer. All three refused. Somebody objected that there was not one German soldier who would be willing to fight for the Reichsmarschall. Hitler retorted, “There’s not much fighting left to be done. And when it comes to negotiating, the Reichsmarschall will be better at that than I.”
It was nearly 5 P.M., and the Russians had now taken the Silesia station. The F¸hrer’s bunker vibrated with the distant echoes of exploding shells. His petrified staff was clustered in the passageway, many of them expecting to hear pistol shots announcing that Hitler had abandoned them. In a private aside to Eva Braun, General Burgdorf put their chances now at only 10 percent. But Jodl argued on—pointing out that Hitler still held powerful trump cards in the form of Sch–rner’s undefeated army group and the armies on the Elbe and in Norway. He reminded Hitler of the demarcation line shown on the captured “Eclipse” maps and suggested that now they should swing Wenck’s Twelfth Army around from west to east and use it to relieve Berlin. Hitler shrugged. “Do whatever you want !” Secretly he may have been relieved, like a convict granted a last-minute reprieve. Perhaps, as Jodl argued, now the Allies would take his anti-Bolshevik intent seriously. Keitel announced that he would drive in person to give the necessary orders to Wenck that night. Hitler ordered a hearty meal prepared for the field marshal before he set out.
Hitler was not appalled at the prospect of imminent death. At an August 1944 war conference he had told his generals he was almost looking forward to it, just as an artisan savors the coming of the evening, when he can set his gnarled hands to rest ; in death Hitler looked for “a release from my sorrows and sleepless nights and from this nervous suffering. It takes only the fraction of a second—then one is cast free from all that and rests in eternal peace.” Ever since World War I he had lived on borrowed time. Besides, as he told Sch–rner, his death might remove the last obstacle preventing the Allies from making common cause with Germany. If Model could find the courage to take his own life, so would he ; he, Hitler, was no Paulus. “Did not Varus command his slave : ‘Now kill me !’” he noted in a comparison to the Roman general who had led three legions to their destruction.
He gruffly instructed Eva Braun and the two remaining secretaries to get changed and fly south. “It’s all over—it’s quite hopeless.” Eva took both his hands in hers. “But you know I am going to stay here with you !” Hitler’s eyes glistened, and he did something nobody had seen him do before—he kissed her lightly on the lips. Frau Junge chimed in, “I’ll stay too !” and Frau Christian echoed her. “I wish my generals were as brave as you,” Hitler replied.
Despite a telephone call from his liaison officer, Hermann Fegelein, Himmler had failed to show up at the shelter, evidently fearing from what Fegelein told him that he would be arrested for SS General Steiner’s passivity ; Fegelein was sent to meet him halfway but failed to return. Instead Himmler’s doctor, Karl Gebhardt, a potbellied, bespectacled Bavarian, arrived about 11 P.M.; he pleaded with Hitler to leave or at least to let the women and children sheltering in the adjacent Voss Bunker escape under Red Cross cover. Hitler learned that Himmler had a battalion of six hundred SS troops for his own safety outside Berlin ; he invited Himmler through Gebhardt to contribute them to the defense of the Chancellery. Some time after, Himmler’s chief lieutenant, General Gottlob Berger, arrived. Hitler repeated to him his reproaches about the SS’s disloyalty and asked Berger to go to Bavaria to crush the dissident and separatist movements stirring there and in W¸rttemberg and Austria. “Everybody has deceived me ! Nobody has been telling me the truth ! The Wehrmacht has lied to me ! Even the SS has left me in the lurch !” His last instruction to Berger before the latter flew south was to round up as many British and American officer-prisoners as possible and transport them under guard to the Alpine Redoubt—as hostages ; though for what purpose even Hitler did not seem clear.
Under cover of darkness, still more of his staff left Berlin. General Koller flew to Bavaria. Morell came to the shelter, clutching his heart and gasping that he needed a change of climate ; he offered Hitler a last injection before he left, a morphine pick-me-up, but Hitler suspected that a plot might be afoot to drug him and evacuate him from Berlin by force. He contemptuously dismissed the gaudily bedecked professor. “You can take off that uniform and go back to your practice in the Kurf¸rstendamm !” Morell chose Munich instead and flew out that night. Hitler sent out the remaining two staff stenographers as well ; their orders were to take the last shorthand records to the “outside world.”
Hitler’s press officer, Heinz Lorenz, was instructed to take down the remaining historic war conferences as best he could. His fragmentary notes—which begin with Keitel’s exhausted return with Jodl from the battlefield at 3 P.M. on April 23—reveal the growing desperation at Hitler’s shelter. East of Berlin the Fifty-sixth Panzer Corps had vanished without trace, as had General Weidling, its commander. “It is all so abominable ! When you come to think it over, what’s the point of living on !” exclaimed Hitler. Steiner had made no discernible move with his 25th Panzer-Grenadier and 7th Panzer divisions at Eberswalde, north of the capital. The Russians had swarmed across the Havel River between Oranienburg and Spandau—unless the Havel lakes could be defended, the city would be completely encircled at any moment.
The situation on Germany’s other fronts no longer occupied Hitler. With tanks swarming as far as the eye could see toward the heart of Berlin along the Landsberg Chaussee from the east—and the new “Stalin” tanks at that, virtually impregnable to German shells—the bunker conferences devolved only on the defenses of Berlin. Hitler’s last stratagem began unfolding. At noon Goebbels’s ministry released the news. “The F¸hrer is in Berlin.... Our leadership has resolved to remain in Berlin and defend the Reich capital to the end.” Perhaps if Stalin knew that Hitler was still in Berlin, his armies might overreach themselves and suffer the same kind of defeat Hitler himself had suffered at Moscow. Lorenz recorded Hitler’s belief thus : “The enemy now knows I am here. They will do all they can to concentrate on us. That gives us an excellent opportunity of luring them into an ambush. But this depends on all our people realizing the importance of this hour and genuinely obeying the orders they get from above ; they must be honest about it ! This business up here”—indicating Steiner on the map—“was downright dishonest ! Steiner had too many nagging doubts about the defenses confronting him.” General Krebs interjected, “I believe we still have four days’ time.” “In four days we’ll know the outcome,” agreed Hitler.
The “ambush” to which Hitler referred was the plan Keitel and Jodl had proposed—for the army on the Elbe and Mulde fronts, facing the Americans, to be turned around, to link up south of Berlin with Busse’s Ninth Army and then strike northward toward Potsdam and Berlin, mopping up the elite Russian troops they thereby cut off. Wenck’s objective would be the autobahn at Ferch, near Potsdam. At the same time the Forty-first Panzer Corps—commanded by the reliable General Rudolf Holste, an old regimental comrade of Keitel’s—would be brought back across the Elbe, to counterattack between Spandau and Oranienburg ; Steiner was to turn over his mechanized divisions (the 25th Panzer-Grenadiers and the 7th Panzer) to Holste, northwest of Berlin.
The realist in Hitler whispered that defeat was inevitable, and he made no secret of this to his intimates, even if he felt constrained to put on a braver face to his generals. Eva Braun wrote that April 23 : “The F¸hrer himself has lost all hope of a happy ending. But while we still live all of us have hope, including me.” Later she added : “At present things are said to be looking up. General Burgdorf who gave us only a 10 percent chance yesterday has raised the odds to 50-50 today. Perhaps things may turn out well after all !” Hitler drank chocolate with Goebbels’s five little girls and son Helmuth, who had now moved into Morell’s quarters. Helmuth read aloud his school essay on the F¸hrer’s birthday. Helga squawked, “You stole that from Papa !” “You mean Papa stole it from me !” retorted Helmuth, to the delight of the adult listeners. The children seemed oblivious of the fate their parents planned for them.
Before Keitel returned to Wenck’s headquarters, he came in to see Hitler and quietly inquired whether any talks at all were proceeding with the enemy. Hitler replied that before he could start talks he must win “one more” victory—the Battle for Berlin. He disclosed that he had opened up one channel to the Allies through Italy and that he had asked Ribbentrop to discuss further steps with him that evening. Ribbentrop’s only proposal of substance was to have top Czech industrialists flown that night to France, where they would attempt to persuade the Americans to protect Bohemia and Moravia from the Bolsheviks. “The F¸hrer has agreed to this,” Ribbentrop informed Karl-Hermann Frank by letter. For the first time Hitler now admitted to Ribbentrop that the war was lost—but he insisted that he had been right all along, that Britain would have done better to have fought at his side and not against him. He dictated to Ribbentrop four secret negotiation points to put to the British if he got the chance, points vital to the future of Europe. If the Continent was to survive in a world dominated by bolshevism, then somehow London and Berlin must bury the hatchet between them. He instructed Ribbentrop to write secretly to Churchill in this sense. “You will see,” Hitler predicted. “My spirit will arise from the grave. One day people will see that I was right.”
