B006OAL1QM EBOK (43 page)

28th April, which was Saturday, brought further baiting of the tethered Leader. On this day Hitler discovered the treachery of Himmler whose half-hearted negotiations with Count Bernadotte were being conducted on the assumption that he would undoubtedly be Hitler's chosen successor. Unfortunately news of these discussions had leaked into the international press. The report was laid before Hitler, who at the sight of it collapsed once more into another of his soul-destroying rages which revealed the madness inherent in his nature and reduced his face and body to a bloodshot, trembling monstrosity. Such paroxysms of human ferocity are in any situation terrifying to watch; they reveal too openly the primeval forces that lie at the base of human nature. But in the straitened circumstances of the Bunker, where no one could escape from the savage onslaught of such erupting anger, there was nothing to be done but to stand, pale and exposed, until the screaming and the raving had spent themselves and calm was somehow restored. Then Hitler shut himself away with Goebbels and Bormann, and in this secret session, of which no note survives, they doubtless determined the actions which were put into force during the next forty-eight hours.

Fegelein, the unfortunate representative of Himmler, was questioned and afterwards taken into the garden and shot; he had admitted knowledge of Himmler's tentative discussions with Bernadotte. Then, against all expectations, with Russian tanks as near as the Potsdamer Platz, a sergeant-pilot of the Luftwaffe managed to get a training plane from Rechlin by flying in at 13,000 feet and dropping down to the East-West Axis. He had come to take the new Commander of the Luftwaffe, Ritter von Greim, back to his headquarters. Though both von Greim (who was seriously ill and had been under the care of Stumpfegger ever since his arrival in the Bunker) and his strange companion Hanna Reitsch wanted to die with Hitler, he managed to persuade them to take their slender opportunity of retreat and to carry with them certain written instructions and private letters from the besieged inhabitants of the Bunker. Among them was Magda's last letter to her elder son, Harald Quandt, who was a prisoner-of-war. It has been preserved. It is dated 28th April, and is headed “Written in the Führerbunker”:
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My darling son,

It is six days by now that we have been in the Führerbunker, all of us, Papa, your small brother, your five little sisters and I, so as to give our National Socialist life the only possible and honourable end.

I don't know whether this letter will ever reach you, but perhaps there is a human soul after all, enabling me to send you these, my last greetings. I want you to know that it was against Papa's will that I have decided to stay with him, and that even last Sunday the Führer still wished to help us to get out of here. But you know your mother, we have the same blood, and for me there was no other choice. Our glorious ideas are coming to an end, and with them everything beautiful and admirable and noble and good I have known in my life. The world to come after the Führer and after National Socialism will not be worth living in, and that is why I have taken the children along with me. They are too good for the sort of life to come after us, and a merciful God will understand my reasons for sparing them that sort of life….

The children are wonderful. Without anyone to help them they look after themselves in these more than primitive circumstances. Whether or not they have to sleep on the floor, whether or not they can wash themselves, or have something to eat—there is never a word of complaint from them and they never cry. Artillery bombardment shakes the Bunker, and whenever that happens the bigger children look after the smaller ones; and incidentally their presence here is a blessing if only for the fact that from time to time they make the Führer smile.

Last night, the Führer took his own Party badge and pinned it on me. It made me very proud and happy. May God give me the strength for my last and most difficult duty. There is only one thing we want now, to be true to death to the Führer and to finish our lives with him. And in a way, this is a blessing of fate we never dared to hope for….

My darling son, live for Germany!

Your Mother.

Naumann spoke to Magda shortly after Hitler had presented her with his own Party badge, which was made of gold. She was quite overcome with happiness; her mind for the moment was freed from the clouds of sorrow which the approach of death was massing over her.

Goebbels also wrote a last, very characteristic letter to his step-son:

My dear Harald,

We are shut away in the Führerbunker next to the Reich Chancellery, fighting for our lives and our honour. God alone knows how this struggle will end, but I do know that, alive or dead, we shall not leave the Bunker unless we can leave it honourably. I do not think we shall see each other again, and these are probably the last words you will ever receive from me. If you survive this war, I expect you at all times to do honour to your mother and your father. It is not necessary for us to remain alive in order to influence our people's future. The probability is that you will be the only survivor to continue the tradition of our family. Do it in such a way that we would never have been ashamed of you. Germany will survive this terrible war, but only if there are examples to guide its resurrection. Such an example of loyalty we are about to set here in the Bunker.

You can be proud of your mother. Yesterday the Führer gave her the golden Party badge that he has worn for so many years. No one deserves the gift more than she.

In future you should recognise one duty only: to be worthy of the great sacrifice that we are determined to make. I know you will be worthy, but do not be led astray by the unrest which will spread now all over the world. One day the untruths will collapse under their own weight, and truth will once more rise supreme. The time will come again when Germany will face the world unsullied, as spotless as our own faith and purpose have always been.

Good-bye, my son Harald. It is in God's hands whether we are ever to meet again. If this will never be, you can be proud of belonging to a family which, in these dark days, stood by the Führer and remained loyal to him with its last breath, and faithful to his great and sacred cause.

My best wishes to you from the bottom of my heart,

Your Father.

Von Greim and Reitsch left the Bunker some time after midnight, and in the early hours of the morning looked down on the furnace of Berlin as their plane climbed to heights for which it was never intended. But they reached Rechlin in safety, and then went on to Doenitz's headquarters at Ploen.

