“Führer’s birthday. Sadly no one is in the mood for a party.”
(Martin Bormann’s private diary)
The orders were precise. Hitler didn’t want a party for his birthday. It would have been both ridiculous and inappropriate. The day before, he informed his valet, Heinz Linge, of this, and immediately demanded that his will be respected by everyone in the bunker. But no one paid any heed. The Führergeburtstag (Führer’s birthday) remained a holy date in the calendar in Nazi Germany, almost the equivalent of 25 December. So how could the most fervent zealots of the regime be prevented from celebrating their hero? It was the custom in the dictator’s closest circle to wish him a happy birthday at midnight. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers advancing on Berlin wouldn’t change that. Like good school pupils anxious to attract the favour of their teachers, seven Nazis crammed into the dictator’s tiny antechamber. Their uniforms perfectly ironed and their medals on display, chins held high, nothing in their attitude revealed their ardent desire to flee Berlin. Linge remembered that those present were General Hermann Fegelein (Eva Braun’s brother-in-law), General Wilhelm Burgdorf, SS officer Otto Günsche, the diplomat Walther Hewel (Ribbentrop’s liaison agent, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs), Werner Lorenz (representative of the Reich’s head of press), Julius Schaub (Hitler’s personal aide-de-camp), and Alwin-Broder Albrecht (Hitler’s naval aide-de-camp).
They were all bustling about around Linge, the dilettante SS officer who had only ever seen the front from an open-topped car beside his master. Linge, who wore the epaulettes of a lieutenant colonel even though he was only a valet. But this was no longer a time for contempt. Linge was the last person in the bunker who was in permanent contact with Hitler. All of those proud officers, those Nazi Party officials, came to him to persuade the Führer to accept their best wishes. “After informing Hitler of this,” Linge recalled, “he gave me a tired and depressed look. I had to tell the arrivals that the Führer had no time to receive them.”* But that didn’t take into account Fegelein’s determination. This young and scheming thirty-eight-year-old general had felt almost untouchable since marrying Gretl, Eva Braun’s sister, on 3 June 1944. Hitler couldn’t refuse to receive them if it came from Eva, Fegelein said to himself. And he was right! He asked his sister-in-law to persuade Hitler. Reluctantly, the Führer came out and quickly shook the hands extended to him. His men barely had time to wish him “happy birthday,” before he returned to his study, his back bent. Fegelein was proud. He thought he had made his point. That could always be useful when the right time came.
During the rest of that day, other personalities from the Reich came to the Chancellery that stood above the bunkers. Hitler left his shelter and came up into the fresh air to meet them in the halls of the imperial building. One by one the apparatchiks saluted the Führer like serfs saluting a feudal lord, more out of obligation than devotion. The Gestapo kept a close eye on everyone’s attitudes, and no one was immune to the possibility of a death sentence for treason. Not even the generals and the ministers. Top-ranking visitors included the Nazis most fully implicated in the regime: Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS; Hermann Göring, Reich Vice-Chancellor; Admiral Karl Dönitz; Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
With an arm outstretched in attempts at a fascist salute, they were engaging in an act of pretence. Pretence that the man in front of them was still capable of saving Berlin, let alone the country. Hitler was officially fifty-six, but he looked more like a cursed phantom. A phantom haunting the damp soil of the capital of his Reich.
What had become of the man who had galvanised millions of Germans only twelve years before? An old man with Parkinson’s disease, barely capable of ruling over a reinforced concrete air-raid shelter. Here is what Erwin Giesing, one of his personal doctors, wrote of the Führer after examining him in February 1945:
He seemed to have aged, and to be more bent-backed than ever. His face was pale and there were great rings around his eyes. His voice was clear but faint. I noticed that the trembling in his left arm was getting worse if he didn’t hold it with his hand. That was why Hitler kept his arm resting on the table or on the headrest of an armchair. […] I had a sense of a man who was completely exhausted and absent.*
Erich Kempka, his personal chauffeur, was present on that occasion. “On the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday, 20 April 1945, I reflected on past years when the German people celebrated this day and held great celebrations and parades.”† Gone were the grand parades! Gone the military bands with their bombastic music in the square of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. The cohorts of admirers lined up by the side of the road clutching little black swastika flags lay crushed by the Allied bombs. As to the hundreds of diplomats who had come from all over the world to offer their allegiance to the strong man of a conquering Germany, where were they now?
There is an astonishing document that sums up this fall of the Nazi regime. It is in the Russian State Military Archives in Moscow. When the Red Army entered the Reich Chancellery on 1 May 1945, they laid hands on a curious book. It is a large book bound in red leather, emblazoned with an eagle holding a laurel wreath with a swastika in the middle. This document is nothing other than a visitor’s book. Foreign diplomats invited to major ceremonies had to write their names in it. The feasts celebrated included New Year’s Eve, the national German day of celebration, and, of course, the Führer’s birthday. Every guest signed, gave their function and sometimes declared their fervent admiration of the Nazi regime.