When Ribbentrop left—eventually attaching his diplomatic staff to General Wenck’s Twelfth Army staff—an adjutant announced that Albert Speer had just arrived in the Chancellery, having made a venturesome landing by light plane on the East-West Axis across the Tiergarten after a flight escorted by a whole fighter squadron from Rechlin. Eva Braun, who like Hitler had been troubled by the recurring rumors of Speer’s inexplicable behavior, greeted him warmly. “I knew you’d return—you won’t desert the F¸hrer !” Speer grinned. “I’m leaving Berlin again tonight !” According to Julius Schaub—who also left that night—when Hitler asked his friend’s opinion on his decision to fight the battle for Berlin to its end, Speer’s almost brutal advice was that it was better to die there than in his weekend cottage on the Obersalzberg, that is, if the F¸hrer attached any importance to the verdict of history. The remark reveals much about Speer’s own motives. Hitler, unaware that Speer had secretly arranged with Heinrici for Berlin to be abandoned to the Russians, agreed.
After the war conference, Bormann brought to Hitler a startling telegram just received from G–ring at Berchtesgaden. G–ring, it seemed, was seizing power.
Mein F¸hrer !In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, are you agreed that I immediately assume overall leadership of the Reich as your Deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941, with complete freedom of action at home and abroad ?
Unless an answer is given by 10 P.M. I will assume you have been deprived of your freedom of action. I shall then regard the conditions laid down by your Decree as being met, and shall act in the best interests of the people and Fatherland.
You know my feelings for you in these the hardest hours of my life. I cannot express them adequately.
May God protect you and allow you to come here soon despite everything.
Your loyal Hermann G–ring.
Bormann no doubt read this aloud to Hitler in tones worthy of a public prosecutor. But that Ribbentrop and Speer, G–ring’s other archenemies, were by chance also in Hitler’s bunker was a double misfortune for the Reichsmarschall. Ribbentrop had received from G–ring a telegram asking him to fly down immediately unless ordered to the contrary by 10 P.M. Keitel also heard from G–ring. Somehow Hitler learned that G–ring’s plan was to fly to the American supreme commander, General Eisenhower, and ask for peace terms. Hitler immediately cabled G–ring that he alone would decide when the Decree of June 29, 1941, took effect ; G–ring was forbidden to undertake any steps in the direction he had hinted at. The F¸hrer then ordered G–ring and his staff on the Obersalzberg placed under house arrest. The shelter was in an uproar over G–ring’s “treachery.” Speer undoubtedly fanned the flames, for that same day he wrote to General Galland, now a jet-fighter squadron commander in Bavaria, enclosing a copy of G–ring’s telegram to Ribbentrop. “This telegram is clear. The F¸hrer has reacted to it accordingly and ordered G–ring’s arrest. I request you and your comrades to do everything to prevent an airplane flight by G–ring as discussed.”(6)
Thus with characteristic hesitancy and with prodding from Bormann, Hitler took the decision with which he had been grappling since September 1944—dismissing G–ring. But even then he spared his feelings, telegraphing the Reichsmarschall : “Your actions are punishable by the death sentence, but because of your valuable services in the past I will refrain from instituting proceedings if you will voluntarily relinquish your offices and titles. Otherwise steps will have to be taken.” G–ring hastened to comply. Hitler meanwhile ordered General Robert von Greim from Munich to Berlin ; Koller was also instructed to return, and the Luftwaffe’s General Josef Kammhuber was sent for as well. Greim’s take-off was, however, prevented by an air raid ; Koller pleaded ill-health, and Kammhuber also avoided coming to the capital. The Luftwaffe was in chaos anyway. General Galland’s fighter squadron had somehow amassed ninety-five new Me-262 jets on its Munich airfield, but the squadron had only twenty pilots ; on the other hand, the crack jet-fighter wing JG.7 had only twenty Me-262s left and could not obtain replacements. Nothing had prevented the British bomber squadrons from executing a precision attack in broad daylight on the Obersalzberg early on April 25, leaving the Berghof a smoking ruin.
The last week of Hitler’s leadership was plagued by the crumbling communications system. From April 24, 1945, onward, it is difficult to relate the orders emanating from his bomb- and shell-shattered Chancellery building to either the war information reaching him or the actions of his commanders in the field. On April 24, Hitler himself contributed to the command chaos by an order upending the existing command structure and subordinating the General Staffs eastern front to the OKW operations staff. But three days later Hitler’s only radiotelephone link with Jodl’s headquarters was silenced, and Hitler could communicate with the outside world only via a telephone to the admiralty’s still-functioning signals room. Jodl’s clear instructions to the armies were repeated by Hitler on April 24 : Generals Holste, Wenck, Sch–rner, and Busse were to speed up their relief attacks toward Berlin, from northwest, southwest, and south, respectively, and “restore a broad land contact with Berlin again, thereby bringing the Battle of Berlin to a victorious conclusion.” But apart from Wenck and Sch–rner, Hitler’s commanders no longer even paid lip service to his authority—they were driven only by the compulsion to escape the Russian grasp themselves before the final collapse came.
