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Overview
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. But victory over the Nazi regime was not celebrated in western Europe until May 8, and in Russia a day later, on the ninth. Why did a peace agreement take so much time? How did this brutal, protracted conflict coalesce into its unlikely endgame?
After Hitler shines a light on ten fascinating days after that infamous suicide that changed the course of the twentieth century. Combining exhaustive research with masterfully paced storytelling, Michael Jones recounts the Führer’s frantic last stand; the devious maneuverings of his handpicked successor, Karl Dönitz; the grudging respect Joseph Stalin had for Churchill and FDR, as well as his distrust of Harry Truman; the bold negotiating by General Dwight D. Eisenhower that hastened Germany’s surrender but drew the ire of the Kremlin; the journalist who almost scuttled the cease-fire; and the thousands of ordinary British, American, and Russian soldiers caught in the swells of history, from the Red Army’s march on Berlin to the liberation of the Nazis’ remaining concentration camps. Through it all, Jones traces the shifting loyalties between East and West that sowed the seeds of the Cold War and nearly unraveled the Grand Alliance.
In this gripping, eloquent, and even-handed narrative, the spring of 1945 comes alive—a fascinating time when nothing was certain, and every second mattered.…
INCLUDES PHOTOS
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780451477019 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1. The spell breaks: the Nazi eagle and swastika above the damaged grandstand of their rally site at Nuremberg.
2. East meets West: Lieutenants William Robertson and Alexander Sylvashko embrace at Torgau on the Elbe (April 25, 1945).
3. US infantrymen move down a street in Waldenburg, south-central Germany, April 1945.
4. Berlin falls to the Red Army: Marshal Georgi Zhukov on the steps of the Reichstag, May 2.
5. British tanks race toward Lübeck, May 2.
6. The horror: a sign erected by British forces outside Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, May 1945.
7. The British arrive at Hamburg: a Cromwell tank guards the bridge over the Elbe.
8. German soldiers—some using horse-drawn transport—make their way toward British forces to surrender.
9. British and Russian troops meet at Wismar, May 3.
10. A Russian tanker and British sapper drink to victory.
11. Monty’s triumph: the British field marshal receives the German delegation at Lüneburg Heath, May 3.
12. A day later the formal surrender of Denmark, Holland and northwestern Germany is signed in Montgomery’s tent.
13. The American field command—seated (left to right) are Generals William Simpson, George Patton, Carl Spaatz, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges and Leonard Gerow. Standing (center) is Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith.
14. High-ranking American and Russian officers meet on the Elbe, May 5 (from the Soviet 3rd Guards Tank Corps and the US Third Army).
15. Confronting the truth: a German woman walks past bodies of murdered slave workers exhumed by US troops near Nammering, Germany.
16. Prisoners of Mauthausen concentration camp (Austria) liberated by US soldiers on May 5.
17. The anguish: refugees on the road trying to return home.
18. “Displaced Persons”—one of the great humanitarian challenges faced by the Allies.
19. “Calling all Czechs!” Barricades go up in Prague at the beginning of the uprising, May 5.
20. US troops enter western Czechoslovakia, May 6.
21. Operation Manna: loading supplies to be airdropped to the starving Dutch population.
22. Unlikely rescuers: troops from the 1st Division Russian Liberation Army (Vlasov Army) arrive outside the Militia HQ, Prague, May 6.
23. Field Marshal Montgomery meets his Russian counterpart, Field Marshal Rokossovsky, at Wismar on the Baltic.
24. General Alfred Jodl signs the first unconditional surrender at SHAEF headquarters, Rheims, May 7.
25. “False alarm”: a special edition of Stars and Stripes prematurely announces “Germany Quits” on May 7.
26. VE-Day in London, May 8: a huge crowd gathers at Whitehall to hear Churchill’s speech.
27. “The German war is . . . at an end”: Churchill broadcasts to the nation.
28. “The day of death”: SS units fight for the center of Prague with Czech insurgents, May 8.
29. The second signing at Karlshorst: the German delegation now headed by Field Marshal Keitel.
30. The Allied delegation now headed by Russia’s supreme commander, Georgi Zhukov.
31. Russian troops liberate Prague.
32. VE-Day in Moscow, May 9.
33. The celebratory fireworks that night.
© Imperial War Museums: 1 above/IWM CL3092, 3 above/IWM BU4972, 3 below/IWM BU6955, 4 above/IWM BU5077, 4 below/IWM CL2538, 5 above/IWM BU5230, 5 below/IWM BU5238, 6 above/IWM BU5145, 6 below/IWM BU5207, 12 above left/IWM BU5523, 12 above right/IWM EA65715, 12 below/IWM EA65948, 13 above/IWM D24586, 13 below/IWM H41846, 14 below/IWM FRA203385. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): 1 below/NARA 111-SC-204516, 2 above/NARA 111-SC-205778, 7 above/NARA 280-YE-182, 8 above/NARA 111-SC-264895. Prague Military Institute: 10, 11. RIA Novosti: 2 below/RIA Novosti 608394, 7 below/RIA Novosti 362876, 8 below/RIA Novosti 369161, 9 above/RIA Novosti 608790, 9 below/RIA Novosti 355, 14 above/RIA Novosti 677390, 15 above/RIA Novosti 574539, 15 below/RIA Novosti 881134, 16 above/RIA Novosti 594370, 16 below/RIA Novosti 583984.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if there are any errors or omissions, NAL Caliber will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgments in any subsequent printings or editions.
1. General situation map showing Allied advance to May 1945 xvii
2. The British advance to the Baltic, May 2, 1945 xviii
3. The Prague uprising, May 5–9, 1945 xix
PREFACE
May 2015 is the seventieth anniversary of VE-Day in Europe. For many, in the Allied armed forces and among the civilians who supported the war effort, it is a last opportunity to connect with a vitally important achievement—the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi regime. We remember those who sacrificed their lives so that we might see this day. All of us are in their debt.
This book tells the story of the last ten days of the war, from the death of Hitler on April 30 to the celebration of VE-Day in Moscow on May 9, a day after it is held in the West.
In its structure, it follows a countdown formula from day to day—but within this framework it also takes a thematic approach, bringing out the complex international politics and diplomacy that underlay these military events. It also addresses a wider concern—the humanitarian catastrophe that was engulfing Europe and the psychological impact this had on those caught up in it.
Its central aim is to show why we celebrate two VE-Days—May 8 in the West, May 9 in the East (although the Channel Islands also celebrate their liberation on May 9): how this came about and what its real significance is. These separate days tell a story of the common cause between allies, but also of the divisions that nearly caused a rift between them in the days after Hitler’s death. It was a crisis largely hidden from public view and in the event it was successfully mastered. All those involved in the behind-the-scenes diplomacy deserve credit for that.
I have tried to present a view that is fair to all the members of the Grand Alliance, and in particular the Soviet Union—whose motives in May 1945 (and indeed throughout the war) were sometimes viewed with considerable suspicion in the West—recognizing its major contribution to the victory against Nazi Germany and that it had legitimate concerns of its own. In a final reckoning, we will never know whether the descent into the Cold War was inevitable. I look at the pernicious influence of the administration of Hitler’s successor, Admiral Dönitz, whose shadowy role in the days after the Führer’s death is often underestimated—and the fears of both sides as the post-war map of Europe began to unfold. In such circumstances, I believe it was a real achievement that the Alliance held firm at the war’s very end.
I also try to acknowledge those issues that were not resolved as this terrible war drew to its close. I counterpoint the victory celebrations in the West with the course of the little-known but important uprising in Prague in the East. On May 8, 1945, while London was en fête with all the joys of VE-Day, the Czech capital was fighting for its very life. By a quite miraculous series of events Prague was saved—but the Russian Liberation Army, which played a crucial part in rescuing the city, would be less lucky. Amid the euphoria, the war’s end involved awkward and sometimes unjust political compromises. But in the final defeat of the Third Reich and all that it stood for there was also real reason for hope.
In the summer of 2008 I visited Berlin with the instructions of two veterans fresh in my mind. One, Armin Lehmann, had been a member of the Hitler Youth and a courier to the Führer in the last terrible days of fighting in the city, as the war drew to its close. He had been in the Führer Bunker on the morning of Hitler’s death, on April 30, 1945. A day later, Armin had made a hellish breakout through the burning rubble of Berlin—eventually reaching the safety of American lines on the River Elbe. The other, Red Army lieutenant Vasily Ustyugov, had on the same day—April 30—been only a few hundred meters away from Armin, fighting inside the Reichstag—which, despite lying in ruins for most of Hitler’s rule, became a symbol for the Russians of the hated Nazi regime. For Armin, the beginning of May 1945 was the collapse of everything he believed in; for Vasily, it was a triumphant vindication of a patriotic cause. As I visited some of the places seared in their memories and powerfully recounted in their stories, the genesis of this book emerged—the story of the last days of the Second World War, the days after Hitler’s death.
The concept grew the following autumn when I embarked on a cruise of the Black Sea under the banner of the BBC History Magazine Team, alongside fellow lecturers Greg Neale and Martin Folly. It was a powerful experience to visit Yalta and the site of the great summit in February 1945 that decisively shaped post-war Europe, and to hear Dr. Folly’s ideas on the three-power diplomacy between Britain, America and the Soviet Union that was its anvil. Since then, many have helped in this book’s evolution. Alongside Martin, I would like to thank Professor Geoffrey Roberts of the University of Cork, Dr. Elke Scherstjanoi of Berlin’s Institut für Zeitgeschichte, and particularly Richard Hargreaves—who shared his knowledge of the siege of Breslau and German archives in general—and Tomas Jakl of Prague’s Military Institute, who guided my work on the uprising of May 1945.
Many veterans have given generously of their time. I would especially like to thank Antonin Sticha of the Czech House of Veterans in Prague for sharing his own memories of the uprising there and facilitating other interviews. Alexander Ivanov of the Russian Council of War Veterans in Moscow also arranged a number of important meetings. And Julie Chervinsky of the Blavatnik Foundation Archive has drawn my attention to a number of moving veteran accounts. Further acknowledgments are to be found in the endnotes.
I am grateful to the staff of the collections of the Imperial War Museum and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, the National Archives at Kew, the Churchill Archive Center at Churchill College, Cambridge, the East Sussex Record Office (where the Mass Observation Archive is now housed) and the Second World War Experience Centre near Leeds. Foreign documentary material has also been drawn from the Prague City Archives, the Bundesarchiv at Freiburg, the Russian Ministry of Defense Archive at Podolsk and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington. Ralph Gibson of RIA Novosti kindly helped me with some of the illustrative material and also located some eyewitness accounts of Moscow on May 9, 1945.
I am grateful to Amanda Helm for giving me access to the unpublished memoir of her father, Captain Derek Thomas, and to Russell Porter for sharing the reminiscences of his father, Lance-Corporal Ray Porter, both of the British 6th Airborne Division, and to the Airborne Forces website for additional veteran information. I would like to thank the BBC for permission to cite from their “People’s War” online archive (those involved are individually acknowledged in the endnotes). I have also benefited enormously from the material on the numerous US divisional websites. Soviet material has been provided by the Russian Veterans’ Association, Moscow, the Blavatnik Foundation Archive, New York, and Artem Drabkin’s “I remember” link at www.russianbattlefield.com. On the German side, the Courland Pocket website, www.kurland-kessel.de, has been of particular value. Place names have been modernized—except in those instances (as with Breslau instead of Wroclaw) where the original allows the narrative to be clearer. All Soviet source references—in the Endnotes and Bibliography—have been translated from the Russian.
It has been a privilege to assemble such moving material—and to tell the story of the last days of the Second World War in Europe.
APRIL 29, 1945
Hitler draws up his last will in the bunker by the Reich Chancellery. Later that day he marries his former mistress, Eva Braun. The Red Army has now captured most of Berlin except for the central government quarter (the area around the Reich Chancellery, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate).
Russian forces continue to push forward in Austria and Czechoslovakia. In Vienna, the Soviet Union sets up a provisional government.
The British 2nd Army crosses the Elbe at Lauenburg, 20 miles east of Hamburg, and advances toward Schwerin and Wismar in Mecklenburg.
French forces liberate the last part of their country still held by the Germans, on the Alpine frontier.
The 30,000 surviving inmates of Dachau are freed by the US Third Army. The American advance continues toward Munich.
Arctic convoy RA 66, leaving Murmansk, becomes involved in the last convoy battle of the war.
In western Holland, still held by the Germans, a truce is agreed to enable the Allies to drop food on the starving population. Over the next ten days, in Operation Manna, British Bomber Command drops over 6,000 tons of food; the US Air Force joins in (Operation Chowhound), supplying another 4,000 tons.
Venice is liberated by the British 8th Army. The US 1st Armored Division enters Milan.
The German garrison in Italy prepares to surrender unconditionally. Terms are signed at Caserta—to come into effect on May 2. Once they are ratified twenty-two German divisions in Austria and Italy will lay down their arms.
APRIL 30
Red Army forces break into the Reichstag (although fighting within the building will continue for another two days). Russian troops are now within 400 meters of the Reich Chancellery and Führer Bunker. Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide at around 3:45 p.m. Under the terms of Hitler’s will, the new German leader will be the head of the navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz.
In northern Germany, soldiers of Marshal Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front advance toward Straslund. In Czechoslovakia, the Red Army occupies Ostrava. German forces continue to hold parts of Moravia and most of Bohemia.
The French 1st Army enters Austria near Lake Constance. The British 2nd Army advances toward the Baltic coast. The US 7th Army enters Munich.
In northern Germany, British troops free over 21,500 prisoners at Sandbostel camp. The Red Army liberates Ravensbrück concentration camp.
MAY 1
General Krebs begins surrender negotiations in Berlin with Russian general Chuikov. They are suspended when Goebbels refuses to accept unconditional surrender. Early that evening Goebbels and his wife decide to kill their six children and then commit suicide. Later, in a breakout from the bunker, Martin Bormann is also killed. Dönitz announces the death of Hitler to the German nation.
In the north, the British continue their advance toward Lübeck and Hamburg. The US First and Ninth Armies are firmly established along the Elbe and Mulde rivers, but have been forbidden to advance any farther into the zone designated for Soviet occupation. The US Seventh Army continues to advance into Austria.
The Americans capture three German field marshals, von Rundstedt, von Leeb and List.
MAY 2
German forces in northern Italy and parts of Austria surrender to Field Marshal Alexander. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group seizes Lübeck and Wismar, the latter only hours ahead of the Russians. Alexander sends troops into Trieste—although the city is already occupied by Tito’s Yugoslav partisans.
German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun is captured by troops of US 12th Division in southern Bavaria, after he and his team of scientists flee from their rocket research base at Peenemünde.
MAY 3
Admiral Dönitz moves the seat of his government to Flensburg.
The German delegation begins surrender negotiations with Montgomery on Lüneburg Heath. Hamburg surrenders to British forces.
The Cap Arcona is sunk in the Bay of Lübeck.
MAY 4
Montgomery receives the unconditional surrender of German forces in Schleswig-Holstein, western Holland and Denmark (to be effective from 8:00 a.m. on May 5). It is estimated that more than half a million German troops are involved, who will join another half-million who have surrendered in the last forty-eight hours.
German forces in northern Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria conduct rearguard actions against the Red Army, as they attempt to break away and reach the Anglo-American lines. Fighting continues in besieged Breslau, Moravia, the Vistula Delta and the Courland Pocket in Latvia.
US troops enter the Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Bavarian stronghold.
During negotiations for the formation of the United Nations in San Francisco, Soviet foreign minister Molotov informs US secretary of state Stettinius that the Red Army had arrested sixteen Polish peace negotiators (an event that actually took place in March).
MAY 5
German Army Group G surrenders unconditionally to US forces at Haar in Bavaria. US 11th Armored Division liberates Mauthausen concentration camp.
On the Baltic coast, Russian troops capture the German rocket research centers at Swinemünde and Peenemünde.
At Wageningen in Holland, General Blaskowitz surrenders the German 25th Army to Canadian general Charles Foulkes.
British paratroopers land in Copenhagen.
The beginning of the civilian uprising in Prague. General Patton’s US Third Army invades western Czechoslovakia.
MAY 6
Dönitz sacks Himmler from all official positions within the Third Reich.
The US 97th Division occupies Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. The US 12th Corps advances toward Prague, but is then halted on the orders of Eisenhower—to allow the Soviet forces to occupy the rest of the country, as had originally been agreed.
