Hitler

Oppositions

At the beginning of 1944 the assault upon Fortress Europe began in earnest, forging Hitler to the defensive on all fronts. In the south the Western powers pressed forward as far as Central Italy. Their technological advantage, based for the most part on superior radar, enabled them to wage almost total air warfare, while the German side was forced temporarily to cease submarine attacks. In the East, meanwhile, the Russians were racing toward the battlefields on which the German armies had won their first great victories in the summer of 1941. Though his defensive lines were wavering and breaking everywhere, Hitler merely continued to repeat his formula of resistance to the last man, thus once again revealing that his talents as a generalissimo covered only offensive situations. The speed of the retreat kept him from carrying out his aim of leaving the enemy nothing but “a totally scorched and destroyed land.”¹ But the landscape itself was the scene of a ghostly drama. Oil-soaked iron grids had been set up above gigantic fires, and members of “Squad 1005” worked feverishly and silently around these. Their assignment was to locate the innumerable mass graves of nearly three years of rule, to exhume the corpses, and to eliminate all traces of the massacres. Gigantic clouds of black smoke rose up from these cremation sites. The regime was abjuring its visions and reducing them to an idée fixe.

Ever since it had become apparent that strength was departing from Hitler’s colossus, resistance had been stirring everywhere in Europe. In many cases it was centered in the Communist parties, but it also sprang from leagues of military officers, from the Catholic Church, or from groups of intellectuals. In some countries, such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and even France, it became organized in paramilitary formations, calling themselves the Home Army or the Fighting Forces of the Interior, to wage an embittered and bloody war against the occupation troops. The Germans answered the growing number of assassinations and acts of sabotage with summary executions of hostages, in which the death of a single guard might often be paid for by twenty, thirty, or even more victims. The revenge of SS Division Das Reich upon the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and its 600 innocent inhabitants marked the climax of this merciless guerrilla war. Tito’s famous breakthrough operation on the Neretva, or the Warsaw uprising of the summer of 1944, were battlelike actions that became legends of the European Resistance.

Simultaneously, oppositional forces reappeared also inside Germany. In the past years they had been undone first by Hitler’s diplomatic, then his military successes, and after the victory over France had reached the nadir of discouragement. But now the changing fortunes of the war brought out all the repressed doubts that had been present since the beginning of the Hitler regime, alongside of the cheering and jubilation. After Stalingrad, and once more after the defeats of the winter of 1943–44, the prevalent mood in Germany for considerable spells of time was compounded of fear, war weariness, and apathy. It was a mood that spurred the efforts of the opposition, since there was at last some hope of a response. After the many disappointments of earlier years the oppositionists were afraid that the rapidly approaching military defeat would once more, and forever, rob them of their chance to act. This concern enormously strengthened their resolution. But it also provides grounds for the charge, which has been repeatedly voiced, that the German opposition opportunistically resolved to topple the regime only when it was already falling. All that happened, it has been argued, is that a few nationalists roused themselves to act because they were more eager to save the country’s power than its morality.

We cannot judge this matter without taking into account the difficulties the opposition faced in 1944. Some time before, the Gestapo had blown the cover of the “Central Bureau,” Oster’s office, and arrested its chief members. Admiral Canaris had been largely frozen out, and General Beck temporarily incapacitated by a severe illness. Moreover, Mussolini’s fall had given Hitler a good scare and prompted him to still greater wariness. He tried more than ever before to keep his movements secret. His staff had instructions to conceal scheduled appointments even from the highest persons in the leadership, such as Göring and Himmler. On the rare occasions that he did appear in public he usually changed the program at short notice, sometimes only minutes before he was due to appear. Even in his own headquarters he used to wear the heavy, armored cap that came down over his ears. In his radio address of September 10, 1943, dealing with the events in Italy, there was a distinctly threatening note in the way he called upon his “field marshals, admirals, and generals” to show their loyalty to him and dash the enemy’s hopes of finding in the German officers corps “traitors like those in Italy today.”

The dilemma faced by the active opponents of the regime in Germany was computed of a complicated complex of inhibitions of a traditional order. While throughout the European Resistance, national and moral duty coincided almost completely, in Germany these norms clashed sharply, and for a good many of those who opposed the regime the contradiction was insoluble. Throughout all their years of plotting and planning, many leading members of the opposition, particularly the military men, were unable to overcome entirely that last emotional barrier. What they were projecting still seemed to them treason, a renewed “stab in the back.” Unlike the European Resistance, what they could initially expect from their liberating act was not liberty but defeat and surrender to an implacable enemy. And it would take an arrogant moralist to belittle the conflict of those who, despite their hatred of Hitler and their horror of the crimes he instigated, nevertheless could not forget the crimes of Stalin, the atrocities of the “Red Terror,” or the great purges, as well as the victims of the Katyn Forest massacre.

Such scruples also marked the unending discussions whose gravity can be appreciated today only by an act of historical empathy. How binding was an oath taken to one who had committed perjury? How far did the duty of obedience extend? Above all, there was the question of assassination, which some saw as essential and as the only consistent, grand act of resistance, whereas others, whose moral integrity cannot be called into question,² rejected the idea to the very end. But both groups were isolated within their own country, surrounded by a gigantic intelligence apparatus and always vulnerable to denunciation. In addition, the dependence of all their plans upon the course of events was a perpetual brake upon action. Every victory of Hitler’s diminished the chances for an internal coup; every defeat weakened the opposition’s stance with regard to the Allies, whose support was indispensable.

Given these circumstances, the history of the German opposition is a saga of scruples, contradictions, and mix-up. The sources sometimes lead one to think that a good many of the doubts that plagued the opposition were inspired by a mania for creating problems, thus dodging the obligation to act. Other scruples served one group among the higher officers as an excuse for their own moral rigidity. But even considering all this, there remains in all the statements and activities of the German opposition an unmistakable note of deep despair. This evidently sprang not so much from the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the brutal regime as from the inner impotence of people who had recognized the anachronistic, crippling nature of their values, but were nevertheless unable to give those values up. Significantly, such men as Generals Beck, Halder, and von Witzleben, or Admiral Canaris, much as they despised Hitler, had to conquer a thousand resistances within themselves before they could resolve to act, and after the first failure in the autumn of 1938 they never again summoned up the momentum. It took the entry of a number of young officers, less hampered by preconvictions, to supply new energy to an enterprise that had run down from the weight of its arguments and counterarguments. One of them, Colonel von Gersdorff, recognized this contrast. He has described how carefully Field Marshal von Manstein, in the course of a talk, excluded himself from the circle of the conspirators. At last, after a pause for reflection, he broke the silence by asking: “Then you want to kill him?!” And received the terse reply: “Jawohl, Herr Feldmarschall, like a mad dog!”

From the spring of 1943 on, there was a series of attempts at assassination. Not one came off, either because of technical failure, or Hitler’s knack for scenting danger, or because some seemingly incredible chance intervened. Two explosives that Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff had placed in the Führer’s plane in the middle of March, 1943, after Hitler had visited the headquarters of Army Group Center, failed to explode. A week later von Gersdorff planned to blow himself up, together with Hitler and all the leaders of the regime, during a tour of the Berlin Arsenal. This project came to nothing because Hitler suddenly cut the visit to ten minutes, so that the time fuse could not be set off. Colonel Stieff planned to set off a bomb during a military conference in the Führer’s headquarters; this failed because the bomb exploded prematurely. A young infantry captain named Axel von dem Bussche volunteered in November to sacrifice himself: while showing new army uniforms, he would leap upon Hitler, seize him, and at the same time set off the explosion. But on the day before this plan was to be carried out, an Allied bomb destroyed the uniforms. When in December von dem Bussche appeared with a new set of samples, Hitler suddenly decided to go to Berchtesgaden. By so doing he frustrated both this attempt and another planned for December 26 by a colonel who wanted to carry a time bomb into the Führer’s headquarters in his briefcase. This was the first appearance on the scene of Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. Shortly afterward von dem Bussche was severely wounded, whereupon another officer put himself at the disposal of the conspirators: Ewald Heinrich von Kleist. For reasons never explained Hitler did not appear at the presentation planned for February 11. An attempt by Cavalry Captain von Breitenbuch to shoot Hitler down during a conference at the Berghof failed because the SS guard, allegedly on orders from Hitler himself, refused the captain admittance to the great hall. A number of other projected assassinations ended similarly.

The conspirators were no more successful in their efforts to gain foreign backing for their operation and to obtain certain assurances from the Western powers in case of a successful coup d’etat. Their repeated tries to make contact by all sorts of routes invariably went wrong. Granted, the reluctance of the Allied statesmen was far from incomprehensible. Why should they tie their own hands when victory was at last within sight? Moreover, they were justifiably concerned about affronting the Soviet Union, and with the elation that sprang from certainty of victory they were incapable of grasping the involved politico-moral conflicts of the German conspirators. Moreover, there was in Roosevelt, Churchill, and several of their advisers an unmistakable hostility toward the very type of person who now came forward to offer himself as the pillar of a new system, but who seemed only to represent the system of the day before yesterday: “militarists,” “Prussian Junkers,” “the General Staff.”

Nor was this feeling on the part of the Western powers mollified when in 1943 none other than Heinrich Himmler for a moment bobbed up on the periphery of the opposition. Disturbed by Hitler’s seemingly morbid obstinacy and urged on by several of his own followers, he had obtained a medical affidavit that apparently described Hitler’s general condition as pathological. Thereupon, though constantly vacillating, he had allowed Walter Schellenberg, chief of the foreign service of the SD, to utilize go-betweens in Spain, Sweden, and America to sound out the possibilities of a compromise peace without and against Hitler.³

Meanwhile several conservative plotters were attempting to play off the key figures of the regime against one another and simultaneously extend the opposition’s connections into the realms of the SS, the police forces, and the Gestapo. On August 26, 1943, a meeting between Johannes Popitz, Prussian Secretary of the Treasury, and Heinrich Himmler provided the opposition with information on the acute qualms even among the regime’s top leaders. But then the threads broke, almost simultaneously in all directions. Among the foreign countries, England in particular took a strong stand against all efforts at a premature peace settlement. Domestically, the leading members of the opposition themselves became involved in fierce controversy. Undoubtedly Popitz and the advocates of the resistance by intrigue who were playing along with Himmler and the SS intended to outwit their partners after the success of the planned coup, and re-establish legal conditions. This was nothing but a stupid revival of the conservatives’ old illusions in the spring of 1933 that they would be able to “tame” Hitler. But in addition it was a failure to realize that even the most temporary alliance with one of the infamous members of the regime would utterly compromise the meaning and ethics of the opposition. In the course of one dispute in the headquarters of Army Group Center several of the younger officers indignantly told Admiral Canaris that in the future they would refuse to shake hands with him if a planned contact with Himmler were actually undertaken.

Such differences of opinion, and in general the peculiar babble of voices presumably speaking for the German opposition, should make it clear that it was not a bloc. To treat it as if it were a single concept is inaccurate; it was a loose assemblage of many groups objectively and personally antagonistic and united only in antipathy for the regime. Three of these groups emerge with somewhat sharper contours: (1) The Kreisau Circle, called after Count Helmuth James von Moltke’s Silesian estate. This was chiefly a discussion group of high-minded friends imbued with ideas of both Christian and socialist reform. As a civilian group its opportunities were limited, and it practiced revolt only in the sense of intellectual encouragement. “We are being hanged because we thought together,” von Moltke wrote in one of his last letters from prison, with a note of almost happy pride at the power of the spirit thus attested by his death sentence.⁴ (2) Then there was the group of conservative and nationalist notables gathered around Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, and General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff. These men, not yet cognizant of the meaning of Hitler’s policies, were still claiming a leading role for a Greater Germany within Europe. It has seriously been questioned whether they even offered any real alternative to Hitler’s imperialistic expansionism. So strong was their leaning toward an authoritarian state that they have been called a continuation of the antidemocratic opposition in the Weimar Republic. Moltke spoke tersely of the “Goerdeler trash.”⁵ (3) Finally there was the group of younger military men such as von Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, and Olbricht, with no pronounced ideological affiliations, although for the most part they sought ties with the Left and in contrast to Beck and Goerdeler did not look to a rapprochement with the Western powers, but with the Soviet Union.

In terms of background, a strikingly large number of the conspirators belonged to the Old Prussian nobility. There were also members of the clergy, the academic professions, and high-ranking civil servants. On the whole, those oppositionists who were now beginning to urge action were people originally from the conservative or liberal camp, with a sprinkling of Social Democrats. The Left was still suffering from the effects of the persecution, but it, too, with characteristic ideological rigidity, feared any alliance with army officers as a “pact with the devil.” Among the many participants in the opposition there was, significantly, not a single representative of the Weimar Republic; that republic did not survive even in the Resistance. But members of the lower middle class were also conspicuously absent, and also businessmen. The former showed the “little man’s” dull constancy to a course once taken and his inability to enter into any commitments beyond the personal realm. The latter remained fixated upon the traditional German alliance between industrial interests and power politics. Business always came to heel when the state whistled. That meant an economy capable of unusual performance; but it also led by many involved paths all the way to the defendants’ benches in the Nuremberg trials of industrialists. Finally, there were scarcely any workers in the Resistance. Their opposition was greater than historians have so far noted, but it was still far less than their role of grand historic antagonists to Fascism called for. Fundamentally, they offered no real resistance on a realistic basis at all but, rather, a series of demonstrations, mute and planless, as if they were stunned from their defeat of 1933 and from the fading of all dreams about the power and importance of the proletariat.⁶ All these groups, moreover, were intimidated by the events of the war; they were exhausted and had experienced a failure of nerve. What can really be called opposition came “from above.”

It remained isolated. In February, moreover, von Moltke was arrested and the Kreisau Circle broken up. Shortly afterward, the Abwehr was subjected to a merciless investigation, so that discovery of the conspiracy had to be daily reckoned with. Goerdeler and Beck, repeatedly wavering, made a last attempt in April, 1944, to act before time ran out. They sent an offer to the United States to throw open the Western front after the coup d’etat and permit Allied parachute units to land in the territory of the Reich. But once again they received no reply. Their only course now was to place the elimination of the regime on the plane of moral argument, independent of all strategic and political considerations. Several of the conspirators seem to have taken the view that the top leadership should see the disaster through to the end and experience their just retribution.

