Armageddon - Max Hastings [354]
HITLER’S DEATH ensured that the end would soon come, but did not itself terminate the dying. At no single moment did every corner of the German, Czech, Dutch, Scandinavian, Baltic and Yugoslav battlefields fall silent. Rather, the struggle stuttered to an end in one corner of Europe after another during the first two weeks of May, as one by one Hitler’s commanders succumbed to the inevitable. Even as some Russian soldiers, victorious in Berlin, were addressing themselves to the fruits of victory, elsewhere they were obliged to fight fiercely, not against an enemy aspiring to victory, but against Germans preferring death to Soviet captivity. A total of 3,404,950 of Hitler’s soldiers were disarmed following the final surrender. Most of these men, it may be assumed, were still offering at least nominal resistance to the Allies after the fall of Berlin.
On the evening of 1 May, from his headquarters at Plön in north Germany, Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz announced on German radio the death of Hitler and his own appointment as the Führer’s designated successor:
German men and women, soldiers of the German armed forces! Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. In deepest grief and respect the German people bow. He early recognized the frightful danger of Bolshevism and dedicated his being to this struggle. At the end of this, his struggle, and his unswerving life’s path, stands his hero’s death in the capital of the German Reich. His life was a unique service for Germany. His mission in the battle against the Bolshevist storm-flood is valid for Europe and the entire civilized world. The Führer has appointed me as his successor. In consciousness of the responsibility, I take over the leadership of the German Volk at this fateful hour.
An element of black farce was thus introduced to a tragedy. Instead of seizing the opportunity to offer an immediate capitulation and save thousands of lives, Dönitz’s mockery of a government permitted the killing to go on for a further week. The admiral sought negotiations with the Western allies, while striving to sustain resistance to the Russians. Capital sentences for desertion and mutiny continued to be carried out. On the Eastern Front, men fought on, unable to perceive any way to stop.
“I did not mourn Hitler,” said Captain Karl Godau of 10th SS Panzer, “but we felt that his death meant the end of everything. We simply could not imagine what might happen next. After all the threats that the Allies had made against Germany, one could not believe that anything good would follow.” Maria Brauwers of Jünkerath, however, grieved when she heard of Hitler’s passing: “I knew nothing about the Holocaust. But I remembered that the Führer had done many good things before the war, especially for those of us who were young.”
Corporal Helmut Fromm, a sixteen-year-old soldier from Heidelberg, shared the agony of the encircled Ninth Army in the fields and forests south of Berlin after the city had fallen and Hitler was dead. In their thousands, some in organized bodies and others alone, they trudged westwards, like some gigantic armed football crowd dispersing after a match, fighting Russians wherever they met them. The roads and surrounding countryside were jammed with fugitives, constantly attacked by Soviet aircraft. Sharing their misery were scores of thousands of civilian refugees of both sexes and all ages, clutching pitiful possessions. The remains of Fromm’s unit was commanded by a young Luftwaffe lieutenant, and included two women in army uniform. As they reached a ride in a forest, they suddenly saw two Soviet tanks, which fired at them. “Quick!” said their officer. “Run across while they’re reloading!” One of the women stopped dead in the midst of the ride, staring “like a paralysed rabbit” at the T-34 before her. “Run, you silly bitch!” shouted the officer. He