With the end drawing near, the mythologizing tendencies became increasingly dominant. Germany, embattled on all sides, was stylized into the image of the solitary hero. Idealized contempt for life and glorification of death by violence had long been deeply impressed upon the German mentality. Now that spirit was once again invoked. The fortresses and defense perimeters that Hitler had ordered to be established throughout the country and inflexibly held, symbolizing in miniature the idea of the forlorn hope that Germany as a whole represented. “There is only one thing I still want: the end, the end!” It was surely not accidental that Martin Bormann, in his last preserved letter from the chancellery written in early April, 1945, should have reminded his wife of the doom of “those old boys the Nibelungs in King Etzel’s [Attila’s] hall.” We may surmise that the assiduous secretary had also taken over this notion from his master.49
Goebbels, on his part, could exult once more when Wurzburg, Dresden, and Potsdam were leveled to the ground. For these acts of senseless barbarism sustained Hitler’s prediction that the democracies would ultimately be the losers, since they would have to betray their principles. Nor was that the only gratification. For these air raids were entirely in tune with Hitler’s own passion for destruction. In his proclamation of February 24 Hitler had actually voiced his regret that the Berghof on Obersalzberg had hitherto been spared by bombs. Not long after, the attack came. Three hundred and eighteen four-motored Lancaster bombers transformed the site, according to the report of an eyewitness, into a “moon landscape.”
The surmise that Hitler wanted to keep himself secure from the processes of doom he was so zealously sponsoring is probably mistaken. It is much more likely that despite all the shipwreck those weeks and days were irradiated by complex feelings of fulfillment. The suicidal impulse that had accompanied him throughout his life and predisposed him to take maximum risks, was at last reaching its goal. Once again he stood with his back to the wall, but now the game was up; there were no stakes left to double. In this end there was an element of excited onanism that alone explains the still considerable power of will summoned up by this “cake-gobbling human wreck,” as one member of his intimate entourage called the Hitler of the final weeks.
But the program for doom now encountered an unexpected block. Albert Speer, who had come close to being Hitler’s friend and had been his partner in past architectural enthusiasms, in the fall of 1944 began using his authority as Armaments Minister to counter Hitler’s destructive orders. Speer made his opposition felt in the occupied countries and in the German border areas as well. In taking this course, he was by no means free of scruples. Increasingly disenchanted though he had become, he was still conscious of owing a great deal to Hitler, whose personal liking for him had determined his whole career, and given him generous opportunities to develop his art, influence, fame, power. But when Speer was put in charge of the destruction of industries, his sense of responsibility, peculiarly colored by objective as well as romantic motivations, ultimately proved stronger than feelings of personal loyalty. In a series of memorandums he had tried by means of realistic situation analyses to persuade Hitler that from a military point of view the war was hopeless. All he gained, however, was Hitler’s disfavor, though modified by Hitler’s sentimentality. In February he had, in his “despair,” finally conceived the plan of killing the inmates of the Führer’s bunker by introducing poison gas into the underground ventilation system. But a last-minute reconstruction of the air shaft balked the plan and once again saved Hitler from assassination. On March 18 Speer handed him another memorandum predicting the impending “final collapse of the German economy with certainty” and reminding him of the leadership’s obligation “in a lost war to preserve a nation from a heroic end.” Speer later reproduced the gist of the conversation in a letter to Hitler:
From the statements you made that evening the following was unequivocally apparent—if I did not misunderstand you: If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. In any case, only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.
These words shook me to the core. And a day later when I read the demolition order and, shortly afterward, the stringent evacuation order, I saw these as the first steps toward carrying out these intentions.50
Although the demolition order stripped Speer of power and overrode all his instructions, he traveled to the regions close to the front and convinced the local authorities of the senselessness of the order. He had explosives disposed of under water and issued submachine guns to the heads of plants vital for the civilian economy so they could defend themselves against the appointed demolition squads. Called to account by Hitler, he insisted that the war was lost, and refused to go on vacation, as Hitler required. Later, in a dramatic scene, Hitler demanded that he take back what he had said about the war’s being lost, and then, when Speer remained obstinate, that he declare his faith in ultimate victory. Finally, as an almost piteous compromise, he asked Speer for an expression of hope in nothing more than “a successful continuance of the war”: “If you could at least hope that we have not lost! You must certainly be able to hope…. that would be enough to satisfy me.” But Speer still did not answer. Abruptly dismissed and given twenty-four hours to think it over, he finally escaped the threatened consequences by making a personal declaration of loyalty. Hitler was so moved that he actually restored part of Speer’s former powers.51
During these days Hitler left the bunker for the last time in order to visit the Oder front. He drove in a Volkswagen to the castle at Freienwalde, where generals and staff officers of the Ninth Army were waiting for him: a stooped old man with gray hair and sunken face who occasionally, with an effort, ventured a confident smile. Over the map table he pleaded with the officers standing around it: the Russian onslaught upon Berlin must be broken; every day and every hour gained was precious; he was fabricating the most frightful weapons and these would bring about the turning point; that was why he begged them to make a final effort. One of the officers commented that Hitler looked like a man who had risen from the grave.
But while in fact it proved possible to check the Soviet advance in the East for a short while, the Western front now fell apart. On April 1 General Model’s army group in the Ruhr area was encircled, and by April 11 the Americans reached the Elbe. Two days earlier Königsberg had fallen. At the Oder, meanwhile, the Russians were preparing their offensive against Berlin.
In those hopeless days Goebbels, according to his own account, consoled the despondent Führer by reading aloud to him from Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great, choosing the chapter that describes the difficulties the King encountered in the winter of 1761–62: