However, Soviet troops broke through the front in Pomerania. Hitler put the blame for this on the General Staff for failing to take account of his intuitive foresight. To suppress the ‘creeping disobedience’ of the generals, Hitler hastily established mobile field courts, charging them with investigating all cases immediately, passing sentence, and shooting generals found guilty.
On 11 March Hitler listened with satisfaction to Goebbels’ report that Colonel General Schörner, one of the few the Führer still trusted, had employed ‘radical methods’. ‘To raise the morale of the troops’, he had hanged a considerable number of German soldiers. ‘This is a good lesson that everyone will pay attention to,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary, delighted by the Führer’s approval. Hitler had just received a report that one of the new field courts had sentenced to death a general responsible for a bridge not being blown up, and that the general had been shot without delay.
‘That at least is a ray of light,’ Goebbels exclaims in his diary. ‘It is only by such measures that we can save the Reich.’
On the evening of 27 March, Hitler and Goebbels take a walk in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. In Goebbels’ words, ‘The garden of the Reich Chancellery looks desolate. There are piles and piles of debris. The Führer’s bunker is being reinforced.’ They regret having missed the moment when they could have dealt with the generals by directing the blow against them rather than against Röhm, if he had not been ‘a homosexual and anarchist’.
And if Röhm had had a first-rate personality without vice then, probably, on 30 June [1934] several hundred generals would have been shot instead of several hundred SA leaders.
A second call-up to the Volkssturm militia was announced and sixteenyear-olds were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Women’s battalions were formed in Berlin. ‘We should place them in the second rank, then the men would lose their desire to retreat from the first rank,’ Goebbels muses in his diary on 5 March.
Trains with men on leave were combed for deserters. On 7 March an order was issued that soldiers taken captive without being wounded or in the absence of evidence that they fought to the last moment, would be executed and their relatives arrested.
Massive daily air raids on Berlin by Anglo-American aircraft. (Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, had assured Germans that no enemy aircraft would ever cross the border into Germany.) War from the air, with which Hitler had planned to subjugate London, Moscow and Leningrad, had come with all its mercilessness into the skies above Germany.
On 8 March 1945, Goebbels writes in his diary,
We are being bombed night and day. The damage is very severe… We have nothing worth mentioning to oppose the enemy’s air armadas. The air war has turned the Reich into piles of rubble.
Transport was disrupted, the electricity supply was disrupted. Berlin was ablaze with fires. The postal service was no longer operating and delivery of coal was increasingly erratic. The supply of fuel had been reduced.
The food ration in Germany was catastrophically lowered, condemning the population to starvation. In mid-March, the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, considered the war lost because the German economy could only last another four weeks.
‘The problem of foreign workers is going to cause us major difficulties,’ we read in the diary of the commissioner for the defence of Berlin, Josef Goebbels.
We must try to retain these workers for as long, at least, as the industry of Berlin is capable of functioning. Over and above that, we want, even if Berlin were to be encircled, for industry, at least the arms industry, to continue to operate. On the other hand, the capital of the Reich has about 100,000 workers from the east [Ostarbeiter]. If they fall into the hands of the Soviets, we will find within three or four days that they are fighting us as a combative Bolshevik infantry. Needless to say, we must try if necessary to isolate at least the eastern workers as quickly as possible.
Hitler had promised that the outcome of this war would be the enrichment of the people of Germany, unheard-of territorial gains and world domination, but monstrous crimes had not brought victory. Everything was in ruins. A defeat was imminent that would wipe Hitler and his criminal accomplices from the face of the earth, but before that happened, Hitler would turn with murderous hatred on the German people for disappointing his hopes.
On 19 March he ordered a scorched earth policy, this time on German soiclass="underline" all military, industrial, transport and communications sites and facilities, and all Germany’s material resources were to be destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. The population was to be evacuated (but where to?). Cities taken by the enemy were to be devastated and destroyed. That the German people would thereby be deprived of their means of subsistence was of no consequence. Hitler formulated his attitude to this issue in an order he gave to Speer:
There is no need to take into consideration what the people need for a primitive continuation of life. On the contrary, it is better for us to destroy all this ourselves because the German people have shown their weakness… After a defeat, only inferior people remain.
In 1941, after experiencing the nightmarish December retreat from the gates of Moscow, Hitler told Goebbels that,
if he [Hitler] were to show a moment’s weakness, the front would turn into a landslide and a catastrophe would be imminent that would put that suffered by Napoleon completely in the shade.
Paradoxically, the Führer now found the dismal scenes of the German retreat from Moscow inspiring. They fed an illusion that a mortal threat would cause an upsurge of national fervour among the Germans and, at the critical moment, when German troops were defending the capital of the Third Reich, just as their enemy had when defending Moscow, they would bring about a turning point in the war.
Goebbels, instantly picking up on the direction in which the Führer’s thoughts and wishes were moving, was already describing the defence of Moscow as ‘an encouraging example’.
In his diary at this time we periodically find his traditional exaltation of the Führer. In part, this rhetoric is the autosuggestion Goebbels needs in order not to fall prey to doubts about Hitler’s ability to alter the course of events. ‘I am amazed how firmly the Führer is taking charge.’ But even the obsequious Goebbels allowed himself to criticize Hitler in his diary. At one time this is in connection with his orders: ‘We issue orders in Berlin which in reality do not go down the chain of command at all, quite apart from the question of whether they could possibly be carried out.’ Another time he complained that in this time of crisis Hitler cannot bring himself to make an appeal to the people on the radio. ‘The Führer has now a fear of the microphone I find completely incomprehensible.’ He goes on filling up the pages, one utterance cancelling out another, neutralizing it; one moment extolling Hitler, the next complaining about his lack of decisiveness.
Goebbels is dictating his diary, and has two full-time shorthand-typists employed at the Ministry of Propaganda for just that purpose. Every day he is dictating thirty, forty, fifty or more pathologically prolix pages.
Meanwhile, ‘Near Berlin the Soviets have begun what is admittedly only a local, but extremely powerful, offensive’ (23 March). The people are losing faith in the Führer and, more generally, losing hope. ‘The situation is intolerable.’ It has become known from a United Press report that the entire gold reserve of Germany and its art treasures (including the bust of Nefertiti) have fallen into the hands of the Americans in Thuringia. ‘If I were the Führer, I would know what needs to be done now… There is no strong hand…’ But what can be done? ‘I always insisted that the gold and the art treasures should not be evacuated from Berlin.’ On 8 April an unsuccessful attempt had been made to transfer them back from Thuringia to the capital, which Goebbels, the commissioner for the defence of Berlin, wholly irrationally supposed to be the most suitable safe place for them.