It was chiefly Stauffenberg who now took over. He established new connections and recruited new conspirators. In spite of the Allied formula of unconditional surrender, in spite of the danger of a new stab-in-the-back legend, in spite of the possible charges of tardiness and opportunism, he pushed straight through all inhibitions and steered toward assassination and a coup. The scion of an old family of South German nobility, related to the Yorck and Gneisenau families, he had in his youth associated with the Stefan George circle. Legend has it that on January 30, 1933, he placed himself at the head of an enthusiastic crowd in Bamberg, to hail the beginning of the new regime. That happens not to be true, but he certainly watched with moderate approval the regime’s revolutionary tendencies and Hitler’s early successes.

He made a distinguished career as an officer attached to the General Staff. The 1938 pogroms against the Jews first aroused doubts in him; and in the course of the war, as he observed the occupation in the East and what was being done to the Jews there, he developed into a principled opponent of the Nazi government. He was thirty-seven years old and had lost his right hand, two fingers of his left hand, and an eye in the North African theater. Stauffenberg provided an organizational frame for an undertaking that had bogged down in mental maneuverings. He replaced obsolete notions, which trapped many military men in an inextricable tangle of clashing principles, with something akin to revolutionary resolve. “Let’s get to the essence,” he once began a conversation with a new conspirator. “With all the means at my disposal I am practicing treason.”⁷

Time was pressing. In the spring the conspirators had succeeded in winning over none other than Rommel, the field marshal, who enjoyed great popularity. Around the same time Himmler remarked to Admiral Canaris that he had definite knowledge that a revolt was being planned by certain groups in the Wehrmacht; he, Himmler, would strike at the proper moment. Moreover, the Allied invasion was expected at any time, and it could be assumed that this would scotch all the conspirators’ subsidiary political aims. It would also provide the tradition-bound older officers with a new alibi.

On July 4, 1944, the Gestapo arrested Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein as they were attempting to extend the network of Resistance cells by making contact with the Communist group that had formed around Anton Saefkow. In thus striking, the Gestapo itself propelled events toward a decision. Even Stauffenberg seems to have wavered for a moment at this time. A message from Tresckow, which incidentally revealed the innermost motivations of the conspirators, implored Stauffenberg to put aside all considerations of success or failure and wait no longer: “The assassination must be attempted, coûte que coûte. Even if it does not succeed, they must act in Berlin as if it did. The practical purpose no longer matters; what matters is that the German resistance movement should have taken the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, anything else is of no consequence.”⁸

On June 6, 1944, the invasion forces began moving out of the ports of southern England. An armada of 5,000 vessels headed for the coast of Normandy, while British and American parachute units dropped on the flanks of the intended landing zone. Toward three o’clock in the morning the first landing craft entered the water several miles off the coast, and, in rough seas, moved out of the shadow of the transport fleet.

As they approached shore toward dawn some three hours later, thousands of planes flew over the coastal strip and dropped a hail of bombs on the German positions. Simultaneously, the entire landing area was bombarded by heavy naval guns. At some points, especially at the foot of the Cotentin Peninsula and near the mouth of the Orne, the landing operation succeeded against unexpectedly meager German resistance. But in the central part of the landing area, near Vierville, the Americans ran into a German division that by chance had been alerted for an invasion exercise, and encountered withering fire (Omaha Beach). The defenders fired at a “carpet of people,” one report put it; the entire beach was covered with burning armored vehicles, ships, and dead and wounded men. By evening the Americans had taken two small bridgeheads, and the British and Canadians had seized an expanse of beach amounting to nearly 200 square miles. Above all, the Allies possessed numerical superiority in the landing area.

The quick success of the landing operation once again exposed German inferiority in matériel and military forces. Even the time and place of the invasion had taken the Germans by surprise. Because of German weakness in the air, the Allied troops and fleets had assembled undiscovered in the deployment area of southern England. German military counterintelligence had, it is true, precisely predicted the time of the landing, but the Abwehr was in bad odor and no attention had been paid to this information. Field Marsha] von Rundstedt, the commander in chief in the West, had informed Hitler as recently as May 30 that no signs of an impending landing could be observed. Field Marshal Rommel, inspector of the coastal defenses, had left his headquarters on June 5 and gone to Berchtesgaden for a talk with Hitler. Moreover, the German leadership was convinced that the enemy attack would come at the narrowest point of the Channel, in the Pas de Calais, and had therefore placed the main force there. Hitler, on the other hand, guided by his peculiar “intuition,” had expressed the view that Normandy was just as likely an invasion area; but he had finally bowed to the opinion of his military experts, all the more so since that opinion seemed to be confirmed by various movements on the enemy’s part.

The invasion exposed a disastrous failure of leadership on the German side. The crisis had been foreshadowed when Hitler could not manage to forge the divergent views of his generals into a coherent plan for fending off a landing. The result was a series of muddled compromises, aggravated by the prevailing confusion of authority. On June 6 various command centers were scattered all over Berchtesgaden, not one of them able to function wholly independently, communicating with one another solely by telephone throughout the morning, and arguing chiefly over the release of the four reserve divisions in the West. Hitler himself, meanwhile, after one of his long, empty nights of palaver had gone to bed toward morning, with orders not to be awakened for the present. A first military conference took place at last early in the afternoon; but Hitler had asked the participants to meet in Castle Klessheim, about an hour’s drive by car from Berchtesgaden, for he was expecting Hungarian Premier Sztójay there on that day. After his arrival he went up to the map table; from his look one could not tell whether he suspected the Allies of a feint or was himself trying to deceive his entourage. In Austrian dialect he said the equivalent of: “So this is it!” A few minutes later, after being briefed on the latest developments, he went to the upper rooms for the “show sit.” Shortly before five o’clock in the afternoon he finally issued the order “that the enemy is to be annihilated at the bridgehead by evening of June 6.”

Almost throughout the initial phase of the invasion Hitler retained that somnambulistic calm, seemingly divorced from reality, that he had displayed on the first day. Again and again in the preceding months he had declared that the offensive in the West would decide victory or defeat: “If the invasion is not repulsed, the war is lost for us.” Now, with his faith in his infallibility, he was unwilling to realize that the landing operation was indeed the invasion. Instead, he held considerable forces in the area between the Seine and the Scheldt, where they waited in vain for the landing of those phantom divisions that the enemy by a stratagem had conjured up for him (“Operation Fortitude”). Meanwhile, in his usual manner, he interfered in the fighting even on the lower planes of command and made decisions rationally incompatible with the situation at the front.

On June 17 Hitler at last yielded to Rundstedt’s and Rommel’s impatient urging and came to the rear area of the invasion front for a personal briefing. The talks took place in the Wolfsschlucht II Führer’s headquarters in Margival, north of Soissons, which had been set up in 1940 for the invasion of England. Hitler “looked pale and sleepless,” Rommel’s chief of staff, General Speidel, wrote. “He played nervously with his glasses and with pencils of all colors, which he held in his hand. He was the only one seated, hunched on a stool, while the field marshals were kept standing. His earlier magnetic force seemed gone. After a brief, frosty greeting he started shouting, bitterly expressing his displeasure at the successful landing of the Allies and trying to find fault with the local commanders.”

Rommel pointed out the enormous enemy superiority. Hitler rejected that excuse, as he rejected, too, the request for permission to withdraw the threatened German forces from the Cotentin Peninsula and to bring up the reserves from the Pas de Calais. Instead, Hitler expatiated with increasing emphasis upon the “decisive” effect of the secret “V” weapons, and promised “masses of turbo fighters” that would drive the enemy from the skies and at last force England to her knees. When Rommel attempted to turn the discussion to political questions and to insist, in view of the grave situation, on steps toward ending the war, Hitler brusquely interrupted him. “Don’t you worry about the continuance of the war, but about your invasion front,” he said.⁹

The antipathies that emerged in the course of this meeting intensified Hitler’s already strong distrust of the officer corps. Significantly, shortly before his arrival he had had the area ringed by SS units, and during the one-dish meal with von Rundstedt and Rommel he started to eat only after the food had been tasted. Throughout the meal two SS men were posted behind his chair. Before they parted the generals tried to persuade Hitler to come to Rommel’s headquarters and listen to the reports of several frontline commanders. Reluctantly, Hitler agreed to come on June 19. But shortly after Rundstedt and Rommel had left Margival, he himself returned to Berchtesgaden.¹⁰

Within ten days the Allies had landed nearly a million men and 500,000 tons of matériel. But even now, after calling on Hitler in Berchtesgaden, the field marshals could not persuade him to yield them so much as freedom of decision in operational matters. Icily, he listened to their representations and ignored their request for a talk in a small group. Instead, he abruptly relieved von Rundstedt of his post. He appointed Field Marshal von Kluge to succeed him.

Kluge’s first appearance at the front made it plain how deceptive and distorted the image of reality had become in Hitler’s entourage. Kluge had just spent two weeks as a guest at the Berghof, and in spite of his critical if vacillating attitude toward Hitler, he had become imbued with the view that the leadership of the troops in the West was suffering from a failure of nerve and defeatism. On his arrival at the invasion front, he reproached Rommel in a heated argument with being unduly impressed by the enemy’s material superiority and therefore blocking Hitler’s justified orders. Furious at the commander in chief’s “Berchtesgaden style,” Rommel challenged him to go to the front and see for himself. As could be expected, two days later Kluge returned from his visit to the front considerably sobered. On July 15 Rommel, by way of Kluge, addressed a teletype message to Hitler: “The unequal struggle is nearing its end,” he wrote, and concluded with a demand: “I must ask you immediately to draw the necessary conclusions from this situation.” To General Speidel he remarked: “If he [Hitler] draws no conclusions, we shall act.”¹¹

Stauffenberg was also bent on taking action—all the more so since it appeared that the entire Eastern front was also breaking under the impact of the Soviet summer offensive. A fortunate circumstance had arisen: on June 20 Stauffenberg had been appointed chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the army reserve (sometimes called the home army), and thus had admission to the military conferences in the Führer’s headquarters. Upon taking office on July 1 he had told Fromm that he must in fairness inform him he was planning a coup d’etat, Fromm had listened silently and asked his new chief of staff to assume his duties.

On July 6 and 11 Stauffenberg had been summoned to conferences in the Führer’s headquarters at the Berghof. After so many fiascos he had now resolved to undertake both the assassination and the leadership of the coup personally. On both occasions he had taken a package of explosives with him and had arranged for his immediate return to Berlin. But he had both times given up his plan since neither Göring nor Himmler, whom he intended to eliminate simultaneously, was present in the conference room. Another attempt on July 15 miscarried because Stauffenberg found no opportunity to set the ignition mechanism before the beginning of the conference, On July 11 and July 15 the troops that were to occupy Berlin had been placed on emergency footing; both times the undertaking had to be called off and all elements of suspicion eliminated.

On July 17, two days after the last attempt, the conspirators learned that an order for Goerdeler’s arrest was pending. Unlike the cases of Leber, Reichwein, Moltke, and Bonhoeffer, they felt that Goerdeler was not the sort of person who would be able to keep silent under Gestapo interrogation. Stauffenberg took this information as the final mandate for action; the Rubicon had now been crossed, he remarked. That same day Rommel was severely wounded, thus putting one of the key figures in Stauffenberg’s game out of commission. For the field marshal enjoyed great prestige among the Allies, and the latest idea had been to have him obtain an armistice in the West, evacuate the occupied areas, and use the returning armies to support the coup. Nevertheless, Stauffenberg refused to be deterred at this point. He would now act no matter what the circumstances, he declared, but added that this would be his last attempt.

A few days earlier the Führer’s headquarters had again been transferred from Berchtesgaden back to Rastenburg. The convoy stood ready to depart and everyone had already gone to their cars when Hitler turned back once more and re-entered the Berghof. He stepped into the salon, stood a while in front of the big window, and then walked about the room with slow, uncertain steps. For a few moments he lingered in front of Anselm Feuerbach’s Nana. He indicated to one of the bystanders that he probably would not be returning to this place.¹²

Stauffenberg had an appointment to report in Rastenburg on July 20.

The assassination attempt and the dramatic events of that day have been frequently described: the sudden shift of the conference to a barrack whose thin walls did not confine the explosion; Stauffenberg’s belated arrival, after he had been surprised in an adjacent building while he was setting the time fuse with a pair of pliers; the search for Stauffenberg immediately after he had placed the bomb under the heavy map table and left the room; the explosion as Hitler, leaning over the table and propping his chin in his hand followed General Heusinger’s report on the map. Stauffenberg stood beside his readied car some distance away and observed a huge cloud of smoke rise up over the barrack, wood and paper whirl through the air, and people rushing out of the shattered building. Then, certain that Hitler was dead, he made his escape and flew to Berlin, while much precious time passed.

Like everyone else in the room, Hitler had experienced the explosion as an “infernally bright darting flame” and a deafening crash. When he got up out of the burning, smoking debris with blackened face and the back of his head singed, Keitel came running toward him, shouting, “Where is the Führer?” and helped him get out of the room. Hitler’s trousers hung in shreds; he was covered with dust, but only lightly injured. He had escaped with slight bleeding at his right, elbow, and a few trivial bruises on the back of his left hand; and although both his eardrums had been ruptured, he suffered some loss of hearing only for a short time. The injuries to his legs were the worst; many splinters of wood had been driven into the flesh. But at the same time he discovered to his surprise that the trembling in his left leg had largely ceased. Of the twenty-four persons who had been in the room at the time of the explosion, only four were severely injured. A prime factor in protecting Hitler had been the heavy table top he was leaning over at the moment of detonation. He was excited, but at the same time seemed curiously relieved. Repeatedly, and with some satisfaction, he told his retinue that he had long known of a conspiracy and now at last he could unmask the traitors. He displayed his tattered trousers like a trophy and did the same with his jacket, which had a square hole ripped out of the back.¹³

His calm derived principally from the sense of a “miraculous rescue.” It was as if he owed to this treacherous act his reinforced sense of his own mission. That, at any rate, was his interpretation of the event when Mussolini arrived in Rastenburg in the afternoon for a previously announced visit. As they looked at the devastated conference room, Hitler said: “When I call it ali to mind again, I conclude… that nothing is fated to happen to me, all the more so since this isn’t the first time I’ve miraculously escaped death…. After my rescue from the peril of death today I am more than ever convinced that I am destined to carry on our great common cause to a happy conclusion.”

Obviously impressed, Mussolini added: “This was a sign from heaven.”¹⁴

In the course of the afternoon, however, his self-mastery was to give way. Toward five o’clock Hider and Mussolini were back at the Führer’s bunker where Göring, Ribbentrop, Donitz, Keitel, and Jodi were assembled. The conversation once again centered around Hitler’s salvation, but soon passed into mutual and increasingly ugly reproaches. Admiral Donitz inveighed against the treacherous army, and Göring joined him; but then Donitz also attacked the air force and its inadequate performance. Whereupon Göring attacked Ribbentrop for the failure of his foreign policy and, if the account of the incident is correct, finally raised his marshal’s baton and waved it threateningly. Ribbentrop, addressed without the preposition denoting nobility, rapped back at Göring that he was the Foreign Minister and that his name was von Ribbentrop. For a while Hitler seemed lost in thought; he sat dully brooding, sucking on the various colored lozenges prescribed by Dr. Morell. But when one of the disputants spoke of the purge of Röhm, he sprang to his feet and began without the least preamble to rage. The punishment he had inflicted on the traitors then was nothing in comparison to the retaliation he would practice now, he screamed; he would annihilate the guilty together with their wives and children; no one who had opposed the workings of Providence would be spared. While he was shrieking, white-clad SS servants moved silently through the rows of chairs, accompanying the murderous tirade by serving tea.

The events in Berlin, with their crises, climaxes, and debacle, have also been described many times over: the incomprehensibly delayed launching of “Operation Valkyrie”; the failure to cut oif news from the Führer’s headquarters; Remer’s telephone conversation with Hitler (“Major Remer, do you hear my voice?”); the arrest of Fromm; Stauffenberg’s persistent pleading and propelling the slow-moving mechanism into action; Field Marshal von Witzleben’s angry scene at the headquarters of the High Command of the armed forces; the radio announcement around nine o’clock that Hitler would speak to the German people that very evening; the first signs of helpless perplexity on the part of the conspirators; the arrest of City Commandant von Hase; then again Stauffenberg still passionately urging but meeting no response, and finally reappearing late in the evening, resigned, his eyeflap removed, passing through the rooms of the OKW; and finally Fromm’s theatrical reappearance on the scene, suddenly reasserting control over the seemingly paralyzed military apparatus on which the conspirators had placed their hopes. All this followed by the arrests, by Beck’s several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, by the hastily arranged executions in front of the sandpile in the inner courtyard, illuminated by the headlights of a few trucks; and finally Fromm’s “Hurrah!” for the Führer.

Toward one o’clock in the morning Hitler’s voice spoke over all German radio stations:

German racial comrades! I do not know how many times an assassination attempt against me has been planned and carried out. If I speak to you today, I do so for two reasons: first, so that you may hear my voice and know that I myself am uninjured and well. Secondly, so that you may also learn the details about a crime that has not its like in German history.

A very small clique of ambitious, wicked and stupidly criminal officers forged a plot to eliminate me and along with me virtually the entire staff of the German leadership of the armed forces. The bomb which was planted by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg burst two meters to the right of me. It very seriously injured a number of associates dear to me; one of them has died. I myself am completely uninjured except for some very small scrapes, bruises or burns. I regard it as a confirmation of my assignment from Providence to continue to pursue my life’s goal as I have done hitherto….

The group represented by these usurpers is ridiculously small. It has nothing to do with the German armed forces, and above all with the German army. It is a very small coterie of criminal elements which is now being mercilessly extirpated…. We will settle accounts the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settle them.¹⁵

That same night a wave of arrests began, directed against all suspects whether or not they had anything to do with the coup. A second wave about a month later (“Operation Thunderstorm”) again rounded up several thousand suspected oppositionists, chiefly members of former political parties.¹⁶ A “July 20th Special Commission,” staffed by 400 investigators, continued until the last days of the regime, tracking down every clue and issuing a steady series of bulletins about its success, thus demonstrating the extent of the resistance. Crushing pressure, torture and blackmail soon uncovered the outlines of an opposition that had functioned for years, had been extremely thorough theoretically but incapable of action. It had produced a plethora of letters and diaries, which gave it the character of a permanent monologue. The way the persecutors went about their task is illustrated by the fate of Henning von Tresckow, who had shot himself on July 21. He was mentioned in the armed forces communiqué with praise as one of the army’s outstanding generals. But as soon as his part in the abortive coup came to light, his corpse was dragged from the family vault, to the accompaniment of savage abuse of his relatives, and taken to Berlin, where it was used in the interrogation of his stubbornly denying friends as a means of breaking their morale.

In general, the regime, contrary to its ideal of dispassionate sternness, displayed a remarkable cruelty, for which Hitler himself repeatedly gave the cues. Even in his periods of utmost control, he had shown a need to avenge himself in the most excessive fashion for every snub, every rejection. The savage extermination policy practiced upon the Poles, for instance, was not primarily the application of a theory concerning the treatment of the peoples of the East. Rather, it was Hitler’s personal revenge upon the one country in the East whose alliance he had vainly sought in order to realize his main vision, the grand march against the Soviet Union. And when Yugoslavia attempted, as a result of an army officers’ coup, to withdraw from the Tripartite Pact into which she had been forced, Hitler was so beside himself with fury that he had the defenseless capital of the country systematically bombed from a low altitude for three full days. That was “Operation Punishment.” Now, in 1944, a few days after the attempted assassination, he commented after a military conference: “This has to stop. It won’t do. These are the basest creatures that ever in history wore the soldier’s tunic. We must repel and expel the offscourings from a dead past who have found refuge among us.”

On the legal measures to be taken, he declared:

This time I’m making short work of it. These criminals are not to be brought before a court-martial, where their accomplices are sitting and where the trials are dragged out interminably. They’re going to be expelled from the armed forces and face the People’s Court. And they’re not to receive the honorable bullet, but are to hang like common traitors! We’ll have a court of honor expel them from the service; then they can be tried as civilians and they won’t be soiling the prestige of the services. They must be tried at lightning speed, not be given a chance to make any grand speeches. And within two hours after the announcement of the verdict it has to be carried out! They must hang at once without the slightest mercy. And the most important thing is that they’re given no time for any long speeches. But Freisler [the president of the People’s Court] will take care of things all right. He is our Vishinsky.¹⁷

Such in fact was the procedure. A “court of honor” with Field Marshal von Rundstedt presiding and Field Marshal Keitel, General Guderian, and Generals Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, Burgdorf, and Maisel as associates, on August 4 meted out dishonorable discharges to twenty-two officers, among them one field marshal and eight generals. For the first time in the history of the German army this was done without giving the persons involved a chance to plead. Hitler received daily reports on the interrogations. He also insisted on being kept abreast of arrests and executions, and “greedily devoured the information.” He received Roland Freisler, the president of the People’s Court and the chief executioner, in the Führer’s headquarters, and ruled that the condemned were to be denied the consolations of religion or, in fact, any consolations of any kind. His instructions were: “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle.”¹⁸

On August 8 the first eight conspirators were executed in Plötzensee Prison. One by one they entered the execution room in prison garb and wooden shoes. Passing by the guillotine, they were led to the hooks fastened to a rail running across the ceiling. The executioners took off their manacles, passed a rope around their necks and bared the bodies to the hips. Then they raised the condemned, dropping them into the noose, and pulled off their trousers while they were slowly strangled. The records as a rule noted the duration of the execution as up to twenty seconds, but the orders were to protract the process of dying. After each execution the executioner and his aides braced themselves with a drink held ready on a table. Movies were taken of the proceedings, and that same evening Hitler had these films shown down to the last twitches of the condemned.

Hitler’s savagery expressed itself not only in the intensity but also in the extent of the persecution. Sippenhaft—responsibility of the conspirators’ next of kin—was justified on an ideological basis. Two weeks after the failed coup, Heinrich Himmler declared in a speech at the gauleiters’ meeting of August 3, 1944, held in Posen:

For we shall introduce here absolute responsibility of kin. We have already acted on that basis and… let no one come to us and say: what you are doing is Bolshevistic. No, don’t take this amiss, it isn’t Bolshevistic at all, but a very old custom practiced among our forefathers. You can read up about it in the Teutonic sagas. When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed, or when there was a blood feud in a family, they were utterly consistent. When the family was outlawed and banned, they said: This man has committed treason; the blood is bad; there is traitor’s blood in him; that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. The family of Count Stauffenberg will be wiped out down to the last member.¹⁹

Following this principle, all relatives of the Stauffenberg brothers ranging from a three-year-old child to a cousin’s eighty-five-year-old father were arrested. Members of the families of Goerdeler, von Tresckow, von Seydlitz, von Lehndorff, Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Yorck von Wartenburg, von Moltke, Oster, Leber, von Kleist, and von Haeften, as well as many others, suffered a similar fate. Field Marshal Rommel was threatened with both the arrest of his family and a public trial unless he committed suicide. Generals Burgdorf and Maisel, who carried that message of Hitler’s to him, also brought him an ampoule of poison. Half an hour later they took the corpse to an Ulm hospital and forbade any autopsy: “Do not touch the corpse,” Burgdorf informed the medical head of the hospital. “Everything has already been arranged from Berlin.”

The executions continued until April, 1945.

Thus the trail of the attempted coup of July 20 trickled out in execution barracks and morgues. The plot had failed primarily because of the psychological obstacles in the way of an act that ran counter to far too many habits of thought and reflexes sanctified by the traditional values of the military class. The resolute core among the conspirators was desperately frustrated by this problem.

One handicap that burdened “Operation Valkyrie” from the start was the fact that it had been planned to fit into the fiction of the “legal coup,” respecting the officers’ complex about violating their oath, and their horror of mutiny. On the crucial day of July 20, one of the chief rebels, General Hoepner, had refused to take command of the army reserve until he received a written order explicitly empowering him to do so. Pedantry of this sort gave the coup, in spite of all its moral high-mindedness, a peculiarly clumsy and almost farcical character. In retrospect, many of the episodes and details have some of that unforgettable quixotic quality displayed by General von Fritsch in 1938: after Himmler’s schemes had brought about his resignation, he wanted to challenge the Reichsführer-SS to a duel. Here, an ancestral world, imbued with rigid values, was encountering a group of unprincipled revolutionaries; and those among the conservatives who did not succumb to the new spirit reacted, almost without exception, awkwardly and oddly. Goerdeler, for example, thought he could bring Hitler around and induce a change of heart in verbal confrontation. Consequently, he had all along opposed the idea of an assassination, and a few days after July 20, while in flight, he greeted a woman co-conspirator with the admonishment: “Thou shalt not kill.” Stauffenberg and other conspirators intended, after the restoration of legality, to surrender voluntarily to a court of law.

Most of the group demonstrated the same kind of inveterate rectitude, even after the failure of the coup. Incapable of fleeing and hiding, they waited for their arrest. “One mustn’t run—one must endure,” Captain Klausing, one of the leading plotters in the High Command of the armed forces, explained. Theodor Steltzer even returned from Norway. General Fellgiebel, immediately before his arrest, rejected a proffered pistol; that just wasn’t done, he remarked. The old-fashioned, touching nature of all this behavior was exemplified by the way Carl Goerdeler strapped the knapsack to his back, picked up a staff, and set out on foot to escape his pursuers. In the interrogations, too, some of the participants were obviously more intent on proving the seriousness and resoluteness of the opposition than on defending themselves. Others for moral reasons refused to lie, though their pride was only playing into the hands of the investigators. One of the heads of the July 20 special commission commented that “because of the manly attitude of the idealists we were instantly on the right track.”

The highly moral basis of the undertaking led to another curious fact: the attempted putsch was started without a shot being fired—which necessarily reduced its chances of success. The initial decision to utilize military channels of command was justified on the ground that the idea was to issue orders, not engage in shooting. Hans Bernd Gisevius, onp of the conspirators, quite rightly asked why the SS leader and the pro-Hitler general who blocked the way of the rebels at the Bendlerstrasse headquarters of the OKW had not been arrested and “immediately stood up against the wall.” Shooting the two, he said, would have sparked the coup and given it credibility by imparting to it the nature of an extreme challenge. At this point it became apparent that July 20 was an officers’ coup in another respect: it lacked the enlisted men who could shoot, make arrests and occupy positions. In the accounts of that day we repeatedly come upon mentions of the small squad of officers who held themselves in readiness for special assignments. Late in the evening not even the High Command of the armed forces had a detachment of guards at its disposal; Colonel Jäger vainly asked General von Hase for the shock-troop platoon with which he was to arrest Goebbels. Basically, the plot had no striking power; and even the officers at its head were mostly intellectual types, staff officers rather than tough-minded soldiers like Major Remer. Beck’s two failures in his effort to commit suicide at the end of the day can be taken as a symbol of the conspirators’ utter ineffectuality when it came to acting.

Finally, however, the coup also lacked popular support. On the evening of July 20, as Hitler was accompanying Mussolini back to the railroad station at headquarters, he paused by a group of railroad workers and said: “I knew from the first that men of your sort were not involved. It’s my deep conviction that my enemies are the ‘vons’ who call themselves aristocrats.”²⁰ He had always felt almost insultingly sure of the common man, as though he had a sure grasp of the peoples’ wishes, behavior, and limits even now. And, in fact, the public, with a kind of mechanical reaction, first viewed the coup as a crime against the state that evoked a mixture of indifference and repugnance. One of the reasons for this reaction, to be sure, was the still considerable coherence of the state and, above all, Hitler’s continuing prestige.

