Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

On 23 April, Count Bernadotte had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to Schellenberg’s suggestion to meet Himmler for a fourth time that evening. The meeting took place in the Swedish Consulate in Lübeck, eerily lit by candles because of a power cut. ‘Hitler is very probably already dead,’ Himmler began. At any rate, his end could be no more than a few days away. Before now, his oath of loyalty had prevented him from acting, Himmler went on. But with Hitler dead or on the verge of death, the situation was different. He now had a free hand. There could be no surrender to the Soviet Union. He was, and always would be, the sworn enemy of Bolshevism. He insisted that the struggle against Bolshevism must continue. But he was ready to declare Germany defeated by the western powers, and begged Bernadotte to pass his offer of capitulation to General Eisenhower in order to prevent further senseless destruction. Still by candlelight, Himmler drafted a letter to Sweden’s Foreign Minister, to be handed to him by Bernadotte, and passed on to the western Allies.¹¹³

Himmler, like Göring (if in a different way), had taken the news of Hitler’s outburst on 22 April to imply the Fiihrer’s effective abdication. Like Göring, Himmler was soon to be disabused of such presumption. His immediate instinct, however, now that his own decision had been clarified, was to build a cabinet, invent (at Schellenberg’s suggestion) the name for a new party — the ‘Party of National Concentration (Nationale Sammlungsparteiy — and ponder whether he should bow or shake hands when he met Eisenhower.¹¹⁴ It apparently never occurred to him that his offer of capitulation might be turned down. But that outcome — as good as certain to all beyond the perimeters of the detached mental world of Nazi leaders at this juncture — was precisely what had happened by the time, during the course of the afternoon of 28 April, the sensational news filtered out of the Reichsführer-SS’s willingness to capitulate.¹¹⁵

For Hitler, this was the last straw. That his ‘loyal Heinrich’, whose SS had as its motto ‘my honour is loyalty’, should now stab him in the back: this was the end. It was the betrayal of all betrayals. The bunker reverberated to a final elemental explosion of fury. All his stored-up venom was now poured out on Himmler in a last paroxysm of seething rage. It was, he screamed, ‘the most shameful betrayal in human history.’¹¹⁶

When the outburst subsided, Hitler retired to his rooms with Goebbels and Bormann for a lengthy discussion. As soon as he reappeared, he sent for the imprisoned Fegelein and subjected him to a fearsome verbal assault. Fegelein’s recent disappearance now appeared to have sinister significance: joining the base treachery of the Reichsführer-SS. Hitler’s paranoid suspicions were running riot. Possibly Himmler was plotting to assassinate him; or to hand him over to the enemy. And Fegelein was part of the plot. After the merest formalities in a hastily improvised ‘court martial’, Fegelein was summarily sentenced to death, immediately taken out, put in front of a firing-squad and executed.¹¹⁷ For some of the bunker inmates, there was a sense of shock that one from within the ‘inner circle’ was guilty of such ‘betrayal’, and had been so peremptorily dispatched. For Hitler, it was the closest he could come to revenge on the Reichsführer-SS himself.

By now, Soviet troops had forced their way into Potsdamer Platz and streets in the immediate vicinity of the Reich Chancellery. They were no more than a few hundred yards away. A breakdown in communications for most of the day had left the bunker inmates desperate for any news of Wenck’s army (which remained, hemmed in, south of Potsdam).¹¹⁸ In the prevailing climate within the bunker, even the lapdog Keitel and the ever-reliable Jodl were now coming under suspicion of treachery for not bringing about the relief of Berlin.¹¹⁹