Himmler does not appear to have been called. Perhaps he was too far away; he was establishing a headquarters at Ziethen Castle, Wustrow, on the Baltic coast to the east of Lübeck Bay, to which he could move when Berlin fell. More probably it was because he was out of favour. Sepp Dietrich’s ‘failure’ in Hungary on top of his own failure to halt the Russian thrust into Pomerania had made a bitter impression on Hitler. Goebbels’ diary entry for 30 March had recorded Hitler talking of Dietrich’s ‘guilt before history’, and he noted that ‘Himmler’s standing with the Führer has accordingly sunk
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