He still exerted psychological power, although its basis had meanwhile changed. What the public now felt was not so much its onetime admiration as a dull, fatalistic sense of an indissoluble reciprocal bond. That feeling was reinforced by both domestic and Allied propaganda, by the threatening advance of the Red Army and the intimidating pressures of the Gestapo, the system of informers, and the SS. All this was blanketed by a vague hope that this man would know the way to avert disaster, as he had done so often in the past. The failure of the assassination and the premature end of the coup spared the German public that decisive question with which the conspirators wanted to confront it by revealing the moral baseness of the regime, the conditions in the concentration camps, Hitler’s deliberate war policy, and the practice of extermination. Goerdeler was convinced that the public would cry out with indignation and that a popular uprising would erupt. But the question was not posed.

Thus July 20 was confined to the decision and the act of a few individuals. The social make-up of the conspiracy, however, meant that when it was crushed, more than a number of rebels died. The doomed Prussian nobles who formed the core of the uprising constituted a class rich in tradition, “perhaps the only and certainly the strongest force capable of governance that Germany has produced in modern times.” It alone possessed “what a ruling class needs and what neither the German high aristocracy nor the German bourgeoisie nor, so it seems, the German working class had or have: coherence, style, desire to rule, forcefulness, selfassurance, self-discipline, morality.”²¹

Granted, Hitler had corrupted this class, had stripped its members of their powers and exposed their parasitical aspects. But only now did he liquidate them. Along with the bearers of many resounding names, old Germany stepped off the stage. Granted, their eminence had long since been squandered, gambled away in opportunistic and shortsighted collaboration with Hitler. Nevertheless, it must also be granted that the decision to break the onetime alliance came from these men. Hitler’s savage reaction sprang from his never-abandoned resentment toward this old world, his hatred for its gravity, its ethics, its discipline. He had the same ambivalence toward it that he had always felt toward the bourgeois world. “I have often bitterly regretted that I did not purge my officer corps the way Stalin did,” he remarked.²² Taken in this light, July 20 and the executions that followed it constituted the consummation of the National Socialist revolution.

Seldom has a social class managed to carry out its “exodus from history” more nobly than did these Prussian Junkers. But it is also true they made the sacrifice only for their own sakes. Ostensibly they acted in the name of that “sacred Germany” which Stauffenberg once more invoked in his pathetic outcry before the execution squad. But behind that slogan was the conviction of acting as a class, of being subject as a class to a special moral imperative that gave them the right to resistance and made it their duty to overthrow a tyrant. “We are purifying ourselves,” General Stieff replied when asked why they were going ahead with an act whose success was so uncertain.

This desire for self-purification governed all their actions. Hence they could overlook the possible charges of treason, perjury, or stab in the back. It rendered them immune to the misinterpretations and calumnies they saw coming. “Now the whole world will descend upon us and berate us,” Henning von Tresckow said to one of his friends shortly before his death. “But I still hold firmly to the conviction that we acted rightly.”²³ In fact both Nazi and Allied propaganda, in one of those dreadful harmonies they exhibited more and more frequently at this stage of the war, denounced the conspirators. Both sides were committed to the thesis of the monolithic character of the regime, of the identity between Führer and people—the Allies even well beyond the war’s end. The occupation authorities, for instance, prohibited publication about the German Resistance. The rather reluctant respect that is nowadays accorded the conspirators preserves elements of this earlier unease. None of their ideas and values have come down to the present day. They left scarcely a trace; and the accidents of history curiously underlined their total disappearance. The bodies of the executed men were turned over to the Anatomical Institute of Berlin University. The head of the Institute had close friends among the conspirators, and therefore blocked their use as cadavers. He had them cremated intact and the ashes buried in a nearby village cemetery. There an Allied air raid destroyed most of the urns.

The events of July 20 once more gave the regime a vigorous radicalizing impulse. If it ever approached the abstract concept of totalitarian rule, it did so in those last months, during which greater devastation was wreaked on the country than in all the preceding years of the war. On the very day of the assassination Hitler appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as commander of the army reserve, thus deliberately humiliating the Wehrmacht. Five days later, Goebbels, who had been incessantly urging Hitler to tighten up the domestic front, was assigned the new post of Reich commissioner for Total War Commitment. Under the slogan “The people want it!” he instantly issued indexes of restrictions, embargos, and shutdowns. Almost all theaters and revues were closed, all academies, all schools of domestic science and commerce. All furloughs were canceled. Obligatory labor for women up to fifty was introduced, and many similar measures taken. On August 24 Goebbels announced total mobilization. Soon all remotely fit men between the ages of fifteen and sixty were drafted into the Volkssturm (militia). “It takes a bomb under his backside to make Hitler see reason,” Goebbels commented.²⁴

Simultaneously, the production of armaments once again reached the highest figures since the beginning of the war. The retreats and incessant air raids constantly caused new difficulties, but Albert Speer repeatedly succeeded in overcoming these by vigorous and ingenious improvisations. The production of artillery pieces was increased from 27,000 in 1943 to more than 40,000, the number of tanks from 20,000 to 27,000, of planes from 25,000 to nearly 38,000. But these extreme increases ruthlessly used up all reserves of strength, as if in preparation for the last battle. There was no way of replacing the resources consumed by such production; the feat could not be maintained, let alone repeated. Consequently, it only accelerated the collapse—all the more so when the Allies began those systematic attacks on refineries that they had once before planned and then rejected. The production of airplane fuel, for example, dropped from 156,000 metric tons in May, 1944, to 52,000 metric tons in June to 10,000 tons in September, 1944, and finally to 1,000 tons in February, 1945.

Thus the means for continuing the war were beginning to cancel one another out. The retreats and bombings resulted in serious losses of raw materials; these in turn reduced the production of weapons and the ability to use the weapons produced, so that new losses of territory followed, which in turn enabled the enemy to base its air forces closer and closer to German territory. From this point on, almost every operational decision was influenced by considerations of armaments; every military conference revolved around reserves of raw materials, transportation difficulties, shortages. From August, 1944, explosives had to be stretched by the use of up to 20 per cent salt. On the airfields readied fighter planes stood with empty tanks. And in a memorandum of that same period Speer came to the conclusion: “Considering the time needed by the processing industries, the production dependent on chromium, which means the entire production of armaments, will cease on January 1, 1946.”²⁵

Meanwhile, the Russians had advanced through the shattered front in the central sector as far as the Vistula. Thanks to Hitler’s obstinate refusal to yield ground, they had been able to cut off and encircle more and more German divisions. The situation in the West developed in similar fashion, a series of breakthroughs and encirclements, once the Allies initiated the war of movement at the end of July. Hitler, who in the past had so successfully employed this very operational method, found himself increasingly incapable of responding to it. He continued to reject all proposals for a mobile defense, such as the newly appointed Chief of Staff Guderian was constantly making. Instead, as if compulsively fixated upon his offensive ideas, he continually developed new plans for attack that prescribed to the local commanders the sectors and even the details of the villages, bridges, and roads over which they were to advance.

The Wehrmacht at this time still comprised more than 9 million men. But these forces were deployed over half the continent, from Scandinavia to the Balkans. Hitler’s determination to hold lost positions for the sake of prestige, and the necessity of protecting the vanishing base of raw materials, strangled all operational freedom. In August, 1944, Rumania with her oil fields was lost to the Red Army, in September, Bulgaria; and while the German position in the Balkans was cracked open almost without opposition, exhausted Finland withdrew from the war. About the same time the British landed in Greece and captured Athens. By the end of August the Allies had also taken northern France, sweeping up gigantic quantities of material and armaments as well as an army of prisoners. In the early days of September their tank forces reached the Moselle, and a week later, on September 11, an American patrol for the first time crossed the western boundary of Germany. Shortly afterward, a Russian thrust into East Prussia was beaten off. But there could now be no doubt about it: the war was coming home to Germany.

Nevertheless Hitler did not even think of surrender. He met the first signs of disintegration in the Wehrmacht with drastic measures; at the beginning of September, for example, he had Himmler threaten deserters with arrest of kin. He was counting on dissension among the Allies, on the intervention of “Providence,” which he saw confirmed again by the events of July 20, and on a sudden turn of affairs. “They are stumbling into their ruin,” he declared in the course of a conversation in the Führer’s headquarters, and made clear his resolve to continue the war under all circumstances:

I think I can say this, that it is impossible to imagine a greater crisis than the one we have already experienced in the East this year. When Field Marshal Model went there, Army Group Center was actually nothing but a hole. There was more hole than front, but then at last there was more front than hole…. We will fight even on the Rhine if need be. That doesn’t matter in the least. Come what may we will continue this struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our accursed enemies tires of continuing to fight, and until we obtain a peace which will guarantee the life of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years, and which above all does not sully our honor a second time, as happened in 1918…. If my life had been ended fon July 20], that would have been for me personally—I believe I may say this—only a liberation from anxieties, sleepless nights, and a severe nervous disease. It is only a fraction of a second; then one is released from all that and has one’s rest and eternal peace. Nevertheless I am grateful to Providence that I was left alive.²⁶

All the same his body seemed to be reacting violently to the incessant overstrain. After July 20 Hitler hardly left the bunker. He avoided the open air, fearing infections and assassins. His doctors urged him to leave the musty, confined rooms with their depressing atmosphere, but he refused. Instead, disillusioned and bitterly misanthropic, he buried himself more and more deeply in the world of the bunker. In August he began complaining about constant headaches; in September he suffered an attack of jaundice. Along with this, he was tormented by dental troubles. And in the middle of the month, shortly after the Allied troops had penetrated the territory of the Reich in force, he collapsed with a heart attack.

For some time he lay torpid on his cot, his voice low and quivering, and at times all desire to live seemed to have ebbed out of him. Attacks of dizziness, sudden sweating, and stomach cramps followed in quick succession, all connected, with a severe infection. That this bout of illness was of hysterical origin, or at any rate psychosomatic, seems all too likely; and the hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that just now, as had happened in the autumn of 1935, an operation on his vocal chords was necessary. On October 1, while being treated by one of his doctors, Hitler briefly fainted. Shortly afterward, the illnesses began to diminish; only the trembling in the limbs persisted, stronger than ever now. He also had spells of disturbed equilibrium, and, occasionally, during one of his rare walks, when he finally let himself be persuaded to take one, he would suddenly veer to one side as if directed by an alien hand. But his recuperation was on the whole quite surprising. Possibly he was pulling himself together for those fundamental decisions that had to be made in view of the impending final phase of the war.

Strategically, he was left with only two options. Returning to the old theory of the bulwark, he could gather the greater part of Germany’s remaining forces in the East and thus reinforce the long defensive front. Or else he could once more muster his forces for a blow against the West. Ever since the summer of 1943 the question had been asked whether it would be better to look for the way out of the quandary in the East or in the West. Now this question was being put in military terms—weak and fundamentally untenable though it was. Early in 1944 Hitler, in a radio address, had tried to revamp his old claim to being Europe’s rescuer from “Bolshevist chaos.” Comparing his mission to that of ancient Greece and Rome, he declared that this war would achieve its higher meaning when it was seen as a decisive struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union, that it was fending off a new invasion by the Huns, which menaced all of Western Europe and America. If Soviet Russia were to win, “within ten years the continent of the most ancient culture will have lost the essential features of its life. The scene so dear to all of us of millennial artistic and material evolution would be wiped out. The peoples who stand as the representatives of this culture… would die wretchedly somewhere in the forests or marshes of Siberia, those of them who had not been finished off by a shot in the nape of the neck.”²⁷ But now, only a few months later, he decided on an offensive against the West, at the cost of weakening the hard-pressed Eastern front.

This decision has frequently been viewed as a last great unmasking, as the self-revelation of an unprincipled cynic. And it does almost seem to rend a veil and expose him as the nihilistic revolutionary Hermann Rauschning had pictured: a man without a concept, a program, a goal, who merely used concepts, goals, and programs for the accumulation of power and the cranking up of actions. Undeniably, the predicament in which he found himself at this time brought to light some basic elements of this character: his faithlessness toward ideas and convictions, his contempt for principles. And certainly the decision casts a peculiar light upon the already tattered banner of “struggle against Bolshevism.” It was, strictly speaking, more compromising than the Moscow Pact, which Hitler in any case could justify as a detour and tactical maneuver. For now there were no more detours left.

And yet the decision to attack in the West does not contradict Hitler’s lifelong fixation. Close scrutiny reveals its inherent consistency. Naturally defiance and despair influenced it—for he now hated the West, which had destroyed his grand design. And presumably in the radical moods of the last year he discovered once again his greater closeness to Stalin, that “fellow of genius,” as he had often called him, for whom one had to have “unreserved respect.”²⁸ All in all, Hitler was prompted by a higher degree of calculation than we might expect of him on the verge of doom, at the end of his power and his life.

He believed that his admiration for Stalin gave him certain clues to the Russian’s behavior. Greatness, he knew, was by its nature inexorable; it would have no truck with those shifts that were the business of bourgeois statesmen. A new offensive against the East, therefore, could possibly delay the end, but certainly could not avert it. An offensive in the West, on the other hand, might produce a shock of surprise among the Americans and British, who he believed were easily shaken. Thus he would recapture the initiative and so secure that gain in time which might yet bring about the hoped-for split in the enemy coalition. In this sense the offensive was a kind of last desperate offer to the Western Allies to make common cause with him.

Above all, however, an offensive seemed possible only in the West; and this consideration virtually decided the matter. There he could advance once again, once again bring to bear his genius as a commander, which had been proved in offensive operations. The vast expanses of the Eastern front, with its gigantic rear areas, where he himself had gone astray even in the days of optimum force, offered far less of an operational base or goal than the West. In the West, moreover, the offensive could take off from the west wall’s system of fortifications. And since it would have shorter distances to cover, less fuel would be needed. Moreover, Hitler also thought that his armies in the East would put up a bitter resistance in any case. In the East fear was on his side, whereas in the West he had to reckon with a growing defeatism. The Morgenthau Plan (so-called after Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Ir.) for the dismemberment and agrarianization of Germany had just become known, and was being exploited by the propaganda specialists to build up anxiety. Though not entirely unsuccessful in this, they did not manage to create anything like the wild terror they had counted on. Consequently, the offensive was to confer upon the war in the West some of the grimness it already had in the East.

