Authors: Heinrich Fraenkel,Roger Manvell
The following day, 21st April, Hitler ordered an attack on the Russians which never took place, and by the afternoon of 22nd April he was beside himself at the lack of any news that his orders had been carried out and the attack launched. The Government district was now a shambles, and what staff remained was working in the innumerable basements and bunkers beneath the ministries and their gardens. Standing alone with Naumann at a window in the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels on one of his last days above ground had said to his deputy:
“Mark my word, Naumann, what you are seeing happen here is an historical drama of such magnitude that there has been nothing to compare with it this century nor indeed in any century unless you go back to Golgotha.”
31
The guns echoed their resonant, Wagnerian accompaniment to this pronouncement in which Calvary and the
Götterdämmerung
were strangely mixed in Goebbels' haunted imagination.
Hitler, however, was less than a god at his last major staff conference on 22nd April. He gave way to utter anger in a volume of denunciation which lasted hour upon hour until those with him were left stricken and helpless, while others listened breathless outside the narrow conference chamber of the Bunker. He raged at the villainy of the world, the wickedness and cowardice of men, the treachery of those who had deserted him and left him to die in the ruins of Berlin. The last vestiges of his monstrous energy were poured out in words which seemed as if they would never stop. Eventually, after three hours of the storm, a calm came over him and he recovered. The outburst was undoubtedly Hitler's admission to himself of defeat, the uproar of the stricken giant. Goebbels was spared the horror and indignity of this scene; all he knew was the outcome of it, an announcement which Hitler ordered to be broadcast that Berlin would be defended to the end and that in Berlin the Führer would stay no matter what might come.
When Hitler calmed he spoke more hopefully to Keitel, before he too left, about the possibility of the relief of Berlin by General Wenck's Twelfth Army, which was fighting on the Elbe. This army, which never reached Berlin or had hope of doing so, was to become Hitler's final obsession as he shut himself away from the noise outside in the deep recesses of the Bunker. Then in the evening he agreed that Goebbels and his family should join him in the narrow cells of his concrete castle beneath the shaking earth.
CHAPTER NINE
The Bunker
G
OEBBELS,
Magda and the children left their house for the shelter of the Bunker shortly after five o'clock in the evening of 22nd April. It was a Sunday. They travelled in two cars driven by Rach, Goebbels' chauffeur, and Günther Schwaegermann, his adjutant. Semmler was there to say good-bye before leaving to join his unit. Goebbels thanked him and told him to do his duty as a soldier. Semmler watched the cars pull away. Goebbels remained calm and formal, but Magda and the children were weeping bitterly.
1
All through the day that had seen the terrible outburst of Hitler's despair Goebbels had worked calmly, conferring, dictating his diary, recording a speech for broadcasting in which he declared Berlin to be a military objective. During the recording the sound of shelling went on, and there was one explosion so near the house that the recording was momentarily stopped. When the speech was played back Goebbels remarked favourably on the realistic sound effects.
2
He saw his old friend Dr. Winckler and thanked him for all he had done. “We shan't meet again,” he said.
3
He was less revealing to his tireless stenographer, Otte. He merely told him that he was going into the Führerbunker for a week or so and that as soon as Wenck broke through to Berlin he would come out again. Meanwhile Otte was to take care of himself and keep away from the fighting. Goebbels had work for him to do in the future.
4
Goebbels in fact, according to Naumann, still believed that some sort of political victory might be achieved once the Western Allies found themselves face to face with the Russians. Then, thought Goebbels, Churchill and Truman will see the light and invite Hitler to become their ally to oppose the Bolshevist invasion of Europe.
After lunch he slept as usual in spite of the shelling, which made Magda and the Ministry staff uneasy. Later in the afternoon Goebbels made an astonishing admission to Fritzsche, which he remembered and included in his testimony at Nuremberg. “In the final analysis this is what the German people wanted,” said Goebbels. “The great majority of the Germans voted in favour of our leaving the League of Nations, in other words against a policy of appeasement and for a policy of courage and honour. It was the German people who chose war.” Fritzsche protested that the Party line then was that Germany wanted peace, but Goebbels refused to listen.
5
The shell-fire was by now incessant and the house unsafe. Goebbels' declared intention was to remain in Berlin with Hitler, and as the normal means of communication gradually broke down it was only natural that the inner circle—reduced now to Hitler, Bormann and Goebbels—should make their last stand together in the Führerbunker. But the decision that Goebbels and his family should retire to the Bunker was taken suddenly following the break-through achieved by the Russians.
