Even now his entourage followed him almost without a murmur into the more and more transparent fantasies fabricated from self-deception, distortion of reality, and delusion. Shaking, with bowed torso, he sat in front of the map table and swept his hand jerkily over the maps. Whenever a bomb struck some distance away and the ceiling light began to flicker, his eyes wandered restively over the unmoving faces of the officers who stood erect and straight before him: “That was close!” But frail and feeble though he was, he still preserved something of his magnetic powers.
It is true that certain signs of dissolution seeped into the bunker. There were breaches of protocol and revealing informality on the part of the staff. It became a rarity for anyone to stand up when Hitler entered the main conference room; hardly a conversation stopped. But these were revocable laxities; the predominant note remained the unreal climate of court societies, if anything, intensified by the unreality of the cave dweller’s world. One of the participants in the military conferences has reported that everyone was “psychically almost suffocated by this atmosphere of servility, nervousness and prevarication. You felt it to the point of physical illness. Nothing was authentic there except fear.”
Yet Hitler still succeeded in transmitting confidence and in awakening the most preposterous hopes. In spite of all the mistakes, lies, and misconceptions, his authority remained entirely unchallenged until literally the last hour, when he no longer had the power to punish or reward and could no longer enforce his will. Sometimes it seems as if he had the faculty for shattering, in ways hard to understand, the relationship to reality of all those who entered his presence. In the middle of March Gauleiter Forster appeared in the bunker in despair. Eleven hundred Russian tanks were at the gates of Danzig, he reported; the Wehrmacht had only four Tiger tanks. He was determined, he announced in the anterooms, to present “the whole frightful reality of the situation” to Hitler with all candor and “to force a clear decision.” But after only a brief conversation he returned “completely transformed.” The Führer had promised him “new divisions,” he said; he would save Danzig, “and there’s positively no doubt about it.”45
Such incidents also permit another conclusion: of how artificial the system of loyalties in Hitler’s entourage was, how dependent upon the Führer’s continual commitment of his own person. His excessive suspiciousness, which assumed morbid and grotesque forms during the last months, was not without grounds. Even before the Ardennes offensive he had tightened the existing strict rules of secrecy by an unusual measure: the army commanders had to give him a written pledge of silence. On January 1, 1945, the Luftwaffe fighter-plane force, briefly revived by summoning up its last reserves, fell victim to this suspicion. On that day a grand armada of approximately 800 planes launched a surprise low-level attack upon the Allied airfields in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. Within a few hours, with a loss of approximately one hundred of their own planes, they put close to 1,000 enemy aircraft out of action. But on the return flight, thanks to the exaggerated rules of secrecy, they ran into their own antiaircraft fire and lost nearly 200 additional planes.
When Warsaw was lost by mid-January, Hitler Ordered the officers in the sector to be arrested at gunpoint, and had his acting chief of staff subjected to hours of interrogation by Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Chief Müller.
As he came to distrust everyone with whom he now had dealings, he once again reached out to his old fellow fighters, as though they could give him back the daredevil spirit, the radicalism and the faith of the past. His appointment of the gauleiters to the newly created posts of Reich defense commissioners was one such way of reviving old intimacies. Now he also remembered Hermann Esser, the party comrade of his early ventures into politics, pushed into the background some fifteen years before. On February 24, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the party program, he had Esser read a proclamation in Munich, while he himself received a deputation of high party functionaries in Berlin. In his address to them he tried to inspire the group with the idea of a heroic Teutonic struggle to the last man: “Even though my hand trembles,” he assured the group, who had been visibly shocked by the sight of him, “and even if my head should tremble—my heart will never tremble.”46
Two days later the Russians in Pomerania broke through to the Baltic, thus giving the signal for the conquest of Germany. In the West the Allies at the beginning of March overran the west wall along its full extent from Aachen to the Palatinate. On March 6 they captured Cologne and established a bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine at Remagen. Then the Russians opened another grand offensive in Hungary and put Sepp Dietrich’s elite SS units to flight. Almost simultaneously Tito’s partisan armies went over to the attack, while the Western Allies crossed the Rhine at several additional points and advanced tempestuously into the interior of Germany. The war was entering its concluding phase.
Hitler reacted to the general collapse with renewed orders to hold out, with fits of rage and itinerant courts-martial. For the third time he relieved Field Marshal von Rundstedt of his post, had Sepp Dietrich’s units stripped of their armbands with the embroidered divisional name, and on March 28 tersely dismissed his chief of staff, ordering him to take a six-month recuperation leave at once. As the minutes of the conferences demonstrate, he had lost any over-all view and squandered his time in useless bickerings, recriminations, and reminiscences. Nervous and inconsistent meddling only made matters worse. At the end of March, for example, he gave the order to send a reserve unit of twenty-two light tanks to the vicinity of Pirmasens. Then, in response to alarming reports from the Moselle he directed them “to the vicinity of Trier,” then changed the order to “in the direction of Koblenz,” and finally, in response to changing reports from the front, ordered so many changes of direction that no one could possibly make out where the tanks were in actuality.
Now the strategy of doom reached the stage of realization. Rather than a calculated scheme of self-destruction, it was a chain reaction of reckless responses, outbursts of rage, and fits of hysterical weeping. Hitler’s heart was trembling after all. And yet at almost every juncture we can detect a craving (for catastrophe. In order to create an atmosphere of maximum intransigence, Hitler had as early as February issued instructions to the Propaganda Ministry to attack the Allied statesmen in such a way and to insult them so personally “that they will no longer have any possibility of making an offer to the German people.”47 With nothing but burned bridges behind him, he entered the last stage of the fight. A series of commands, the first of which was issued on March 19 (the “Nero Command”), ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial and food-supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.”
Preparations were at once made in the Ruhr for demolition of the mines and pitheads, for blocking canals by the sinking of cement-laden barges and for evacuation of the population into the interior, Thuringia, and the vicinity of the central Elbe. The abandoned cities, as Gauleiter Florian of Düsseldorf was slated to proclaim, were to be set afire. A so-called flag order made it clear that surrender was not to be thought of: all male persons were to be taken from houses showing a white flag and shot at once. An order to the commanders dated the end of March called for “the most fanatical struggle against the now mobile enemy. No consideration for the population can be taken.”48 In curious contrast were the efforts to safeguard the art treasures that had been looted from all over the continent, or Hitler’s preoccupation with the model of the city of Linz. These were last, futile stirrings of the lost dream of a state dedicated to beauty.