The Soviet Union publishes a full report on the death camp at Auschwitz.
That evening, the 1st Division of the Russian Liberation (Vlasov) Army enters Prague in support of the rebels and Breslau surrenders after an eighty-two-day siege.
MAY 7
General Jodl signs the instrument of unconditional surrender between Germany and the Allies in a schoolroom at Rheims at 2:41 a.m. The Soviet Union refuses to accept this, and asks that a revised treaty be signed in Berlin the following day.
In western Czechoslovakia, a platoon from the US Army’s 803rd Tank Destroyer Battalion is ambushed by the Germans, and one of the unit is killed. GI Charles Havlat will be the last American soldier killed in Europe.
US troops arrest Göring.
After a day of fierce fighting in defense of the Prague uprising, General Bunyachenko, commander of the 1st Division of the Russian Liberation Army, is told the city will soon be occupied by the Red Army, and his forces must leave the following morning.
MAY 8
VE (Victory-in-Europe) Day for the Western Allies. The German surrender is ratified in a second signing at Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin.
The Red Army occupies Dresden. German forces on the Courland Peninsula in Latvia—undefeated in more than six months of fighting against the Red Army—agree to surrender the following morning.
The “day of death” in Prague as SS and regular Wehrmacht units come close to obliterating the uprising. But the approach of the Red Army forces General Toussaint to negotiate. The German garrison leaves the city that evening, although some SS units keep fighting. The Russian Liberation Army’s 1st Division retreats westward through Czechoslovakia toward American lines.
MAY 9
VE-Day for the Soviet Union. The Courland Pocket and final German outposts on the Vistula Delta surrender. So do the remaining garrisons at Dunkirk, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle and the Channel Islands.
The Red Army occupies the Danish island of Bornholm. In Operation Doomsday, British troops prepare to fly to Norway to accept a German surrender there.
MAY 11–12
Battle of Slivice in western Czechoslovakia.
MAY 13–14
Battle of Poljana in northern Yugoslavia.
MAY 15
Final cessation of hostilities on the Eastern Front.
MAY 20
Ceasefire enforced on the Dutch island of Texel.
MAY 23
Arrest of the Dönitz government at Flensburg. Heinrich Himmler commits suicide.
1
THE FUNERAL PYRE
APRIL 30, 1945
At 6:00 a.m. on April 30, 1945 Major General Wilhelm Mohnke was summoned to attend Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery Bunker in the center of Berlin. Mohnke’s forces were responsible for defending the government quarter of the city. “I was taken to meet the Führer in his own bedroom,” Mohnke recalled.
He sat on a chair beside his bed. Over his pajamas he was wearing a black military greatcoat . . . His left hand shook incessantly and yet he exuded a strange sense of calm, as if his thoughts were collected and he had slept well—which of course he had not.
Hitler was precise. He began: “Mohnke, how long can we hold out?” I answered “24 hours my Führer, no longer than that.” I then described the military situation. The Russians had reached the Wilhelmstrasse and advanced through the U-Bahn tunnel under the Friedrichstrasse. Most of the Tiergarten was in their hands, and they had fought right up to the Potsdamer Platz, only 300 meters from the bunker. Hitler digested this calmly.
With military matters concluded, he began to talk to me about politics. It struck me that this might be his last discourse of any length on this subject. The basic theme was the future fate of Europe. The western democracies were decadent, and the powerful momentum of the peoples of the east—successfully channeled by the Communist system—could not be opposed by them. The west would fall under their domination. His tone of voice, as this argument was developed, was subdued and distant. Shortly after 7:00 a.m. I left and returned to my command post.
Hitler’s dark yet compelling personality, which had held millions under its dominion, was now a mere shadow of its former self. Wolf Heisendorf, a personal assistant to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who remained with his master in the Führer Bunker, observed:
By April 30 it was obvious to everyone that further defense of Berlin was hopeless. Germany was split into several parts by Anglo-American and Russian armies—the hoped-for clash between them had never in fact materialized. Our Army High Command no longer existed as a meaningful force—its resources were scattered in all directions by the rapid advance of our opponents. The machinery of government had virtually collapsed. Our last resort had been to pull out one of our armies [General Walther Wenck’s 12th] from its defense of the Elbe (turning its back on the American troops on the far side of the river) and instead push it toward Berlin. But by the 30th it was clear that these men were unable to reach the capital. In such circumstances, to try to hold out any longer against the well-equipped Russian forces of Marshal Zhukov was utterly pointless.
Heisendorf recalled the chaotic attempts to evacuate government ministries from the threatened city.
As the Red Army neared Berlin there was utter panic. Those heads of departments who could flee did so, scattering in all directions, and leaving their staff largely to fend for themselves. Hitler’s own orders were disregarded. One head of the Propaganda Ministry jammed the boot of his car so full of secret documents that the catch would not close properly. As his car accelerated a mass of paper flew up in the air behind him. As the bureaucratic vestiges of our Ministry disintegrated it all seemed like a bad farce.
At Rheims in northern France, the headquarters of the Western Allies, the fate of Hitler’s capital was followed with somber expectation. “Berlin is near the end,” SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force) liaison officer Colonel Richard Wilberforce wrote simply in his diary on April 30.
Berlin—the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich—was indeed tottering. The Red Army had fought its way to the center of the city and the Führer’s domain had shrunk to a few square miles of government buildings. But for some in the wider Third Reich, even at this late, desperate stage of the war, the Nazi doctrine remained intact. On the same day Hildegard Holzwark, a German from the Sudetenland who had welcomed Hitler as a liberator after he annexed that part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, wrote in her diary:
Tomorrow is the first of May—workers’ day, a national holiday for the German people. Will there be anyone celebrating it this year?—I doubt it. It is heartbreakingly sad to face such a bitter end to our war. For six long years we held out. And there was real value to our struggle, despite our defeat. It is hard to sum up all these war experiences.
Artillery fire from the front line draws closer and closer. And yet, for the time being, I feel insulated from the fighting. A while ago I was afflicted by such fear. I just hold out for the chance that in the Sudetenland the Americans will come before the Russians. And I can only clutch on to one hope, that the western powers will not let Europe fall completely under the sway of Bolshevism. We Germans were for a long time the bulwark against this threat. But we cannot maintain it any longer—everything is now in a state of collapse.
It seems that our remaining troops lack the resolve to maintain the struggle. Discipline has broken down and everything is chaotic—such is the effect of the losses we have borne. Our people’s will to resist has been broken; we have lost our self-belief. In Berlin there is bitter street fighting. The Führer stands there, virtually alone. I fear for his life.
But in truth, little had been epic in the decision to defend Berlin to the last. Rather than being the product of cold-blooded calculation, or fanatical belief, it had come about through the German leader’s utter collapse in a military briefing some eight days earlier.
At 3:30 p.m. on April 22 the day’s situation conference had begun with bad news: the Russians had reached Berlin’s northern suburbs. Hitler looked haggard and agitated and he twice left the room to go to his own private quarters. Then the Führer was told that a counterattack from SS general Felix Steiner that he had waited all morning for had not in fact taken place. At this point something snapped. Hitler ordered everyone out of the briefing room except Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (the head of the German armed forces), General Alfred Jodl (the chief of staff), General Hans Krebs (chief of staff of the German army), Lieutenant General Wilhelm Burgdorf (Hitler’s adjutant), Martin Bormann (secretary of the Nazi Party) and the stenographer Gerhard Herrgeswell. There followed a violent tirade, clearly audible to all those outside the room, in which he screamed that he had been betrayed by those he most trusted. And then he slumped back in his chair.
Hitler had always resolutely claimed that the war was not lost and the fight would continue until the very end. Now he decided that he would die in Berlin. Stenographer Gerhard Herrgeswell was dumbfounded by this—the Führer had never previously acknowledged the possibility of failure, always closing matters with the resolute phrase: “We will fight to the end of the Third Reich.” Struggling to find an explanation for this about-turn, he believed Hitler had suffered a form of breakdown: “He said that he had lost his faith—and that he wanted to end it all, that he would die in the German capital,” Herrgeswell recalled. “He repeated this fatalistic lament between ten and twenty times, with slight variations: ‘I die here,’ ‘I die at the Chancellery’ or ‘I have to die here in Berlin.’”
Others concurred. When General Burgdorf left the room, he also told his staff officer, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, that Hitler had suffered a breakdown. According to one report, “Hitler’s face went purple, and he could not put his left foot on the ground properly. Throughout that night he suffered a nervous collapse and kept raving that he would meet his end in Berlin.” Learning that SS units northeast of the city (at Eberswalde on the Finow Canal, 15 miles from Berlin’s center), the so-called Steiner group, had not responded to his orders to attack the Russians threw him over the edge. He realized that the will to resist was no longer there.
Those around him were astonished. Before this extraordinary outburst no decision to stay in Berlin had been made; indeed, his closest supporters believed Hitler’s plan was to leave the German capital and fly to his Bavarian retreat, the Berchtesgaden, and first Field Marshal Keitel and then Party Secretary Martin Bormann attempted to get the Führer to change his mind. They failed.
Their leader had suffered some form of psychological collapse. He could now offer little beyond the despairing utterance—“You will have to go to south Germany and form a government. Göring will be my successor. He will negotiate.” Whether this was an order or a prophetic utterance was totally unclear to those around him.
If the military briefing was a complete shock to those who witnessed it, Hitler’s physical and mental decline had begun months earlier. Wolf Heisendorf, personal assistant to Propaganda Minister Goebbels, observed:
It was clear to all of us that the Führer’s days were numbered. He seemed broken, physically and emotionally—some even speculated that he had suffered a stroke. But whatever had occurred, he now appeared a sick, broken old man. In such a state, he was unable to broadcast live on the radio and the few speeches that he did deliver had to be prerecorded and then re-edited. His voice changed completely—its range and depth replaced by a dull monotone. And the content of the speeches, which no-one was allowed to alter (even Goebbels could only make minor adjustments), caused consternation within the Propaganda Ministry. Their historical analogies—the Carthaginians at Cannae, or Frederick the Great and the Seven Years War—seemed increasingly absurd with the Russians at the gates of Berlin.
And yet, however much Hitler’s condition had deteriorated, he remained the central reason why the Grand Alliance had been formed. The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, detested Nazism and his rivalry with the Führer was very much a personal one. The leader of the Third Reich was the symbol of a system that Churchill loathed, even before its worst excesses were widely known. On June 22, 1941, the day that Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill broadcast to the nation, declaiming: “Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder.” In a war cabinet meeting of July 6, 1942, he was scarcely less vehement, denouncing him as “the mainspring of evil,” and adding that if he fell into British hands “we shall certainly put him to death.” Among the three great powers of the Alliance, Churchill’s struggle had been the longest, as a minister in the cabinet of Neville Chamberlain from the declaration of war against Germany in September 1939 and as prime minister from May 1940, when the United Kingdom stood alone against the Nazi hegemony in Europe.
As Britain resisted the might of Germany in the dark days of 1940, the Soviet Union had established a non-aggression pact with Hitler and was supplying the Nazi war machine with vital industrial equipment. This pact, formalized between the two foreign ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, allowed both powers to extend their areas of influence. Germany overwhelmed western Europe in a lightning campaign; Russia occupied the Baltic states, defeated Finland and seized territory from her, and also grabbed land from Romania. The two countries had invaded hapless Poland together—Germany from the west, the Soviet Union from the east—and divided the country between them.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler breached the non-aggression pact, ordering a surprise invasion of his former ally. The onslaught required months of preparation and yet it caught the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, completely off guard. He could not believe that Germany would attack him while Britain still resisted to the west. The colonization of the east was part of the Führer’s personal vision—set out in his book Mein Kampf—which showed his detestation of the Slavs, whom he regarded as an inferior people. Hitler wanted to create Lebensraum—living space—for the German master race by subjugating most of European Russia. He also loathed Bolshevism, but while his attack on Russia was proclaimed as a crusade against communism, at heart it was a brutal race war. Neither side had signed up to the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the German onslaught unleashed one of the most destructive conflagrations in human history.
The Soviet leader was politically astute but also chronically suspicious. He had gambled on more time—to re-equip and retrain the Red Army and relocate Russian industries to the east, and when he received warnings from British intelligence that a German invasion was imminent, he imagined it a Western plot to embroil him in a war. Stalin’s failure to anticipate a breach of the pact was the greatest blunder of his entire leadership, and in the dark days of 1941, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht surged hundreds of miles into Russia, winning a series of devastating victories against a reeling Red Army, his country was brought to the brink of defeat.
But Stalin and the Soviet Union held firm—and despite sustaining losses that no Western democracy could ever have contemplated, turned the tables on the German war machine. The Führer’s previously invincible forces were repulsed from Moscow, destroyed at Stalingrad, and defeated once again at Kursk—the last major offensive they would launch in the east. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army launched Operation Bagration—their most complete military success against the German army—and that autumn finally liberated all of their territories that had fallen under the sway of the Nazis. The Red Army—now consisting of a colossal 8 million men—fought its way into eastern Europe, dispatching Hitler’s former allies Romania and Hungary, liberating much of Yugoslavia, and occupying Poland and eastern Germany. In sheer numerical strength, Russia was the strongest military power in the Alliance, and its armies dominated central and eastern Europe.
These events had been initiated by Hitler and always held a grave risk. At the height of his power and influence, the Führer had carried most of his party with him and many of his generals too (although a considerable number still held strong reservations), but it was highly unlikely that anyone else in Nazi Germany would have embarked upon such a hazardous course. By opening up a war on two fronts, Hitler was gambling on defeating the Soviet Union quickly. Were he to fail, he was dooming Germany to a battle of attrition against a country of vastly superior manpower and resources.
Hitler created the war in the east—and as a result brought the Soviet Union into a most unlikely alliance with the two Western imperialist and capitalist powers—Britain and America—that were its ideological enemies. It was common hatred of Hitler—and his brutal Nazi state—which overrode their enormous differences.
In the summer of 1941 Britain stood alone. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a remarkable opportunity and it was to Churchill’s considerable credit that he seized it, despite his loathing of Bolshevism. It was a mark of great statesmanship that he formed an alliance with a country whose political system he so distrusted. Britain had entered the war in partnership with France, but France had been defeated and occupied and most of Europe was now under Nazi sway. With America not yet willing to commit itself to a European war, Churchill saw it was vital that Russia and Britain join forces if the Third Reich was ever to be defeated. In the short term, the most that Britain could do was offer the Soviets material aid, through the Arctic convoy route to Murmansk and Archangel. The Arctic convoys—menaced by German U-boats and the Luftwaffe—suffered considerable losses, but Churchill insisted that they be maintained, despite the objections of the Admiralty, because they gave substance and succor to the Anglo-Soviet alliance. Churchill’s courageous and powerful rhetoric after the evacuation from Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain inspired the nation, and will always rank as one of his greatest achievements, but his embrace of the Soviet Union in 1941 matched it. In a desperate situation, there was hope once more.
And yet it was hope bought at a price. The Anglo-Soviet alliance was a partnership of expediency. Britain entered the war in September 1939 to protect Poland in the same month the Soviet Union stabbed that country in the back. Between 1939 and 1941 Stalin administered eastern Poland with a brutal ruthlessness that rivaled, and at times surpassed, the atrocities of the Nazis in the other half of the country. In the longer term, as the German war machine was rolled back, Poland would be a source of friction between the United Kingdom and Russia. And in April 1945 Britain’s diplomatic options were limited—the entire country was now occupied by a resurgent Red Army.
Then there was the United States of America. American involvement in the Grand Alliance was once again a product of Hitler’s foreign policy. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor—drawing the United States into a long Pacific conflict. Faced with such a prospect, President Franklin Roosevelt was unlikely to persuade the nation to enter a European war against Nazi Germany as well. Remarkably, Hitler forced his hand. Five days after Pearl Harbor, with his armies in retreat from Moscow in terrible winter weather, the Führer declared war on America.
This quite incredible decision doomed Germany to eventual defeat in the war. It is hard to find an explanation for it other than as the product of Hitler’s growing megalomania. Four days later he appointed himself leader of the German army, although his military experience in the First World War had not taken him beyond the rank of corporal.
Hitler thereby brought the Grand Alliance into being. As the war continued and he demanded fanatical obedience from the German people and utterly refused to compromise or negotiate with his foes, he ensured that the Alliance held firm. Now, a wreck of his former self, entombed in Berlin and surrounded by his Russian enemies, a simple yet paramount question was forming—what would happen to the Alliance after Hitler’s death?
Hitler’s oratory, his sway over an audience, was always one of his greatest strengths. Its wane in the twilight of his rule—and the pathos of his terrible outburst in the bunker—was disconcerting to those accustomed to it. But even at the end, Hitler retained remnants of his political instinct and charisma. SS general Felix Steiner’s failure to obey the Führer’s command on April 22 to attack numerically superior Red Army forces had precipitated the Nazi leader’s dramatic collapse. Steiner’s army group—depleted and outnumbered by the Russians—was unable to perform the military role Hitler demanded.
This may well have been recognition from Steiner of practical reality—that the resources of men, equipment and resolve necessary to carry out this order were no longer available. But it may also have carried the vestiges of treachery, as the Führer had claimed. Earlier that month, Steiner held secret discussions in Berlin with SS comrades Richard Hildebrandt and Otto Ohlendorf. Their intention was to create a new German government and procure a separate peace with the Western Allies. Steiner hoped it would be led by Himmler and that Hitler would simply be pushed aside. Steiner wanted to encourage the Anglo-American forces to advance to the River Elbe without opposition in return for a tacit agreement that they would halt there, allowing Germany to continue its struggle against the Russians in the east. The chances of such a deal were slight, but the Nazi position was desperate enough to risk exploring it. Accordingly, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, left Hitler on April 20, headed to northern Germany and within a matter of days, on his own initiative, attempted to open talks with Britain and America. With Hitler remaining in Berlin, it probably suited Steiner to simply abandon him there. His inaction did not stem from military weakness alone, but was an act of deliberate disobedience. The Führer—always the political bloodhound even at this critically late stage of the war—may well have sensed it.
As Germany’s military fortunes declined, members of the SS hierarchy— a bastion of Nazi ideology—began to contemplate different policies from those of their leader. The warning signs had been there for months. One of them was Himmler’s decision, without Hitler’s authorization, to train an army of anti-Bolshevik Russians, led by General Andrei Vlasov. Hitler, who loathed the Slavs and was hidebound by his racism, could not countenance ever using Russians, even those who renounced Stalin’s regime, in any military capacity whatsoever. Yet Himmler—once his devoted disciple in such prejudice—now struck out on a path of his own. By February 1945 two full-strength divisions had been formed; the first of these was subsequently thrown into combat against the Red Army—Russian against Russian—on the Oder front in the east.
It is unclear whether reports of such recruitment were deliberately concealed from Hitler, or that he chose instead to ignore them and act as if such formations did not exist. The soldiers of the 1st Vlasov Division remained on active service, and would play a remarkable role at the war’s very end. The existence of this force showed the beginnings of Himmler’s estrangement from Hitler’s war policy, which in the last days of the Reich would lead him to undermine the authority of his political master.
On April 22, 1945, Hitler and his immediate entourage retreated into the massive bunker complex by the Reich Chancellery, where they commenced a bizarre underground existence. The complex had two levels: the ante-bunker, and—connected to it by a circular staircase—the deeper Führer Bunker. The Führer Bunker consisted of about twenty small, sparsely furnished rooms. The corridor in front of Hitler’s private apartment boasted an upholstered bench and a few old armchairs. Next to it was the conference room—where military or situation conferences took place, and where up to twenty people would crowd around the map table in a small space measuring 3.5 x 3 meters. Hitler was the only person able to sit.
Hitler’s two private rooms, a study and a bedroom, were also sparsely furnished. A Dutch still-life hung over the sofa in his study, and above his desk, in an oval frame, was a picture of Frederick the Great. At the end of the Seven Years War Frederick—exhausted and on the verge of defeat—had been saved by a miracle when, in 1762, the death of the tsarina Elizabeth had changed the course of the conflict. Hearing of the death of the American president Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, the Führer hoped for a similar miracle to rescue him from his own predicament. In each of the rooms, naked lightbulbs hung from the ceilings. The harsh light, the constantly humming diesel engines that powered the ventilation system, the cramped quarters and inlaid concrete created an oppressive and disorientating atmosphere, which the rapidly worsening events only accentuated.
Hitler’s Germany had been invaded by an Allied coalition, but Russian soldiers were now poised to encircle and take Berlin. At the Big Three conference at Yalta in February 1945 the Allied powers had drawn up a political map for post-war Europe. Germany was to be divided into four zones: three for the Western Allies, including newly liberated France, whose armies were fighting with the Americans, and the fourth for the Soviet Union. The Soviet zone of eastern Germany included Berlin. The city itself would be split into four separate administrative areas—British, American, French and Russian—but it rested within territory entirely controlled by the Soviet Union. At the time these arrangements were drawn up, Russian armies were already on the Oder, only 50 miles from Berlin. At the conference, it seemed likely that the German capital would be taken by the Russians.
Allied policy was to fight first and make the necessary political realignments afterward. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, clung to the belief that even at this late stage the Allies might fall out as the Western powers realized the Soviet danger as Stalin’s forces spread Bolshevism over eastern Europe. “It is well-known that Russians invariably call everything that isn’t ‘communist,’ ‘fascist,’” Goebbels wrote after the conclusion of Yalta—well aware, from his own experience, that any dictatorship muzzled its political opponents. He noted that the Russians “under the guise of ‘a struggle against fascism’ would exterminate all forces opposing bolshevization in any country [over which] they held influence.” Goebbels hoped that such heartless realpolitik would repel the Western democracies. He was particularly drawn to Poland.
Goebbels felt not a shred of sympathy for that country, callously remarking that the suffering of the Poles was the result of failing to accept Germany’s “extremely reasonable terms” in 1939—but he believed it a likely cause of rupture between the Allies. He recalled how in April 1943 German forces had uncovered the Katyn grave site near Smolensk and found more than 14,000 Polish officers murdered there. The Soviet Union claimed that this atrocity had been carried out by the Germans, but the evidence pointed elsewhere. It seemed likely that the killings were the work of Russia in the spring of 1940 and Goebbels had a propaganda field day—inviting a host of neutral observers to view the site. Stalin remained exceptionally sensitive over the issue, and when the Polish government-in-exile in London grew skeptical of his version of events, he broke off diplomatic relations with them. The Western Allies discouraged press speculation about the massacre and expressed solidarity with the Soviet view, but in private questioned their ally’s version of events.
Goebbels’ Nazi regime was capable of plenty of killing of its own. In August 1944 the Polish uprising in Warsaw was crushed by the SS with savage force. Stalin—well aware that the rising was led by opponents of his own puppet regime, the Lublin Poles—ordered his advancing armies to halt outside the city. The Red Army waited until the revolt was utterly destroyed before resuming its advance. Stalin denied American and British planes access to his airfields to drop supplies to assist the insurgents. The Soviet leader’s cynical indifference to the suffering within the city did not bode well for the Yalta accord.
In February 1945 the Grand Alliance put an optimistic gloss on their joint communication over Poland’s future. In reality it was an uneasy compromise and President Roosevelt, ill and tired, had left the proceedings early, before its provisions were fully hammered out. The devil was in the detail, and loose wording allowed each power to interpret matters differently. Roosevelt and Churchill believed they had secured a reasonable settlement over the form of the Polish government. Goebbels doubted that. He saw such aspirations—that the Soviet leader would set up a fair and representative government within the country—as utterly naive: “Stalin is firmly determined . . . to negotiate with no-one over the Polish question,” Goebbels observed bluntly, but with a degree of insight. “The only choice for the Poles is either to be exterminated by force or bow to the Kremlin.”
Once the Western Allies realized this, tensions with the Soviet Union would inevitably rise and Goebbels clung to this hope in his retreat to the depths of the Führer Bunker. His assistant, Wolf Heisendorf, recalled frankly:
After the Russians broke into Berlin Goebbels fell into deep depression. He realized that death was inevitable, and yet—amidst the wreckage of all his dreams—remnants of his former policy were fleetingly grasped. Each day Goebbels gathered what material he could from foreign press and radio reports. There was one theme—that a conflict between the Soviet Union and Britain and America might suddenly erupt.
Heisendorf, seeking insight into his master’s attempts to maintain a grasp of the situation, continued:
I read these résumés many times. For Goebbels, the first touchstone would be Poland; the second, the meeting on the Elbe of Russian and American troops. The possibility that the Grand Alliance opposing him might disintegrate did after all have some basis. With keen political instincts alert to the seeds of any dissension, Goebbels could only desperately hope it might appear in time to save Germany’s fortunes.
