Even now the generals in charge of Berlin’s defence would not contemplate capitulation. When General Kurt von Tippelskirch arrived on 27 April to take over the 21st Army, hastily put together from whatever units could be found, he had a long conversation with Heinrici, with whom he had served in Russia, about the position of Army Group Vistula. They acknowledged that every day brought further immense destruction to what remained of the Reich. Only capitulation could prevent it. Yet such a decision was still impossible, Tippelskirch argued. It would mean acting against the will of the Führer (and Jodl had recently emphasized that negotiations were impossible as long as Hitler lived).146 Moreover, an attempt to capitulate would be unsuccessful. The mass of the soldiers would refuse to obey orders to hand themselves over ‘and start on the road to Siberia’, and would seek to find their own way home. The enemy would then claim the conditions of capitulation had not been met. The war would continue. So would the destruction of the land. The soldiers would be taken prisoner anyway. No good would, therefore, have been served. But ‘the Army Group would bear the disgrace of capitulation and desertion of the Führer’. ‘The fight must therefore go on, with the aim of bringing the armies gradually so far to the west that ultimately they would fall not into Russian but into Anglo-American captivity.’147 In this reasoning, plainly, the interests of the army exceeded all other concerns.
Away from the madhouse in the bunker, the remnants of government were in terminal disarray. Most ministerial staffs (with the big exception of the Propaganda Ministry) had been relocated to southern Germany, beginning in March, leaving no more than skeletal arrangements in Berlin. A number of ministers and their staffs had followed in April, welcoming the opportunity to leave. Berlin was now a government capital without government apparatus. The head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, had left for Berchtesgaden at the end of March. He went on leave, claiming high blood pressure. In fact, he had suffered a severe nervous breakdown. He had for long served little real purpose. The Reich Chancellery’s function had since the previous summer been hardly more than residual, as its powers had drained off to Bormann in the Party Chancellery. In its last days, its acting head was the State Secretary, Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, who was left with the purely theoretical task of coordinating the other ministries and the remainder of the Reich Chancellery civil servants from Berlin. Asked after the end of the war why he had not resigned, Kritzinger seemed scarcely to understand the question. ‘As a long-standing civil servant I was duty-bound in loyalty to the state,’ he answered, expressing shame at its policies towards Jews and Poles. (Even on the morning of 21 April, as Soviet rockets exploded in the government district of Berlin, civil servants continued to ‘work’ – doing nothing useful – at their desks.148) When asked further why Lammers continued to do all he could for the war effort, Kritzinger replied: ‘Well, there had to be some sort of organization. Think just of food for the people. That functioned to the end.’ ‘Would it have been better had it not functioned to the end?’ his interrogator retorted. ‘It was war,’ shrugged Kritzinger.149
On the evening of 20 April Kritzinger gave instructions to the ministerial staffs still in Berlin to leave with all haste for the south by road. That proved impossible. A new order was given to leave next day by air. Not enough planes were available. It was then suggested that they should go to the north instead. Exasperated by now, the Finance Minister, Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, who in previous weeks had pressed Goebbels and Speer to take action that would pave the way for the western Allies to come to terms,150 demanded a clear order of the Führer, saying he had no intention of being hanged en route by the SS as a deserter. When, after much trying, Kritzinger managed through Bormann to obtain a ‘recommendation’ from Hitler for the ministers to head north, it was not enough for Krosigk. He now insisted on a written Führer order. Eventually, Kritzinger succeeded in persuading Bormann to get Hitler, for whom this was scarcely the highest priority at the moment, to sign a written order to head for Eutin, far to the north in Schleswig-Holstein. Amid such panicky improvisation, the ministers of a Reich with a long and proud tradition of state service fled the capital and a head of state set on self-destruction.
With Hitler’s earlier orders to split the Reich into northern and southern sectors coming into effect, there were by now effectively six centres of government in Germany: Hitler in his Berlin bunker, his authority real and unchallenged – where it could still reach; the High Command of the Wehrmacht, itself now divided between Krampnitz and Berchtesgaden; parts of the Reich cabinet based in the south and the remainder in the north under Dönitz; Göring still presided (until ousted by Hitler on 23 April) over his own remaining Luftwaffe command in Berchtesgaden; while Himmler had what was left of his SS and police power-base in the Lübeck area in the north.151 There was no semblance any longer of a central government of the Reich.