Apart from word that part of the Ninth Army had been encircled southeast of Berlin, there was no news of the army until Weidling, the “missing” commander of its Fifty-sixth Panzer Corps, whose arrest for desertion Hitler had ordered, reached Berlin’s outskirts and the public telephone ; he then stormed into the Chancellery to establish his innocence. On April 24, Hitler willingly appointed this fiery general battle-commandant of Berlin.
Weidling set about reorganizing the capital’s defenses, laying down new signals networks and dismissing indifferent sector commanders ; but his task was nigh impossible. Hitler and Goebbels had optimistically sacrificed the capital’s resources of men, ammunition, and gasoline to the forward defenses on the Oder, and little now remained for Berlin. According to Keitel, a decamping army commandant had blown up Berlin’s last major ammunition dump at Krampnitz. Weidling would have little infantry, no artillery, and hardly any tanks. Apart from the shattered remnants of his own corps, the coming street battles would be fought between trained, professional Russian combat troops with the glint of final victory in their eyes, and a few thousand antiaircraft soldiers, Volkssturm men, and police armed with captured rifles, broken-down tanks, or makeshift rocket-launchers. About 2,700 youths—hardly more than children—had been mustered into a “tank-killer brigade”; Hitler assigned this Hitler Youth offering to the defense of the bridges across which the relief armies must march into Berlin. Late on April 24, Hitler appealed to the navy for troops ; from Flensburg, Admiral D–nitz promised to airlift 2,000 of his best sailors and fortress troops into Berlin in the next forty-eight hours and to put 3,500 more of his most cherished fleet personnel—including crews trained to operate the new secret U-boats—on standby for the fight ; unless Berlin won this last battle—which Hitler described to D–nitz as “a battle for Germany’s whole future” outranking all other theaters in importance—those U-boats would never operate.
D–nitz kept this promise—unlike Himmler, who had eventually parted with only half his personal security battalion. (According to stenographer Ewald Reynitz, in these last days of his life Hitler refused to speak to Himmler even over the telephone and flatly forbade Himmler to participate in the war conferences.) Even Ribbentrop courageously requested permission to take up arms in Berlin. But Hitler forbade this : Ribbentrop knew too many secrets to be allowed to fall into enemy hands ; and Walther Hewel—whom Hitler urged with the rest of his staff to take poison before the Russians could capture them(7)—telegraphed the foreign minister in Mecklenburg : “The F¸hrer appreciates your intentions but has turned you down. Until the ring encircling Berlin has been broken open or until you receive further instructions, you are to stand by outside the combat area.” Hewel added significantly : “I have no political information whatever.” Sch–rner, whose army group had just recaptured Bautzen and Weissenberg, south of Berlin, inflicting heavy losses on the Russians, also began moving northward toward the capital. “The attack by Sch–rner’s army group proves,” D–nitz was signaled by Hitler’s staff on April 26, “that given the will, we are still capable of beating the enemy even today.” These distant victories glowed faintly through the thickening gloom of the communications breakdowns besetting Hitler’s shelter.
“The British and Americans along the Elbe are holding back,” Hitler observed. “. . . I think the time has now come when out of a sheer instinct for selfpreservation they must act against this bloated proletarian Colossus, this Bolshevik Moloch.. . . If I can win through here and hang on to the capital, perhaps hope will spring in British and American hearts that with our Nazi Germany they may after all have some chance against this entire danger. And the only man capable of this is me.... But I am only F¸hrer as long as I can really lead. I can’t lead if I go south and sit on some mountain, but only if I have authority over armies and those armies obey me. Give me one victory here—however high the price—and then I’ll regain the right to eliminate the deadweights who constantly obstruct. After that I will work with the generals who’ve proved their worth.” Later he again digressed on this theme. “First I must set an example to everybody I blamed for retreating, by not retreating myself. It is possible that I will die here, but then at least I shall have died an honorable death.” Hitler proclaimed that this Battle of Berlin was as important as the 1683 Battle of Vienna, which had turned the tide of the Turkish conquest of Europe.
