“Himmler’s Opening Gambit To End European War”
(Reuters new agency headline)
The day got off to a bad start. At about nine o’clock an SS officer from a combat unit came to deliver his report to Hitler. He told him that the first Russian commando squads were approaching Wilhelmstrasse, just over a kilometre from the Chancellery. And Wenck still hadn’t arrived. The question was no longer whether the bunker would fall, but when that fall would take place. As soon as the news spread, everyone in the shelter asked for their little cyanide capsule. There weren’t enough for everyone, and only a small elite had the honour. The soldiers who formed the last guard around the Führer would have to commit suicide with their service weapons. As to alerting anyone outside who might have been able to bring help, that was a waste of time because the last telephone lines had been cut. To find out about enemy troop movements, the bunker telephone operators listened to wireless radio broadcasts, particularly those of the BBC. Thanks to the British station the Führer learned of a new betrayal. A betrayal yet more painful than Göring’s. Although the sound was barely audible, the news being repeated on an endless loop on the BBC left no room for doubt: Himmler had proposed that the Third Reich capitulate to the Allies. The BBC quoted a dispatch from the British Reuters news agency, saying that the supreme head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was offering a separate peace to the Anglo-Americans. The Reuters article is headlined “Himmler’s Opening Gambit To End European War” and reads: “Himmler’s reported overture of surrender to Britain and America alone, excluding Russia, which provided the sensation of the week-end, is regarded as the opening gambit of moves which will bring the war in Europe to an end.” The deal was as follows: Hitler would be deposed, Himmler would take his place, the Third Reich would be maintained, and the German army would join the Allies to fight the Bolsheviks. In the bunker, that was too much. While Göring’s attitude hadn’t really surprised anybody, the position of Himmler, the man of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” the most trusted and true of Hitler’s followers, destroyed the last certainties of the Nazi regime.
Hitler reacted like a madman. Hanna Reitsch remembered: “From pink, his face turned crimson and really unrecognisable. […] After that very long fit, Hitler finally sank into a kind of stupor, and the bunker fell entirely silent.” As he had done with Göring, Hitler immediately dismissed Himmler and excluded him from the Party.
Fegelein would pay for his betrayal of the head of the SS. Since he was officially Himmler’s representative to Hitler, his death sentence was authorised on the spot. For the Führer, Eva Braun’s brother-in-law must have been aware of Himmler’s plans to take power and negotiate with the enemy. His attempt at flight was proof of that in Hitler’s eyes. “An RSD [Reichsicherheitsdienst, Reich Security Service] colleague […] shot Fegelein from behind with a machine pistol in the cellar corridor.”*
Following these multiple betrayals, a feeling of paranoia spread throughout the bunker. Who would be next? Everyone was keeping an eye on everyone else, wary of the slightest hint of flight, of any criticism of the supreme commander. Meanwhile, outside, above ground, the centre of Berlin was a field of ruins. The fury of the Russians continued to rain down on the Reich capital. The powerful Soviet tanks were eviscerating the buildings on Potsdamer Platz, very close to the bunker. The German resistance consisting of a few soldiers and, above all, a civilian militia, the Deutscher Volkssturm (“German People’s Storm”) could only slow down the inexorable defeat by a few days.
The Volkssturm was created in autumn 1944 on the basis of an idea of Himmler’s. The whole people had to take part in the war. At first the mass enlistment involved all healthy men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Then, particularly in Berlin, even the wounded, younger children, and old men were called in to swell troops destined to be cannon fodder. Poorly equipped both in arms and uniforms, the Volkssturm militiamen were seen as mavericks by the Soviets, and as such they did not benefit from the protective frameworks of the international conventions in case of war. In plain language, even if they surrendered they were shot.
For the last time, the inhabitants of the bunker begged Hitler to escape. Artur Axmann, the head of the Hitler Youth, wanted to save the day. He claimed that he could get the Führer out. Thanks to a commando unit of hand-picked men ready to die for him, flight was still possible. There was still one aeroplane fit to fly to Gatow Airport. The improvised runway just beside the Chancellery remained under German control. Hans Baur confirmed that it was dangerous, perilous, but possible. A word, a gesture on the part of the Führer, and the escape would get under way.
Hitler doubted, and listened, but he was tired. With his sick body and his fragile nerves, would he even survive the shock of leaving? For Hanna Reitsch, that fifty-six-year-old man was now no more than an old man at the end of his life. “If a safe passage had existed, allowing him to leave the shelter, he wouldn’t have had the strength to take it,” she believed. His ultimate hope of leaving the bunker was to win the battle of Berlin.
* Rochus Misch, Hitler’s Last Witness, op. cit., p. 197.