Shortly afterwards Günsche heard that
General Krebs had been instructed to make contact with the Russian Marshal Zhukov in order to achieve a cessation of hostilities; accordingly, the breakthrough of the Berlin garrison was postponed. After that I returned to my room and after that put myself at the disposal of the combat group of SS Brigadeführer Mohnke.
This group was formed mainly from the Führer and SS escort battalions.
More hours passed as they waited for a response and anticipated an opportunity to get out of Berlin.
Bormann’s diary has an entry about the death of Hitler and Eva Braun under the date 30 April 1945.
On 1 May, evidently after Krebs returned, the entry consists of just one phrase: ‘Attempt to escape the encirclement!’ On that the diary ends.
At 18.00 hrs the previous day, Bormann had informed Grand Admiral Dönitz by radio-telegram that the Führer had appointed him, Dönitz, as his successor instead of Göring. Dönitz, not having heard of Hitler’s death, responded with effusions of devotion to the Führer and promised to come to his aid.
On 1 May at 07.40 hrs Bormann sent a top secret radio-telegram to Dönitz: the Führer’s will had come into force, but an official announcement should be postponed until Bormann himself arrived to see Dönitz.
Later the same day, at 15.00 hrs, he, jointly with Goebbels, sent Dönitz a last radio-telegram reporting the death of the Führer and his appointments to the top posts.
‘In the buffet corks were popping ,’ Rattenhuber writes, ‘as the SS men ratcheted themselves up before a desperate attempt to escape under Russian fire.’
The only people who remained were less fearful of retribution. All the others fled.
Voss:
SS Brigadeführer Mohnke, responsible for defending the area of the Reich Chancellery, saw that further resistance was useless and, in accordance with the orders of the commissioner for the defence of Berlin, assembled the remnants of his combat group, about 500 individuals. He was joined by surviving officials intending to fight their way out of the encirclement. All these people gathered by Dugout No. 3 at the Reich Chancellery… I was one of them.
The refusal Krebs brought back, and the words of Sokolovsky and Chuikov he reported – that, as agreed among the Allies, only unconditional surrender could be discussed – were the final catastrophe for Goebbels. He told Vice Admiral Voss that there was no point in him, with his limp and his children, even attempting to escape. He was doomed.
In fact, as I write about this now, I very much doubt he had any illusions about the possibility of an armistice. The British king had already rejected Himmler’s machinations out of hand. It was a fanatical careerist who sent Krebs to parley, purely in order to consolidate his place in history, Goebbels the second person in the Reich, Goebbels the Reich Chancellor, in case his emissaries to Dönitz proved unable to deliver the will.
He was no stranger to gestures and hypocrisy. In his will, Goebbels wrote that he was disobeying the Führer’s order to leave the capital and participate in the government he had appointed only because of his desire to be at the Führer’s side during these difficult days in Berlin.
In fact, however, for as long as Hitler was alive he did not allow Goebbels to leave him. When he decided on 22 April to remain in Berlin, Hitler surrounded himself with people devoted to him. It was he who, knowing Goebbels’ unquestioning obedience, ordered him to move, together with his wife and children, into the bunker.
Magda Goebbels told Dr Kunz and Hanna Reitsch that she had pleaded with Hitler at this time to leave Berlin. If Hitler had agreed in a timely fashion, both they and their children would have been able to get out. She must obviously have been thinking about that. There is testimony to the effect that she asked her husband to have the children evacuated in armoured personnel vehicles, but by that time it was impracticable.
Murdering his children if defeat seemed imminent was something Goebbels had thought about a long time ago, and imposed on his obedient wife. As early as August 1943 he advised his devoted adjutant, Wilfried von Oven, of his intention. Oven wrote later that ‘his thinking was directed to just one end: the effect on history.’[1]
Careerism was fundamental to Goebbels’ personality. Right up until the end of his life, he fusses tirelessly, backstabbing his rivals, portraying them in a bad light to the Führer and in his diary, and extolling himself at every turn in the expectation that his monstrous diary, which reads like misbegotten self-parody, will remain a primary source on the basis of which history will award points to fanatics inflamed by their own vanity.
In the farewell letter Magda Goebbels wrote from the Führerbunker to her elder son, Harald, ‘The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and that is why I also brought the children here. I could not bear to leave them for the life that will come after us, and a merciful God will understand me if I myself give them deliverance from it.’
And then, after describing how patiently the children had put up with the conditions in the bunker in which they were destined to die, she reports, ‘Last night the Führer took off his gold badge and pinned it on me. I am proud and happy.’
Goebbels, too, in the farewell letter to his stepson, goes on about the Führer’s gold badge and how it has been given to Harald’s mother.
Both these letters were spirited out of encircled Berlin by Hanna Reitsch. If he had sent the letter a day later, after Hitler had signed his testament listing the appointments in his new government, Goebbels could have told Harald about his culminating moment of destiny. Everything was jumbled together in that underground complex: genuine despair and posturing, fanaticism, hypocrisy and death.
Goebbels was sometimes called the Führer’s faithful dog. Well, Hitler tried out the poisonous ampoule on his beloved sheepdog, Blondi. Similarly, he kept Goebbels and his family close to him to the last, until it was too late for them to do anything about their predicament. With each successive betrayal of the Führer by his accomplices, Goebbels moved a rung up the ladder towards his ultimate ambition of becoming the second in command in the Reich. At last, on the day after Hitler’s wedding, when Red Army soldiers were already in the Reichstag, Hitler awarded Goebbels the post of Reich Chancellor of a defunct empire. The pantomime continued. Goebbels accepted the top job, only a day later to follow Hitler to the grave.
Sergeant Major Tornow came one last time to chef Lange for food for the puppies. Having the day before informed the cook of the death of the Führer, he was back with a similar message. Lange told us,
He came to the Reich Chancellery kitchen at 8 or 9 on the evening of 1 May and informed me that Goebbels and his wife had killed themselves in the garden near the Führer’s bunker. Sergeant Major Tornow told me no further details… In the evening of 1 May Sergeant Major Tornow was about to leave the Reich Chancellery and try to break through the ring of encirclement of Red Army units. Whether he managed to do so, I do not know.
Those fleeing the underground complex made their way to Wilhelmplatz, and there walked along the metro track to Friedrichstrasse. From there they needed to break through in the wake of Mohnke’s combat group, but intensive artillery shelling made any mass breakthrough impossible. They broke through in groups.