Career and status considerations continued to predominate among the top Nazi leaders. Sometimes this strikes even Goebbels as weird, especially if it concerns a rival.
Reich Minister Rosenberg is still opposing the dissolution of the Eastern Ministry. He is no longer calling it the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories, because that would be seen as grotesque, but the ‘Ministry of the East’. He wants to concentrate all our eastern policy in this ministry. I could with no less justification establish a western or southern ministry. It is complete nonsense, but Rosenberg is defending his status and refuses to accept that his ministry has long since failed.
The breakthrough of the fortifications on the Oder caused panic in Hitler’s headquarters. The Berlin bureaucracy fled: the Autobahn from Berlin to Munich was choked with their motor cars and nicknamed by the Berliners the ‘Reich Refugee Autobahn’. Nobody gave a second thought to the Berliners themselves.
The rumours were insistently repeated that a ‘new secret weapon’ would come into service on the Führer’s birthday. The mass psychosis of expecting a miracle spread to all sections of the population. Someone claimed to have seen vehicles shrouded with tarpaulins, concealing the secret weapon from prying eyes. People fantasized and tried to guess its destructive power.[1] Everyone was waiting for an announcement on the radio.
On 20 April, however, the Führer’s birthday, the radio was silent during the day, and silent at night, too, when shells were heard exploding as the long-range artillery of our 3rd Shock Army began firing on Berlin. The following day shells were exploding in the streets of the city. Berliners hiding in their basements could not understand why the radio had not warned them of the danger by sounding a siren.
There was neither a siren nor any announcement from the German high command when Red Army troops entered the outskirts of Berlin and the Battle of Berlin began.
After the breakthrough on the Oder, Hitler and his Headquarters prepared to move to his residence in Berchtesgaden (Obersalzberg). Orders were given to prepare to fly out.
Bormann notes in his diary:
Friday, 20 April. The Führer’s birthday, but the mood, unfortunately, is anything but festive. The advance team is ordered to fly out.
In Bormann’s papers, which I was going through in the now deserted underground complex and which I was next to see in the Council of Ministers Archive, there are radio-telegrams to his adjutant, Helmut von Hummel, with instructions to prepare accommodation in Berchtesgaden. On 21 April Hummel responded with his plan for locating services and departments, already partly implemented, and a request to approve it. Certain services had been moved to Berchtesgaden, as had part of Hitler’s archive, one of his secretaries, and his personal doctor, Theodor Morell. (Hitler had long been unable to get by without strong stimulants and Morell was constantly by his side.)
Everything was ready for the final flight but, on 21 April, the day Soviet troops entered the outskirts of Berlin and artillery fire reached the city centre, Hitler ordered a counter-attack. On 22 April, at a regular meeting with the army, Hitler heard from the generals that his counter-attack, under the command of SS General Felix Steiner, had not taken place and that Berlin could not be expected to hold out for long. Accordingly, he should leave the capital in order to allow the troops to retreat. This was all the more necessary because it made no sense for Hitler, as the commander-inchief, to remain encircled in Berlin. It would no longer be possible for him to command the armies from there.
Hitler’s reaction was fury, hysterics, shrieking about treason and a threat to commit suicide. He halted the meeting and ordered that he should be put through on the telephone to Goebbels.
What happened then is described by Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche: ‘After a few minutes Goebbels hobbled in. He was extremely agitated.’ Goebbels was conducted to the Führer’s office, where they talked. When Goebbels left the office, the generals and Bormann rushed to him. He said the Führer was in a state of collapse. He had never seen him in such a condition. He added, ‘how frightened he was when the Führer, in a cracking voice, told him over the telephone that he should immediately move with his wife and children to the bunker with him because it was all over.’
Later, when Jodl was arrested by the Allies, he told them under interrogation,
On 22 April Goebbels asked me whether it was possible to prevent the fall of Berlin by military means. I replied that it was possible, but only if we took all our troops from the Elbe and threw them into defending Berlin. On the advice of Goebbels, I reported my views to the Führer, he agreed and instructed Keitel and me, together with headquarters, to leave Berlin and personally lead the counter-attack.
To leave the Western Front open and withdraw all forces from there to defend Berlin was now Hitler’s decision. General Wenck’s Twelfth Army was ordered to fight its way through to aid Berlin.
Throughout 22 April the airwaves were heavy with radio-telegrams from Bormann to Hummel. Initially there are feverish orders to prepare for the Führer’s arrival in Berchtesgaden. By the end of the day, however, everything is reduced to a request in a telegram that survives in Bormann’s file:
22 April 45.
From Berlin.
To Hummel, Obersalzberg.
Send immediately with today’s planes as much mineral water, vegetables and apple juice as possible, and my mail.
The evacuation by air never happened. Anglo-American troops had reached Munich, which was near Berchtesgaden. Hitler could not bring himself to flee from defeated Berlin only to become a played-out pawn in the hands of the Anglo-Americans.
On 21 April Hitler had withdrawn German troops from the Elbe, opening the road to Berlin to the Americans, but they were still far away. In order to set back the hour of his death, he gave orders to blow up the barriers on the canal and flood the underground railway, which assault detachments of the Red Army, rapidly advancing towards the government district, had entered. Hitler gave that appalling order in the full knowledge that thousands of his compatriots would die as the water poured in: the wounded, women and children who had taken refuge in the underground tunnels.
His intention to remain in Berlin was seen by the generals as confirming his inability to continue to command the army.
Berlin was abandoned by the High Command of the German Armed Forces: Grand Admiral Dönitz; Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of Staff of the High Command; Colonel General Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the High Command; and Air Force General Koller. They and their headquarters staffs departed in search of a more secure base and there was subsequently almost no contact with them.
The infantry and tank divisions of the Red Army rapidly surrounded Berlin. In heavy fighting they flattened one belt of the German defences after another and the troops rushed towards the city centre. Russian artillery shells were reaching the Reich Chancellery, and it was only the heavy concrete of his bunker that saved Hitler after a direct hit. The Chancellery’s radio mast collapsed and its underground cable was damaged.
1
During the Nuremberg Trials Albert Speer confirmed that Germany was considerably behind in atomic energy. ‘We would have needed another one or two years to split the atom.’