In March 1945 the Alliance did indeed fall under strain. On March 7 American troops seized the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen in a daring coup de main. Four days later, they began preliminary negotiations in Switzerland with the SS leader Karl Wolf about a possible German surrender in Italy. It was uncertain whether Wolf had Hitler’s backing—although Himmler had given his cautious support—and discussions were held in strict secrecy. The Western Allies correctly informed the Russians that they were taking place, but then unwisely, and tactlessly, refused a Soviet request to send a representative to them.
This played to Stalin’s suspicion that the West was engineering a secret peace with Germany, to enable the Nazis to continue the fight in the east. Over the next month the telegrams between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin saw some of the most unhappy and mistrustful exchanges of the war. On April 3 the Soviet leader stated that either the American president was lying or he was being deliberately deceived by his advisers. Stalin himself had played a part in the sudden frosting of relations, for in response to the perceived slight of the Swiss negotiations with Wolf he began discussions of his own with a Polish nationalist group—offering them the chance to join an enlarged pro-communist government—and then promptly arrested them on charges of sabotage, a sequence of events acknowledged by Russia only in early May. All the Western powers knew in mid-March was that this group of sixteen Poles had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.
As suspicions grew, the possibility arose that Anglo-American and Russian armies would make a dash for Berlin at the same time. The military situation gave Stalin the initiative. Two Russian fronts (the Soviet equivalent of an American or British army group)—the 1st Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian—were on the Oder river, only 50 miles from the German capital. In fierce fighting, Red Army troops were also moving into Czechoslovakia and eastern Austria, and it was clear that the Russians would soon capture Vienna. In the west, British and American armies had crossed the Rhine on a broad front, and were advancing into Germany at speed. The Anglo-American forces were farther from Berlin than their Russian allies, but Germans might offer less resistance to them. Churchill and his commander in northwest Europe, Field Marshal Montgomery, urged that an attempt on Berlin be made.
General Dwight Eisenhower—Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force—now took a crucial decision. He decided that Anglo-American forces would halt on the River Elbe. An exception was made for Montgomery’s 21st Army Group to the north, which would cross the river and strike at the Baltic ports of Lübeck and Wismar. Denmark could then be secured by the Western Allies, ahead of the Russians. In the center, American armies would halt at the river boundary; in the south, they would push on into Bavaria and western Austria.
Eisenhower’s decision to halt on the Elbe minimized the chances of American and Russian forces colliding. However, the military intelligence behind it was faulty—a concern over the so-called National Redoubt, an Alpine fortress guarded by elite SS divisions where it was believed Hitler and his followers would make a final stand. The evidence for such a mountain fastness was largely illusory, but once Goebbels realized the American preoccupation with it he delightedly arranged for a mass of false documentation to fall into their hands—most of it concocted within his Propaganda Ministry. General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group and a close personal friend of Eisenhower, would later confess ruefully that “it was amazing how we fell for this in the way we did.”
United States forces were racing southward to secure a fairy-tale fortress complex that in reality was non-existent, and the decision to halt at the Elbe left Berlin to the Russians. Eisenhower had conferred with General Bradley about the likely cost in American lives of reaching the German capital. Bradley reckoned about 100,000 men—“a lot for a prestige objective”—and General George Marshall, the army chief of staff, concurred. Eisenhower allowed the Red Army the honor of storming Hitler’s capital, knowing that Soviet troops would also pay the price in casualties to take the city. He communicated directly with Stalin, saying that Berlin was no longer a major objective for him—he would be halting his armies on the Elbe and pushing southeast instead.
Stalin was taken aback. Bluffing, he said that Berlin was no longer of particular importance to him either, and then summoned his military commanders Zhukov and Konev and ordered them to take the city as soon as possible. The assault would take place on April 16, 1945. Zhukov launched the main Russian offensive directly against the last German defense line, the Seelow Heights on the western bank of the Oder, and headed straight for Berlin.
On the same day Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front crossed the Oder farther south and wheeled round the German capital. By April 23 the city was encircled and no further supplies or reinforcements would reach its defenders. Stalin—who knew Churchill was still lobbying for an attack—wanted to block any last-ditch attempt by the Western Allies to reach Berlin. But Eisenhower kept his promise to the Soviet leader and Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, was content to let him do so. Even when General Wenck’s 12th Army pulled out of the German battle line on the Elbe, on the same day, and marched east in an attempt to save Berlin, American troops kept to their agreed position on the far side of the river. The Grand Alliance held firm.
Within the German capital, hasty defense measures were put in place when it was realized Hitler intended to make a stand there. But there were so few troops available. On April 23 General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the LVI Panzer Corps, was appointed commander of the city. A day earlier the Führer had ordered Weidling to be executed by firing squad for having retreated in the face of the enemy. The charge was then dropped, but Weidling was unenthusiastic about his new post. “I’d rather be shot than have this honor,” he exclaimed.
Weidling organized the defenses into eight sectors. He had about 45,000 regular troops available, supported by the Berlin police force, the Hitler Youth, and about 40,000 men of the Home Guard (Volkssturm). Soviet forces outnumbered them by eight to one. The soldiers of the LVI Panzer Corps were known to the Russians already, for in the spring of 1944 they had been responsible for the worst atrocity ever committed by the German army in the Soviet Union, the creation of typhus camps where more than 50,000 civilians in the region of Parichi were deliberately infected, and then left in the path of the advancing Red Army, with the hope of causing a major typhoid epidemic among the Russian soldiers. In the words of General Pavel Batov, commander of the Soviet 65th Army, “This atrocity we would neither forgive nor forget.” The fight for Berlin would always have been bitter, but the presence of LVI Panzer Corps in the city, which quickly became known to the Russians, ensured the battle was particularly savage.
Over the next few days German troops mounted a desperate defense, but the Russians closed inexorably on Berlin’s center. On April 27 General Weidling wrote in his diary:
At 5:00 a.m., after a violent bombardment and with very strong air support, the Russians attacked on both sides of the Hohenzollerndamm. Defense Zone Headquarters is under heavy fire. The account for the sins of past years has arrived.
The Potsdamer Platz is also under heavy artillery bombardment. Brick and stone dust hangs in the air like a thick fog. The car in which I am driving can only make slow progress—shells are bursting on all sides and we are showered with their fragments.
Everywhere the roads are full of craters and broken brickwork, and streets and squares lie desolate. To take cover from a Russian heavy mortar bombardment we took shelter in an Underground Station. In the two-level building many civilians had taken refuge— a mass of scared people, standing packed together. It is a shattering sight.
In my afternoon situation report, I spoke of the sufferings of the population and the wounded, about everything I had seen with my own eyes during the day. Hitler seemed in a disjointed state of mind, unable to properly comprehend what I was saying.
Time was now running out. On April 28 Admiral Karl Dönitz flew a battalion of naval cadets into stricken Berlin as a gesture of solidarity with his Führer. The commander, Lieutenant Franz Kuhlmann, remembered his nightmarish arrival: “Toward the end of our flight we recognized the capital, burning from a recent bombing raid. It was a truly apocalyptic picture. Despite the lack of contact from the radio tower, our pilot immediately attempted a landing and the plane careered wildly all over the runway.”
In the circumstances, a rough landing was hardly surprising. On April 27 both Tempelhof and Gatow airports had been lost to the Russians. An emergency landing strip was then prepared in the grounds of Berlin’s zoo. This was where Kuhlmann had arrived. By the evening of April 28 this landing strip could not be used either, because of the deep shell holes.
Kuhlmann continued:
When we came to a juddering halt there was a sharp command—“To the shelters—at the double!”—and we raced toward an enormous concrete silo, where military stores and equipment were kept.
In a while, an SS officer appeared, and told us we had been ordered to the Zoo Bunker [a key defense point in the center of Berlin]. When I objected, and said we had been instructed to go immediately to the Reich Chancellery, to defend Hitler’s own quarters, he looked completely bewildered. Eventually we set off in an easterly direction, toward this seemingly prestige objective—along a bombed-out military road. Time and time again we were forced to dive for cover, as Russian planes swept down, strafing the route ahead.
