The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

In Berlin, hardly any people were aware of the subterranean drama in the bunker. They had far more pressing things on their minds. They desperately wanted peace—‘an end with horror rather than a horror without end’, as the well-worn phrase had it. They had equally desperately wanted the Americans to get to Berlin before the Russians.¹⁵⁶ Even that hope had disappeared. All that was left was fear of what was coming and the desire to survive. The streets were empty, apart from some queues of people outside shops trying to buy the food they needed for a long siege.¹⁵⁷ Most were by now living in cellars ‘like woodlice, creeping into the farthest corners’,¹⁵⁸ constantly hungry as rations dwindled, without heating because of coal shortages, with little or no gas or electricity, having to stand in long queues to collect water in buckets from street pumps. People had the feeling that they were no longer governed. ‘No orders any more, no news, nothing. No swine is bothered about us,’ as one woman expressed it.¹⁵⁹ Without electricity, few by now could receive news by radio. As even the last of the two-page broadsheets that passed for newspapers disappeared, they had to rely upon word of mouth to glean fragments of often inaccurate information.¹⁶⁰ At least they were spared the headlines of the Völkischer Beobachter, still printed in Munich until 28 April and proclaiming in its headlines that ‘Germany Stands Firm and Loyal to the Führer’, ‘The Führer—Defender of Berlin’, or ‘The Führer Inflames Berlin’s Fighting Spirit’.¹⁶¹ Anyone expressing such sentiments on the streets of Berlin was thought to be mad. But bodies hanging with notices round their necks proclaiming them to have been ‘traitors’ were a warning not to speak out recklessly, and still to take extreme care of those still standing behind the fatally wounded regime.¹⁶²

As long as the roads out of Berlin had remained open, thousands—many of them pale, worn-out women and their exhausted children—tried to escape to the west, on foot, in horse-drawn wagons, pushing wheelbarrows and prams containing remnants of their last few possessions.¹⁶³ Then the last escape routes were shut off. There was now nothing to do but wait in dread in cellars, wanting the end but fearing what it meant.¹⁶⁴ In the last week of April, the worst fears of many Berliners started to be realized as soldiers of the Red Army arrived.

In the bunker, too, the end was near. The final act in the drama had begun. The regime’s ruthlessness in its own death-agonies struck home within the small bunker community itself when Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, the dissolute and brutal Hermann Fegelein, an SS leader close to Himmler, tried to flee and, after being dragged back was summarily sentenced to death and executed. Fegelein was no more than a substitute for the real arch-traitor in Hitler’s eyes in the last days of his life: Heinrich Himmler. The Reichsführer-SS had, it seems, like Göring, taken news of Hitler’s outburst on 22 April as an effective abdication. He had finally cast off the caution which had dogged him throughout his dealings with Bernadotte and offered to capitulate in the west (though not in the east). This, for Hitler, was the ultimate betrayal. In his last volcanic explosion of rage, he had Himmler, too, thrown out of the Party and ordered his arrest.¹⁶⁵ But his reach no longer stretched far enough to have the Reichsführer-SS, in the north of the country, brought back to Berlin and subjected to a final disgrace and fearsome execution.