Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

Second bombing of the Party Chancellery (severe).

The Russians at Köslin and Schlawe.

All this is still interspersed with the chronicling of social and political life. With every passing day, however, Bormann notes feverishly how the circle is closing in:

Deep breakthroughs in Pomerania. Tanks at Kolberg, Schlawe-Dramburg. Only one bridgehead remaining in the west.

The English have entered Cologne.

The Russians are in Altdamm!!!

First direct hit on the Ministry of Propaganda.

Tanks in Warburg-Giessen.

Guderian was dismissed, and Hitler removed Dr Dietrich from his post as Press Chief. Meanwhile,

In the afternoon tanks are at Beverungen. By night there are tanks at Herzfeld.

Russian tanks at Wiener Neustadt.

The Bolsheviks are at Vienna.

The Anglo-Americans are in the Thuringia region.

For three days in mid-April the same phrase explodes in Bormann’s diary:

Major battles on the Oder!

Major battles on the Oder!

Major battles on the Oder!!

In February the massive fortifications on the Oder had been considered impregnable. There remained just a little more than two months before the total collapse of the Third Reich. On 24 February, celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the Nazi Party, Hitler declared,

Twenty-five years ago I proclaimed the coming victory of the movement! Today, imbued with faith in our people, I predict the ultimate victory of the German Reich!

German military experts had four weeks previously come to the conclusion that all prospect of that had gone. The Führer’s predictions were buttressed, however, by Himmler’s decree establishing special field courts to combat signs of failing morale. Germans suspected of insufficiently firm faith in victory faced swift, merciless retribution.

By this time Hitler himself was thinking not of victory but of salvation, pinning his faith on a miracle and, more realistically, on a falling out between the Allies. In his diary Goebbels quotes the Führer’s view, expressed to him in confidence:

Our task at present is to stay standing no matter what happens. Although the crisis in the enemy camp is growing considerably, the question is whether the explosion will come while we are still at all capable of defending ourselves. That is the prerequisite for a successful conclusion of the war: the crisis must blow up the enemy camp before we are destroyed.

However, Soviet troops broke through the front in Pomerania. Hitler put the blame for this on the General Staff for failing to take account of his intuitive foresight. To suppress the ‘creeping disobedience’ of the generals, Hitler hastily established mobile field courts, charging them with investigating all cases immediately, passing sentence, and shooting generals found guilty.

On 11 March Hitler listened with satisfaction to Goebbels’ report that Colonel General Schörner, one of the few the Führer still trusted, had employed ‘radical methods’. ‘To raise the morale of the troops’, he had hanged a considerable number of German soldiers. ‘This is a good lesson that everyone will pay attention to,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary, delighted by the Führer’s approval. Hitler had just received a report that one of the new field courts had sentenced to death a general responsible for a bridge not being blown up, and that the general had been shot without delay.

‘That at least is a ray of light,’ Goebbels exclaims in his diary. ‘It is only by such measures that we can save the Reich.’

On the evening of 27 March, Hitler and Goebbels take a walk in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. In Goebbels’ words, ‘The garden of the Reich Chancellery looks desolate. There are piles and piles of debris. The Führer’s bunker is being reinforced.’ They regret having missed the moment when they could have dealt with the generals by directing the blow against them rather than against Röhm, if he had not been ‘a homosexual and anarchist’.

And if Röhm had had a first-rate personality without vice then, probably, on 30 June [1934] several hundred generals would have been shot instead of several hundred SA leaders.

A second call-up to the Volkssturm militia was announced and sixteenyear-olds were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Women’s battalions were formed in Berlin. ‘We should place them in the second rank, then the men would lose their desire to retreat from the first rank,’ Goebbels muses in his diary on 5 March.

Trains with men on leave were combed for deserters. On 7 March an order was issued that soldiers taken captive without being wounded or in the absence of evidence that they fought to the last moment, would be executed and their relatives arrested.

Massive daily air raids on Berlin by Anglo-American aircraft. (Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, had assured Germans that no enemy aircraft would ever cross the border into Germany.) War from the air, with which Hitler had planned to subjugate London, Moscow and Leningrad, had come with all its mercilessness into the skies above Germany.

On 8 March 1945, Goebbels writes in his diary,

We are being bombed night and day. The damage is very severe… We have nothing worth mentioning to oppose the enemy’s air armadas. The air war has turned the Reich into piles of rubble.

Transport was disrupted, the electricity supply was disrupted. Berlin was ablaze with fires. The postal service was no longer operating and delivery of coal was increasingly erratic. The supply of fuel had been reduced.

The food ration in Germany was catastrophically lowered, condemning the population to starvation. In mid-March, the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, considered the war lost because the German economy could only last another four weeks.

‘The problem of foreign workers is going to cause us major difficulties,’ we read in the diary of the commissioner for the defence of Berlin, Josef Goebbels.

We must try to retain these workers for as long, at least, as the industry of Berlin is capable of functioning. Over and above that, we want, even if Berlin were to be encircled, for industry, at least the arms industry, to continue to operate. On the other hand, the capital of the Reich has about 100,000 workers from the east [Ostarbeiter]. If they fall into the hands of the Soviets, we will find within three or four days that they are fighting us as a combative Bolshevik infantry. Needless to say, we must try if necessary to isolate at least the eastern workers as quickly as possible.

Hitler had promised that the outcome of this war would be the enrichment of the people of Germany, unheard-of territorial gains and world domination, but monstrous crimes had not brought victory. Everything was in ruins. A defeat was imminent that would wipe Hitler and his criminal accomplices from the face of the earth, but before that happened, Hitler would turn with murderous hatred on the German people for disappointing his hopes.

On 19 March he ordered a scorched earth policy, this time on German soil: all military, industrial, transport and communications sites and facilities, and all Germany’s material resources were to be destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. The population was to be evacuated (but where to?). Cities taken by the enemy were to be devastated and destroyed. That the German people would thereby be deprived of their means of subsistence was of no consequence. Hitler formulated his attitude to this issue in an order he gave to Speer:

There is no need to take into consideration what the people need for a primitive continuation of life. On the contrary, it is better for us to destroy all this ourselves because the German people have shown their weakness… After a defeat, only inferior people remain.