On December 11 and 12, a few days before the attack was started, Hitler summoned the troop commanders of the Western front in two separate groups to meetings in the headquarters of Field Marshal von Rund-stedt. Having first been relieved of weapons and briefcases, they were driven about haphazardly to confuse their sense of orientation until the column of cars at last stopped at the entrance to an extensive system of bunkers that proved to be the Adlerhorst (the Eagle’s Nest) Führer’s headquarters near Bad Nauheim. They were led down a lane formed by SS men to Hitler. One of the participants was stunned to discover “a stooped figure with a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal.” An armed bodyguard stood behind every chair, and one of the participants later declared: “None of us would have dared so much as to pull out his handkerchief.”²⁹

In a two-hour speech combining justifications with encouragements, Hitler informed the assembled commanders of Operation Autumn Mists. The attack was to advance through the Ardennes toward Antwerp, the Allies’ most important supply port, and subsequently to annihilate all enemy forces to the north. Hitler admitted that his plan was a gamble and seemed to stand “in a certain disproportion to the forces and their condition.” But the risk acted as a challenge to him; for the last time he was staking everything on a single card. He pointed out the advantages of an offensive strategy, especially within an overall defensive framework. He implored the officers “to make it plain to the enemy that no matter what he does he can never count on a surrender, never, never.” And then he came back to his ever-growing hope:

On December 16, with low-hanging clouds grounding the enemy air force, the offensive began on a front of seventy-five miles. Hitler had withdrawn several battle-hardened divisions from the Eastern front. The enemy was hoodwinked by deceptive radio messages. To avoid attracting attention, some of the heavy equipment was pulled into position by horses. Low-flying planes were assigned the task of drowning out with their motors the noises and clanging in the German positions. The surprise actually succeeded, and enabled the German divisions to break through at many points. But after only a few days it became apparent that the offensive would have been condemned to failure even without the fierce American defense, simply because the German side quickly ran out of energy and reserves. One tank group stopped a mile from an American supply dump containing 3 million gallons of gasoline. Another unit waited in vain on the ridge near Dinant for fuel and reinforcements, so that it could roll on the short distance to the Meuse. Just before Christmas, moreover, the weather changed; dense swarms of Allied planes reappeared in the blue skies and within a few days flew 15,000 sorties, literally smashing to pieces the German supply lines. On December 28 Hitler once more summoned the division commanders to his headquarters to implore and bully them:

In the East, meanwhile, the Red Army had begun its preparations for an offensive on a broad front, and on January 9, 1945, Guderian once more called on Hitler to alert him to the threatening danger. But Hitler would not hear of it; he was thinking only of his own offensive, which had once more restored the possibility of planning and operating. He called all warnings to the contrary “completely idiotic” and ordered the chief of Foreign Armies Intelligence, East, who had furnished Guderian with his information, to be “locked up in a lunatic asylum at once.” The Eastern front had never been buttressed by so many reserves as it was at the moment, Hitler stated. The chief of staff retorted: “The Eastern front is a house of cards. If the front is penetrated at a single point, it will collapse.”

Early in January the troops in the Ardennes made two further attempts to advance to the south. They were thrown back to their starting positions by January 16. But in the meanwhile, on January 12, the first blow of the Russian offensive under Marshal Konev struck at the bridgehead of Baranov and effortlessly crashed through the German lines. A day later the armies of Marshal Zhukov crossed the Vistula on both sides of the Polish capital, while farther north two armies pushed toward East Prussia and the Gulf of Danzig. The entire front between the Baltic and the Carpathians was in motion. A tremendous war machine with infantry superiority of eleven to one, tanks seven to one, and artillery twenty to one, pushing an enormous avalanche of human beings before it, rolled over the scattered German efforts at resistance. By the end of the month Silesia was lost, and the Russians had reached the Oder. The Red Army was only a hundred miles from Berlin. On some nights the inhabitants of the German capital could hear the rumble of heavy artillery.

On January 30, 1945, twelve years after his appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, Hitler delivered his last speech over the radio. Once again he tried to conjure up the peril of the “Asian tidal wave” and appealed in curiously weary and unconvincing phrases to every individual’s spirit of resistance. “However grave the crisis may be at the moment,” he concluded, “in the end it will be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice, and by our abilities. We will overcome this emergency also.”³²

On that same day Albert Speer addressed a memorandum to Hitler informing him that the war was lost.

Götterdämmerung

On January 16, after receiving news of the beginning of the great Soviet offensive, Hitler returned to the chancellery. The vast gray pile, once intended to be the starting point for the reconstruction of the capital, had meanwhile become surrounded by a landscape of craters, ruins, and mountains of rubble. Bombs had damaged many of the wings, blown loose porphyry and marble, and blasted out windows, whose empty frames were boarded up. Only the section in which Hitler’s apartments and offices were located had remained undamaged; in this wing even the windows were scarcely shattered.

Soon the almost continual air raids had forced Hitler to retire so often to the shelter installed twenty-four feet beneath the garden of the chancellery that after a while he decided to move in there. In any case, this withdrawal to the cave fitted in with the traits that were emerging with ever-increasing force: the fear, the suspicion, and the denial of reality. For a few weeks he continued taking his meals in the upper rooms, but in these, too, the curtains were always drawn. Meanwhile, outside, with the fronts cracking everywhere, against a background of burning cities and roads choked with refugees, of ruins and collapsing supplies, unprecedented chaos broke out.

But through it all some guiding energy seemed to be at work, arranging matters, as it were, so that the Third Reich did not just end but went down to destruction. Hitler had repeatedly posed the alternative of world power or doom. A flat, undramatic end would have disavowed his entire previous life and his operatic temperament, his fascination with stunning effects. Early in the thirties, in one of his fantasies about the impending war, he had declared that if the National Socialists did not win, “even as we go down to destruction we will carry half the world into destruction with us.”®³³

But there was more than defiance and despair, more than histrionics, in his craving for catastrophe. In fact, Hitler saw disaster as his ultimate chance for survival. The study of history had taught him that only grand downfalls lent themselves to the process of mythmaking. Consequently, he was staking all his remaining strength on staging his departure. When Otto Ernst Remer, the officer who had suppressed the July 20 coup and had been rewarded by being promoted to a general’s rank, asked him at the end of January why he wanted to continue the struggle in spite of admitted defeat, Hitler replied darkly: “From total defeat springs the seed of the new.” He made a similar remark to Bormann about a week later: “A desperate fight retains its eternal value as an example. Think of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans. In any case it does not suit our style to let ourselves be slaughtered like sheep. They may exterminate us, but they will not be able to lead us to the slaughter.”³⁴

This determination lent an obstinate consistency to Hitler’s behavior through the entire final phase and shaped his last conception of how to wage the war: the strategy of grandiose doom. As early as the autumn of 1944, when the Allied armies had advanced to the German border, he had ordered the practice of “scorched earth” for the territory of the Reich and insisted that nothing but a desert should be left to the enemy. But the policy, which at first seemed justified by operational considerations, soon developed into an abstract mania for destruction, totally Without any discernible purpose. Not only industrial plants and supplies were to be demolished, but all facilities essential for the maintenance of life: supplies of food and sewerage systems, amplifying stations, long-distance cables and radio towers, telephone centrals, switching diagrams and stocks of spare parts, municipal registries, and bank-account records. Even those artistic monuments that had survived the air raids were consigned to destruction: the historic buildings, castles, churches, theaters, and opera houses. Hitler’s vandal nature was still there beneath the veneer of cultural respectability. Now that barbarian syndrome emerged undisguised. In one of the last military conferences he joined with Goebbels in regretting that they had not unleashed a revolution in the classical style. Both the seizure of power in 1933 and the annexation of Austria had been marred by the “flaw” of insufficient opposition. Goebbels, who now reverted to his radical beginnings and during these weeks with good reason moved closer to Hitler than ever before, eagerly chimed in that if there had been such opposition they “could have smashed everything to pieces.” Hitler, for his part, regretted his numerous concessions: “Afterwards you rue the fact that you’ve been so kind.”³⁵

In a similar spirit, at the very beginning of the war—according to an account by General Halder—he opposed the opinions of the generals, insisting on the bombing and bombardment of Warsaw when the city was ready for surrender, and extracted aesthetic thrills from the images of destruction: the apocalyptically darkened sky, the walls pulverized by a million tons of bombs, people panic-stricken and wiped out.³⁶ During the campaign in Russia he waited impatiently for the annihilation of Moscow and Leningrad, similarly in the summer of 1944 for the doom of London and Paris, and later he voluptuously pictured the effects an air raid would have upon the canyons of Manhattan. But he had been thwarted in all of this.³⁷ Now he could once again, and almost without check, pursue his primal bent for destruction. That emotional bias matched effortlessly with his special strategy of doom and with his revolutionary hatred for the old world. It provided the slogans of the final phase in an act of extreme selfrevelation. “Under the ruins of our devastated cities the last so-called achievements of the bourgeois nineteenth century have finally been buried,” Goebbels raved. “Together with the monuments of culture, the last obstacles to the fulfillment of our revolutionary task are likewise falling. Now, when everything lies in ruins, we are forced to reconstruct Europe. In the past private ownership imposed bourgeois restraint upon us. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only razed the walls of the prisons that had incarcerated them…. The enemy who strove to annihilate Europe’s future has succeeded only in annihilating the past, and consequently everything old and worn out is gone.”³⁸

The air raid shelter into which Hitler had withdrawn extended beneath the chancellery garden and ended in a round concrete tower that also served as an emergency exit. In the twelve rooms of the bunker’s upper level, called the “ante-bunker,” some of the staff, Hitler’s diet kitchen, and several service rooms were located. A spiral staircase led into the lower Führer bunker, which consisted of twenty rooms. A wide corridor gave access to it. A door on the right led to the rooms occupied by Bormann, Goebbels, the SS physician Dr. Stumpfegger, and several offices. On the left was a wing of six rooms occupied by Hitler. At the front the corridor opened into the large conference room. During the day Hitler mostly stayed in his living room, which was dominated by a portrait of Frederick the Great and contained only a small desk, a narrow sofa, a table, and three armchairs. The bareness and closeness of the windowless room made for a depressing atmosphere. Many visitors complained of this. But undoubtedly this last refuge of concrete, stillness and electric light expressed something of Hitler’s true nature, the isolation and artificiality of his existence.

All witnesses to the events of those weeks agree in their description of Hitler. Above all they noted his hunched posture, his gray and somber face, his progressively feebler voice. The once hypnotic eyes were now glazed with weariness and exhaustion. More and more he let himself go; it seemed as if the many years of maintaining a stylized image were at last exacting their price. His jacket was frequently soiled by driblets of food; crumbs of cake clung to his sunken, old man’s lips. Whenever, during the daily report, he took his glasses into his left hand, they clinked lightly against the desk top. Sometimes he would lay them aside as if caught napping. He was kept on his feet by will alone, and the trembling of his limbs tormented him partly because it belied his view that an iron will could achieve anything. An elderly General Staff officer described his impression as follows:

Physically he presented a dreadful sight; He dragged himself about painfully and clumsily, throwing his torso forward and dragging his legs after him from his living room to the conference room of the bunker. He had lost his sense of balance; if he were detained on the brief journey (seventy-five to a hundred feet), he had to sit down on one of the benches that had been placed along either wall for this purpose, or else cling to the person he was talking to…. His eyes were bloodshot; although all documents intended for him were typed out in letters three times ordinary size, on special “Führer typewriters,” he could read them only with strong glasses. Saliva frequently dripped from the corners of his mouth.³⁹

By now his postponement of sleep had literally reversed day and night; the last military conference usually ended toward six o’clock in the morning. Then, lying on the sofa totally drained, Hitler waited for his secretaries to give them their instructions for the coming day. As soon as these women entered the room, he rose heavily. “With shaking legs and quivering hand,” one of them subsequently reported, “he stood facing us for a while and then dropped exhausted down on the sofa again. His servant would prop up his feet. He lay there completely torpid, filled with only one thought… chocolate and cake. His ferocious appetite for cake had become actually morbid. Whereas in the past he had eaten at most three pieces of cake, he now had the platter handed to him three times, and heaped his own plate each time…. He virtually did not talk at all.”⁴⁰

In spite of this precipitate decline, even now Hitler refused to let the conduct of operations out of his hand. A mixture of obstinacy, suspicion, sense of mission, and will power repeatedly lent him new impetus. One of his doctors who had not seen him since the beginning of October, 1944, was stunned by the impression he made in mid-February, 1945. He particularly noted Hitler’s weakening memory, his inability to concentrate, and his frequent spells of absent-mindedness. Early in February Guderian offered a plan for building a defensive position in the East that ran completely counter to Hitler’s concept. Hitler did not say a word; he merely stared at the map. Then he rose slowly, took a few staggering steps and paused, staring into space, then tersely dismissed the participants in the conference. Yet there is no saying how much play-acting went into such scenes. A few days later an objection by the chief of staff provoked one of his major outbursts: “Cheeks flushed with rage, with raised fists, he stood before me with his whole body shaking, beside himself with fury and altogether out of control. After each eruption of wrath Hitler paced back and forth on the edge of the rug, then paused right in front of me and hurled the next reproach at me. He choked up with shouting; his eyes bulged from their sockets and the veins in his temples swelled.”⁴¹

Such shifts of mood were characteristic of his state during those weeks. He abruptly dropped people who had been close to him for years, and just as abruptly drew others to himself. When his doctor of many years, Karl Brandt, together with his associate von Hasselbach, attempted to check Morell’s influence and free Hitler from his fatal dependence on drugs, Hitler abruptly dismissed Brandt and shortly afterward condemned him to death. With similar brusqueness, Guderian, Ribbentrop, Göring, and many others were shunted aside. Frequently Hitler lapsed into that dull brooding that had been characteristic of his early formative years. Absently, he would sit on his sofa, a male pup of Blondi’s latest litter on his lap. He called the pup Wolf and was training it himself. In every obstacle, every retreat, he saw treachery. Humanity was too wicked, he occasionally complained, “for it to be worthwhile going on living.”⁴²

The already noted need to vent his misanthropy by tasteless teasing of his entourage once again grew stronger. Thus he might tell a group of women that “lipstick is manufactured from Paris sewage.” Or during meals he would speak of Morell’s drawing blood from him and would banter with his nonvegetarian guests: “I’ll have blood-sausages made for you from my surplus blood. Why not? After all, you’re so fond of eating meat.” One of his secretaries had reported how one day, after the usual grand lament over treachery, he spoke mournfully of the time after his death: “If anything happens to me, Germany will be leaderless; for I don’t have a successor. The first went mad [Hess], the second has thrown away the attachment of the people [Göring], and the third is rejected by the party membership [Himmler]… and is a totally unartistic person.”⁴³

Nevertheless, he managed repeatedly to throw off these depressions. Frequently he took his stimulus from the chance mention of an admired troop leader, or some other resounding triviality. It is possible to trace in the minutes of the last conferences the way he habitually seized upon a word, a reference, reshaping it, magnifying it, and finally deriving a euphoric certainty of victory from it. Sometimes he manufactured illusions by the skin of his teeth. From the autumn of 1944 on he had had many so-called people’s grenadier divisions levied—infantry divisions stiffened by experienced front-line cadres. At the same time he directed that the remnants of defeated traditional divisions should not be dissolved; they should continue as entities and be allowed gradually to “bleed to death,” because he considered the demoralizing effect of a severe defeat something from which a division never recovered.⁴⁴ The result of this order, however, was that in spite of increasing casualties he could cherish the illusion of a tremendously growing armed force. One of the features of that mad world of the bunker was his dealing in ghost divisions, which he repeatedly deployed for new offensive operations and finally for decisive battles that would never take place.

