Armageddon - Max Hastings [323]
Hans Siwik, the Hitler Jugend leader who had escaped from East Prussia, called at the Reich Chancellery to see some old comrades from the days when he served with Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard. Otto Günsche, the Führer’s SS adjutant, ventured a notable banality to his old comrade: “Things are not going too well.” When Siwik saw Hitler, whom he had revered so deeply for so long, he was appalled by the senile, broken figure before him. He received a perfunctory handshake and was disturbed to notice that the hand was ice-cold. The atmosphere around the Chancellery and the bunker was fevered, and on every side Siwik heard words of mistrust, bitterness, recrimination. It was plain that the end was close. “It all seemed so unjust,” he said. Siwik was one among many of his fellow countrymen still incapable of comprehending what the Third Reich, in which he had been a minute but eager cog, had brought upon the world.
Even some sophisticated Germans remained remarkably naive about the prospect before them. Many who could have fled did not do so. “We pretended that, having been through these years of anguish and humiliation, we now wanted to witness the final and total destruction of the evil,” recorded von Stemann. “Perhaps we were motivated by a vain and boyish pride to show that we could make it. Perhaps we had more unrealistic fantasies. None of us expected the end to come as it did. I believe we had a vision of a Cecil B. de Mille picturesque and well-planned parade of the Allied leaders, moving in a great cortège past the Siegssaule and through the Brandenburg gate.”
Kertzendorf, the lovely mansion south of Berlin owned by Freddy Horstmann, a portly, moustachioed former diplomat, had been destroyed by bombing. Horstmann remained in the gardener’s cottage, crowded with art treasures salvaged from the big house. He awaited the arrival of the British and Americans with equanimity, confident of patronage from prominent Allied acquaintances. “They are all my friends,” he declared expansively. A former ambassador in Lisbon and Brussels, Horstmann had abandoned government service when told that his promotion would require a divorce from his half-Jewish wife Lally. An indolent sophisticate who lived in great style on the family newspaper fortune, he had endured the war by simply denying its reality. Horstmann and his friends agreed sagely that there could be no battle for Berlin, for the means no longer existed to defend the city. A friend arriving to stay in the spring of 1945 apologized for having been obliged to abandon a camembert cheese on his train when it was strafed. “Ach, a camembert!” said Horstmann regretfully. “What a pity. When shall I ever eat a camembert again?” He never did so, for he died in a Russian labour camp.
Until days before the Russians arrived, at great country houses around Berlin there were still liveried servants, fine wines and candle-lit dinners at the tables of the doomed Prussian nobility. The gravel of their drives was raked, the gardens tended by large staffs of prisoners, doing duty for family retainers absent at the front. “The participants appeared to take it all for granted, and behaved as if this life would go on for ever,” wrote Paul von Stemann. “Most families had lived on their estates for hundreds of years, but were soon to join the stream of refugees, leaving the splendours behind to be looted and vandalised.” At a big party one night in the house of his married daughter, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, former Panzergruppe