The second briefing of the day began with Mohnke announcing that the first enemy tanks had managed to penetrate to the Wilhelmsplatz, the heart of the government quarter. They had been repulsed — on this occasion — but time was running out. Krebs reckoned the bunker residents had no more than about twenty-four to twenty-six hours; the link-up between the armies of Wenck and Busse had to take place within that time if there was to be any hope. Hitler inwardly knew, however, that this would not happen. He repeatedly bemoaned ‘the catastrophic mistake’ of the 9th Army, which he blamed for ignoring his orders and trying to penetrate the Soviet lines in the wrong direction. The faint hopes from the remaining forces in the north, those of Holste and Steiner (in whom Hitler had lost all confidence days earlier), were now also — realistically, if not in dreams — largely abandoned.
Despite a desperate plea from Keitel to throw everything into the relief of Berlin, Jodl had diverted the hard-pressed units of Holste and Steiner to fend off Soviet forces to the north of the capital. It was tantamount to giving up on Berlin.84 Bormann scathingly commented in his diary, in remarks pointedly directed at Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s recognized reluctance to deploy Steiner’s SS corps to help save Berlin: ‘The divisions marching to our relief are held up by Himmler-Jodl!
Hitler and Goebbels relapsed into reminiscences. They were prompted by Mohnke’s remark, entirely without irony: ‘We haven’t quite brought about what we wanted in 1933, my Führer!’ Hitler’s explanation — it had scarcely been in his mind at the time — was that he had come to power too early. A year or more later, at Hindenburg’s death, would have been the right time. To bring about a complete revolution, the old system needed to have revealed itself as utterly bankrupt. As it was, he had been forced to compromise with Hugenberg, Schleicher — not much of a compromise since the former Reich Chancellor had, in fact, had been murdered by Hitler’s henchmen at the time of the ‘Röhm affair’ in 1934 — and other pillars of the old order. By the time of Hindenburg’s death, Hitler went on, the determination to rid himself of the conservatives had lessened, and the work of reconstruction was under way. ‘Otherwise, thousands would have been eliminated at that time,’ he declared. ‘It could have happened, if I had come to power through an express will of the people’ — presumably meaning a presidential election — ‘or through a putsch. You regret it afterwards that you are so good,’ he concluded.
This took the discussion inexorably once more back into pathos and an evocation of ‘heroism’. He was staying in Berlin, Hitler said, ‘so that I have more moral right to act against weakness… I can’t constantly threaten others if I run away myself from the Reich capital at the critical hour… I’ve had the right to command in this city. Now I must obey the commands of fate. Even if I could save myself, I won’t do it. The captain also goes down with his ship.’ Voß, predictably, picked up the metaphor. Pathos and emotion got the better of him, too. ‘Here in the Reich Chancellery it’s just like the command-bridge of a ship,’ he implausibly ruminated. ‘One thing here applies to all. We don’t want to get away.’ (He would, ultimately, like most of the others, nevertheless seek to flee the bunker at the last moment.) ‘We belong together. It’s only a matter of being an upright community.’86
The news trickling in during the day could scarcely have been worse. Wenck’s troops, without assistance from the 9th Army (whose encirclement was by now accepted as practically a foregone conclusion), had been pushed back south of Potsdam. There was a ‘doomsday’ mood in the bunker, alleviated only by copious supplies of alcohol and food from the Reich Chancellery cellars.87 Hitler told Below he had decided to give Weidling, the Commandant of Berlin, the order to break out. All his staff should go, as well as Bormann and Goebbels. He would stay behind and die in the capital. By evening, amid worsening news, he had changed his mind. An attempt to break out would be useless. He gave Below a poison-capsule, should it come to ‘a difficult situation’.88
