Incapable of finding fault in himself — in his judgement, his strategy, his leadership — Hitler turned the blame for what had gone wrong more and more on the military professionals, the army leaders whom he had never fully trusted, who had never been fully imbued with the National Socialist spirit. And once some of these officers had tried to do away with him in the summer of 1944, his obsession with treachery reached paranoid levels. Attempts to reason with him on military or strategic grounds were increasingly futile — likely only to prompt furious outbursts about the worthlessness and betrayal of his army leaders. Only generals such as Schörner or Model, who combined high military skills with something approaching Hitler’s own philosophy and acceptance of his ruthless and unbending demands of his troops, met with his favour. His refusal to accept that willpower alone could not overcome massive superiority of the enemy in numbers and equipment would cost countless thousands of his soldiers’ lives in needless sacrifice. It mattered not to him. According to his remorselessly cruel logic, their weakness had condemned them. Their individual loss meant nothing in the nation’s struggle for its very existence. And when the German people, despite heroic efforts, showed themselves, too, to be incapable of withstanding superior enemy might, he was prepared to accept that they deserved to go under. They had ultimately proved themselves weak; they had not matched up to his demands of them; they had been, as he told one of his generals, in the end, unworthy of him.3
This leadership, which had taken Germany into such a reckless gamble, which had stunned the world through triumphs derived from boldness, ruthlessness, and lack of compromise as long as it had held the whip-hand, and which had been founded on principles of ‘all-or-nothing’ struggle, was, therefore, not the leadership to seek or entertain a diplomatic way out once backs were to the wall. Indeed, as Hitler — less distant from reality than has often been presumed — fully realized, his own person was an outright obstacle to any form of negotiated armistice. His own days were numbered in the event both of a negotiated peace or total defeat. With nothing at stake for him personally, therefore, the principle of ‘no capitulation’ — meaning self-destruction for him, for the regime, and for the German Reich — was easy to uphold. When, almost two years earlier, Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter of Vienna, had expressed in frank terms his view that the war somehow had to be ended, an enraged Hitler had asked: ‘How does he think that can come about? He knows only too well that there is no further way, unless I shoot myself in the head.’4
The ‘either-or’ dogmatism, the stubbornly principled refusal to entertain compromise or concession, had served him well and had invariably proved successful in his political ‘career’ as long as he was combating weak, divided, and irresolute opponents. But it was a massive and insuperable obstacle when enemy positions were strong and united, when initiative had been irretrievably lost, bargaining power was weakening by the day, and more flexible military tactics and more subtle political skills were desperately needed. Not just the scale of the monstrous crimes against humanity perpetrated by his regime eliminated the possibility of any search for a negotiated end to the war — which could conceivably have been attained by a different leadership despite the Allied demands for ‘unconditional surrender’ stipulated in 1943 at Casablanca. His character, and everything he had stood for since entering politics, also categorically ruled it out. Hitler’s temperament, often revealed in crises on his way to attaining absolute power — in 1921, for instance, when he gained the Party leadership, in 1923, when forcing ahead the ill-fated putsch, or in 1932 when faced with the challenge of Gregor Strasser — inclined him to pose self-destruction as the alternative to having his own way. There was indeed a touch of the theatrical, the melodramatic, the hysterical about his threats of suicide. But they nevertheless reflected a genuine, deep-rooted trait of Hitler’s character. His philosophy of life as ‘struggle’, his reduction of all elements of conflict to stark ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘either-or’, his instinctively radical stance on all matters, precluded any thought of retreat or compromise, leaving only the threat of self-destruction as his alternative to domination of his will.
Thus a Wagnerian end implicitly beckoned. There would be no capitulation at any cost — even if this meant bringing down Valhalla.
