Armageddon - Max Hastings [338]
Everywhere along the Eastern Front, Germany’s forces were cut off, or disintegrating as they fell back to the last bastions of the Reich. When survivors of 10th SS Panzer were refused permission to break out of encirclement on 19 April, “we saw it as our death sentence,” said Captain Karl Godau, a gunner. He still had his battery, but no fuel to move it. Command and control had broken down. On the 20th, they fired off the last of their ammunition, then blew up the guns and trucks within sight of the Russians: “It was horrible—like being stripped naked.” A few men escaped. Godau’s battalion commander, a much admired officer named Harry Jops, swam the Elbe to escape imprisonment. The remainder surrendered. To their surprise, at first the Russians treated them quite well. It was later, during the long march to imprisonment in Silesia and afterwards in Russia, that their descent to misery took place, with stragglers shot down and many men perishing of starvation or despair.
Germany’s armies were crumbling one by one. In the west, resistance had almost ceased. In the east, men manned their positions conscious that to hope even for personal survival was extravagant. Fanatical Nazis aspired only to make an end in keeping with their demented, heroic vision of the Third Reich. Yet every other foothold of German resistance paled into insignificance alongside Hitler’s capital. It was there, the world knew, that the last terrible melodrama must be played out. All eyes now turned upon the grimy, battered, desperate streets of Berlin.
“HITLER KAPUTT! HITLER KAPUTT!”
IT IS IN the nature of war that many people find it impossible to acknowledge that the horrors they witness represent reality, or that a familiar environment is doomed. How can the heart accept the signals of the brain, however powerful and rational, that a known universe, in which the blotter stands where it has always stood on the office desk, the sofa in the lounge of the house, the shop on the corner of the street, is about to disappear for ever? If this phenomenon is true for ordinary mortals, then it becomes unsurprising that the Nazi leadership, with the notable exception of Speer, retreated into fantasy even as the Allied armies closed in for the kill. A regime that had suborned a nation and sought to conquer the world sustained its giant edifice of self-delusion to the last. Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz had directed Germany’s campaign in the Atlantic with some skill if no imagination. Now, with mindless devotion to the cause he had slavishly served, he continued to conduct the Navy’s affairs as if he was making policy for decades of Nazi hegemony. On 14 April, he volunteered to the Führer the services of 3,000 young naval personnel to operate as guerrillas behind enemy lines in the west, oblivious of the fact that these men were wholly untrained. Four days later, he circulated an order from naval headquarters, applauding the actions of a petty officer of the raiding cruiser Cormoran, who languished in a prison camp in Australia. This exemplary fig-ure, said the grand-admiral, had successfully killed every man among his fel-low PoWs who displayed communist leanings: “This petty officer is certain of my full recognition for his resolve and his execution. I shall promote him . . . on his return.”
Hitler’s ranting against his subordinates had increased in intensity. Guderian described one such session which continued for two hours, “his fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling . . . After each outburst of rage Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples.