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

8. IfZ, Nbg.-Dok., PS-1787, Jodl’s ‘Notizen zum Kriegstagebuch’, ‘Lage am 22.1.45’ (23.1.45), not printed in the published trial documents. According to Goebbels, Hitler stated that the first priority was possession of oil, then coal, then a functioning armaments industry.—TBJG, II/15, p. 218 (25.1.45). Hungary produced some 22 per cent of the petrol and 11 per cent of the diesel demand of the Reich.—Heinrich Schwendemann, ‘Strategie der Selbstvernichtung: Die Wehrmachtführung im “Endkampf” um das “Dritte Reich”’, in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.), Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, Munich, 1999, p. 226.

9. Guderian, pp. 382–7, 392–3.

10. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, London, 1982, pp. 531–2; DRZW, 9/1 (Förster), p. 605.

11. Schwendemann, ‘Strategie’, p. 231.

12. The coffins of Hindenburg and his wife were initially transported to Potsdam’s garrison church, then shortly afterwards moved secretly to a safer location in a salt mine near Bernterode (a small town in Thuringia). The Americans found the coffins there on 27 April, the names scrawled on them in red crayon, and in May took them west to Marburg, where the former Reich President and his wife were finally reburied, unobtrusively, at night, in August 1946.—Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis, Oxford, 2009, pp. 193–6.

13. Heinrich Schwendemann, ‘Das Kriegsende in Ostpreußen und in Südbaden im Vergleich’, in Bernd Martin (ed.), Der Zweite Weltkrieg und seine Folgen: Ereignisse—Auswirkungen—Reflexionen, Freiburg, 2006, p. 96.

14. Where not otherwise indicated, the above description of the military course of events draws upon DZW, 6, pp. 498–517; DRZW, 10/1 (Lakowski), pp. 491–542, 568ff.; Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus den Gebieten östlich der Oder-Neiße, ed. Theodor Schieder et al., pb. edn., Munich, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 16E–23E; Erickson, ch. 7; Guderian, pp. 389ff.; Brian Taylor, Barbarossa to Berlin: A Chronology of the Campaigns on the Eastern Front 1941 to 1945, vol. 2, Stroud, 2008, pp. 267–79; Heinz Magenheimer, Hitler’s War: German Military Strategy 1940–1945, London, 1998, pp. 264–71; Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45, London, 2004, chs. 9–10; and Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, pb. edn., London, 2007, chs. 3–4.

15. Ralf Meindl, Ostpreußens Gauleiter: Erich Koch—eine politische Biographie, Osnabrück, 2007, pp. 435–8; Kurt Dieckert and Horst Grossmann, Der Kampf um Ostpreußen: Ein authentischer Dokumentarbericht, Munich, 1960, pp. 119–20.

16. Hastings, pp. 322–3.

17. Alastair Noble, Nazi Rule and the Soviet Offensive in Eastern Germany, 1944–1945: The Darkest Hour, Brighton and Portland, Ore., 2009, p. 320 n. 168; Meindl, pp. 441–2.

18. Meindl, p. 445. According to Noble, p. 210, Koch initially moved to the comfort of a Pillau hotel, but this was bombed a few days later. See also Isabel Denny, The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City: The Battle for Königsberg, 1945, London, 2007, pp. 201–2. In early February, Koch moved his staff to Heiligenbeil to help organize the evacuation of refugees over the ice of the Haff.—Meindl, p. 447.

19. Heinrich Schwendemann, ‘Endkampf und Zusammenbruch im deutschen Osten’, Freiburger Universitätsblätter, 130 (1995), p. 19; Hans Graf von Lehndorff, Ostpreußisches Tagebuch: Aufzeichnungen eines Arztes aus den Jahren 1945–1947, pb. edn., Munich, 1967, pp. 18 (23.1.45), 40 (7.2.45).

20. Some of many examples in Edgar Günther Lass, Die Flucht: Ostpreußen 1944/45, Bad Nauheim, 1964, pp. 85–7.

21. Lehndorff, pp. 24–5 (28.1.45).

22. Die Vertreibung, vol. 1, p. 28 (testimony from 1951).