Even now his entourage followed him almost without a murmur into the more and more transparent fantasies fabricated from self-deception, distortion of reality, and delusion. Shaking, with bowed torso, he sat in front of the map table and swept his hand jerkily over the maps. Whenever a bomb struck some distance away and the ceiling light began to flicker, his eyes wandered restively over the unmoving faces of the officers who stood erect and straight before him: “That was close!” But frail and feeble though he was, he still preserved something of his magnetic powers.

It is true that certain signs of dissolution seeped into the bunker. There were breaches of protocol and revealing informality on the part of the staff. It became a rarity for anyone to stand up when Hitler entered the main conference room; hardly a conversation stopped. But these were revocable laxities; the predominant note remained the unreal climate of court societies, if anything, intensified by the unreality of the cave dweller’s world. One of the participants in the military conferences has reported that everyone was “psychically almost suffocated by this atmosphere of servility, nervousness and prevarication. You felt it to the point of physical illness. Nothing was authentic there except fear.”

Yet Hitler still succeeded in transmitting confidence and in awakening the most preposterous hopes. In spite of all the mistakes, lies, and misconceptions, his authority remained entirely unchallenged until literally the last hour, when he no longer had the power to punish or reward and could no longer enforce his will. Sometimes it seems as if he had the faculty for shattering, in ways hard to understand, the relationship to reality of all those who entered his presence. In the middle of March Gauleiter Forster appeared in the bunker in despair. Eleven hundred Russian tanks were at the gates of Danzig, he reported; the Wehrmacht had only four Tiger tanks. He was determined, he announced in the anterooms, to present “the whole frightful reality of the situation” to Hitler with all candor and “to force a clear decision.” But after only a brief conversation he returned “completely transformed.” The Führer had promised him “new divisions,” he said; he would save Danzig, “and there’s positively no doubt about it.”⁴⁵

Such incidents also permit another conclusion: of how artificial the system of loyalties in Hitler’s entourage was, how dependent upon the Führer’s continual commitment of his own person. His excessive suspiciousness, which assumed morbid and grotesque forms during the last months, was not without grounds. Even before the Ardennes offensive he had tightened the existing strict rules of secrecy by an unusual measure: the army commanders had to give him a written pledge of silence. On January 1, 1945, the Luftwaffe fighter-plane force, briefly revived by summoning up its last reserves, fell victim to this suspicion. On that day a grand armada of approximately 800 planes launched a surprise low-level attack upon the Allied airfields in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. Within a few hours, with a loss of approximately one hundred of their own planes, they put close to 1,000 enemy aircraft out of action. But on the return flight, thanks to the exaggerated rules of secrecy, they ran into their own antiaircraft fire and lost nearly 200 additional planes.

When Warsaw was lost by mid-January, Hitler Ordered the officers in the sector to be arrested at gunpoint, and had his acting chief of staff subjected to hours of interrogation by Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Chief Müller.

As he came to distrust everyone with whom he now had dealings, he once again reached out to his old fellow fighters, as though they could give him back the daredevil spirit, the radicalism and the faith of the past. His appointment of the gauleiters to the newly created posts of Reich defense commissioners was one such way of reviving old intimacies. Now he also remembered Hermann Esser, the party comrade of his early ventures into politics, pushed into the background some fifteen years before. On February 24, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the party program, he had Esser read a proclamation in Munich, while he himself received a deputation of high party functionaries in Berlin. In his address to them he tried to inspire the group with the idea of a heroic Teutonic struggle to the last man: “Even though my hand trembles,” he assured the group, who had been visibly shocked by the sight of him, “and even if my head should tremble—my heart will never tremble.”⁴⁶

Two days later the Russians in Pomerania broke through to the Baltic, thus giving the signal for the conquest of Germany. In the West the Allies at the beginning of March overran the west wall along its full extent from Aachen to the Palatinate. On March 6 they captured Cologne and established a bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine at Remagen. Then the Russians opened another grand offensive in Hungary and put Sepp Dietrich’s elite SS units to flight. Almost simultaneously Tito’s partisan armies went over to the attack, while the Western Allies crossed the Rhine at several additional points and advanced tempestuously into the interior of Germany. The war was entering its concluding phase.

Hitler reacted to the general collapse with renewed orders to hold out, with fits of rage and itinerant courts-martial. For the third time he relieved Field Marshal von Rundstedt of his post, had Sepp Dietrich’s units stripped of their armbands with the embroidered divisional name, and on March 28 tersely dismissed his chief of staff, ordering him to take a six-month recuperation leave at once. As the minutes of the conferences demonstrate, he had lost any over-all view and squandered his time in useless bickerings, recriminations, and reminiscences. Nervous and inconsistent meddling only made matters worse. At the end of March, for example, he gave the order to send a reserve unit of twenty-two light tanks to the vicinity of Pirmasens. Then, in response to alarming reports from the Moselle he directed them “to the vicinity of Trier,” then changed the order to “in the direction of Koblenz,” and finally, in response to changing reports from the front, ordered so many changes of direction that no one could possibly make out where the tanks were in actuality.

Now the strategy of doom reached the stage of realization. Rather than a calculated scheme of self-destruction, it was a chain reaction of reckless responses, outbursts of rage, and fits of hysterical weeping. Hitler’s heart was trembling after all. And yet at almost every juncture we can detect a craving (for catastrophe. In order to create an atmosphere of maximum intransigence, Hitler had as early as February issued instructions to the Propaganda Ministry to attack the Allied statesmen in such a way and to insult them so personally “that they will no longer have any possibility of making an offer to the German people.”⁴⁷ With nothing but burned bridges behind him, he entered the last stage of the fight. A series of commands, the first of which was issued on March 19 (the “Nero Command”), ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial and food-supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.”

Preparations were at once made in the Ruhr for demolition of the mines and pitheads, for blocking canals by the sinking of cement-laden barges and for evacuation of the population into the interior, Thuringia, and the vicinity of the central Elbe. The abandoned cities, as Gauleiter Florian of Düsseldorf was slated to proclaim, were to be set afire. A so-called flag order made it clear that surrender was not to be thought of: all male persons were to be taken from houses showing a white flag and shot at once. An order to the commanders dated the end of March called for “the most fanatical struggle against the now mobile enemy. No consideration for the population can be taken.”⁴⁸ In curious contrast were the efforts to safeguard the art treasures that had been looted from all over the continent, or Hitler’s preoccupation with the model of the city of Linz. These were last, futile stirrings of the lost dream of a state dedicated to beauty.

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:

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.

Afterwards he telephones again and complains that jets did not come yesterday from their fields near Prague. I explain that the airfields are constantly covered by enemy fighters so that our own planes… cannot get away from the fields. Hitler rails. “Then we don’t need the jets any more. The Air Force is superfluous.”

In his vexation Hitler mentions a letter from the industrialist Röchling, and screams: “What that man has written is enough for me! The whole leadership of the Air Force ought to be strung up at once!”

In the evening between eight-thirty and nine he is again on the telephone. “The Reich Marshal is maintaining a private army in Karinhall. Dissolve it at once and… place it under SS Obergruppenführer Steiner”—and he hangs up. While I am still considering what this is supposed to mean, Hitler calls again. “Every available Air Force man in the area between Berlin and the coast as far as Stettin and Hamburg is to be thrown into the attack I have ordered in the northeast of Berlin.”… And there is no answer to my question of where the attack is to take place; he has already hung up….

In a series of telephone calls I try to find out what is going on. Thus I learn from Major Freigang of General Konrad’s staff that he has heard Obergruppenführer Steiner is supposed to lead an attack from the Eberswalde area in a southward direction. But so far only Steiner and one officer have arrived in Schönwalde. Army units for the attack unknown.

I telephone the Führer bunker, finally reaching General Krebs at 10:30 P.M., and ask for more precise information about the planned attack…. Hitler breaks into the conversation. Suddenly his excited voice sounds on the phone: “Do you still have doubts about my order? I think I expressed myself clearly enough.” At 11:30 P.M. another call from Hitler. He asks about the Air Force’s measures for Steiner’s attack. I report on this, emphasizing that the troops are altogether unused to battle, and have neither been trained nor equipped for ground fighting, moreover lack heavy arms. He gives me a brief lecture on the situation….”⁵⁸

It is necessary to know this background to grasp the fictitious nature of the Steiner offensive, on which Hitler was placing such far-reaching hopes. “You will see,” he retorted to Koller, “the Russians will suffer the greatest defeat, the bloodiest defeat in their history at the gates of the city of Berlin.” During the entire following morning he waited nervously, and in increasing despair, for a report on the course of operations. At three o’clock, at the beginning of the conference, no report from Steiner had yet arrived, but it now became apparent that his orders of the previous day had so confused and opened the front that the Red Army was able to break through the outer defensive ring in the northern part of Berlin and penetrate the city with its tank spearheads. The Steiner offensive never took place.

In the afternoon the storm burst that made the conference of April 22 memorable. After a brief, brooding silence, as if still dazed by his utter disappointment, Hitler began to rage. He embarked on what amounted to a general denunciation of the cowardice, baseness, and faithlessness of the world. His voice, which in past weeks had dropped almost to a whisper, once more regained some of its former strength. Alerted by his screams, those living in the bunker crowded into the stairways and hallways while Hitler shouted that he had been betrayed. He cursed the army and spoke of corruption, weakness, lies. For years he had been surrounded by traitors and failures. He shook his fists furiously while he spoke; tears ran down his cheeks; and as always in the disastrous disenchantments of his life, everything collapsed along with the one hysterically magnified expectation. This was the end, he said. He could no longer go on. Death alone remained. He would meet death here in the city. Those who wanted to could go south; he himself would stick it out in Berlin. He rejected the protests and pleas of those around him, who regained their capacity for speech only after Hitler fell silent in exhaustion. He would not permit them to drag him around any farther; he should never have left the Wolf’s Lair. Telephoned attempts at persuasion by Himmler and Dönitz had no effect. He refused to listen to Ribbentrop. Instead, he declared once more that he would remain in Berlin and meet his death on the steps of the chancellery. According to one of the witnesses he repeated that phrase ten or twenty times. After he had dictated a radio message announcing (and thus making irrevocable) his decision that he personally had taken over the defense of the city, he ended the conference. It was eight o’clock in the evening. All the participants were shaken and exhausted.⁵⁹

Subsequently, in Hitler’s private rooms, the arguments were revived in a smaller circle. Hitler had sent for Goebbels and proposed that he and his family move into the Führer’s bunker. Then he began gathering his personal papers and ordered the documents to be burned. Next, he commanded Generals Keitel and Jodi to go to Berchtesgaden. He refused their request for operational orders. When they renewed their objections, he declared emphatically: “I shall never leave Berlin—never!” For a moment each of the generals, independently of one another, considered whether they should forcibly remove Hitler from the bunker and take him to the “Alpine redoubt,” but quickly realized that the idea was impracticable. Keitel thereupon left for the headquarters of General Wenck’s army, thirty-seven miles south of Berlin, an army that once more was to be the focus of exaggerated hopes in the few remaining days; Jodi, only a few hours later, gave the following account:

Hitler has… made the decision to stay in Berlin, lead the defense, and shoot himself at the last moment. He said he could not fight for physical reasons, and in any case would not personally fight because he could not risk being wounded and falling into the enemy’s hands. We all emphatically tried to dissuade him, and proposed that the troops be shifted from the west to the fighting in the East. He answered that everything was falling apart anyhow, he couldn’t do it; the Reich Marshal could try. Someone remarked that none of the soldiers would fight for the Reich Marshal. To that Hitler said: “What do you mean, fight? There isn’t much fighting left to do.”⁶⁰

At last he seemed to be bowing to the inevitable. The tremendous consciousness of mission that had accompanied him from early on, and had only occasionally been obscured but never shaken, now yielded to resignation. “He has lost his faith,” Eva Braun wrote to a woman friend. Only once in the course of the evening, when SS Obergruppenführer Berger mentioned the people that had “endured so loyally and so long,” did Hitler relapse into the agitation of the afternoon. “With face flushed purple,” he shouted something about lies and treachery.⁶¹ But, later, as he was bidding good-bye to his adjutant Julius Schaub, two of his secretaries, the stenographers, and many other persons of his entourage, he seemed calm again. And when Speer, filled with “conflicting feelings” once more flew into encircled, burning Berlin next day to bid him good-bye, he likewise displayed an almost unnatural composure and spoke of his impending death as a release: “It is easy for me.” Hitler remained calm even when Speer confessed that for months he had worked against the orders given him; he seemed rather impressed by Speer’s initiative.⁶²

But the next fit of fury was already in the offing. Indeed, the remaining hours of this life were marked by more and more abrupt changes of mood, from euphoria directly to profoundest depression. The symptoms suggest that these leaps were reflections of a final breakdown, produced by years of abuse of Morell’s mind-distorting drugs. That evening, it is true, Hitler had dismissed his doctor with the words: “I don’t need drugs to see me through.”⁶³ But after Morell’s departure he continued to take the medicines. The equanimity he now achieved was surely, viewed as a whole, not philosophical in origin. Far from submission to his fate, there was always, in his resignation, an undertone of careless contemptuousness. He could be vacant, but not calm. The stenographic minutes of one of the last conferences has preserved the characteristic combination of illusionary exuberance, depression, and contempt:

For me there is no doubt about this: the battle has reached a climax here. If it is really true that differences have arisen among the Allies in San Francisco—and they will arise—then a turning point can come about only if I deliver a blow to the Bolshevistic colossus at one place. Then the others may after all realize that there is only one force that can check the Bolshevistic colossus, and that is I and the party and the present German State.