On 20 April 1939, Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday. He had already been in power for six years, he had annexed Austria, the Sudetenland, and then Bohemia-Moravia, he had openly persecuted the German Jews, and he had caused ever greater alarm to the European democracies. But no matter. The dictator was no less available to the sixty or so diplomats who had come to pay him tribute. Their decoratively written signatures are lined up over six pages of the visitors’ book. They include representatives from France and the United Kingdom. For them, it would be the last opportunity to wish Hitler a happy birthday, because in less than five months, on 1 September, war would be declared between those two countries and Germany.
Let us turn the pages. Here we are in 1942. Hitler is celebrating his fifty-third birthday. He’s stopped making the western democracies nervous; he terrifies them now when he isn’t actually destroying them. The list of victims is long: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Poland… The Führer is at the height of his power, and that is apparent from the number of diplomats attending his birthday party. Over a hundred signatures over twelve pages. Admittedly there are no French people now, no British names, and even fewer Americans, but there are still Italians, Japanese, Spaniards. And one loyal guest at the Nazi celebrations, the apostolic nuncio of Pope Pius XII.
20 April 1945. The last date in this imposing collection of signatures. No more block capitals at the top of the chapter. One imagines that the Führer’s personal secretariat were short of time. In its place, a simple date hastily scribbled in the margin: 20.4.45. And five signatures from diplomats. Five. Who are they? Their names are barely legible, the writing seems so nervous. The ones that can be deciphered are the following: an Afghan ambassador, a Thai, one from China. Where are the other ambassadors? The ones who were honoured to attend the regime’s celebrations? They have disappeared. Even the representative of the Vatican no longer added his signature to this now cursed book. But the apostolic nuncio hadn’t missed a single Nazi ceremony since 1939. He was still there for the New Year’s celebration on 1 January 1945. His conscientious handwriting on these villainous pages attests to diplomatic connections that many would prefer to keep under wraps.
On 20 April 1945, everyone is fleeing Hitler. All those who can, or who dare. Even among the Nazis, not least in the first circle of senior leaders, including one of the most emblematic of the regime: Marshal Göring.
Hermann Göring certainly did come to Berlin. In line with his outrageous temperament, he enthusiastically swore his profound attachment, his eternal loyalty and his certainty of imminent victory. Then he fled as quickly as possible for the mountains of Obersalzberg. Not for fear of the fighting in Berlin but, he claimed, to prepare the counter-offensive in the Bavarian Alps. The hasty departure of the spirited marshal did not go unnoticed in the bunker. “After a surprisingly short time, Göring left Hitler’s office and the Führerbunker,” wrote the Führer’s personal chauffeur, Erich Kempka. “The same day he fled Berlin and never came back.”* Göring’s escape shocked the other inhabitants of the bunker, but more than that, it terrified them. Would they have time to wait for Hitler’s decision to leave Berlin? Adjutant Rochus Misch was a telephone operator in the Führerbunker. He bears witness to the danger that lay in wait: “On 20 April, the day of Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, Soviet tanks had reached the outskirts of the capital. The city was practically encircled. That day or the day before, someone went down to the bunker to announce that the roar of artillery fire could be heard.”†
For the Russian troops, 20 April 1945 was an extremely worrying date. What if the rumours of a Nazi special weapon, a weapon that could turn the war around, were true? According to German propaganda, that weapon was due to be unveiled on the day of Hitler’s birthday. “Some people had seen tarpaulin-covered vehicles transporting the secret weapon in question,” said Elena Rzhevskaya, a German interpreter with the Red Army. “We fantasised, trying to imagine its destructive force. We waited for the announcement on the radio.”* But nothing came. That new weapon was the atom bomb. Nazi engineers had been working on it for years. The Allied air raids on German industrial sites over several months considerably hampered Hitler’s mad project. The Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, speculated in his memoirs that “with extreme concentration of all our resources, we could have had a German atom bomb by 1947, but certainly we could not beat the Americans, whose bomb was ready by August 1945.”†
* Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Valet, trans. Geoffrey Brooks, Barnsley, Frontline Books, 2013, p. 187.
* Ibid., p. 174.
† Erich Kempka, I was Hitler’s Chauffeur: The Memoirs of Erich Kempka, Barnsley, Frontline Books, 2012, p. 57.
* Erich Kempka, I was Hitler’s Chauffeur, op. cit., p. 58.
† Rochus Misch, J’étais garde du corps d’Hitler (1940–1945), Paris, Le Cherche Midi, 2006, p. 193.
* Elena Rzhevskaya, Carnets de l’interprète de guerre, Paris, Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 2011, p. 287.
† Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, London, Orion, 1970, p. 229.