6
As soon as they had gone the staff of the Ministry and of Goebbels' household disintegrated like the crew of a vessel whose captain has left them before shipwreck. Most of them had had their bags packed for some time ready to move off to safety at a moment's notice. They were thankful for their release and worried that it had come too late. Only the members of the
Volkssturm
were under orders to remain on duty. Meanwhile in the Bunker Goebbels declared to Hitler his readiness to die with him, if need be, and Magda, in spite of Hitler's protests, swore that she would do the same after taking her children's lives.
The Bunker has been the subject of detailed description. Briefly, it consisted of two connected groups of rooms built on two levels below ground. The first group of twelve minute rooms (four of which were the kitchen suite) flanked a central passage or hallway where meals were normally taken. At the further end of the passage a spiral staircase led down to Hitler's own quarters, a group of eighteen rooms scarcely greater in size and disposed on either side of a similar central passage divided into two sections, the further of which was used for conferences. Boldt describes this conference-passage as “only seventeen feet square; its walls are painted grey and without pictures. The furniture consists of a brown bench along the wall, a huge table for maps and a desk chair.”
7
Apart from the passageways, the living-rooms were like cells very little bigger than the compartments of a rail-coach. Of these six were set aside for Hitler and Eva Braun, while five others housed the lavatories, the power-house and the telephone exchanges. There were three entrances to the Bunker—the first through the butler's pantry of the New Chancellery, the second from the garden of the Foreign Office, while the third, which was situated at the further end of the lower section, led from the Chancellery garden. This last was intended to be an exit for use only in emergency, and it was through this that the bodies of Adolf and Eva Hitler were carried to their funeral pyre on the afternoon of 30th April.
Hitler, Eva Braun, Goebbels, his wife and their six children were the principal inhabitants of this double bunker. Magda and her young family were given four cells in the first section of the structure, and Goebbels himself had a room in the principal section facing Hitler's suite on the opposite side of the passageway used for conferences. The other senior residents were Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's surgeon, who had taken charge of the Führer's health after the dismissal of Professor Morell on 22nd April, and Günther Schwaeger-mann, Goebbels' adjutant. The rest were Hitler's adjutant, his valet, his two secretaries and his vegetarian cook. Bormann was accommodated in an entirely separate bunker a short distance away.
Boldt was told by one of the officers guarding the Bunker area that the diminutive suite of rooms used by Goebbels was “very luxuriously furnished”, though Naumann denies this; Boldt also added that in all between six and seven hundred S.S. men, guards, orderlies, clerks, servants and kitchen personnel were on duty in the area of the Führerbunker.
8
Boldt himself, who paid several visits to the Bunker, comments on the relief of getting outside again where the air was clean and cool. He found the atmosphere inside stifling. He comments further on the curious fact that until Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun he “had known nothing whatever about the existence of this woman, let alone seen her; and yet she had been with us in the Führer's shelter the whole time”.
9
The Bunker was, of course, the scene of constant arrivals and departures. The conventional hours of day and night meant little in the artificial light below ground. For Hitler sleeping was confined to the earlier part of the morning. By midday he was up and he worked and talked while the rest of the day and night passed outside. As the Russians gradually encircled the city the street fighting began during this last week of April and communications with the outside world became increasingly hazardous. Light aircraft landing on the East-West Axis roadway, which was relatively near the Chancellery, brought the last visitors from a distance, such as Ritter von Greim and Speer.
Goebbels during these last days became Hitler's shadow. The men and women who came and went were not concerned with him, but with the Führer. Even Naumann, his Deputy, reported to Hitler now, since his presence was required in his other capacity as Major in charge of the battalion guarding the Bunker. Naumann, however, kept in touch with Goebbels and with Magda as time and opportunity permitted. Only Goebbels' adjutant, Günther Schwaegermann, remained in the Bunker solely to look after him.
Naumann has revealed something of the atmosphere in which Goebbels and his family now lived. While Hitler maintained the urgency of the war surrounding him, Goebbels was relieved of almost all his duties. His Ministry was all but gone and the active defence of Berlin, such as it could be, was now under the direction, though not the control, of Hitler himself. Goebbels spent a great deal of time with his children, playing with them, reading to them and comforting them in this difficult and unnatural life. Magda was busy keeping their clothes washed and in order, because in the hurry of their departure for the Bunker she had brought an inadequate supply of clothes. She had thought they would be incarcerated underground for a short while only. They were to survive there for nine days.
Boldt pays tribute to Magda's courage. “Frau Goebbels,” he wrote, “showed little sign of being afraid of death up to the very end. Lively and elegant, she pranced up the staircase, always taking two steps at once, while we descended. Always friendly, she smiled at the people she met…. She displayed an admirable strength of mind, doubtless inspired by her fanatical religious belief in Hitler. We cannot be sure how much of it at that moment was still sincere; but it is certain that she was not only moved by very strong political and social ambition, but had given herself over to a blind worship of the Führer.”