The SS officer accompanied me to Mohnke’s command post—in one of the underground shelters of the Reich Chancellery—announced my arrival to the general, and then disappeared. SS General Mohnke, the commander of Citadelle [the government district of Berlin, with Hitler’s bunker at its heart], was surprised and delighted to see us, showing a degree of interest that was flattering in view of our relatively insignificant combat strength.
General Mohnke had about 2,000 men under his command—including 800 soldiers from the elite Leibstandarte SS Guard Battalion. These formed the last bulwark against the Russians. Kuhlmann continued:
Mohnke inquired carefully about the number of men I had brought, their weaponry and combat experience—quickly grasping that most were cadets, and neither properly equipped or trained for this kind of fighting. His manner was well-disposed and friendly, until I perhaps unwisely told him that I was under orders to announce myself to Hitler personally. Then his tone changed. He told me bluntly that it was hardly practicable for every junior officer to request an audience with the Führer.
Kuhlmann accommodated his men in the cellars of the nearby Foreign Office and awaited further orders. The artillery fire raining down on the Reich Chancellery became ever more violent, as groups of Red Army soldiers began to approach Citadelle’s defenses.
Despite the command to stay put, Kuhlmann was summoned into the labyrinth of the Führer Bunker. Dönitz, keen to curry favor with his master, asked—through his representative in the bunker, Admiral Hans-Erich Voss—that the marine battalion’s commander formally present himself. The Führer assented—and Kuhlmann descended into this subterranean world. A shock awaited him. He arrived at the lower section of the bunker as Hitler was holding a situation conference. Voss was presiding, with General Hans Krebs, Joseph Goebbels and Artur Axmann (the head of the Hitler Youth) also present.
Kuhlmann recalled:
Hitler’s body had completely shrunk in on itself. His left arm and leg shook uncontrollably. Much of what he said was incomprehensible to me—it was as if, in a state of delirium, he had discovered a completely made-up language. Odd fragments of it lodged in my mind. An oft-repeated refrain: “Oh those citizens of Berlin! Those citizens of Berlin!” or “One can never do without a Hanna Reitsch [the woman pilot who had just then audaciously landed a plane on the Unter den Linden, Berlin’s main thoroughfare]!” Knowing nothing of what had happened to him in this vault, I was unable to make any coherent sense of such disjointed outpourings.
The reference to a “made-up language” is striking. It may have been partly the result of extreme stress and disorientation, but it strongly suggests that the Führer had never fully recovered from his breakdown of April 22. “Hitler then dismissed me,” Kuhlmann continued, “by offering his steadier right hand, and I climbed with Voss back up the bunker stairs. Although I was deeply shaken, I said nothing of my impression to Voss—and he also avoided saying any word about the state Hitler was in. But I noticed that he was aware of my embarrassment, and probably guessing the reason for it, talked about plans to bring more naval troops into Berlin instead.”
When General Weidling found that much of the last defense line was “manned” by the Hitler Youth (teenage boys aged between fourteen and eighteen), he ordered Axmann to disband such combat formations within the city. The order was never carried out. On April 29 Hitler Youth courier Armin Lehmann and three of his comrades tried to carry an urgent message to a command post across the Wilhelmstrasse—now being pulverized by Russian shells. Lehmann was the only survivor. Later, he sat in the Führer Bunker in a state of shock. A woman came out of one of the rooms and poured him a glass of water. “It’s terrible out there,” she said. It was Eva Braun—Hitler’s long-term mistress, whom he had married only hours earlier.
Within the bunker, fatalistic despair reigned. Hearing that his deputy Hermann Göring, in Obersalzberg in Bavaria, was attempting to take control of the leadership, Hitler had him arrested. On April 28 Hitler also learned that Heinrich Himmler was putting out peace feelers to the Western Allies. Himmler’s representative in Berlin, Hermann Fegelein, was rounded up and shot. The Führer then began putting his own affairs in order. He married Eva Braun early on the morning of April 29—less an occasion of celebration, more of a suicide pact—and drew up his private and public wills. Göring and Himmler were both expelled from the party for their treachery. Impressed by the loyalty of Admiral Dönitz, and recently reminded of it by Kuhlmann’s visit, Hitler designated him as his successor. He hoped that Dönitz’s government—to be set up in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany—would also be joined by Bormann and Goebbels.
Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, typed out the copies of Hitler’s will. “I worked as fast as I could,” Junge recalled. “My fingers moved mechanically and I was amazed to see I made hardly any typing errors. Bormann, Goebbels and the Führer himself kept coming in to see if I’d finished yet. They made me nervous and only delayed matters. Finally they almost tore the last sheet out of the typewriter, went back into the conference room, signed the three copies and sent them out by courier.” One was sent to Dönitz in northern Germany. Another went to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner in Czechoslovakia. Impressed by his fanatical loyalty to the Nazi cause, the Führer had appointed Schörner as the new head of the German armed forces. “With that, Hitler’s life was really over,” Junge continued. “Now he was hoping for confirmation that at least one of these documents had reached its intended destination. At any moment now, we expected the Russians to storm our bunker, so close the sounds of war seemed to be . . . We were trapped there and just sat waiting.”
Early on April 30 news came through that General Wenck’s 12th Army was unable to make further progress and no relief of Berlin was possible. Hitler and Eva Braun both decided to commit suicide. The Führer’s preoccupation that morning was that enough gasoline be found to completely burn his corpse. The previous day he had learned of the death of his ally, Benito Mussolini, who had been executed by Italian partisans. Mussolini’s body—and that of his mistress, Clara Petrucci—was then strung up by its heels. Hitler resolved that his own corpse would not be made a spectacle of.
“The 30th April began like the days before it,” Junge recalled. “The hours dragged slowly by . . . We ate lunch with Hitler. The same conversation as yesterday, the day before yesterday, for many days past: a banquet of death under the mask of cheerful composure.” After lunch, Junge went to smoke a cigarette in the servants’ room. She was told the Führer wanted to say good-bye.
I went out into the corridor. I vaguely realized there were other people there too. But all I saw was the figure of Hitler. He came very slowly out of his room, stooping more than ever and stood at the open doorway shaking hands with everyone. I felt his right hand in mine. He was looking at me, but not seeing me. He seemed to be very far away. He said something to me but I didn’t hear it. I didn’t take in his last words. The moment we had been waiting for had come—but I was frozen and scarcely knew what was going on around me.
Eva Braun came over to Junge and embraced her. “Try to get out,” she said. “You may get through.” Shortly before 3:00 p.m. they both retired to Hitler’s living room and its heavy door closed behind them. Eva Braun took cyanide. Hitler either took cyanide or shot himself. Fifteen minutes later the two bodies were carried up the bunker stairs, laid in a bomb crater in the Reich Chancellery garden and doused in petrol. The flames rose quickly and a last Nazi salute was delivered by the small group of onlookers. Hitler’s rule over the German people had ended.
The Führer’s legacy was one of death, destruction and terrible suffering. It was a legacy brought to Europe as a whole, and increasingly visited on his own people. Allied bombing had killed more than 400,000 German civilians and injured another 800,000. Nearly 2 million homes had been destroyed and another 5 million people had been forced to evacuate. Most of the casualties had occurred in the last months of the war. The Soviet invasion of eastern Germany in January 1945 resulted in another 500,000 civilian deaths and untold misery, with hundreds of thousands fleeing westward, away from the Red Army.
Major General Erich Dethleffsen, a former head of operations in the German Army High Command, and then a prisoner of war, began a memoir in the last weeks of the war:
Only slowly, in shock, and with reluctance are we awakening from the agony of the last years and recognizing ourselves and our situation. We search for exoneration, to escape responsibility for all that led to the war, its terrible sacrifices and dreadful consequences. We believe ourselves to have been fooled, led astray or misused. We plead that we knew little or nothing of all the terrible crimes . . . But we are also ashamed that we let ourselves be led astray . . . Shame mainly finds expression at first in defiance or self-denigration, only gradually in regret. That is how it is among our people.
And as the war reached its terrible climax, Allied soldiers tried to make sense of what the Third Reich represented. British sergeant Trevor Green – wood of the 9th Battalion Royal Tank Regiment was in a force occupying the German town of Schüttorf. At the end of April he wrote to his wife:
The war is developing so rapidly that I hate to miss a single news broadcast . . . The Nazis obviously know the game is up, but it is by no means certain that fighting will cease in the immediate future. It would appear that they cannot stomach unconditional surrender to the Russians. But they may think again, and then peace in Europe would be imminent. It is the awful uncertainty which is so upsetting . . .
