Speer was one of the losers in the aftermath of the bomb plot. He could no longer depend upon his special favour with Hitler. Without a Party base, he began to feel the cold. So, too, as the Party reasserted itself, did Lammers, the only point of coordination between the work of the various Reich ministries and Hitler. Though his relations with Bormann had never been free of tension, they had functioned after a fashion — and had sometimes formed the basis of a pragmatic alliance against other forces in the regime.147 In autumn 1944, the balance in their positions had started to tip as Bormann’s position strengthened. Contact between the two waned. More important still: Lammers lost his access to Hitler. The chief orchestrator of government business was no longer in a position to discuss that business with the head of state. In a letter to Bormann on 1 January 1945, Lammers, pointing to the early good cooperation, lamented the fact that his last audience with Hitler had been three months earlier, that he had had to give up at the end of October his quarters close to Hitler’s field headquarters, and that Reich Ministers would inevitably have to seek other channels of approach to the Führer if he could not provide them. He had been, he bemoaned, often in the embarrassing situation that he had had to carry responsibility for decisions of the Führer which had simply been transmitted to him, without any possibility of his affecting them and bringing about a different outcome. His lament ended with a pathetic request to Bormann to arrange a brief audience with the Führer so that he could address the many issues which had accumulated in the meantime.148 With the end of the regime in sight, Hitler had, it seemed obvious, little time for or interest in the normal business of government. Meanwhile, the work of the major offices of state could only fragment further.
Yet another development, from a most unlikely source, provides in retrospect — at the time it was still well concealed — the clearest indication that the regime was starting to teeter. Among the biggest beneficiaries of the failed coup of 20 July 1944 had been Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.149 Hitler had given ‘loyal Heinrich’, his trusted head of the labyrinthine security organization, overall responsibility for uncovering the background to the conspiracy and for rounding up the plotters. And beyond his other extensive powers, Himmler had now also gained direct entrée into the military sphere as Commander of the Reserve Army, with a remit to undertake a full-scale reorganization. He was soon, as we have seen, also to have control over the people’s militia, the Volkssturm. Yet at this very time, Himmler, conceivably now the most powerful individual in Germany after Hitler, was playing a double game, combining every manifestation of utmost loyalty with secret overtures to the West in the forlorn hope of saving not just his skin but his position of power in the event of the British and Americans eventually seeing sense and turning, with the help of his SS, to fend off the threat of Communism. In October, Himmler used an SS intermediary to put to an Italian industrialist with good connections in England a proposal to make twenty-five German divisions in Italy available to the Allies as a defence against Communism in return for a guarantee of the preservation of the Reich’s territory and population. Both the British and the Americans rejected the overtures out of hand.150 In this scenario, Hitler would have been dispensable. But it was pure self-delusion. Himmler was too centrally implicated in the most appalling facets of the Nazi regime to be taken seriously by the Allies as a prospective leader of a post-Hitlerian Germany. For Himmler, too, there was no way out. Without Hitler’s backing, his power would vanish like a breath in the chill morning air. This was as true in late 1944 as at any other time during the Third Reich.
Hitler’s authority remained intact. But if they could have found an escape route by removing him or discarding him, there were now those among his closest paladins who would have followed it.
