From time to time, powerfully impregnated with Dr. Gebhardt's
medicaments, Himmler made the pretence of returning to his
headquarters and directing the battle. His personal regime was
leisurely by any standards. He would rise at eight-thirty in the
morning, sleep for three hours after lunch, and retire to his room at
ten o'clock at night—very different hours from those prevailing
at the
Reichskanzlei
. But when the ice melted on the Oder,
Himmler dropped even this pose and retired to his favourite room at
Hohenlychen. The thaw had affected him profoundly, he told Schellenberg. It had been a miracle. The second miracle (the other, of
course, need he say it, had been the Führer's deliverance at
Rastenburg) to affect him personally within a year. And it had left
him convinced of the existence of the Almighty. There was a God,
Himmler told Schellenberg, and they were His instruments.
Like so many in the condemned cell, the Reichsführer, who had
forbidden church parades at Bad Tölz, hounded the Wehrmacht
chaplains, and permitted his soldiers to dese-crate shrines and use
church walls for execution the length and breadth of Europe, had seen
the Light.
Aside from the spiritual conversion of its chief, the thaw on the
Oder had come just in Jime for Army Group Vistula. For the 9th Army,
which was holding the centre and most of the river stretch, was an
untidy hodgepodge of
Volkssturm
and SS, many of the latter
being strictly "Byzantine" Waffen units, like Krueger's 5th
SS Mountain Corps of Albanians and Slovenes, or security forces with
little combat experience against regular enemy troops. Among them
were those durable villains of the Eastern front, Bach-Zelewski,
Dirlewanger, and the "Police General" Reinefarth, all of
whom will be remembered for their part in suppressing the Warsaw
uprising.
[ See Ch. 20]
Guderian had noted in his diary that cracks were appearing in SS
morale ". . . although the
panzer
troops continued to
fight bravely, whole SS units, taking advantage of the cover thus
offered, proceeded to retreat against orders," and he now became
increasingly concerned with the prospects of the Reichsführer's
army group once the Russians had accumulated the strength to mount
a set-piece attack on the Oder position. On 18th March he drove to
Himmler's headquarters at Prenzlau, where he found conditions
"completely chaotic," and was told that Himmler had gone to
Hohenlychen "with an attack of influenza." Guderian got
back into his car and went to Gebhardt's clinic, where the National
Leader was found, sitting up in bed but "apparently in robust
health."
Among the variety of Mad-Hatter's-Tea-Party scenes which stimulate
historical curiosity during the last weeks of the Third Reich, the
interview which followed must have a high place. The bright,
impersonal hospital room; the Chief of the General Staff, jack-booted
in his ankle-length
feldgrau
greatcoat, Knight's Grand Cross
at his throat; and in pajamas, his countenance puffy, the
Reichsführer SS, Chief of the Police, Commander in Chief of the
Home Army, and G.O.C. Army Group Vistula. No matter what respect he
might have for Himmler's ability, Guderian told him, surely ". .
. such a plethora of offices was bound to be beyond the strength of
any one individual?" Himmler said nothing Perhaps by now the
Reichsführer had come to realise that the command of troops at
the front is no easy matter? Might it not be appropriate for the
Reichsführer to give up the command of his army group and
concentrate on his other offices?
Himmler plucked at the sheets. Guderian formed the opinion that he
"was no longer so confident as in the old days." Then the
National Leader offered an excuse. He could not go and say such a
thing to the Führer, he protested. "He wouldn't approve of
my making such a suggestion." Guderian, however, was equal to
the situation, and immediately suggested that he make the proposal
to Hitler on Himmler's behalf. The National Leader gave his assent
and sank back into the pillows, to ruminate undisturbed on the
sibylline utterances of Dr. Wulf, and the Chief of Staff returned to
his motorcar and hurried over to Zossen. That very evening Guderian
told Hitler that the "overburdened" Reichsführer
should be replaced by General Heinrici, a meticulous and donnish man,
at that time commander of the 1st Panzer Army. Hitler, after "a
certain amount of grumbling," agreed, and the relief took place
on 22nd March.
On the day after Guderian's visit the National Leader roused
himself and travelled, not to his headquarters at Prenzlau, but to
Berlin, "to catch up on the political situation." Then, on
the evening of the 21st, he returned, thoroughly exhausted, to
Prenzlau for the handing over to Heinrici the following day.
But at this point the military situation began to make its
influence felt once again, and soon its intolerable pressure,
intensifying the claustrophobia which pervaded the Nazi leadership,
was to trigger a new round of dismissals and realign-ments. For
Zhukov had massed twenty-seven armoured brigades above the
confluence of the Warthe and the Oder, and Rokossovski, deploying
nearly as great a strength, had reached the Baltic on either side of
Kolberg and was bombarding Stettin. It was plain that a full-dress
assault on the Oder position was not many days off.
The meeting between Himmler and Heinrici (who recorded that the
Reichsführer was looking "unusually white and puffy")
was interrupted by a telephone call from General Busse, commanding
the 2nd Army, with the news that the two small Russian bridgeheads on
either side of Küstrin had sprung to life and linked up to the
west of the town, isolating the garrison. "You command the Army
Group now," Himmler told Heinrici, handing him the receiver,
"please give the appropriate order."
[In his account (Thorwald,
Das Ende an der Elbe
II, 25) of
this meeting, Heinrici states that Himmler ended by volunteering the
opinion, "The time has come to enter into negotiations with oui
western neighbours. I have initiated steps. My agents have established contact." Yet this is very hard to believe, for only the
previous afternoon Guderian had walked with Himmler in the Chancellery garden in Berlin and suggested that the two of them go to Hitler
and urge him to conclude an armistice. To which Guderian alleges (p.
467) Himmler replied, "My dear Colonel-General, it is still too
early for that."]
But if Himmler was now too preoccupied—with his health, with
his conscience, with "global matters" of politics and
reconciliation—to concern himself with the fate of the Küstrin
garrison, the Führer was not. For the defenders of Küstrin
were an exceptionally "reliable" force. Of such a
character, that is to say, that their reliability was guaranteed by
the fate which awaited them at the hands of the Red Army. Cooped up
inside the town were none other than Reinefarth and four battalions
of his "police" army corps, wearing uniforms which ensured
their immediate execution should they surrender. Hitler addressed
himself to the problem of their relief. He told Guderian to see to
it that Busse achieved this immediately, and also to commit five
divisions in a counterattack from the Frankfurt bridgehead, as a
"diversion."
After a certain amount of shuffling Busse launched his relief
attack on 26th March. But both Guderian and he refused to waste
their strength in attempting a pointless sortie from the Frankfurt
perimeter. By now the Russian footholds on the west bank of the Oder
were building up at such a rate that Busse's relief force was heavily
outnumbered, and within twenty-four hours he had been beaten back
with heavy casualties. At the Führer conference on 27th March,
Guderian defended Busse with difficulty, and by frequently referring
to the figures of killed and wounded he had sustained. The Chief of
Staff undertook to visit the Frankfurt position the following day and
see whether the projected attack was "a practical proposition."
However, that morning Krebs brought Guderian a message from the
Führer, forbidding him to visit the front and summoning him
and Busse to attend the noon conference (instead of the usual night
conference).
To avoid interruption from air attack, it had been customary for
some time for these afternoon "briefings," as they were
called, to be held in the corridor of Hitler's personal underground
bunker, and into this confined space there crowded, at 2 p.m. on 28th
March, Guderian and Busse, Keitel, Jodl, Burgdorf, Hitler, Bormann,
and sun-dry adjutants, staff officers, stenographers, and men of the
SS bodyguard. Soon the conference took on the character, which was to
be a recurrent feature of the "bunker period," of a
hysterical multipartite shouting match. Busse had barely started on
his report when Hitler began to interrupt him with the same
accusations of negligence, if not cowardice, which Guderian had
protested against the previous day. Guderian then began to interrupt,
using unusually strong and dissenting language, drawing in turn
murmurs of reproof from Keitel and Burgdorf. Finally Hitler brought
the company to order by dismissing everyone except Guderian and
Keitel, and turning to Guderian, he said, "Colonel-General,
your physical health requires that you immediately take six weeks'
convalescent leave."
