The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor Roper

Author:Hugh Trevor Roper [Trevor-Roper, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330470278
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

It was not in this cloud-cuckoo-land that the affairs of Germany were being, or would be, decided. All this time the evacuation of ministries from Berlin was continuing; but Hitler remained in his bunker, undecided, at least until he had made one further effort to throw the Russians back from the city. On 21 April, Hitler, who in all these days personally directed the movements of every battalion, ordered a final, all-out attack by the troops in Berlin. It was the Steiner attack, under the command of an S S general, Obergruppenfuehrer Steiner; it was to be launched in the southern suburbs of the city; and every man, every tank, every aircraft was to be diverted to take part in it. ‘Any commanding officer who keeps men back,’ Hitler shouted, ‘will forfeit his life within five hours.’ ‘You will guarantee with your head,’ he told Koller, ‘that absolutely every man is employed.’

So Hitler ordered; but his orders bore no relation now to any reality. He was moving imaginary battalions, making academic plans, disposing non-existent formations. The Steiner attack was the last, most symbolic instance of Hitler’s personal strategy; it never took place.

The facts emerged at the staff conference of 22 April. All through the morning, a series of telephone calls from the Fuehrerbunker had never ceased to demand whether the attack had been launched. At one time a telephone message from Himmler reported that it had; at another a report from the Luftwaffe stated that it had not. At three o’clock in the afternoon, there was still no news. Then the conference began. Bormann, Burgdorf, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs were there, and Herrgesell and Hagen, the two stenographers. Doenitz was not; during the night he had moved, with his staff, to his new headquarters at Ploen in Schleswig-Holstein, leaving only a liaison officer, Admiral Voss, in the Bunker. Voss, with the other liaison officers, Hewel and Fegelein, and adjutants and others, remained on the profane side of the partition, ready to join the conference on demand. General Koller, Goering’s chief of staff, was not there. He was preoccupied with command work; ‘and anyway’, he records plaintively, ‘I should never have been able to tolerate being insulted all day long.’ He had therefore arranged for General Christian to deputize for him.

The conference opened with the usual expositions of the military situation by Krebs and Jodl. As usual they were unfavourable, but not hopeless. Then came the news of the Steiner attack. It had not materialized. Nothing had happened. In spite of elaborate plans, in spite of ferocious threats, the Luftwaffe had not gone into action. No orders had been received from Steiner. And then, following on these negative tidings came reports of positive calamities. While troops had been withdrawn to support Steiner in the south, the Russians had broken into the suburbs in the north, and their armoured spearheads were now within the city of Berlin.

Then came the storm, which made the conference of 22 April famous and decisive in the history of Hitler’s last days.

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