If fate decides differently, then I would vanish from the stage of world history as an inglorious fugitive. But I would think it a thousand times more cowardly to commit suicide at Obersalzberg than to stand and fall here. I don’t want anyone saying: You as the Leader…

I am the Leader as long as I can really lead. I cannot lead by sitting down somewhere on a mountain…. I did not come into the world solely in order to defend my Berghof.

He then referred with gratification to the enemy’s casualties, which, he said, had “consumed a great part of his strength.” In the house-to-house fighting for Berlin the enemy would be “forced to bleed to death.” He added: “Today I shall lie down slightly reassured, and wish to be awakened only when a Russian tank stands before my sleeping nook.” Then he grieved over all the memories he would be losing in death, and stood up shrugging: “But what does all that matter! Sooner or later everyone has to leave all such nonsense behind.”

On the evening of April 23 Göring wired from Berchtesgaden to ask whether Hitler’s decision to remain in Berlin brought into force the law of June 29, 1941, which appointed him, the Reich Marshal, as successor. The telegram was couched in loyal terms, and Hider had received it calmly. But Göring’s old antagonist, Martin Bormann, succeeded in representing the matter as a kind of coup d’état. With a few whispered words, he incited Hitler to one of his grand outbursts. Hitler denounced Göring for laziness and failure, accused him of having “made corruption in our state possible” by his example, called him a drug addict, and finally—in a radio message written by Bormann—stripped him of all his offices and privileges. Then, exhausted and with an expression of dull satisfaction, he slumped back into his apathetic state and added contemptuously: “Well, all right, Let Göring negotiate the surrender. If the war is lost anyhow, it doesn’t matter who does it.”⁶⁴

He now had no reserves left. The feelings of impotence, anxiety, and selfpity demanded expression. The pathetic camouflages of the past would no longer serve. All his life he had needed and sought roles to play. Now he was at a loss: the role of the beaten man had never entered his repertory, while the panache of the Wagnerian hero put too great a strain upon his remaining energies. The lack of control that was expressed in the fits, bursts of rage, and spells of uncontrolled sobbing was partly caused by this loss of his roles.

That was once more revealed on the evening of April 26, when General Ritter von Greim, whom he had appointed Göring’s successor as commander in chief of the air force, flew into the encircled city with the pilot Hanna Reitsch. They came because Hitler had insisted on making the appointment in person. He had tears in his eyes, as Hanna Reitsch described it. His head drooped and his face was deathly pale when he spoke of Göring’s “ultimatum.” “Now nothing remains,” he said. “Nothing is spared to me. No loyalty, no honor is left; no disappointment, no treachery has been spared me—and now this on top of it all. Everything is over. Every possible wrong has been inflicted upon me.”

Nevertheless, he still had one hope, a small one, but he elaborated it in interminable soliloquies into one of his phantasmagorical certainties. During the night he summoned Hanna Reitsch and told her that the great cause for which he had lived and fought now seemed lost—unless the army of General Wenck, which was approaching, managed to break through the ring of the besiegers and relieve the city. He gave her a vial of poison. “But I still have hope, dear Hanna. General Wenck’s army is moving up from the south. He must and will drive the Russians back far enough to save our people.”

That same night the first Soviet shells struck the chancellery, and the bunker vibrated under the impact of tumbling walls. In some areas the conquerors had moved to within a half a mile of the chancellery.

The following day, SS Gruppenführer Fegelein, Himmler’s personal representative in the Führer’s headquarters, was picked up in civilian dress, and within the bunker new laments at the steadily spreading treachery were heard. Hitler’s suspicions now turned against everyone. Eva Braun, who was related to the arrested man, since Fegelein had married her sister Gretl, exclaimed: “Poor, poor Adolf, they’ve all deserted you, all betrayed you.” Aside from Eva, only Goebbels and Bormann remained beyond suspicion. They formed that “phalanx of the last” which Goebbels had hailed years before, in one of his paeans to doom. The more Hitler succumbed to his fits of melancholia and his misanthropies, the more closely he drew these few loyal souls around him. Since his return to the chancellery he had spent most of his evenings with them, although occasionally Ley was included. There was evidence of something secret going on, which soon aroused the curiosity of the other bunker inmates.

Years later it became known that Hitler, in meetings between the beginning of February and the middle of April, had embarked on a kind of general retrospective, summing up his life, as it were. In a series of lengthy monologues he once more examined the course he had taken, the premises and goals of his policies, and their prospects and errors. As always, he elaborated his reflections verbosely and chaotically. But on the whole the pages as they stand constitute one of the fundamental documents of his life. They reveal his intellectual energy, though somewhat diminished, and also the old obsessional ideas.

The starting point of his reflections was the still rankling failure of an Anglo-German alliance. Up to early 1941, this senseless mistaken war could have been ended, especially since England had “proved her will to resist in the sky above London” and moreover “had on the credit side of her ledger the shameful defeats of the Italians in North Africa.” Had the war been thus ended, America would have been kept out of European affairs. The “phony” world powers, France and Italy, would have been compelled to renounce their “anachronistic politics of greatness” and instead could have undertaken a “bold policy of friendship with Islam.” England, still the heart of his grand design, would have been able to devote herself “entirely to the welfare of the Empire,” while Germany, secure in the rear, could turn to her true task, “the goal of my life and the reason for the genesis of National Socialism: the extirpation of Bolshevism.”⁶⁵

Probing for the causes that had ruined this design, he once again encountered the enemy who from the very beginning had blocked his way and whose power he had nevertheless failed to appraise correctly. This was, as he now saw it in retrospect, his most serious mistake: “I had underestimated the overpowering influence of the Jews upon the British under Churchill.” And he complained: “If only fate had sent an aging and calcified England a new Pitt instead of this Yid-ridden half American souse!” Now he hated the arrogant islanders, whom he had courted in vain more than any other of his enemies, and did not conceal his satisfaction that in the days to come they would be departing from history and, in keeping with the law of life, would go to their doom. “The English people will die of hunger or tuberculosis on their damned island.”⁶⁶

The war against the Soviet Union, he insisted once again, stood above all arbitrary considerations. It had been the principal goal of all his endeavors. Granted, it was possible that it might fail and end in defeat. But not to have undertaken it would have been worse than any defeat, equivalent to an act of treason. “We were condemned to wage war, and our concern could only be to choose the most favorable moment for its start. At the same time it was beyond question that we could never give up once we had become involved in it.”

As to what the most favorable moment might have been, Hitler manifested far less certainty. The excitement with which he returned to this theme on several evenings, examining its tactical and strategic aspects and finding justifying arguments, indicates that he considered his choice of the moment his gravest error. Characteristically, he presented the situation as one without alternatives:

It is the nemesis of this war that it began for Germany too soon on the one hand, somewhat too late on the other hand. From the military point of view it was to our interest to begin it a year earlier. In 1938 I ought to have seized the initiative, instead of letting it be thrust upon me in 1939, since it was inevitable in any case. But I couldn’t do anything since the British and French accepted all my demands at Munich.

To that extent, then, the war came some time too late. In regard to the preparation of our morale, however, it came far too soon. I had not yet had time to shape the people to the measure of my policies. I would have needed twenty years to bring a new elite to maturity, an elite which so to speak had imbibed the National Socialist way of thinking with its mother’s milk. It is the Germans’ tragedy never to have enough time. Circumstances are always forcing us. And if we lack time, that is chiefly due to our lack of space. The Russians, in their tremendous plains, can afford the luxury of not being hurried. Time is working for them. It is working against us….

Fatefully, I have to complete everything during the brief span of one human life…. Where the others have an eternity at their disposal, I have only a few miserable years. The others know that they will have successors who will take up their work just where they have left it, who will make the same furrows with the same plow. I ask myself whether the man will be found among my immediate successors who is destined to take up the torch that is slipping from my hand.

It is my other nemesis that I have been serving a nation with a tragic past, a nation so inconstant, so fickle as the Germans, falling with a strange calm according to circumstances from one extreme to the other.⁶⁷

These were the premises whose prisoner he was, the fundamental obstacles in situation and material that he had been forced to accept as he found them. But he had also made mistakes, he concluded, fateful acts of thoughtlessness. He had made all sorts of unnecessary concessions. And it is exceedingly illuminating that now, in his searching retrospect, he disavowed one of the few intact human relationships of his life:

When I regard events soberly and stripped of all sentimentality, I must admit that my immutable friendship with Italy and with the Duce can be placed on the debit side of the ledger, as one of my errors. One might even say that the Italian alliance proved more useful to our enemies than to ourselves… and in the end it will contribute to our—if the victory proves not to be ours after all—our losing the war….

Our Italian ally hampered us almost everywhere. For example, he prevented us from employing revolutionary policies in North Africa… for our Islamic friends suddenly saw in us voluntary or involuntary accomplices of their oppressors. The memory of the barbarous reprisals against the Senoussis is still very much alive among them. Moreover, the Duce’s ridiculous claim to be regarded as the “sword of Islam” arouses just as much laughter today as it did before the war. This title belongs by rights to Mohammed and to a great conqueror like Omar. Mussolini had it conferred on himself by a few poor devils whom he paid or terrorized. There was a chance for us to pursue a grand policy toward Islam. But we missed that opportunity, like so much else, because of our loyalty to the Italian alliance….

From the military point of view it is hardly any better. Italy’s entry into the war almost immediately enabled our enemies to have their first victories, and made it possible for Churchill to inspire his countrymen with fresh courage and the Anglophiles all over the world with new hope. Although the Italians had already shown themselves incapable of holding Abyssinia and Cyrenaica, they had the nerve to plunge into the totally senseless campaign against Greece without asking us, without even informing us…. That forced us, contrary to all our plans, to intervene in the Balkans, which in turn resulted in a catastrophic delay for the beginning of the war against Russia…. We should have been able to attack Russia starting with May 15, 1941 and… end the campaign before the winter. Then everything would have turned out differently!

Out of gratitude, because I could not forget the Duce’s attitude during the Anschluss, I always refrained from criticizing and condemning Italy. On the contrary, I tried to treat her as our equal. Unfortunately the laws of life show that it is a mistake to treat as equals those who are not really equal…. I regret that I did not follow the dictates of reason, which prescribed to me a brutal friendship in regard to Italy.⁶⁸

On the whole, to his mind it was his soft-heartedness, his lack of toughness and implacability, which led to his failure after he had been so close to triumph. In this last document, too, he revealed his own unmistakable brand of radicalism. “I fought against the Jews with open vizard; before the war started, I gave them fair warning….”⁶⁹ He regretted not having ruthlessly eliminated the German conservatives from public life, of having supported Franco, the nobility, and the church in Spain rather than the Communists, and, in France, of having failed to liberate the working class from the hands of a “bourgeoisie of fossils.” Everywhere, he now thought, he should have fostered the uprising of the colonial peoples, the awakening of the oppressed and exploited nations. The Arabs, the Iraqis, the entire Near East, which had hailed the German victories, should have been incited to revolt. The German Reich was now collapsing not because of its bellicosity and sins against moderation, but because of its incapacity for radicalism, its fixation on morality. “What might we have done!” he grieved. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper has commented on the remarkable lucidity with which Hitler in these soliloquies analyzed-the strengths and weaknesses of his concept of world power. He was in no doubt about the principle. He realized that Europe could be dominated by a continental power that controlled western Russia, drew upon the reserves of Asia, and simultaneously presented itself as the advocate of the colonial nations by linking political revolution with slogans of social liberation. He also knew that he had gone to war with the Soviet Union over the question of who would assume this part. The issue had gone against him, he believed, because he had not been able to fight on consistently revolutionary principles. He had entered the war with the fuss-and-feathers diplomats and generals of the old school, additionally hampered by his friendship with Mussolini, and had not been able to free himself from these burdens. His radicalism had not been sufficient; he had revealed too many bourgeois sentiments, too much bourgeois halfheartedness. He, too, had been split—this was the conclusion of his meditations. “Life forgives no weakness!”⁷⁰

His decision to call it quits came on the night of April 28 and in the early hours of the morning of April 29. Shortly before 10 P.M., in the midst of a conversation with Ritter von Greim, Hitler was interrupted by his valet, Heinz Linge. Linge handed him a Reuter’s report that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had made contact with the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte in order to negotiate a surrender in the West.

The shock that followed this report was more violent than all the emotions of the past week. Hitler had always regarded Göring as opportunistic and corrupt; thus the Reich Marshal’s betrayal came as no surprise. But Himmler had always made loyalty his watchword and prided himself on his incorruptibility. His conduct now signified the breach of a principle. For Hitler it was the gravest imaginable blow. “He raged like a madman,” Hanna Reitsch described the ensuing scene. “He turned purple, and his face was almost unrecognizable.” In contrast to the preceding outbursts, however, this time his strength gave out after a short time, and he withdrew with Goebbels and Bormann for a conversation behind closed doors.

