When it became apparent that the war was lost, Hitler and a few loyalists repaired to an underground air raid shelter—the Führerbunker—to wait out the end of the world. At first it was just Hitler and his general staff, including chief deputy Martin Bormann.
Hitler had spent only his nights in the bunker 33 feet under the Reich Chancellery garden, but by mid-April, his empire had collapsed into 18 underground rooms. The worthies had been joined there by Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler’s German shepherd Blondi; with Goebbels’ wife and six children installed in an adjoining bunker connected by an underground tunnel.
By the end of the month, as many as 36 other staff members were sheltered there—doctors, nurses, Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, and Sgt. Rochus Misch, Hitler’s bodyguard who also operated the telephone switchboard.
Hitler mainly kept to the lower level, making his last trip to the surface on April 20 (his 56th birthday) to present the Iron Cross to the boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. That same day, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler departed the bunker to try to save themselves.
Hours later, Soviet artillery began shelling the city for the first time. As Hitler and a few top generals huddled desperately to try to come up with a strategy to defend the city, others in the bunker began drinking copious amounts of brandy, playing music, and dancing. There are eyewitness reports of some of the support staff openly engaging in sex acts in the canteen.
Cornelius Ryan, in his 1966 book The Last Battle, describes a scene where Maj. Gen. Walther Buhle enters the war room to report to Hitler, obviously drunk. Nobody—including Hitler, who took pains to present himself as abstemious—seems to care. The Führer asks Buhle a few questions, which he answers “thickly … and stupidly” but to Hitler’s satisfaction.
Somehow, 150,000 more troops are found to battle the advancing allied forces.
“Faith and strong belief in success will make up for all these insufficiencies! Every commander must be filled with confidence! You!” Hitler rails at the disbelieving Gen. Gotthard Heinrici. “You must radiate this faith! You must instill this belief in your troops!”
Heinrici replied that faith would not win the battle; he would soon be relieved of his command. But he survived the bunker and lived until 1971. He wrote in his diary he knew “Hitler was completely wrong. All I could think of was, ‘How can anyone delude themselves to this extent?’ I realized that they were all living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (cukoo-cukoo land).”
In the end we know what happened—the generals began to understand Hitler was commanding divisions that existed only on maps. As Nazi officer Albert Speer wrote in a scathing letter, the Führer had conflated his destiny with that of the German nation. Hitler had gambled recklessly and lost, and destroyed a great nation as collateral damage.
In Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2002), he recounts a dramatic scene near the end where Hitler’s chief adjutant, Gen. Wilhelm Burgdorf, has the scales fall from his eyes. Burgdorf, who had spoken of his “limitless devotion” to Hitler, begins to shout at Bormann. Burgdorf says he has been mocked by his fellow officers and called a “traitor” for maintaining his allegiance to the obviously mad Hitler.
They were right, he says.
“[T]hey died for you,” he screams at Bormann. “Millions of innocent human beings [were] sacrificed, while you, the leaders of the Party, enriched yourselves with the wealth of the people. You lived it up, amassed immense riches, stole Junker [members of the landed nobility in Prussia] estates, indulged in luxury, deceived and oppressed the people.
“You trampled our ideals into the mud, our morals, our beliefs, our soul. For you a human being was only a tool for your unquenchable hunger for power. You destroyed our centuries-old culture and the German people. This is your terrible burden of guilt.”
Fest writes that the bunker grew quiet. And then Bormann—“cool, deliberate, and unctuous”—lifts his brandy and replies, “But my dear man, there’s no need to get personal. Even if others have all gotten rich, I’m free of guilt …. Cheers.”
On April 30, discipline broke down. The bunker had become a non-stop party. Shortly after 3 p.m., an orderly came up from the lower level and demanded quiet, for the Führer was about to die. He was ignored. The music continued even as the report of a pistol reverberated though the rooms. Hitler and Braun had bitten into cyanide capsules, the efficacy of which had been tested on the “beloved” Blondi and her pups. For good measure, Hitler had then shot himself with his service revolver.
Their bodies were cremated in the chancellery garden by bunker survivors (as per Hitler’s orders) and reportedly partially recovered by Russian troops. It wasn’t until 1956 a German court officially declared Hitler dead.
Burgdorf’s moment of clarity must have passed, or was subsumed by his fatalism. He remained in the bunker until after the suicides of Hitler, Braun, and Goebbels and his wife (after murdering their children). He was one of the last residents of the bunker; on May 2, he and Gen. Hans Krebs sunk into overstuffed armchairs and drank a bottle of brandy together. Then they each shot themselves. (They were so drunk it was a minor miracle they didn’t botch their suicides.)
In retrospect, we might be puzzled as to how the German people and the generals who surrounded him could be so slow to recognize Hitler for what he was—a naked narcissist with no coherent vision of leadership whose only real policy was one of destruction.
It’s sometimes said that it is beyond a soldier’s ken to question orders, that a soldier must respect the chain of command above all and behave accordingly. Erwin Rommel’s widow insisted her husband was not a Nazi, just a soldier. And a soldier asks no questions.
But every soldier is also a human being, in which is installed some moral apparatus we might be called to obey above all kings and governments. It is easier to rationalize that evil is not evil, that what we wish to believe is what is, and, as Hitler told his generals on April 27, 1945, it ultimately doesn’t matter: “At some point you have to leave all this rubbish behind anyway.”
This is how we come to genocide and pogroms, by forgetting our history and denying our worst capacities.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com