• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1671 0

ührer-conferences, Hitler usually had only two or three interlocutors. There is no noticeable sycophancy in their answers to his ceaselessly probing questions. Gun calibres, oilfields, plastic versus metal mines, Panzer driver training, encirclement strategies: little escaped his attention. ‘Can’t we make a special supply of flame-throwers for the west?’ he asked just before D-Day. ‘Flame-throwers are the best for defence. It’s a terrible weapon.’ He then made a telephone call to order a trebling of the monthly flame-throwing production, ending the conversation: ‘Thank you very much. Heil! Happy holidays.’ There are several moments of unintended humour – ‘One always counts on the decency of others. We are so decent,’ Hitler said – but the atmosphere was uniformly businesslike, even towards the very end. There was of course no mention of the Holocaust in front of the stenographers. Other things were not transcribed, such as his paeans about his German shepherd dog Blondi and his constant asking of the time – Hitler never wore a watch – but otherwise his every word was taken down. He only really started rambling incoherently towards the end, as the Red Army advanced on his bunker and he took refuge in nostalgia, Schadenfreude, accusations of betrayal (many of them perfectly justified) and blind optimism.

It was after a Führer-conference in February 1945 that Albert Speer tried to explain to Dönitz how the war was certainly lost, with the maps there showing ‘a catastrophic picture of innumerable breakthroughs and encirclements’, but Dönitz merely replied, ‘with unwonted curtness’, that he was only there to represent the Navy and ‘The rest is none of my business. The Führer must know what he is doing.’53 Speer believed that had Göring, Keitel, Jodl, Dönitz, Guderian and himself presented the Führer with an ultimatum, and demanded to know his plans for ending the war, then ‘Hitler would have had to have declared himself.’54 Yet that was never going to happen, because they suspected – half of that group correctly – that there was soon to be only a rope at the end of it. When Speer approached Göring at Karinhall soon after he had spoken to Dönitz, the Reichsmarschall readily admitted that the Reich was doomed, but said that he had ‘much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together – and he could no longer break loose’.

Hitler knew too: on 2 March 1945, criticizing a proposal by Rundstedt to move men south from the sector occupied by the 21st Army Group, he perceptively pointed out: ‘It just means moving the catastrophe from one place to another.’55 When five days later an armoured unit under Brigadier-General William M. Hoge from the 9th Armored Division of Hodge’s US First Army captured the Ludendorff railway bridge over the Rhine at Remagen intact, and Eisenhower established a bridgehead on the east of the Rhine, Hitler’s response was to sack Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west and replace him with Kesselring. Few chalices could have been more heavily poisoned than that appointment at that time, with American troops swarming over the bridge into Germany, and Patton crossing on 22 March, and telegraphing Bradley to say ‘For God’s sake tell the world we’re across… I want the world to know 3rd Army made it before Monty.’56 Montgomery’s crossing of the Rhine the next day, codenamed Operation Plunder, was watched by Churchill and Brooke and established a 6-mile-deep bridgehead within forty-eight hours. When 325,000 men of Army Group B were caught in the Ruhr pocket and forced to surrender, Field Marshal Walther Model dissolved his army group and escaped into a forest. Having recently learnt that he was to be indicted for war crimes involving the deaths of 577,000 people in Latvian concentration camps, and after hearing an insanely optimistic radio broadcast by Goebbels on the Führer’s birthday, he shot himself on 21 April.

A few days earlier, Churchill had proposed a triple proclamation from the Big Three ‘giving warning to Germany not to go on resisting. If [the Germans] carry