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

With Hitler gone, the chief and unyielding barrier to capitulation was removed. When Bormann’s wireless message had informed Dönitz at 6.35 p.m. on 30 April that Hitler had named him as his successor, there was no indication that the Dictator was by then dead. Dönitz had, however, been given immediate full powers to take whatever steps were needed in the current situation.¹⁴ He felt an enormous sense of relief that he could act, immediately summoning Keitel, Jodl and Himmler to discuss the situation.¹⁵ But remaining unsure, Dönitz telegraphed the bunker in the early hours of 1 May—a telegraph left unmentioned in his memoirs—to profess his unconditional loyalty to the Führer he presumed still alive, declaring his intention to do all possible (while knowing it to be a futile aim)¹⁶ to get him out of Berlin and declaring, ambiguously, that he would ‘bring this war to an end as the unique heroic struggle of the German people demands’.¹⁷ Only later that morning did Dönitz receive Bormann’s message that the Testament was in force. On this clear news of Hitler’s death, Dönitz now felt finally that his hands were free.¹⁸

As long as Hitler had lived, Dönitz had seen himself bound to him as head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht by his oath of military obedience, which the Grand-Admiral saw, like most of his generation who had been schooled as officers, as a sacred commitment. Beyond that, he had totally accepted—as had most leading figures in the military—the ‘leadership principle’ (Führerprinzip) that had been the basis of Hitler’s authority in the Party, then in the state and in his military command, throughout the Third Reich.¹⁹ He had consequently, and consistent with his unbending principles, refused all considerations of capitulation and upheld the fanatical continuation of the struggle as long as Hitler was alive. Immediately that he knew Hitler was dead, however, he felt in a position to contemplate a negotiated end to a lost war.²⁰ There could be no plainer illustration of the absolute centrality to the catastrophic continuation of the war not just of the person of the Führer, but of the structures of rule and mentalities that underpinned Hitler’s domination.

Even now there was a process of liquidation of the war, not an immediate end. Dönitz’s proclaimed aim, on 1 May, ‘to rescue the German people from destruction through Bolshevism’, denoted an attempt to give meaning to the continued fight in the east while looking to a negotiated end in the west.²¹ All at once, therefore, the question of capitulation—though not in the east—was a real and urgent one. Could general capitulation be avoided, even now? Could the western powers, even at this stage, through partial capitulations, be persuaded to join forces with the Wehrmacht to fight Bolshevism? Could some terms favourable to sustaining the Reich as a political unity be attained? Could a deal be struck that would save the German troops on the eastern front from Soviet captivity? The end was plainly imminent. But whereas Hitler had ruled out capitulation totally and was prepared to take everything into the abyss with him, the new Dönitz administration concerned itself from the beginning with the type of surrender that, it thought, could potentially be negotiated and still stave off the worst—submission to Bolshevism. And whereas Hitler, at least until the visibly crumbling days before his death, had been able to depend upon residual loyalties backed by a high dosage of terror and repression to hold the fading regime together, Dönitz could rely upon neither personal standing nor the backing of a mass Party or huge police apparatus, and was left with little at his disposal beyond the shrinking framework of military leadership, a restricted intelligence network and the residues of ministerial bureaucracy. ‘Who is this Herr Dönitz?’, General of the Waffen-SS, Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner contemptuously asked on hearing that the Grand-Admiral was to be the new head of state. ‘My forces and I are not bound by oath to him. I will negotiate on my own footing with the English at my rear.’²²