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January 19 - January 23, 2025
The Fuehrer realized, as Keitel later explained to an interrogator at Nuremberg, “that it would be a terrible scandal in Germany if this well-known Field Marshal, the most popular general we had, were to be arrested and haled before the People’s Court.” So Hitler arranged with Keitel that Rommel would be told of the evidence against him and given the choice of killing himself or standing trial for treason before the People’s Court. If he chose the first he would be given a state funeral with full military honors and his family would not be molested.
The once mighty Army, like every other institution in the Third Reich, would go down with him, its leaders too benumbed now, too lacking in the courage which the handful of conspirators alone had shown, to raise their voices—let alone do anything—to stay the hand of the one man who they by now fully realized was leading them and the German people rapidly to the most awful catastrophe in the history of their beloved Fatherland.
Hitler often discussed this technique with his old party cronies. There is a stenographic record of a monologue of his at headquarters on May 3, 1942. “I quite understand,” he said, “why ninety per cent of the historic assassinations have been successful. The only preventive measure one can take is to live irregularly—to walk, to drive and to travel at irregular times and unexpectedly… As far as possible, whenever I go anywhere by car I go off unexpectedly and without warning the police.”
At Hitler’s insistence the production of civilian goods had been maintained at a surprisingly large figure throughout the war—ostensibly to keep up morale. And he had balked at carrying out the prewar plans to mobilize women for work in the factories. “The sacrifice of our most cherished ideals is too great a price,” he said in March 1943 when Speer wanted to draft women for industry.4 Nazi ideology had taught that the place of the German woman was in the home and not in the factory—and in the home she stayed. In the first four years of the war, when in Great Britain two and a quarter million
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The end came quickly for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945.
As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler’s lack of interest in it and Himmler’s practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical “scientific” experiments which he deemed more important.
Albert Speer, the outspoken Minister for Armament and War Production, had anticipated the barbarous directive from previous meetings with Hitler and on March 15 had drawn up a memorandum in which he strenuously opposed such a criminal step and reiterated his contention that the war was already lost. He presented it to the Fuehrer personally on the evening of March 18. In four to eight weeks [Speer wrote] the final collapse of the German economy must be expected with certainty… After that collapse the war cannot be continued even militarily… We must do everything to maintain, even if only in a
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That the German people were spared this final catastrophe was due to—aside from the rapid advances of the Allied troops, which made the carrying out of such a gigantic demolition impossible—the superhuman efforts of Speer and a number of Army officers who, in direct disobedience (finally!) of Hitler’s orders, raced about the country to make sure that vital communications, plants and stores were not blown up by zealously obedient Army officers and party hacks.
Vienna had already fallen on April 13. At 4:40 on the afternoon of April 25, patrols of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division met forward elements of the Russian 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe, some seventy-five miles south of Berlin. North and South Germany were severed. Adolf Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The last days of the Third Reich had come.
“My Fuehrer,” Goebbels said. “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday, April the thirteenth. [It was already after midnight.] It is the turning point!” Hitler’s reaction to the news was not recorded, though it may be imagined in view of the encouragement he had been receiving from Carlyle and the stars.
That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of the Fuehrer’s most trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering, the latter in a motor caravan whose trucks were filled with booty from his fabulous estate, Karinhall. Each of these Old Guard Nazis left convinced that his beloved Leader would soon be dead and that he would succeed him. They never saw him again. Nor did Ribbentrop, who also scurried for safer parts late that night.
Berger, but not Himmler, went to Berlin that night and his visit is of interest because of his firsthand description of Hitler on the night of his great decision.
“Hanna,” he said, “you belong to those who will die with me… I do not wish that one of us falls to the Russians alive, nor do I wish our bodies to be found by them… Eva and I will have our bodies burned. You will devise your own method.” Hanna took the vial of poison to Greim and they decided that “should the end really come” they would swallow the poison and then, to make sure, pull a pin from a heavy grenade and hold it tightly to their bodies.
April 28, as we have seen, had been a trying day in the bunker. The Russians were getting close. The expected news of Wenck’s counter attack, or of any counterattack, had not come through.