Greenwood struggled to comprehend the mentality of his opponents. “For our sergeants’ mess we have a large house, fully furnished, and including a well-stocked library of books,” he related.
And that means literature by the ton eulogizing the Nazi party and its leaders . . . Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Streicher and Ley. To see the lavishness of these works makes one gasp. I never realized propaganda could be formed on such a colossal scale . . . They have undertaken enormous construction schemes, from road-building to gun-making. And every industry which has assisted in the creation of this “new Germany” seems to have had a staff of resident photographers on hand, recording each stage of it. These volumes have one purpose—to carefully and systematically convince the reader of the glory of the Führer and the power of his party. There is something sickeningly repetitive about them . . . Their owners must have become intoxicated with the sheer weight of propaganda.
As I looked through these pages I saw how the army of the Third Reich was formed . . . how the youth of the country was regimented through “working parties” at a time when Germany was forbidden to have arms or an army. How they were taught elaborate parade discipline and “rifle drill” with spades. Of enormous roads being built . . . the Autobahn . . . Of gliding schools where future pilots were trained under the guise of an innocuous “sport” . . . And then I lifted my eyes and glanced through the window of my temporary home, and this book-world of achievement vanished. Instead, I saw a war-damaged German town—with only a few civilians about, some wheeling handcarts or bicycles, all carrying the pitiful remnants of their worldly possessions.
Beyond them was a seemingly endless procession of British army lorries, each packed solid with German prisoners. All were heading triumphantly westward.
Amid the debris, British troops pondered how to respond to the defeated civilians. “These people would now like to be friendly with us,” Greenwood mused. “They don’t like ‘non-fraternization’ [the official policy of minimal contact] . . . It is a stern necessity.” In France, Belgium and Holland the British troops had been welcomed as “liberators.” In Germany they were “conquerors.” Greenwood continued:
Once across the border we cease to regard civilians as normal human beings; we have to behave toward them more as automatons than men. And that change-over, the rigid suppression of one’s normal instincts, is not easy—to ignore a friendly greeting from a child, or to refuse a cigarette to a destitute tramp, or withhold assistance to an old lady, painfully pushing a handcart overladen with personal property. But we have to face these things . . . It is a horrible business having to behave in this manner, but it is hardly our fault. We cannot differentiate between “good” Germans and “bad” ones, so we have to regard them all as potential evil-doers.
Such views were widespread among British troops. In theory, there was a distinction between “Nazis” on the one hand and ordinary Germans on the other. In practice, Greenwood was not so sure. Could the Nazis alone have unleashed so much evil upon the world? “The German people had fought and worked for Hitler,” he continued. “They knew what was going on—the persecution of the Jews, the horrors of Belsen . . .” Greenwood himself had not seen any of the Nazi concentration camps, but many of his fellows had. And he was struck by something in the room they now used as an officers’ mess—previously the home of a prosperous German. It was a painting, and at first glance it seemed innocuous, pleasing even. “This painting is of a moorland scene—with two or three silver birches in the foreground and a background of heather in full bloom,” Greenwood noted.
It is quite an attractive picture really, but when examined closely there is a sinister irregularity about the skyline, and when you draw close to this, you find that this irregularity is nothing but a complete concentration camp. Clearly visible are the watch-towers for machine guns, the searchlight towers for night use, the barbed-wire compound enclosing the squat wooden huts for prisoners. And set apart, are more imposing brick buildings for the staff. The meaning of the picture is puzzling. Is it a scenic work, with an incidental background, or was the artist inspired to paint the camp from the nearest vantage point he could find? The picture, an original, has now been ceremoniously destroyed by our officers.
On April 30 US troops from the 40th Combat Engineer Regiment took possession of Dachau concentration camp. Soldiers from the US 42nd and 45th Divisions had liberated it the previous day. These men had been spearheading the US 7th Army’s drive on Munich—aware that the German army might still attempt to make a stand outside the city. They were totally unprepared for what they found at Dachau. Outside the camp were thirty-nine carriages of an abandoned freight train. Inside them were hundreds of corpses. Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks of the 45th Division recalled:
“Battle hardened veterans became extremely distraught. Some thirty minutes passed before I could restore order and discipline. During this time, the over 30,000 camp prisoners still alive began to grasp the significance of the events taking place. They streamed from their crowded barracks and soon were pressing up against the confining barbed wire fence. They began to shout in unison, a shout that became a chilling roar.”
Now the camp had to be cleared of the dead. Engineer Donald Jackson said: “We used wagons to pile up the bodies—and forced German civilians to do the loading.”
Horrors such as this made the talks in San Francisco, which had begun on April 25, over the formation of a new world body—the United Nations—all the more important. The Soviet Union had initially been suspicious, but after the death of Roosevelt had given them their backing as a mark of respect to the late US president.
Amid a world of shifting loyalties, upheaval and displacement were those who held no clear place in either the Allied camp or that of its foe. There were those in the Baltic states who had hoped to preserve their national independence and instead had been occupied, first by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany. There were those in the Ukraine who also longed for independence, and had waged war against Germans who occupied their country in 1941 and the Soviets who liberated it in 1944. There were those in Poland who detested the occupation of their country—whether by Germans or Russians. And there were those Russians who were repulsed by Stalin’s regime and hoped for a different future for their country.
In February 1945 Himmler had created an anti-Bolshevik army without the formal approval of Hitler. It was named the Vlasov Army, after the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov who commanded it. Vlasov had been one of Stalin’s most brilliant commanders, but after his capture by the Germans in the summer of 1942 he had renounced communism and offered to recruit a force of Russians opposed to the Soviet leader. At this late stage of the war this force had finally come into being—but what its fate would now be was entirely unclear. These soldiers, whatever their motivation, had joined in common cause with the arch-enemy of their state, the Wehrmacht.
On April 30, 1945, one of the recently formed Vlasov divisions was in Austria, the other in western Czechoslovakia. The future for both seemed bleak. German liaison officer Captain Arthur Mongrovius wrote that day from Linz in Austria (Hitler’s childhood home): “I have got to know a Russian general, Mikhail Meandrov, a well-educated and cultivated man. In the presence of an interpreter I have enjoyed with him many wide-ranging discussions about God and the world. These leave me in no doubt that many of the officers who join the Vlasov Army do so not out of opportunism or self-interest, but a real conviction that Stalin’s rule has inflicted great damage on the Russian people.”
General Meandrov was the commander of the 2nd Division of the Vlasov Army. Mongrovius was fascinated by him—and curious too. He wondered whether Meandrov was a genuine Russian patriot. At the conclusion of such a terrible war, it was difficult to gauge men’s motivations. Mongrovius related one incident:
This general shows himself as a man of compassion. When a daily transport of prisoners arrived where we were staying, Meandrov persuaded the SS guards to release the unfortunates. Half-starved, still in their convict garb, they scattered in all directions. In their pitiful state they posed a risk to others, and the fact that all passed off peacefully was due to the presence of mind of the general, who persuaded the local villagers to provide food for these hungry creatures.
This vignette, superficially pleasing, was ambiguous. A show of clemency, whether by Meandrov himself or the SS guards he apparently persuaded, could easily have been motivated by the very opportunism Mongrovius decried, in an attempt to ingratiate oneself with the Western Allies. The Vlasov Army was simply trying to survive.
And yet, some measure of patriotism was clearly there. In a different time and place, an anti-Bolshevik army of Russians would have been welcomed by the Anglo-Americans. But at the end of April 1945, with the Grand Alliance still holding firm, these ideological fellow travelers were regarded as outcasts. Mongrovius’ attention turned back to the Vlasov Army itself—loathed by Stalin and the Soviet state and a political embarrassment to the Western powers:
“It has set all its hopes on the first, informal contacts it is making with the Americans,” the German continued, “as it believes it impossible that the United States could hand over the Vlasov Army, which is wholeheartedly against Stalin’s regime, to the Soviets.” Mongrovius paused uneasily, before concluding: “If it did so, the inevitable end of such a force would be to be strung up on the Kremlin Wall in Moscow’s Red Square.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "After Hitler"
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Copyright © 2015 Michael Jones.
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