In the bunker, meanwhile, Hitler had ordered Schaub to burn all the papers and documents in his private safe in the bunker. He was afterwards instructed to do the same in Munich and at the Berghof. After a perfunctory farewell from the master he had served for twenty years, he left Berlin and flew south.52 The bunker company had by now shrunk.53 Those left behind consoled themselves with drink. They referred to the bunker as ‘the mortuary’ and its inmates as ‘a show house of living corpses’. Their main topic of conversation was when and how to commit suicide.54
Remarkably, Hitler had regained his composure by the next morning. He was still venting anger at troops that seemed to have evaporated into thin air. ‘It’s so disgraceful,’ he fumed. ‘When you think about it all, why still live!’ But Keitel’s news about his meeting with Wenck had provided yet another glimmer of hope. Hitler ordered all available troops, however ill-equipped, to be added to Wenck’s army. Dönitz had already been cabled the previous evening to have all available sailors as the most urgent priority, overriding all naval concerns, flown to Berlin to join the ‘German battle of fate
That afternoon, Albert Speer arrived back in the bunker. He had had a tortuous ten-hour journey to cover only 100 or so miles from the Hamburg area. He had quickly given up an attempt to drive along roads choked with refugees desperate to leave Berlin by any route still open, and flew first to the airfield at Rechlin in Mecklenburg, then on to Gatow aerodrome in the west of Berlin. There, he picked up a Fieseier Storch light aircraft, eventually navigating a landing on the East-West Axis approaching the Brandenburg Gate, the wide boulevard on which he had triumphantly paraded six years earlier during Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations, now, its lampposts removed, converted into a makeshift landing-strip.57 For weeks, as we have noted, Speer had been working with industrialists and generals to sabotage Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ orders. Only two days earlier, in Hamburg, he had recorded an address — never, in the event, broadcast, and probably made with more than one eye on embellishing his own prospects in a world after Hitler — urging an end to the pointless destruction. But despite the growing alienation, Speer could still not break free of Hitler. The emotional bonds remained strong. After his unsung departure on the evening of Hitler’s birthday, the former Armaments Minister felt unhappy at ending their special relationship without an appropriate farewell. That was the reason for his wholly unnecessary, extremely hazardous flight back into the cauldron.58
On his way to Hitler’s room in the bunker, he encountered Bormann. Not anxious to end his own days in the bunker catacombs, the Secretary to the Führer implored Speer to use his influence to persuade Hitler to leave for the south. It was still just possible. In a few more hours it would be too late. Speer gave a non-committal reply. He was then ushered in to see Hitler, who, as Bormann had foreseen, lost no time in asking Speer’s opinion whether he should stay in Berlin or fly to Berchtesgaden. Speer did not hesitate. It would be better to end his life as Führer in the Reich capital than in his ‘weekend house’, he said. Hitler looked tired, apathetic, resigned, burnt out. He had decided to stay in Berlin, he murmured. He had just wanted to hear Speer’s opinion. As the previous day, he said he would not fight. There was the danger that he would be captured alive. He was also anxious to avoid his body falling into the hands of his enemy to be displayed as a trophy. So he had given orders to have his body burnt. Eva Braun would die alongside him. ‘Believe me, Speer,’ he added, ‘it will be easy to end my life. A brief moment, and I am freed from everything, released from this miserable existence.’59
Minutes later, in the briefing — by now a far smaller affair,60 over much more quickly, and, because of communications difficulties, often lacking precise, up-to-date intelligence — Hitler, immediately after speaking of his imminent death and cremation, was again trying to exude optimism. Only now did Speer realize how much of an act the role of Führer had always been.61