The first battalion of D–nitz’s naval troops arrived, and Weidling threw them straight into the fight. The makeshift hospital in the Voss Bunker next to Hitler’s bunker filled with casualties. The streets were strewn with burning vehicles and tanks. The government quarter was under nonstop bombardment by artillery and bombers. But Weidling reported to Hitler that it was proving difficult to demolish bridges—for example along the Teltow Canal defense line—because Speer’s staff had decamped with all the bridge plans. Speer had also fought tooth and nail against the dismantling of the bronze lampposts along the East-West Axis, as Hitler had ordered, to prepare an emergency landing strip. (Speer had protested to Weidling’s predecessor : “You seem to forget I am responsible for the reconstruction of Berlin.”)
During April 26 spirits soared in Hitler’s bunker, as the news of Wenck’s approaching army and Sch–rner’s successes trickled in. That evening General Greim limped into the shelter with a female admirer, having been shot in the leg as he piloted his light plane to the East-West Axis and made a crash-landing on the boulevard. His injuries were tended, then he was put to bed in a room opposite Hitler’s conference room. For many hours Hitler sat at his bedside, morosely describing G–ring’s “ultimatum” and the history of the Luftwaffe’s failure—only General Koller had dared tell him the truth about the technical inferiority of German planes. At 10 P.M., German radio broadcast Greim’s promotion to field marshal and his appointment as G–ring’s successor. Hitler urged suicide capsules on Greim and his woman friend, and instructed them—if worse came to worst—to arrange their own cremation so that the Russians would find nothing. “I firmly believed that Berlin could be saved on the banks of the Oder. Everything we had here was moved forward to that position. You must believe me—when all our efforts there failed I was the most stunned of all,” he mused. But Wenck was now approaching Berlin. “If he can relieve Berlin, we shall fall back to a new line and fight on.” He ordered his new Luftwaffe commander to concentrate the Messerschmitt jet squadrons around Prague.
At night Hitler was kept awake by the shell fire and by his own vivid memories. This was Stalingrad all over again, but this time the miracle would happen. “Imagine ! Like wildfire the word spreads throughout Berlin : one of our armies has broken through from the west and restored contact with us !” How could Stalin hope to reduce a great city of four million people with only four hundred tanks, especially if fifty were being knocked out each day ? “The Russians have already exhausted their strength in crossing the Oder, particularly the northern army group [Zhukov’s].”
Against this Hitler had to set his own virtual helplessness and lack of precise information on the battle. Sch–rner’s forces were approaching, and within one day this pressure should begin embarrassing the Russians in the south. According to Keitel, General Holste’s battle group in the northwest had gained ground at Nauen and Kremmen and would gather its last reinforcements for its main attack early on the twenty-eighth. Hitler impatiently told Krebs, “It’s high time they got a move on !” General Wenck’s relief offensive from the southwest—three well-fueled divisions under General Karl-Erik Koehler—had already reached the Schwielow lake, and during the morning the Party announced that it had reached Potsdam, thus attaining the tactical objective laid down four days before. But a tough ring of Soviet troops still barred the way to Berlin.
Hitler realized that time was running out fast. At 5 A.M. on April 27 a big Russian push along the Hohenzollerndamm Boulevard had begun. As Goebbels nervously put it : “I keep getting this nightmare picture : Wenck is at Potsdam, and here the Russians are pouring into Potsdamer Platz !” “—And I’m here at Potsdamer Platz, not Potsdam !” agreed Hitler uneasily. His eyes were transfixed by the colored arrows marking the relief armies on the map. He recognized the problem his dwindling authority was causing. Wenck had the drive, the gasoline, and the loyalty to get to Potsdam, but he lacked the tanks to smash the Russian armor. General Busse’s Ninth Army—encircled southeast of Berlin—had the tanks, but its westward movement seemed designed to bypass Berlin to the south. Hitler was puzzled by this defiance of his orders.(8) Late on the twenty-sixth he had radioed to Jodl : “Make it clear to Ninth Army that it is to wheel sharply north with Twelfth Army to take weight off Battle for Berlin.” Throughout the twenty-seventh he speculated on this puzzle. “I just don’t understand the direction of its attack. Busse’s driving into a complete vacuum.” “If he had pushed northwest instead, and covered as much distance as he has now, he would have accomplished much more.” “Wenck and the Ninth Army would already have linked up.” And, late that day, it occurred to him at last why the Ninth Army had pleaded its radio failure. “If there’s a long radio silence, it is always the sign that things are going badly.” “It’s impossible to command if every plan that’s drawn up is adapted by every army commander as he sees fit.” “What’s happened now is just what I predicted : they’ve been encircled.”
North of Berlin, the generals’ disobedience to orders was even more blatant. Heinrici’s remaining Oder sector, south of Stettin, had collapsed under the weight of Marshal Rokossovski&#