In the Bunker the first act of Sunday 29th April was the marriage of Hitler to Eva Braun. This seems to have taken place soon after the departure of Ritter von Greim. It was a civil wedding of the simplest, most austere type, and was conducted by a complete stranger, Walter Wagner, who was the nearest to a representative of the local city authority that could he found; he was one of Goebbels'
Gau
Inspectors and arrived wearing a Party uniform. Huddled together in one of the diminutive rooms in Hitler's private suite, the Führer and Eva Braun were hastily married with the fewest possible words. Nevertheless they both declared they were of pure Aryan descent. The only witnesses were Goebbels and Bormann, both of whom signed the marriage certificate. In the passageway outside a small party had been formed to congratulate the bride and groom, and when the hand-shaking and hand-kissing were over, Goebbels and his wife were invited to join a more select group in the private suite to drink champagne and attempt to banish for a while the sense of doom with gossip of old and happy times when Hitler had been a witness to the marriage of Joseph and Magda. But for Hitler such talk soon became impossible, and he reverted once more to the bitterness of his betrayal and his intention of killing himself. Then he left the party to dictate his last will and testament, in which he had little to say but what had been said countless times in the past—the innocence of Germany, the villainy of international Jewry, and the need for high standards of devotion in the fighting services, more particularly in the High Command. He then formally expelled Göring and Himmler from their offices of state and from the Party, and proceeded to appoint a new Head of State and Cabinet. Grand-Admiral Doenitz was made Reich President and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, but even so he was not to be permitted to make up a Cabinet for himself. Hitler did it for him. Among the senior appointments Goebbels was created Reich Chancellor and Bormann Party Chancellor. Goebbels' ambition was at last to be realised, but at the eleventh hour, under a new President. Ribbentrop, in disgrace by reason of his ineffectual position and absence during the last days, disappears completely from this distribution of power on paper.

Hitler's testament is an interesting solution to the wholly theoretical balance of power in Germany. There in the Bunker beneath the fires of Berlin and with the Russian tanks gradually nosing their way nearer and nearer through the streets, Hitler, Bormann and Goebbels, the surviving hierarchy of Nazi Germany, must in their secret conference have worked out this plan in order to preserve a form of status appropriate to their vanity. With the war about to end, Doenitz's Supreme Command was valueless and as President he would be no more than a figurehead in the tradition of Hindenburg's last year of office. The real power would be in the hands of the two Chancellors— the Chancellor of the Reich and the Chancellor of the Party. It was a neat and simple compromise, if only the body of Germany had contained no enemies. But the American and the Russian forces had already met on the Elbe.

A second document, Hitler's personal will, paid a brief but warm tribute to his wife and his staff, disposed of his property, appointed Bormann his executor, and referred to the suicide he and his wife were about to commit.

When these documents had been typed by Hitler's secretary, Frau Junge—the testament is dated 29th April and timed 4 a.m.—Goebbels and Bormann were invited to be the principal witnesses to the Führer's signatures.

While Hitler retired to rest, the need to add some words of his own took possession of Goebbels, who knew now that his great historical studies would never be written and all that mattered was to leave behind the right directives for the survival of the Nazi myth. He went apart and wrote what he called an Appendix to the Führer's Political Testament. It was a brief, clear and pointed address to the German nation in which he proclaimed the reasons for his suicide:

The Führer has ordered me, should the defence of the Reich capital collapse, to leave Berlin and to take part as a leading member in a government appointed by him.

For the first time in my life I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Führer. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Otherwise—quite apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and loyalty forbid us to abandon the Führer in his hour of greatest need— I should appear for the rest of my life as a dishonourable traitor and common scoundrel, and should lose my own self-respect together with the respect of my fellow citizens; a respect I should need in any further attempt to shape the future of the German nation and State.

In the delirium of treachery which surrounds the Führer in these most critical days of the war, there must be someone at least who will stay with him unconditionally until death, even if this conflicts with the formal and (in a material sense) entirely justifiable order which he has given in his political testament.

In doing this, I believe that I am doing the best service I can to the future of the German people. In the hard times to come, examples will be more important than men. Men will always be found to lead the nation forward into freedom; but a reconstruction of our national life would be impossible unless developed on the basis of clear and obvious examples.

For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would un- reservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it falls, but rather, at the side of the Führer, to end a life which will have no further value to me if I cannot spend it in the service of the Führer, and by his side.
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Goebbels signed this statement at 5.30 in the morning. It is a document that takes a literary pleasure in the acceptance of death, and quite consciously and deliberately fulfils the grand gesture of tradition that the greatest thing a man can do is lay down his life for his friend. That his wife should offer to die with him is understandable, for, whether she loved her husband or not, she was always anxious to prove that she was not less devoted to Hitler than he. She became a willing victim in the vortex of violent emotion that was concentrated in the Bunker. What is less understandable is that with so many relatives surviving (among them Goebbels' mother and married sister and Magda's mother) they chose to include in their suicide their six children.

When it was morning outside, arrangements were made for the despatch of three copies that had been made of Hitler's testaments. Three special messengers were briefed to penetrate the Russian lines and carry the documents to safety. They were Major Johannmeier, one of Hitler's adjutants, Wilhelm Zander, a member of fiormann's staff, and Heinz Lorenz, an official from Goebbels' Ministry. Johannmeier was instructed to take Hitler's testament to Field-Marshal Schorner, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Army; Zander was to report to Doenitz with his set of documents, which included also Hitler's certificate of marriage; while Lorenz was told that he was also responsible for carrying the papers to Doenitz's headquarters, but that subsequently they should he sent to Munich, as the birthplace of Nazism, for preservation as documents of history. It was natural that Goebbels should attach his own personal addition to the Führer's testament to this third package. His statement had been made for history. Carrying their precious despatches, the three men left the Bunker together and picked their way west through the occupied city until they reached the northern part of the Havel which was still being defended by a detachment of the Hitler Youth. From here they were able to proceed south by water, passing on the way near to Goebbels' luxurious lakeside mansion of Schwanenwerder, deserted now and awaiting the arrival of the occupying forces.