Hitler. Part 33

I.

Hitler was dead. Only the last obsequies remained. They would not detain the inhabitants of the bunker for long. The man who, living, had dominated their existence to the last was now merely a corpse to be disposed of as rapidly as possible. With the Russians at the portals of the Reich Chancellery, the bunker inmates had thoughts other than their dead leader on their minds.

Within minutes of the deaths being established, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife of a day-and-a-half, Eva Braun, were wrapped in the blankets that Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, had quickly fetched. The corpses were then lifted from the sofa and carried through the bunker, up twenty-five feet or so of stairs, and into the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Linge, helped by three SS guards, brought out the remains of Hitler, head covered by the blanket, his lower legs protruding. Martin Bormann carried Eva Braun's body into the corridor, where Erich Kempka, Hitler's chauffeur, relieved him of his burden. Otto Gunsche, Hitler's personal adjutant, and commissioned with overseeing the burning of the bodies, then took over on the stairs and carried Eva Braun up into the garden. He laid the bodies side by side, Eva Braun to Hitler's right, on a piece of flat, open, sandy ground only about three metres from the door down to the bunker. It was impossible to look around for any more suitable spot. Even this location, close to the bunker door, was extremely hazardous, since an unceasing rain of sh.e.l.ls from the Soviet barrage continued to bombard the whole area, including the garden itself. General Hans Krebs, Hitler's last Chief of the General Staff, Wilhelm Burgdorf, his Wehrmacht adjutant, Joseph Goebbels, newly appointed Chancellor of what was left of the Reich, and Martin Bormann, now designated Party Minister, had followed the small cortege and joined the extraordinary funeral party witnessing the macabre scene.

A good store of petrol had been gathered in the bunker in readiness. Kempka had himself provided, at Gunsche's request, as much as 200 litres. More was stored in the bunker's machine-room. The petrol was now swiftly poured over the bodies. Nonetheless, as the hail of sh.e.l.ls continued, setting the funeral pyre alight with the matches Goebbels supplied proved difficult. Gunsche was about to try with a grenade, when Linge managed to find some paper to make a torch. Bormann was finally able to get it burning, and either he or Linge hurled it on to the pyre, immediately retreating to the safety of the doorway. Someone rapidly closed the bunker door, leaving open only a small crevice, through which a ball of fire was seen to erupt around the petrol-soaked bodies. Arms briefly raised in a final 'Heil Hitler' salute, the tiny funeral party hurriedly departed underground, away from the danger of the exploding sh.e.l.ls. As the flames consumed the bodies in a suitably infernal setting, the end of the leader whose presence had a mere few years earlier electrified millions was witnessed by not a single one even of his closest followers.

Neither Linge nor Gunsche, the two men entrusted by Hitler with the disposal of the bodies, returned to ensure that the task was complete. One of the guards in the Chancellery garden, Hermann Karnau, later testified (though, like a number of the witnesses in the bunker, he gave contradictory versions at different times) that, when he revisited the cremation site, the bodies had been reduced to little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them with his foot. Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6 p.m. Karnau had shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable bodies. Gunsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Fuhrer Escort Squad (Fuhrerbegleitkommando), Hauptsturmfuhrer Ewald Lindloff and Obersturmfuhrer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already thoroughly burnt and were in a 'shocking state', torn open Gunsche presumed in the heavy bombardment of the garden. Reisser's involvement was not needed. Gunsche told him, an hour and a half after giving him the order, that Lindloff had already carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30 p.m. on 30 April.

There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery garden.

When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler's dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke, since 1938, part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the other as Eva Braun's. The lower jaw-bone, too, was. .h.i.tler's. These earthly remains of the once all-powerful ruler of Germany were subsequently taken to Moscow and kept in a cigar-box. Part of a skull with a bullet-hole in it, thought to be Hitler's, was discovered in 1946 and also found its way to Moscow. The other presumed remains of Hitler and Eva Braun what, exactly, the Soviets found is still unclear were deposited initially in an unmarked grave in a forest far to the west of Berlin, reburied in 1946 in a plot of land in Magdeburg, then finally exhumed and burnt in 1970.

II.

The bunker inmates were finally free to think of their own survival. Even while the bodies still burned in the Chancellery garden above, they had forgotten their vows of self-immolation alongside their leader and were agreeing to do what he had always and explicitly ruled out: seek a last-minute arrangement with the Soviet Union. An emissary was sent out under a white flag to try to engineer a meeting of General Krebs (who, as a former military attache in Moscow, had the advantage of speaking fluent Russian) with Marshal Zhukov. At 10 p.m. that evening, Krebs went over the Soviet lines bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann.

