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

The Grand-Admiral, who made no secret even after the war of the mutual respect between him and Hitler, claimed in an early post-war interrogation that he was chosen as the senior member of the armed forces with the necessary authority ‘to put in effect the capitulation’. Since Hitler could not end the war, he asserted, someone else had to do it. ‘This war could only be finished by a soldier who had the necessary authority with the armed forces. The point was to insure that the Army would obey, when told to capitulate…. The Führer knew that I had the authority.’²⁹ Years later, Dönitz added a gloss: ‘I assumed that Hitler had nominated me because he wished to clear the way to enable an officer of the Armed Forces to put an end to the war. That this assumption was incorrect I did not find out until the winter of 1945–46 in Nuremberg, when for the first time I heard the provisions of Hitler’s will, in which he demanded that the struggle be continued.’³⁰ Whether Dönitz at the time understood that the reason for his appointment was to enable him to bring about a capitulation is highly doubtful. Nothing in Hitler’s stance during the last days, or in his dealings with Dönitz, implied that he was handing over power to seek the capitulation which he himself could not undertake.³¹ That would have been totally out of character for Hitler, whose entire ‘career’ had been based on the imperative that there would be no ‘cowardly’ capitulation as in 1918, and who had on a number of occasions expressed the view that the German people did not deserve to survive him. On the contrary: Hitler saw in Dönitz precisely the military leader whose fanaticism was needed in order to continue the fight to the bitter end.³²

Dönitz did, in fact, immediately deviate from Hitler’s expressed wish that the struggle should on no account be abandoned,³³ and began to explore avenues towards negotiating an end to the war short of complete and unconditional surrender on all fronts. But this was almost certainly not a result of misunderstanding the reason for his appointment as head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. It was simply the need to bow to military and political reality now that Hitler was dead. The end was near; most of the Reich was under enemy occupation; the population was war-weary in the extreme; loyalties were fragmenting rapidly; and the Wehrmacht was largely destroyed, its remnants on the verge of total defeat.³⁴ There was little alternative from Dönitz’s point of view, now burdened with responsibility not just for the navy but for the entire Reich, to try even at this late stage to negotiate an end which would be less than total disaster.

In a post-war interrogation several months later, Field-Marshal Keitel claimed that ‘as soon as Hitler was dead, more or less the principal point was this: if somebody else has the responsibility, then the only thing to do was to seek an immediate armistice and attempt to save whatever can be saved’.³⁵ This was disingenuous. No immediate armistice was sought. Dönitz, who later asserted that his government programme was clear, that he wanted to end the war as quickly as possible but above all to save as many lives as he could,³⁶ chose rather to prolong the fight for the time being on both eastern and western fronts in an attempt to buy time to bring back the troops from the east. He had also not altogether given up hopes of splitting the coalition and winning the western powers for a continued war against Bolshevism. In so doing, he did enable hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a far smaller number of civilians to avoid Soviet captivity. But he added a further week of death and suffering to the immense human cost of the war.

II

For those civilians imminently exposed to the prospect of Soviet conquest, the mortal fear and dread was completely unaltered by Hitler’s death. Many, in any case, lacking radio, newspapers and post did not hear the news for days.³⁷ One macabre way the deep anxiety manifested itself was in an epidemic of suicides in the closing weeks of the Third Reich, which continued into May as complete military defeat and enemy occupation loomed.³⁸