As the Russian vise closed on Berlin, Berliner vice resurfaced with a vengeance, but it had a desperate edge to it, as people tried to grab a last bit of pleasure before the anticipated surfeit of pain. There were reports of orgies in the basements and shelters, gluttonous feasts with stolen food, “cellar tribes” anaesthetizing themselves with pilfered medical alcohol and morphine. The physical scene with which the Berliners now had to contend encouraged an abandonment of restraints. With major buildings reduced to piles of rubble, points of orientation had disappeared. Prominent streets and avenues had been replaced by narrow paths winding through the ruins—perfect for muggings and anonymous trysts. As the Berliners said, it was easier to act as if one had just failed the Last Judgment when the world around so closely resembled Hell.
A hell, one should add, with a certain rusticity to it. Due to the loss of their agricultural hinterlands, Berliners had taken to planting vegetable gardens and even grain fields among the ruins. Corn and potatoes grew in the wreckage of the Gendarmenmarkt, between the blasted Schinkel masterpieces. Herds of goats were pastured where cars and busses once zoomed. With its yawning empty spaces, Berlin looked like a semicivilized outpost on the Prussian plain, which of course it once had been. And because transportation and communication between its various districts had broken down, the city also seemed once again to be more a collection of villages than an integrated metropolis. Obviously, this was not what the Nazis had had in mind when they promised to return Berlin to its “true self.”
On April 20, 1945, his fifty-sixth birthday, Hitler made a brief appearance above ground. Due to stress and the poisons prescribed by his quack physician, Theodor Morell, Hitler was a physical wreck. His skin was blotchy, his shoulders stooped, his left arm hung loose, and he listed to the right. Obviously uncomfortable outside his troglodyte world, he quickly pinned decorations on some Hitler Youth in the Chancellery garden and then disappeared back into the bunker, where he gave himself over to fantasies about a miraculous victory. He had been indulging in such fantasies for some time. On April 13, when news reached Berlin that President Roosevelt had died, Hitler and Goebbels thought they saw a reprise of Catherine the Great’s death during the Seven Years’ War, which had allowed Frederick the Great a last-minute victory. Now, they prophesied, Truman would pull the Western forces out of the war, leaving the Reich free to focus on Russia. Hitler also spoke rapturously of “wonder weapons” that would turn the tide: the V-1 and V-2 rockets, a new kind of U-boat, and remote-controlled airplanes. (Ironically—and thankfully—the Germans put little emphasis on developing the most important “wonder weapon” of the Second World War, the atomic bomb.) Down in his map room, Hitler shifted around armies that no longer existed. These forces would fall back on Berlin, he said, creating an impregnable barrier against which the Soviets would throw themselves in vain. Other Nazi forces would then hit the Reds from behind, saving Berlin and opening the way for German counteroffensives across the board. At other moments, however, Hitler could be surprisingly clear-eyed. At a staff conference on April 22 he suddenly announced that the war was lost and that he planned to kill himself.
Blaming his generals for not achieving the fantasy feats he imagined for them, Hitler relieved them of their commands, stripped them of their honors. He fired his best tank commander, Heinz Guderian, for failing to stop the Russians; he sentenced the city commandant of Königsberg to death in absentia for failing to hold that city; and he cursed General Walther Wenck, whose Twelfth Army was situated southwest of Berlin on the Elbe, for not hastening to the rescue of the capital. His fury embraced some of his closest colleagues as well. He ordered Göring arrested for high treason because the Reich Marshal offered to take over leadership of the country in view of Hitler’s decision to stay in the bunker in Berlin. Similarly, he ordered Himmler’s arrest upon learning that the SS leader had tried to broker a capitulation to the Western powers. Finally, he turned his rage against Berlin itself, ordering the demolition of bridges, waterways, electrical plants, communications installations, and all remaining heavy industry.
