How the great king himself did not see any way out and did not know what to do; how all his generals and ministers were convinced that he was finished; how the enemy already looked upon Prussia as vanquished; how the future appeared entirely dark, and how in his last letter to the Minister Graf Finckenstein he set himself a time limit: if there was no change by February 15 he would give up and take poison. “Brave king!” Carlyle writes, “wait but a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Behind the clouds the sun of your good fortune is already rising and soon will show itself to you.” On February 12 the Czarina died; the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass. The Führer, Goebbels said, had tears in his eyes.52
The tendency to seek signs and portents outside reality extended far beyond books as the end came closer; here once again the irrationality of Nazism was revealed, which had been somewhat masked by its seeming modernity. In the early part of April Robert Ley became all excited over an inventor of “death rays.” Goebbels sought predictions in two horoscopes; and while American troops had already reached the foothills of the Alps, while Schleswig-Holstein was cut off and Vienna lost, out of planetary conjunctions, ascendants, and transits in the quadrant, hopes once more flickered up of a great turning point in the second half of April. Still full of these parallels and prognoses, Goebbels learned on April 13—he was returning from a front-line visit to Berlin during a heavy air raid and was sprinting up the steps of the Propaganda Ministry in the glare of fires and exploding bombs—that President Roosevelt had died. “He was in ecstasy,” one witness has described the scene, and immediately telephoned the Führer’s bunker. “My Führer, I congratulate you!” he shouted into the telephone. “It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. Today is Friday, April 13. It is the turning point!”53
In the bunker itself Hitler had meanwhile summoned cabinet ministers, generals, and functionaries, all the skeptics and men of little faith whom he had had to receive repeatedly during the past months in order to “hypnotize” them again and again. In a rush of words, with an old man’s excitability, he showed them the report: “Here! You never wanted to believe it…,”54 Once more Providence seemed to be trying to show it was on his side, to corroborate all the many miraculous dispensations of his life in one last overwhelming intervention. For a few hours a mood of noisy exhilaration prevailed in the bunker, a mingling of relief, gratitude, confidence, and something approaching certainty of victory. But nowadays no feeling could last. Later, Speer recalled, “Hitler sat exhausted, looking both liberated and dazed as he slumped in his armchair. But I sensed that he was still without hope.”
Roosevelt’s death had no effect upon military events. Three days later the Russians, with 2.5 million soldiers, 41,600 artillery pieces, 6,250 tanks, and 7,560 airplanes, opened the offensive against Berlin.
On April 20, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, the leadership of the regime met for the last time: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, Speer, Ley, Ribbentrop, and the top leaders of the Wehrmacht. A few days earlier Eva Braun had unexpectedly arrived, and everyone knew what her coming signified. Nevertheless, the artificial optimism of the bunker persisted; Hitler himself tried, during the birthday congratulations, to revive it once more. He delivered a few brief speeches, praised, encouraged, exchanged reminiscenses. In the garden he received a number of Hitler Youths who had proved their courage in the struggle against the rapidly advancing Soviet armies; he patted and decorated them. About the same time, the last death penalties arising out of the July 20, 1944, plot were carried out—as though sacrifices were being offered to some pagan demigod.
Originally Hitler had expressed the intention of leaving Berlin on his birthday and withdrawing to Obersalzberg, there to continue the fight from the “Alpine redoubt” within sight of the legend-haunted Untersberg. Some of the staff had already been sent ahead to prepare the Berghof. But on the eve of his birthday he had begun to waver. Goebbels in particular had passionately urged him to take up his post at the gates of Berlin for the struggle that would decide the war and, if need be, to seek death amid the ruins of the city as the only end appropriate to one of his historic rank. In Berlin, Goebbels argued, it was still possible to achieve a “moral world’s record.” Everyone else, however, now besought him to abandon the lost city and use the still remaining narrow corridor to the south for escape. In a few days or even hours the ring around Berlin would be closed. But Hitler remained uncertain, consenting only to the establishment of a northern and a southern command, in case Germany should be divided in the course of the enemy advance. “How am I to call on the troops to undertake the battle for Berlin,” he declared, “if at the same moment I withdraw myself to safety!” Finally he said that he would leave the decision to fate.55
On the evening of that same day the exodus began. Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer, and nearly the entire top command of the Luftwaffe joined the long columns of trucks that had been readied for departure. Pale and sweating, Göring took his leave of Hitler. He spoke of “extremely urgent tasks in South Germany.” But Hitler merely stared vacantly at Göring’s still massive figure;56 and there is some indication that his contempt for the weaknesses and opportunistic calculations that he now discovered all around him was already predetermining his decision.
At any rate, he gave orders that the Russians, who had advanced as far as the city line, were to be thrown back in a major attack by all available forces. Every man, every tank, every plane, was to be committed, and any unauthorized actions were to be punished with maximum severity. He entrusted SS Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner with the leadership of the offensive. But he himself started the units marching, determined their initial positions, and set up divisions that had long ago ceased to exist. One of the participants later expressed the suspicion that the new chief of staff, General Krebs, unlike Guderian did not bother giving Hitler accurate information, but instead let him occupy himself with “war games” that bore no relationship to reality but that took account of his illusions as well as the nerves of everyone involved.57 A vivid impression of the confusion of those days can be gathered from the notes of Karl Koller, chief of staff of the Luftwaffe:
April 21. Early in the morning Hitler telephones. “Do you know that Berlin is under artillery fire? The center of the city!” “No.” “Don’t you hear that?” “No! I am in the Werder game park.”
Hitler: “Intense excitement in the city over distant artillery fire. It is said to be a heavy caliber railroad battery. The Russians are said to have seized a railroad bridge across the Oder. The Air Force is to locate and attack the battery at once.”
I: “The enemy has no railroad bridge across the Oder. Maybe he has been able to capture a heavy German battery and turn it around. But probably what you are hearing are medium cannon of the Russian field army; by now the enemy should be able to reach the center of the city with them.” Prolonged debate over whether or not the firing comes from a railroad bridge over the Oder and whether artillery of the Russian field army can reach the center of Berlin….
Soon afterwards Hitler in person is again on the phone. He wants exact figures on the current air strikes south of Berlin. I reply that such questions cannot be answered out of hand because communications with the forces no longer function reliably. We have to be content, I say, with the current morning and evening reports, which are automatically sent in; he is most enraged about this.