In the provinces, too, or what was left of them under German control, the regime was also imploding – accompanied, inevitably, by untrammelled violence in its very last days. On 20 April the Gau administration in Augsburg was told that the banks would run out of money within a week. Wages and salaries could then no longer be paid. No banknotes had been received from the Reichsbank for a week. The Bavarian Finance Ministry was printing money, but it would not be ready for eight to ten days, and it was itself awaiting a transport of 300 million Reich Marks from Berlin, after which Swabia would be allocated its share.152 Whether that happened is unclear, but Swabia had not much longer to limp on before Augsburg was surrendered to the Americans on 28 April.
Near chaos was reported in late April by the Kreisleiter in the small town of Lindau, on the Bodensee at the western tip of Bavaria close to the Swiss border. Drunken German soldiers were rampaging through the streets and looting property. Huge numbers of refugees and deserters had poured into the town. The Kreisleiter sought permission to restore order by having the first hundred seized and shot. Permission, mercifully, does not appear to have been granted. Lindau survived a few more days before surrendering on 2 May.153
Violence also preceded the capitulation without a fight of Regensburg, the capital of the Upper Palatinate. The tone was set by Gauleiter Ruckdeschel, who had engineered Gauleiter Wächtler’s execution. Ruckdeschel and the Nazi leadership in the city were determined to fight on. In a tense meeting in the city’s velodrome on the evening of 22 April, called by the Kreisleiter, Ruckdeschel declared that the city would be ‘defended to the last stone’. His speech, broadcast locally, merely succeeded in stirring up fear and dismay. The Americans were only a short distance away, and few people were prepared to go down in flames as the enemy took the town. Next morning some women started going round shops, spreading the word that there was to be another meeting that evening in Moltkeplatz, in the city centre, to demand that Regensburg be handed over to the Allies without a fight. Nearly a thousand people, many of them women with children, turned out. As the crowd started to become restless, it was addressed by a prominent member of the cathedral chapter, Domprediger Dr Johann Maier, who, however, was able to say only a few words before he and several others were arrested.
When Ruckdeschel heard what had happened, he ordered that Maier and the other ‘ringleaders’ be hanged. A rapidly summoned drumhead court lost no time in pronouncing the death sentence on Maier and a seventy-year-old warehouse worker, Joseph Zirkl. They were hanged in Moltkeplatz in the early hours of 24 April. The terror apparatus had still functioned. But with the Americans on the doorstep, the town’s military commandant, its head of regional government, the Kreisleiter and the head of police suddenly vanished into the night. Gauleiter Ruckdeschel had also disappeared. The way was all at once clear for emissaries to hand over the city on 27 April, still largely undamaged by the war.154
In other parts of Bavaria, too, representatives of the regime were determined to leave the scene with shows of vengeful last-minute murderous violence, as futile as they were horrific. The Nazis, as they knew, were on the way out. But their capa
city for taking violent revenge on their political opponents continued. The murder of more than forty people in different parts of the region, with the Americans in some cases only hours away, was prompted by the proclamation over a captured radio transmitter on the outskirts of Munich on the morning of 28 April of the ‘Freedom Action of Bavaria’, a courageous but ultimately counter-productive localized rising against the Nazi regime in its final days. The ‘Action’ was led by three officers in locally stationed Wehrmacht units, Captain Rupprecht Gerngroß, Major Alois Braun and Lieutenant Ottoheinz Leiling. It aimed at impressing the Allies that in Bavaria at least the Nazi regime did not represent the only face of Germany, and sought to achieve the restoration of traditional Bavarian values in the rebuilding of the province. It was unquestionably a brave mistake at this juncture. In encouraging long-standing opponents of the regime in a number of Bavarian towns and villages to open shows of defiance, it was unwittingly signing their death warrant. There was little to be achieved militarily or politically by the rising. Villages, towns and cities were in most cases being handed over through often bold manoeuvring at the appropriate moment by those on the spot. It was inconceivable that an attempted rising, planned and executed in little more than amateurish fashion, could bring an immediate end to the fighting in Bavaria. Instead, it merely served as a provocation for local Nazis still wielding power to take murderous revenge on their opponents, in the process settling some long-standing vendettas.
The Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria, Paul Giesler, now a cornered fanatic, was behind the worst of the violence. Five men in Munich were taken out on his orders and shot. In Altötting, a Catholic pilgrimage centre, the Kreisleiter led an SS squad which shot five people – local opponents for many years – on a list he had rapidly drawn up. When his hit-squad reported the execution of another three in neighbouring Burghausen, he shouted ‘What, only three?’ The worst outrage was in the small mining town of Penzberg, somewhat incongruously situated in beautiful Alpine scenery between Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Local Nazi leaders wanted to blow up the coal mine, heart of the town’s economic life, and the waterworks and bridges in the vicinity. To block the destruction, former Social Democrats and Communists participated in an attempt to take over the coal mine and depose the Nazi town leadership. It was not long, however, before the officer of a nearby Wehrmacht unit had the leaders of the revolt, including the former SPD mayor, arrested. With the deposed Nazi mayor, he then drove to Munich, where Gauleiter Giesler peremptorily gave orders that they were to be shot immediately, without trial. On return to Penzberg, about 6 p.m., the sentences for treason were read out and the executions of the seven prisoners were promptly carried out. A Werwolf squad, around 100 strong, given the task by Giesler of dealing with the ‘politically unreliable’, meanwhile hastened down to Penzberg and that evening hanged a further eight people, among them two women, at different points of the town, placing notices round their necks declaring that they were traitors and in the service of the enemy. The next day, the Americans arrived.155
In Berlin, hardly any people were aware of the subterranean drama in the bunker. They had far more pressing things on their minds. They desperately wanted peace – ‘an end with horror rather than a horror without end’, as the well-worn phrase had it. They had equally desperately wanted the Americans to get to Berlin before the Russians.156 Even that hope had disappeared. All that was left was fear of what was coming and the desire to survive. The streets were empty, apart from some queues of people outside shops trying to buy the food they needed for a long siege.157 Most were by now living in cellars ‘like woodlice, creeping into the farthest corners’,158 constantly hungry as rations dwindled, without heating because of coal shortages, with little or no gas or electricity, having to stand in long queues to collect water in buckets from street pumps. People had the feeling that they were no longer governed. ‘No orders any more, no news, nothing. No swine is bothered about us,’ as one woman expressed it.159 Without electricity, few by now could receive news by radio. As even the last of the two-page broadsheets that passed for newspapers disappeared, they had to rely upon word of mouth to glean fragments of often inaccurate information.160 At least they were spared the headlines of the Völkischer Beobachter, still printed in Munich until 28 April and proclaiming in its headlines that ‘Germany Stands Firm and Loyal to the Führer’, ‘The Führer – Defender of Berlin’, or ‘The Führer Inflames Berlin’s Fighting Spirit’.161 Anyone expressing such sentiments on the streets of Berlin was thought to be mad. But bodies hanging with notices round their necks proclaiming them to have been ‘traitors’ were a warning not to speak out recklessly, and still to take extreme care of those still standing behind the fatally wounded regime.162
As long as the roads out of Berlin had remained open, thousands – many of them pale, worn-out women and their exhausted children – tried to escape to the west, on foot, in horse-drawn wagons, pushing wheelbarrows and prams containing remnants of their last few possessions.163 Then the last escape routes were shut off. There was now nothing to do but wait in dread in cellars, wanting the end but fearing what it meant.164 In the last week of April, the worst fears of many Berliners started to be realized as soldiers of the Red Army arrived.
In the bunker, too, the end was near. The final act in the drama had begun. The regime’s ruthlessness in its own death-agonies struck home within the small bunker community itself when Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, the dissolute and brutal Hermann Fegelein, an SS leader close to Himmler, tried to flee and, after being dragged back was summarily sentenced to death and executed. Fegelein was no more than a substitute for the real arch-traitor in Hitler’s eyes in the last days of his life: Heinrich Himmler. The Reichsführer-SS had, it seems, like Göring, taken news of Hitler’s outburst on 22 April as an effective abdication. He had finally cast off the caution which had dogged him throughout his dealings with Bernadotte and offered to capitulate in the west (though not in the east). This, for Hitler, was the ultimate betrayal. In his last volcanic explosion of rage, he had Himmler, too, thrown out of the Party and ordered his arrest.165 But his reach no longer stretched far enough to have the Reichsführer-SS, in the north of the country, brought back to Berlin and subjected to a final disgrace and fearsome execution.
With Himmler’s betrayal, it seemed as if the fight had gone out of Hitler. In the last act of the drama, he married Eva Braun, his partner of many years, who had decided to end her life alongside him, and drew up his Testament. In its political section it included the names of the ministers in the successor government. Dönitz, his fanatical support throughout recognized – also in sending sailors to fight in Berlin’s last battle – was to become Reich President. Goebbels, Bormann, Hanke, Saur, Giesler and Schörner, diehards all of them, were rewarded for their loyalty and zealotry. There was no place for Speer. The task done, and the Soviets almost literally at the gates, all that was left was for Hitler and Eva Braun to make the last preparations to commit suicide. In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Hitler shot himself and Eva Braun took poison. Dönitz, up in Plön in Schleswig-Holstein, did not learn of Hitler’s death until next morning – not long after he had sent a message, presuming him to be still alive, professing his continued unconditional loyalty. The Wehrmacht and the German people – those who were listening – were not informed until the late evening of 1 May that Hitler had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital’, a propaganda lie to the last.166 Joseph and Magda Goebbels had committed suicide that day, after poisoning their six children. The following day, 2 May, the German troops in Berlin were ordered to cease fighting. The Soviet ‘hammer and sickle’ flag fluttered from the Reichstag.
The war was still not over. Outside Berlin, fighting continued. But with Hitler’s death, the insuperable obstacle to capitulation was removed. What had been impossible as long as he was alive became immediately realizable as soon as he was dead. Nothing demonstrates more plainly the extent to which he personally had held together
the regime. The bonds with his ‘charismatic community’ and the fragmented structures of rule that had existed throughout the Third Reich and guaranteed his own unchallengeable power had allowed it, at terrible cost to the German people, to continue to operate until the Russians were at the very portals of the Reich Chancellery.
9
Liquidation
Since the western enemies continue their support of the Soviets, the fight against the Anglo-Americans according to the order of the Grand-Admiral carries on.
Head of naval operations staff, 4 May 1945
I
Only two or three years earlier, Hitler’s death would have stunned the nation. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union plunged Germany into a long, attritional and ultimately unwinnable war, the sense of loss would have been immeasurable in every corner of the country. The reactions to Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt in July 1944 show that even then, if Hitler had been killed, the shock waves would have been enormous. By the evening of 1 May 1945, however, when the news of Hitler’s death was broadcast, few tears were shed.
There were of course exceptions. The crew of a minesweeper were said to have been close to tears when they heard the announcement, seeing it as the ‘final heroic tones’ of a long war.1 An NCO based near Prague recorded the lengthy silence and feelings of dismay that greeted the news in his unit, noting that the death of the Führer was regarded positively as a ‘heroic gesture’ by the soldiers – ‘at least by the majority’, he added.2 Whether the assessment was accurate cannot be known. It is equally impossible to ascertain the common reaction among the soldiers to the proclamation issued on 3 May by the most Nazified of all generals, Field-Marshal Schörner, to his Army Group Centre, largely located now in Bohemia. Schörner described Hitler as ‘a martyr to his idea and his belief and as a soldier of the European mission’ who had died fighting against Bolshevism ‘to his last breath’.3 Probably, it seems fair to surmise, most soldiers, wherever they were based, were concerned less with the death of the Führer than with their own struggle to escape falling into the clutches of the Red Army.