With the dismissal of Guderian the last rational and independent
influence was removed from the direction of military affairs in
Germany. Only the "Nazi soldiers" remained, all of them now
in timid conformity with Brauchitsch's "office boy" image
and tied to the execution of the Führer's wayward policies. It
is one more paradox of the Russian campaign that at the end, when
Hitler had mastered the General Staff and finally extinguished the
evasions and insubordinations which had persisted among them
(albeit in diminishing strength) since 1941, he began to take on all
the characteristics which the generals had so long ascribed to him,
and which they had used to excuse their own intermittent
disobedience.
For in April 1945, Hitler was living the reality of a dream he had
foreshadowed to Hermann Rauschning back in 1934:
Even if we could not conquer, we should drag half the world
into destruction with us, and leave no-one to triumph over Germany.
... we shall never capitulate, no, never! We may be destroyed, but if
we are we shall drag a world with us—a world in flames.
Yet to describe the atmosphere in Berlin as pure
Götterdämmerung
,
a sort of nihilist fantasy where rational considerations no longer
applied, is a gross oversimplification. Hitler, certainly, was
obsessed. His ". . . terrible appetite for blood, like his
appetite for material destruction, seemed rather to grow when the
price was to be paid not in inferior currency but in good Aryan
coin." This attitude was shared by Goebbels and professed
(though not, it was later to emerge, held) by many of the lesser
personalities at Hitler's court.
There were others who gave thought to their predicament, and
they reasoned in different ways. First, the Diadochi closest to and
most heavily dependent on the Führer: Bormann, the
Fegelein-Kaltenbrunner cabal, Ribbentrop, Koch, and some of the
senior Gauleiters. These people had to attach their faith to the
Führer's wisdom, the new weapons, the prospect of the
"diplomatic coup," which Ribbentrop still maintained was
possible. Their personal ambitions could best, could only, be
served by sticking as close to Hitler as possible, and by watching
for opportunities to discredit their more independent-minded
rivals, should the fortunes of the Reich change and a redistribution of power become feasible.
Second, there were a few leading executives, notably Himmler and
some of his intimates in the SS, like Schellenberg. They saw
themselves (ludicrously enough) as acceptable in principle to the
Western Allies because of their proven anti-Bolshevism, and necessary
in practice because of the military and administrative power which
they controlled. There can be little doubt that it was this
conviction, as much as considerations of personal vanity, which
prompted Himmler to acquire so many extra titles and provinces, just
as it was Bormann's idea to edge
Treuer Heinrich
away from the
Führer's personal entourage by loading him with an accumulating
burden of responsibilities. For the successful exercise of all
Himmler's various powers was, as has already been shown, fast
receding from the scope of his capability—a state of affairs to
which malign and pointed reference could be made in the privacy of
the Führer's intimate circle.
The third group in the Nazi hierarchy was the tech-nocrats,
military and civil. These were men who saw themselves as trustees
of Germany's greatness. They chose to look no further than
appearances (itself an alarming enough prospect), to ignore the
lunatic and bestial cruelty that underlay the regime, and to regard
their duty in simple terms —those of protecting the German
people from their enemies without and, of late, the unpredictable
savagery of edicts from within. In the first months of the Third
Reich we can see this group—generals like Guderian, Model,
Heinrici, civilians like Speer, struggling doggedly in their private efforts to preserve the still towering edifice of the
Thousand-Year Reich while, around them, the state facade was
crumbling away to reveal a rotten and verminous sub-structure.
These three groups were all, while united by the focus of the
Führer's headquarters, pulling in approximately the same
direction. And although members of each coveted Hitler's succession
there was little that they could, or dared, do. With the
deteriorating military situation and the isolation of the Führer
in Berlin, many people came to equate physical separation with
administrative impotence. They soon learned that "the power of
the Führer was a magic power and no profane hand might reach out
to touch it until the reigning priest was really dead," a
profound truth, which each of the Diadochi (except Goebbels) sought
to evade at some point in the spring of 1945, and all to their peril.
It is this which causes the history of the German collapse to
stratify at three levels. First, the sequence of defeat in the purely
military sphere, the accumulating strain and final rupture of the
bedraggled armies along the Oder. Second, the train of events at the
Führer's headquarters in Berlin; and third, the crude and
hesitant efforts of a few leading Nazis to assume and exercise power
in their own narrow interest.