It was an anxious night for those incarcerated in the bunker. And when Krebs returned around 6 a.m. next morning it was only to report that the Soviet side insisted upon unconditional surrender and demanded a declaration to that effect by 4 p.m. that afternoon, 1 May.

This was the end. It was time for final preparations on the sole remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53 a.m., a telegram for Donitz arrived in Plon: 'Testament in force. I'll come to you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from publication. Bormann.' Earlier that morning, more than nine hours after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand-Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker. Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in a further telegram the last to leave the bunker dictated by Goebbels and arriving at Plon at 3.18 p.m. that afternoon. Neither the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler's death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a broadcast at 10.26 p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon it was the previous day and that his death had taken place in combat 'at his post in the Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism'. In his proclamation to the Wehrmacht, Donitz spoke of the Fuhrer's 'heroic death'. The Wehrmacht's report stated that he had fallen 'at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital'. The delay in informing Donitz had plainly been to allow Bormann and Goebbels the final opportunity of a negotiated surrender to the Red Army without consulting the new head of state. The untruth relayed by Donitz to the Wehrmacht and German people was to prevent a predictable response by the troops, had they been aware of Hitler's suicide, that the Fuhrer had deserted them at the last. This was, in fact, precisely the message which General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander in Berlin, conveyed to his troops when ordering them, in the early hours of 2 May, to cease fighting. 'On 30.4.45 the Fuhrer took his own life and thereby abandoned those who had sworn him loyalty,' ran the order. 'At the Fuhrer's command you believe that you must still fight for Berlin, although the lack of heavy weaponry and munitions, and the overall situation shows the struggle to be pointless ... In agreement with the High Command of the Soviet troops, I therefore demand you to end the fighting immediately.'

By then, the drama in the bunker was finally over. Most of those still entombed below the Reich Chancellery had spent the afternoon and evening of 1 May planning their break-out. Goebbels was not among them. Along with his wife, Magda, he was now making arrangements for their own suicides and for taking the lives of their six children. In the early evening, Magda summoned Helmut Gustav Kunz, adjutant to the head doctor in the SS medical administration in the Reich Chancellery, and asked him to give each of the children Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide, aged between twelve and four a shot of morphine. It was about 8.40 p.m. when Kunz carried out the request. Once they had fallen into a drugged sleep, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's own physician at the end, crushed a phial of prussic acid in the mouth of each of the children.

Later that evening, as Wilhelm Mohnke, commandant of the 'Citadel', gave orders for the ma.s.s break-out from the bunker, Goebbels instructed his adjutant, Gunther Schwagermann, to take care of the burning of his and Magda's bodies. He gave him the silver-framed signed photograph of Hitler that for so many years had stood on his desk as a memento. Then he and his wife, after saying their brief farewells, climbed the stairs to the Chancellery garden, and bit on the prussic acid capsules. An SS orderly fired two shots into the bodies to make sure. Far less petrol was available for the unceremonious cremation than had been saved for burning the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops had little difficulty in identifying the corpses when they entered the Chancellery garden next day.

Krebs, Burgdorf, and Franz Schadle, head of Hitler's escort squad, also chose to end their lives in the bunker before the Russians arrived. The rest of the company sought their luck late that evening in the ma.s.s escape, undertaken in groups. The underground railway tunnel brought them to Friedrichstrae station, a few hundred yards to the north of the ruined Reich Chancellery. But once on the surface, in the burning h.e.l.l of Berlin, with sh.e.l.ls falling all around, confusion took over. The groups found themselves split up in the chaos. Individuals took what chances they could. A few, including the secretaries Gerda Christian, Traudl Junge, and Else Kruger, managed, remarkably, to make their way through to the west. Most, among them Otto Gunsche and Heinz Linge, fell into Soviet hands and years of misery and maltreatment in Moscow prisons. Most of the others were killed seeking a route to safety, or took the last decision left to them. Prominent among the latter were Hitler's constant right hand during the war years, Martin Bormann, and his doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger. Both had given up their hopes of escape and, rather than fall into Soviet hands, had swallowed poison in the early hours of 2 May 1945 in Berlin's Invalidenstrae.

III.