10
Goebbels watched the coming and going of the men on more active service than himself. Naumann says that he read a great deal and continued to maintain his diary. He took part in the conferences which Hitler summoned, and he shared to some extent what was left of the Führer's private life. Boldt describes Goebbels in conference with Hitler in the following terms: “This little thin man has… shrunk and looks very pale and hollow-cheeked. Only seldom does he ask a question; mostly he is silent and follows closely the report on the map; the play of his features and his normally fanatical eyes reveal torturing worries.”
11
Naumann, however, maintains that Goebbels spoke his mind whenever he wanted to.
Hope, on the night of 22nd April, was still centred on General Wenck's Twelfth Army, which was south-west of Berlin on the Elbe; Hitler sent Keitel over-night to Wenck's headquarters with orders for him to proceed at once to the relief of Berlin. He still refused to move south himself, repeating this to Himmler who had telephoned him earlier the same day from Hohenlychen. It was this refusal, together with his permission to everyone to go if they wished, that determined the departure of so many of Hitler's outer circle of generals, adjutants and secretaries.
The following day, Monday 23rd April, saw dramatic developments. In the south Göring, inspired by the news brought by his representative in Berlin, General Roller, planned to take over the leadership of the Reich and sent a telegram to that effect to Hitler. In the north Himmler, wavering in his sense of duty, had his first interview with the Swedish Count Bernadotte with a view to arranging the capitulation of Germany in that area to the Western Allies. In Berlin itself Speer paid his last visit to Hitler and confessed what was so much on his conscience, that he had not carried out the Führer's orders to destroy the resources of Germany. Hitler, unusually calm, forgave him. He explained once more that he was determined to shoot himself in the Bunker when the time came and to have his body burned so that it might not become a showpiece for the conquerors. Goebbels con- tinued to support him in this decision, and Speer also agreed that it was right. Bormann alone went on trying in vain to get the Führer to change his mind even at this eleventh hour. He was not looking for a martyr's death and by now the only escape from Berlin was by air over the Russian tanks and guns; there were Russian troops fighting all round Berlin and to leave by land meant dodging through the Russian lines.
But if Hitler was calm with Speer he was beside himself with anger over Göring's telegram. Urged on by Bormann and Goebbels, he dismissed Göring from all his offices and ordered the S.S. in Obersalz-berg to arrest him for high treason. Boldt says that Goebbels “was boiling with fury, and expressed his feelings in a theatrical burst of words. His exaggerated remonstrances about honour, faith, duty, blood, and so forth, failed altogether to conceal his envy and personal jealousy of Göring who, so it seemed, was about to slip his neck out of the noose.”
12
Be that as it may, for Goebbels was surely committed to share Hitler's fate by his own wish, Göring, Hitler's Deputy and his former friend, was now irrevocably lost.
On this tragic day Hitler saw also the last of Ribbentrop, who quietly slipped away to northern Germany, and of his faithful generals, Jodl and Keitel, whom he had sent on their various missions. Speer, too, left in the early hours of Tuesday 24th April, a day on which little of note seems to have happened in the Bunker. During the night of 25th and 26th April Ritter von Greim and Hanna Reitsch, the test pilot who was one of the more hysterical women Nazis, made their hazardous tree-top flight into Berlin to fulfil an order from Hitler, who had decided to make von Greim Göring's successor at the head of the Luftwaffe. Greim was wounded in the foot during the flight and was confined in the Bunker along with Hanna Reitsch until the early hours of the morning of 29th April. The presence of this sick man and the expostulatory woman obsessed with Nazi heroics only served to increase the already neurotic atmosphere which grew daily among the strange and unnatural collection of incarcerated adults and children.
On Friday 27th April, Hitler was able to find himself a victim. Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's representative attached to Hitler's staff and the brother-in-law of Eva Braun, was found to be missing. He had quite simply gone home to plan his escape south. Hitler had him dragged back across the wreckage of Berlin and placed under guard. That night, under heavy and ceaseless shell-fire above ground, Hanna Reitsch claims that Hitler called his loyal followers together and shared with them a grim discussion of the details of the deaths that everyone present felt in honour bound to pledge to their Führer the moment the Russians stood on the threshold of the Bunker. Yet Hitler persisted in his belief that Wenck's army, which was in fact a defeated remnant on the Elbe, was still moving to the relief of Berlin. 28th April was spent sending out excited telegrams demanding answers to impossible questions concerning these relieving forces which never came and did not even report their movements.