Once more, his single decision brought all the others in its wake. As part of his revenge Hitler had Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison man, subjected to a short, sharp interrogation, then shot in the chancellery by members of his escort squad. He then sought out Greim and ordered him to attempt to get out of Berlin in order to arrest Himmler. He would not hear of any objections. “A traitor must never be my successor as Führer,” he said. “See to it that he does not!”

Hastily, he had the small conference room prepared for a civil wedding ceremony. A district magistrate named Walter Wagner, who was serving in a nearby militia unit, was fetched and asked to marry the Führer and Eva Braun. Goebbels and Bormann were the witnesses. Because of the special circumstances both parties requested a war wedding, which could be performed without delay. They attested that they were of pure Aryan descent and free of hereditary diseases. The record noted that the applications had been accepted, the banns “examined and found in order.” Then Wagner, according to the record, turned to the parties :

I come herewith to the solemn act of matrimony. In the presence of the above-mentioned witnesses… I ask you, My Leader Adolf Hitler, whether you are willing to enter into matrimony with Miss Eva Braun. If such is the case, I ask you to reply, “Yes.”

Herewith I ask you, Miss Eva Braun, whether you are willing to enter into matrimony with My Leader Adolf Hitler. If such is the case, I ask you too to reply, “Yes.”

Now, since both these engaged persons have stated their willingness to enter into matrimony, I herewith declare the marriage valid before the law.

The participants then signed the document. Hitler’s new wife was so agitated by the circumstances that she began signing her maiden name. Then she crossed out the initial letter B and wrote, “Eva Hitler, née Braun.” The entire party then went together to the private rooms, where the secretaries, Hitler’s diet cook, Frâulein Manzialy, and several of the adjutants had gathered for drinks and melancholy reminiscences of times past.

From this point on, it seems, the direction of events finally slipped from Hitler’s hands. It is likely that he would have wished to stage the concluding act more grandiosely, more disastrously, with a greater display of lofty emotion, style, and terror. Instead, what now took place seemed oddly hapless, improvised, as though in view of the many seemingly miraculous reversals in his life he had up to this very moment never really considered the possibility of an irrevocable end. At any rate, the gruesome idea of having this wedding on the verge of a double suicide, as if he feared nothing so much as “illegitimacy” on his deathbed, marked the beginning of a trivial departure. It demonstrated how spent he was, drained of even his histrionic effects, even though the Wagnerian reminiscence of joining his beloved in death might in his eyes give the procedure a saving note of tragedy. But, henceforth, whatever else might remain associated with his name, his death contributed nothing to mythology. Possibly he was now giving up more than the right to direct the life he had always regarded as a role to be played.

For all its casual character, this marriage represented a significant step. It was not only a gesture of gratitude toward the one living being aside from the dog Blondi who, as Hitler once remarked, remained faithful to him to the last. It was also a definitive act of abdication. As the Führer, he had repeatedly declared, he must not be married. The mythological conception he had of his status could not be reconciled with ordinary human ties. Now he was abandoning this stand, with the implication that he no longer believed in the survival of National Socialism. In fact he did remark to his guests that the cause was done for and would not spring to life again.⁷¹ Then he left the group and went into one of the adjacent rooms to dictate his last will.

He produced a political and a private testament. The former was dominated by violent polemics against the Jews, by asseverations of his own innocence, and appeals to the spirit of resistance: “Centuries will pass, but the ruins of our cities and monuments will repeatedly kindle hatred for the race ultimately responsible, who have brought everything down upon us: international Jewry and its accomplices!”

Twenty-five years had passed. He had experienced an unprecedented rise, undreamed-of triumphs and defeats, despairs and downfall, and he himself had remained unchanged. Down to the very phrasing, the ideological passages of the testament might have been taken from the first document of his political career, the letter to Adolf Gemlich in 1919, or from one of his speeches as a young local agitator. The phenomenon of early and total rigidity, of the rejection of all experience, which was so typical of Hitler, was confirmed for the last time in this document.

In a special section he expelled Göring and Himmler from the party and from all of their offices. He named Admiral Dönitz as his successor in the posts of President, Minister of War, and supreme commander of the armed forces. His comment that in the navy the sense of honor still survived, that any thought of surrender was alien to it, was obviously intended to be understood as an injunction to continue the struggle even beyond his death, to ultimate doom. At the same time, he appointed a new government, headed by Goebbels. The document concluded: “Above all I call upon the leaders of the nation and all followers to observe the racial laws scrupulously and to implacably oppose the universal poisoner of all races, international Jewry.”⁷²

His personal testament was considerably shorter. Whereas the political document asserted his claims on history, the personal one expressed the custom’s official’s son who had remained behind all the disguises. It read:

During the years of struggle I did not think I could responsibly undertake to establish a marriage. But now, before the completion of this earthly course, I have decided to take as my wife the girl who after long years of faithful friendship entered this city, already almost besieged, of her own free will, in order to share my fate with me. At her request she is joining me in death as my wife. Death will compensate us for what my work in the service of my people robbed from us both.

All that I own—in so far as it had any value—belongs to the party. If this ceases to exist, to the state; and if the state also is annihilated, no further decision on my part is necessary.

My paintings in the collections I bought over the years were never collected for private purposes, but always only for the expansion of a gallery in my hometown of Linz on the Danube. It would be my heartfelt wish if this bequest could be duly carried out. I appoint as executor of my will my most faithful party comrade, Martin Bormann. He is legally entitled to make all final decisions. He may transfer any personal mementos, or whatever is needed for the maintenance of a modest middle-class standard of living, to my brother and sisters, and particularly to my wife’s mother, and to my faithful associates who are well known to him—principally my old secretaries, Frau Winter, etc., who for many years have sustained me by their work.

I myself and my wife choose death to escape the disgrace of removal or surrender. It is our desire to be burned at once at the place in which I have performed the greater part of my daily work in the course of twelve years of service to my people.

The two documents were signed at four o’clock in the morning on April 29. Three copies were prepared, and in the course of the day arrangements were made to have them taken out of the bunker by different routes. One of the people selected for this messenger service was Colonel von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, who took with him a postscript directed to General Keitel. That was Hitler’s last message and ended with the characteristic sentences:

The people and the armed forces have given their all in this long and hard struggle. The sacrifice has been enormous. But my trust has been misused by many people. Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined resistance throughout the war. It was therefore not granted to me to lead the people to victory. The Army General Staff cannot be compared with the General Staff in the First World War. Its achievements were far behind those of the fighting front.

The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people.⁷³

At various times during the past weeks Hitler had expressed anxiety that he might have to appear as an “exhibit in the Moscow zoo” or as the principal actor in a “show trial staged by Jews.”⁷⁴ These fears were intensified when, in the course of April 29, the news of Mussolini’S death reached him. The Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, who had hastily joined him that same day, had been caught by partisans and on the afternoon of April 28 shot without formalities in the small north Italian hamlet of Mezzagra. The bodies were taken to Milan and suspended by the heels from the roof of a garage on the Piazzale Loreto, where a screaming mob beat, spat upon, and stoned the corpses.

Under the impact of this news, Hitler began making the arrangements for his own death. He charged many members of his entourage, including his servant Heinz Linge, his chauffeur Erich Kempka, and his pilot Hans Baur, with the task of seeing that his remains did not fall into the enemy’s hands. The preparations he made seemed like a last manifestation of his lifelong efforts to conceal his real self. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between Hitler’s crawling into a hole to die, as it were, and the end of Mussolini, who called upon his remaining adherents to go together to the Valtellina and there “die with the sun in our faces.”

But Hitler also feared that the poison he had provided might not bring about death fast enough or reliably enough. Consequently, he ordered the effect of the poison to be tried out on his Alsatian dog. At midnight Blondi was coaxed to the toilet in the bunker. Sergeant Tornow, who was in charge of Hitler’s dogs, forced the animal’s mouth open while Professor Haase, one of the medical staff, reached into the dog’s gullet and with forceps crushed an ampoule of poison inside. Shortly afterward Hitler entered the room and glanced expressionlessly at the corpse. He then invited the occupants of the two adjacent bunkers to come to the conference room for farewells. With a faraway expression, he went down the row, silently shaking hands with each person. Several said a few words to him, but he did not answer, or only moved his lips inaudibly. Shortly after three o’clock in the morning he had a telegram sent to Dönitz complaining about inadequate military measures, and in a kind of stale, repetitive gesture he once more commanded the admiral to proceed “instantly and unsparingly against all traitors.”

Late in the forenoon the military conference took place as usual. With no sign of emotion, Hitler received the information that the Soviet troops had by now occupied the Tiergarten, Potsdamer Platz, and the subway on Vosstrasse, in the immediate vicinity of the chancellery. Then he ordered delivery of 200 liters of gasoline. At two o’clock he had his lunch in company with his secretaries and his cook; at the same moment, two Soviet sergeants raised the Red flag on the dome of the nearby Reichstag. After the meal he summoned his most intimate associates, including Goebbels, Bormann, Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, his secretaries, Frau Christian and Frau Junge, and several orderlies. Together with his wife, he shook hands with all of them and then, mute and stooped, he vanished inside his room. And as though this life, which had so largely been governed by staged happenings and had always aimed at glaringly dramatic effects, could only end with a preposterous climax, at this time a dance began in the chancellery canteen (if we are to believe the accounts of the participants), a dance in which the weeks of strained nerves sought violent release. Even repeated remonstrances that the Führer was about to die could not bring it to a halt.⁷⁵ It was April 30, 1945, shortly before 4 p.m.

What happened thereafter has never been completely and unequivocally clarified. According to the statements of most of the survivors of the bunker, a single shot sounded. Shortly afterward, Rattenhuber, the commander of the SS guards, entered the room. Hitler was sitting hunched over, face smeared with blood, on the sofa. Beside him was his wife, an unused revolver in her lap; she had taken poison. In contrast to this version of things, most Soviet accounts have held that Hitler also ended his life by poison. But there are contradictions in the Soviet story. On the one hand, it denies that any traces of a bullet were detectable in the fragments of a skull that were found later. On the other hand, the story attempts to say who in Hitler’s entourage had been assigned to deliver the “mercy shot” to make sure of his death. These contradictions tend to indicate that the Soviet version of Hitler’s suicide has a political coloration. It sounds like a last echo of the attempts constantly made during Hitler’s lifetime to refute him by belittling him, as though a certain mentality could not bear to concede abilities and strength to the morally reprehensible. It was the story of the Iron Cross or his gifts as political tactician or statesman all over again: he was now begrudged the courage required for the obviously sterner death by a bullet.⁷⁶

Rattenhuber ordered the bodies to be taken into the courtyard. There he had the gasoline poured over them and invited the mourners to come up. No sooner had they assembled than Russian shelling drove them back to the bunker entrance. Hitler’s SS adjutant Otto Günsche thereupon tossed a burning rag upon both corpses, and when the leaping flames swathed the bodies, everyone stood at attention and gave the Nazi salute. A member of the guards detachment who passed by the spot half an hour after this ceremony could “no longer recognize Hitler because he was pretty well charred.” And when he visited the spot again toward eight o’clock “a few flakes were flying up in the wind,” as he put it. Shortly before 11 P.M. the remains of the almost totally consumed bodies were swept onto a canvas shelter half, according to GUnsche’s account, “let down into a shell hole outside the exit from the bunker, covered over with earth, and the earth pounded firm with a wooden rammer.”⁷⁷

Long ago, in the days of struggle, Hitler had let himself be represented grandiloquently as “the man who would rather be a dead Achilles than a living dog.” Later on, he had begun to elaborate the scenario for his obsequies. His burial place was to be a mighty crypt in the bell tower of the gigantic structure he had planned to build on the bank of the Danube at Linz. But in fact he was hastily shoveled into a shell hole among mountains of rubble, fragments of wall, cement mixers, and scattered rubbish.

This was not yet the end of the story. Goebbels tried to coax the Russians into separate negotiations by references to their “common holiday of May 1.” When these efforts failed, Goebbels and his family committed suicide. Bormann, together with the other inhabitants of the bunker, made an attempt to break out. Then Soviet troops occupied the abandoned bunker and immediately set about searching for the remains of Hitler’s body. A medical report dated May 8, 1945, of an autopsy of a severely charred male body came to the conclusion that this was “presumably Hitler’s corpse.” Other statements shortly afterward cast doubt on this assertion. Then again Soviet sources maintained that Hitler had after all been identified on the basis of dental studies; but this statement, too, was questioned, and rumors arose that the British authorities were hiding Hitler in their zone of occupation. At the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, Stalin assured his Western colleagues that the Russians had not found the corpse and that Hitler was hiding in Spain or South America.⁷⁸ In the end the Russians managed to swathe the whole question in such obscurity that the wildest versions concerning the end of Hitler circulated. Some said he had been shot in the Berlin Tiergarten by a German squad of officers. Others had him fleeing in a submarine to a remote island. Still other stories maintained that he was living in a Spanish monastery or on a South American hacienda. All his life Hitler had owed his successes largely to one or the other of his enemies. Now, once more, his ill-wishers—as if in a last display of all the mistakes of the era—made it possible for him to live a mythical posthumous life.

For all that the event had no consequences, it was a symbol. It once again forcibly suggested that the appearance of Hitler, the conditions of his rise and his triumphs, were founded upon premises that point far beyond the narrow framework of merely German conditions. Granted, every nation bears the responsibility for its own history. But only a mind that has learned nothing from the misfortunes of these times will call him the man of a single nation and refuse to recognize that a powerful tendency of the age culminated in him, a tendency that dominated the entire first half of this century.

Thus Hitler not only destroyed Germany. He also put an end to old Europe with its nationalisms, its conflicts, its hereditary foes, and its insincere imperatives—as well as with its brilliance, its grandeur, and the magic of its douceur de vivre. Possibly he was deceiving himself when he called that Europe “outmoded.” His unique radicality, his visions, his missionary fever, and, as the outcome of these, an unprecedented explosion of energy, were needed to destroy it. But ultimately it must be granted that he could not have destroyed Europe without the help of Europe.