This blow—coupled with the news received a few minutes later that the Russians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, but a block away, and would probably storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, thirty hours hence—was the signal for the end. It forced Hitler to make immediately the last decisions of his life. By dawn he had married Eva Braun, drawn up his last will and testament, dispatched Greim and Hanna Reitsch to rally the Luftwaffe for an all-out bombing of the Russian forces approaching the Chancellery, and ordered them also to arrest Himmler as a traitor.
After the brief ceremony there was a macabre wedding breakfast in the Fuehrer’s private apartment.
HITLER’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT These two documents survive, as Hitler meant them to, and like others of his papers they are significant to this narrative.
The “Political Testament,” as he called it, was divided into two parts, the first consisting of his appeal to posterity, the second of his specific directions for the future.
Although during the years of struggle I believed that I could not undertake the responsibility of marriage, now, before the end of my life, I have decided to take as my wife the woman who, after many years of true friendship, came to this city, already almost besieged, of her own free will in order to share my fate.
They were soon joined by a fourth, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, who had been a junior member of the inner circle since the beginning of the war. Below too did not believe in suicide and felt that there was no longer any useful employment in the Chancellery shelter. He asked the permission of the Fuehrer to leave and it was granted.
At least the Supreme Nazi Warlord was remaining true to character to the very end. The great victories had been due to him. The defeats and final failure had been due to others—to their “disloyalty and betrayal.”
Mussolini, Hitler’s fellow fascist dictator and partner in aggression, had met his end and it had been shared by his mistress, Clara Petacci. They had been caught by Italian partisans on April 27 while trying to escape from Como into Switzerland, and executed two days later.
It is not known how many of the details of the Duce’s shabby end were communicated to the Fuehrer. One can only speculate that if he heard many of them he was only strengthened in his resolve not to allow himself or his bride to be made a “spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical masses,”—as he had just written in his Testament—not their live selves or their bodies.
The Russians might come in a few hours and kill them all—though most of them were already thinking of how they could escape—but in the meantime for a brief spell, now that the Fuehrer’s strict control of their lives was over, they would seek pleasure where and how they could find it. The sense of relief among these people seems to have been enormous and they danced on through the night.
This formidable and beautiful blond woman had, like Eva Braun, found it easy to make the decision to die with her husband, but the prospect of killing her six young children, who had been playing merrily in the underground shelter these last days without an inkling of what was in store for them, unnerved her.
Two revolvers had tumbled to the floor, but the bride had not used hers. She had swallowed poison. It was 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become Chancellor of Germany and had instituted the Third Reich. It would survive him but a week.
Goebbels did not think it necessary to inform the new Leader of his own intentions. Early in the evening of May 1, he carried them out. The first act was to poison the six children. Their playing was halted and they were given lethal injections, apparently by the same physician who the day before had poisoned the Fuehrer’s dogs.
On April 29, the day before Hitler took his life, the German armies in Italy had surrendered unconditionally, an event whose news, because of the breakdown in communications, was spared the Fuehrer, which must have made his last hours more bearable than they otherwise would have been. On May 4 the German High Command surrendered to Montgomery all German forces in northwest Germany, Denmark and Holland. The next day Kesselring’s Army Group G, comprising the German First and Nineteenth armies north of the Alps, capitulated.
In a little red schoolhouse at Reims, where Eisenhower had made his headquarters, Germany surrendered unconditionally at 2:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945.
After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness to all but a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for them too, the Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as we have seen, this great nation and this resourceful but so easily misled people to heights of power and conquest they had never before experienced and now it had dissolved with a suddenness and a completeness that had few, if any, parallels in history.
Seven defendants at Nuremberg drew prison sentences: Hess, Raeder and Funk for life, Speer and Schirach for twenty years, Neurath for fifteen, Doenitz for ten. The others were sentenced to death.
This book had a surprising reception. No one—not my publisher, my editor, my agent, my friends—believed that the public would buy a book so long, so full of footnotes, so expensive, and on such a subject. My lecture agent had told me there was no more interest in Hitler and the Third Reich and that I would have to talk about something else. My publisher printed only 12,500 copies in advance. The fact that the book started at once to attract considerable readership was therefore a pleasant surprise to us all.
And now, as the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall goes to press, the world is suddenly confronted with a new reunification of Germany. Soon, united, Germany will be strong again economically and, if it wishes, militarily, as it was in the time of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler.
Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.