Outside Berlin, the winding-up orders on the Third Reich were meanwhile in the process of being served. However, they were carried out by the new Donitz regime based in Flensburg in the north of Schleswig-Holstein with great reluctance, and only under the evident compulsion of the hopeless military situation. At the end of the First World War, disastrous though the defeat had been, it had proved possible to save the existence of the Reich and the German army. The basis for the hopes of national rebirth had been laid. Donitz held to the illusion that this much might be achieved a second time. Even at this late hour, he was hoping through the offer of partial capitulation to the west to avoid total and unconditional surrender on all fronts, at the same time sustaining, with western backing, the German Reich to form, alongside the western powers, a common front against Bolshevism. For this, he needed to gain time also to allow withdrawal to the west of as many as possible of the Wehrmacht troops still engaged in bitter fighting against the Red Army. He was ready to sanction, therefore, the German capitulation in northern Italy on 2 May, which had already been agreed between Himmler's former right-hand man Karl Wolff and OSS chief Allen Dulles on the day before Hitler's suicide. He also reluctantly conceded on 4 May a further partial capitulation involving German troops in north-west Germany, Holland, and Denmark. In the south, where the Americans reached Munich on the day of Hitler's death, Innsbruck on 3 May, and Linz Hitler's home town four days later, Kesselring negotiated the surrender of the German divisions in the northern Alps on the 5th and in Austria on 7 May. Donitz did not, however, include in the partial capitulation the German troops further east, still fighting in Yugoslavia.

The Grand Admiral's hopes of rescuing the remnants of Hitler's Reich were visible in his choice of cabinet. Though he rejected Himmler's overtures for inclusion, and turned his back, too, on Ribbentrop, he retained several members of Hitler's cabinet, among them Albert Speer, while foreign affairs and the direction of the cabinet were placed in the hands of the long-standing finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who, it was presumed, would appear unsullied by the worst crimes of n.a.z.ism. He made no changes in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler's mainstays, Keitel and Jodl, were left in post. The n.a.z.i Party was neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still adorned the walls of government offices in Flensburg. One of the few concessions that Donitz made was the reintroduction of the military salute in the Wehrmacht to replace the 'Heil Hitler' greeting. But military courts continued to hand out death-sentences even as the last rites on the Third Reich were being p.r.o.nounced.

The tactics employed by Donitz were at least successful in enabling an estimated 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid Soviet captivity by surrendering to the western Allies though at a high cost of continuing bloodshed and suffering before the fighting could be finally terminated. While the eastern front had since 1941 been the main theatre of war, under a third of the 10 million or so German prisoners-of-war fell into Soviet hands. But Donitz's intentions of a one-sided, partial capitulation to win the West at this late stage to the defence against Bolshevism cut little ice with Allied leaders. When his envoy (and successor as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy) Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg journeyed with a delegation to Rheims, Eisenhower's headquarters, hoping to seal an agreement with the western Allies amounting to a capitulation to the West, but not to the Soviet Union, Eisenhower was having none of it. He insisted on a full and unconditional surrender on all fronts. Accordingly, on 6 May, Donitz sent Jodl to Rheims on seemingly the same mission to persuade the West to accept German surrender, but to avoid total capitulation though this time with powers to agree to a complete capitulation (following final authorization from Flensburg) and instructions to gain maximum time at least four days in order to bring back the largest German fighting unit still in combat, Army Group Centre, across American lines. Eisenhower remained unmoved. He insisted on the capitulation being signed that very day, 6 May, with effect from midnight on 9 May, and threatened a renewal of air-raids if the agreement were not forthcoming. Jodl was given half an hour to think it over. After difficulties in communication with Flensburg, Donitz, faced with no alternative, eventually conceded his authorization in the early hours. At 2.41 a.m. on 7 May, in the presence of representatives of all four of the Allied powers, the capitulation was signed, stipulating a complete ending of all German military engagements by the end of the following day.

The doc.u.ment to which the signatures were appended was, however, a shortened version of the original text of surrender, agreed by all the Allies. It was, in fact, regarded by the OKW leaders.h.i.+p as 'not final', and to be replaced by 'a general capitulation treaty' still to be signed. Meanwhile, the order had gone out to bring back as many troops and as speedily as possible to the west for surrender to the British and Americans. At Stalin's insistence, Allied representatives a.s.sembled once more, on 9 May, just after midnight, this time at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin, headquarters of Marshal Zhukov, to sign the full doc.u.ment of capitulation. Since the terms agreed at Rheims had already come into effect a few minutes earlier, the doc.u.ment was dated 8 May. Keitel, Friedeburg, and Colonel-General Hans-Jurgen Stumpff (representing the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Ritter von Greim) signed from the German side. Zhukov, the British Air-Marshal Arthur W. Tedder (representing Eisenhower), the French General Jean de Lattre de Ta.s.signy, and the US General Carl Spaatz signed for the Allies.

The last Wehrmacht report, on 9 May 1945, retained a tone of pride, speaking of 'the unique achievement of front and homeland' which would 'in a later, just verdict of history find its final appreciation'. These words, hollow for millions, followed the declaration: 'On command of the Grand Admiral the Wehrmacht has stopped the fight which had become hopeless. The struggle lasting almost six years is accordingly at an end.'

Hitler's war was over. The reckoning was about to begin.

IV.

Many of those bearing heaviest responsibility, after Hitler, for the terrible suffering of the previous years and the deep pall of sorrow left behind escaped full retribution. Suicide, Hitler had always said, was easy. Some of his leading henchmen now followed his example. Heinrich Himmler, the embodiment of police terror, captured by the British under false ident.i.ty and wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht sergeant, crunched a phial of pota.s.sium cyanide in an interrogation centre near Luneburg on 23 May as soon as his true ident.i.ty had been established. Robert Ley, the stridently antisemitic head of the German Labour Front, taken by American troops in the mountains of the Tyrol, strangled himself in the lavatory of his prison cell at Nuremberg on 24 October while awaiting trial. Arrested by US forces near Berchtesgaden on 9 May 1945, Hermann Goring, for so long Hitler's designated successor until his abrupt dismissal in the last days of the Third Reich, also committed suicide cheating the hangman awaiting his presence next day on the late evening of 15 October 1946 after being convicted on all charges, including crimes against humanity, at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Others among the regime's leaders, unwilling or unable to end their own lives, suffered the fate imposed upon them by the Tribunal and were hanged at Nuremberg. Convicted for crimes against humanity in all but one case war crimes, and in some instances conspiracy to commit or actual commission of crimes against peace the warmongering former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel; head of the Operations Department of the Wehrmacht and Hitler's chief military adviser Alfred Jodl; n.a.z.i ideological guru and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg; Reich Minister of the Interior (until his removal from office in 1943) Wilhelm Frick; Hitler's key man in Vienna at the time of the Anschlu and later Reich Commissar in the Netherlands Arthur Sey-Inquart; Labour Plenipotentiary Fritz Sauckel, who presided over the slave-labour programme; Heydrich's fearsome successor as head of the RSHA Ernst Kaltenbrunner; Governor-General of Poland and leading n.a.z.i lawyer Hans Frank; and the former Gauleiter of Franconia, leading Jew-baiter Julius Streicher were executed on 16 October 1946. Few mourned them.

Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister whose hands were barely less dirty than Sauckel's in the exploitation of forced labour, was one of those fortunate to escape the hangman's noose. Like the last head of state Admiral Donitz, Economics Minister Walther Funk, Foreign Minister (until his replacement by Ribbentrop in 1938) Konstantin von Neurath, head of the navy Erich Raeder, long-time Hitler Youth leader and Gauleiter of Vienna Baldur von Schirach, and (until his flight to Scotland in 1941) deputy head of the n.a.z.i Party Rudolf He, Speer was given a long prison sentence. Funk, Neurath, and Raeder were released early on health grounds. Donitz, Speer, and Schirach left prison each after serving the full sentence in Speer's case to become a celebrity, best-selling author, and pundit on the Third Reich with a belated guilt complex as his trademark. He was to commit suicide in 1987, still serving a life-sentence in Spandau prison in Berlin.

Among second-ranking n.a.z.is implicated in the regime's most heinous crimes, the most notorious, the manager of the 'Final Solution' Adolf Eichmann, was to be dramatically abducted from Argentina by Israeli agents, tried in Jerusalem, and hanged in 1962. The commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Ho, the butcher of the Warsaw ghetto Jurgen Stroop, the terror of the Poles in the Warthegau Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, and his scarcely less fanatical counterpart in Danzig-West Prussia Albert Forster were all hanged at earlier dates after trials in Poland. The Poles proved more humanitarian than their previous tormentors in commuting, on account of his poor health, the death-sentence on the notably (even by n.a.z.i standards) cruel and brutal former Gauleiter of East Prussia Erich Koch to a term of life-imprisonment.

Many implicated in crimes against humanity escaped lightly. Hinrich Lohse, former Reich Commissar in the Baltic, was released in 1951 on grounds of ill-health after serving only three years of a ten-year sentence. He died peacefully in his home town in 1964. Wilhelm Koppe, SS leader in the Warthegau and alongside Greiser the instigator of Chelmno extermination camp, where over 150,000 Jews lost their lives, was able to prosper under a pseudonym as the director of a chocolate factory in Bonn until the 1960s. When discovered and arraigned for his part in ma.s.s murder in Poland he was deemed unfit to stand trial, eventually dying in his bed in 1975. Countless others, who in 'working towards the Fuhrer' had exercised positions of great power, often determining life or death (including doctors implicated in the 'euthanasia action') and lining their own pockets at the same time through boundless corruption and ruthless careerism, were able wholly or in part to avoid serious retribution for their actions in some cases building successful post-war careers for themselves.

Few of those forced to account for their actions under Hitler showed remorse or contrition, let alone guilt. With scant exception, they showed themselves, when called to book, incapable of acknowledging their own contribution to the remorseless slide into barbarism during the n.a.z.i era. Alongside the inevitable lies, distortions, and excuses often went, it seems, a psychological block on recognizing responsibility for their actions. It amounted to a self-deception that mirrored the total collapse of their value-system and the demolition of the idealized image of Hitler to which they had clung for so many years which, indeed, had usually underpinned or at least given justification for their motivation. They had been content for years to see their power, careers, ambitions, aspirations depend solely on Hitler. Now, it was in a perverse sense logical that their own plight would be attributed solely to what they saw as. .h.i.tler's lunacy and criminality. From being the revered leader whose utopian vision they had eagerly followed, Hitler was now the scapegoat who had betrayed their trust and seduced them through the brilliance of his rhetoric into becoming helpless accomplices to his barbaric plans.

Such a psychology applied not merely to many of those most heavily incriminated in the n.a.z.i experiment to determine who should inhabit this planet. Countless ordinary Germans were now prepared to find an explanation for or defence of their own actions (or lack of action) in the alleged seductive powers of Hitler a leader promising salvation but in the end delivering d.a.m.nation. Alternatively, they looked to a level of totalitarian terror that had left them with no alternative but to follow orders of which they disapproved. Both responses were wide of the mark.

Hitler's regime, as we have had ample cause to acknowledge, was certainly for most of its twelve-year duration no narrowly based tyranny imposing its will upon the hostile ma.s.ses of the population. And, until the 'running amok' of the last phase of the war, the terror at least within Germany had been specifically targeted at defined racial and political enemies, not random and arbitrary, while the level of at least partial consensus in all reaches of society had been extensive. Generalizations about the mentalities and behaviour of millions of Germans in the n.a.z.i era are bound to be of limited application apart, perhaps, from the generalization that, for the great ma.s.s of the population, the figurative colours to look for are less likely to be stark black and white than varying and chequered shades of grey. Even so, it remains the case that, collectively, the inhabitants of a highly modern, sophisticated, pluralistic society which, following a lost war, was experiencing deep-seated national humiliation, economic bankruptcy, acute social, political, and ideological polarization, and a generally perceived complete failure of a discredited political system, had been prepared in increasing numbers to place their trust in the chiliastic vision of a self-professed political saviour. Once, as can now more easily be seen, a series of relatively cheap and easy (though in reality exceedingly dangerous) national triumphs had been achieved, still further vast numbers were prepared to swallow their doubts and to believe in the destiny of their great leader. Moreover, these triumphs, however much they were portrayed by propaganda as attributable to the achievements of one man, had been brought about not only with huge ma.s.s acclaim, but also with a very high level of support from almost all of the non-n.a.z.i elite-groups business, industry, civil service, above all the armed forces which controlled practically every avenue of power outside the upper echelons of the n.a.z.i Movement itself. Though the consensus was in many respects a shallow one, resting upon differing degrees of backing for the various strands of the overall ideological vision which Hitler embodied, it offered nevertheless until the middle of the war an extremely wide and potent platform of support for Hitler to build upon and exploit.

The rise from the depths of national degradation to the heights of national greatness seemed for so many (as propaganda never ceased to trumpet) to be a near-miracle a work of redemption brought about by the unique genius of the Fuhrer. Hitler's power was able thereby to draw on strong elements of pseudo-religious belief translated into the mysticism of national salvation and rebirth emanating in part no doubt from declining inst.i.tutional religion and from the psychologically needed subst.i.tution in some quarters for the quasi-religious a.s.sociations with the monarchy which also compensated in some ways for the many negative aspects of everyday life under n.a.z.i rule. Even to the very end there were intelligent individuals prepared to exempt Hitler from knowledge of the atrocities committed in Poland and Russia and to attach blame instead to Himmler. The Fuhrer cult, accepted not only by millions of believers but pandered to in their own interests by all in positions of authority and influence, even if they were often inwardly critical or sceptical, enabled Hitler's power to shake off all constraints and become absolute. By the time realization dawned that the road to riches was proving the road to ruin, the personalized rule of the leader was out of control. Hitler was by now though this had not always been so incapable of being checked by the splintered parts of an increasingly fragmented regime bound together largely by the commitment to the ruler himself and, increasingly, fear of the alternative: Bolshevism. The road to perdition lay open, but other than the courageous attempts by small groups or individuals which ultimately failed through bad luck even more than through bad planning there was by now little alternative but to follow this road.

The price to be paid by the German people, above all by the regime's untold numbers of victims inside and outside Germany was beyond calculation. The material price was immense. Writing to The Times The Times on 12 November 1945, the left-wing British Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz described his impressions in Dusseldorf: 'I am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the n.a.z.is were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere ... then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women. I am sure I should have the same feelings if I were in Greece or Poland. But I happen to be in Germany, and write of what I see here.' The moral price was, if anything, even more immeasurable. Decades would not fully erase the simple but compelling sentiment painted in huge letters at the scene of Hitler's annual celebration of the 1923 putsch, the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, in May 1945: 'I am ashamed to be a German.' 'Europe has never known such a calamity to her civilization and n.o.body can say when she will begin to recover from its effects,' was the telling and at the same time prophetic comment of one British newspaper, the on 12 November 1945, the left-wing British Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz described his impressions in Dusseldorf: 'I am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the n.a.z.is were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere ... then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women. I am sure I should have the same feelings if I were in Greece or Poland. But I happen to be in Germany, and write of what I see here.' The moral price was, if anything, even more immeasurable. Decades would not fully erase the simple but compelling sentiment painted in huge letters at the scene of Hitler's annual celebration of the 1923 putsch, the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, in May 1945: 'I am ashamed to be a German.' 'Europe has never known such a calamity to her civilization and n.o.body can say when she will begin to recover from its effects,' was the telling and at the same time prophetic comment of one British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian Manchester Guardian, only three days after the suicide in the bunker. The trauma which was. .h.i.tler's lasting legacy was only just beginning.

V.

Never in history has such ruination physical and moral been a.s.sociated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and actions of this one man has been evident in the preceding chapters. That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the n.a.z.i regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler's name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour, was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.

Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead and millions more grieving their lost ones and trying to put their shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end wrecked, its remnants to be divided among the victorious and occupying powers. The arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich capital itself and presided over half of Europe. Even the German people, whose survival he had said was the very reason for his political fight, had proved ultimately dispensable to him.

In the event, the German people he was prepared to see d.a.m.ned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler. Beyond the repairing of broken lives and broken homes in broken towns and cities, the searing moral imprint of Hitler's era would remain. Gradually, nevertheless, a new society, resting in time, mercifully, on new values, would emerge from the ruins of the old. For in its maelstrom of destruction Hitler's rule had also conclusively demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into calamitous war.

The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis.

Main Published Primary Sources on Hitler

Adolf Hitler: Monologe im Fuhrerhauptquartier 19411944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, ed. Werner Jochmann, Hamburg, 1980 (Hitler's Table Talk, 19411944, introd. by H. R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1953).

Akten der Partei-Kanzlei, ed. Inst.i.tut fur Zeitgeschichte, 4 vols, Munich, 198392.

Akten der Reichskanzlei. Die Regierung Hitler 19331938, 4 vols, Boppard/Munich, 198399.

Akten zur Deutschen Auswartigen Politik 19181945. (Serie D: 1.9.3711.12.41; Serie E: 19411945).

Baur, Hans, Ich flog Machtige der Erde Ich flog Machtige der Erde, Kempten, 1956.

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