Killing Hitler (48 page)

Barely a kilometer away to the south, unbeknownst to the Soviet troops, lay the
Führerbunker
—the real lair of the “Fascist beast.” Located beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery, it was state of the art. Completed in 1943, it was entirely self-contained, with its own heating, lighting, ventilation, and water supply. A two-story complex, 8 meters belowground, it comprised Hitler’s personal quarters, guest rooms, kitchens, map rooms, and a conference area. It was a concrete labyrinth, accessed by steps leading from the Chancellery and the Chancellery garden, with a spiral staircase connecting the two floors. The décor was spartan: bare concrete walls that sweated moisture, exposed wiring and plumbing. Only the Führer’s own quarters made some concession to comfort, with simple furniture, carpets, and his favorite portrait of Frederick the Great.

By the end of April 1945, the bunker was home to around twenty-five people. As well as Hitler and Eva Braun, it was inhabited by Hitler’s staff, including his bodyguards, two secretaries, his cook, his valet, his doctor, his SS adjutant, and Joseph Goebbels, together with his wife and six children. Beyond these, it was regularly visited by a host of generals, ministers, clerks, and adjutants, most of whom were quartered nearby. At any one time, therefore, it is likely to have contained around thirty people.

The atmosphere inside the bunker was a peculiar mixture of calm and desperation. Between bouts of frenzied activity, which usually coincided with Hitler’s daily military conferences, a pregnant silence reigned, which was punctuated only by the echoing clatter of teleprinters, the drone of the generators, and the muffled thud of nearby shelling. The air was fetid and stale, deteriorating further at times when the ventilation system drew in smoke or cordite fumes. The lighting, which flickered incessantly, was never fully extinguished. The bunker personnel, therefore, inhabited a world of perpetual day, where all feeling of time was lost.
They slept little, napping where and when they could. Hitler, too, took to sleeping fully clothed, fearing that a direct hit or a surprise Soviet attack would catch him unprepared. The only thing he feared more than capture, it appeared, was capture in his underclothes.
¹⁰

Yet, despite the all-pervading sense of death, a curious
joie
de
vivre
developed. This was perhaps aided by the incongruous presence of the Goebbels children, who played in the narrow bunker corridors, sang songs to “Uncle Adolf,” and read fairy stories. Some of the younger staff followed their example and soon found release from the tension in wine and song. Indeed, a veritable bacchanal seems to have developed. While the Berliners above-ground starved, the inhabitants of the bunker drank champagne and ate caviar and sweets. One witness described the bunker as “a world peopled with zombies…whose only thought was to laugh and sing.”
¹¹
The carousing was kept from Hitler’s earshot but was otherwise tolerated. Indeed, discipline became distinctly lax. Few of the staff bothered to get up when Hitler entered a room; many of them—including Eva Braun—even smoked in front of him, something that would have been unthinkable only a few weeks before.
¹²
Hitler’s secretary recalled that in the last few days, one could talk to him about anything. She dared to ask why he was not fighting at the head of his troops.
¹³
He replied lamely that he did not want to fall into the hands of the Russians.

Physically, too, Hitler was fading. He had been in the bunker since the middle of January—three months, with only brief sorties to an outside world that he could no longer face. It may be, of course, that Hitler derived some curious enjoyment from bunker life. Claus von Stauffenberg, for instance, is said to have commented: “Hitler in the bunker—that’s the real Hitler!”
¹⁴
Martin Bormann, too, would have concurred. He wrote to his wife in the autumn of 1944, contrasting Hitler’s lifestyle with his own. “The Führer,” he noted,

lives down there in his bunker, and has only electric light and a rarefied atmosphere—the air pressure is always too high in his room because fresh air has to be pumped in continuously. It is just as if he enjoys living in an unlit basement.
¹⁵

Nonetheless, though Hitler himself may not have minded his self-imposed incarceration, it can have done little to reverse his physical decline. Hitler had been slowly poisoned by the cocktail of drugs prescribed by his physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. Narcotics, barbiturates, and sedatives, for example, were all administered on a regular basis for a variety of real and imagined complaints. In addition, every day, Hitler received up to five injections of the stimulant methamphetamine, used eyedrops consisting of a 10 percent solution of cocaine, and took up to sixteen “anti-gas pills” containing strychnine and belladonna.
¹⁶
Though the precise effect of these treatments is unknown, it is reasonable to conclude that Hitler not only suffered the toxic effects of strychnine poisoning but was also at the very least psychologically dependent on amphetamines—a condition that could explain many of his physical and psychological symptoms, such as mood swings, paranoia, cramps, and headaches. One eyewitness in the bunker recalled seeing the Führer in a “pitiful” state:

His flabby left hand, in which he was clasping his steel-rimmed spectacles, was also clutching the table. His whole left arm, up to the shoulder, was trembling and, now and then, shuddering. This arm kept tapping the table rhythmically. To brace himself, he had wrapped both his left calf and foot around one leg of the table. The leg was throbbing, shaking. He could not control it.
¹⁷

Though the diagnosis is disputed—and Hitler’s own physicians considered his trembling to be hysterical in origin—it is possible that Hitler was also suffering from the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease.

In addition to all that, Hitler still bore the effects of the assassination attempt of the previous summer. Though he had not been seriously injured in the bomb attack, his health had nonetheless deteriorated markedly thereafter. As one of his former intimates
recalled, it was as though the shock of the Stauffenberg attempt had brought Hitler’s “evil nature” into the open.

He came into the map room bent and shuffling. His glassy eyes gave a sign of recognition only to those who stood closest to him. His chair would be pushed forward for him and he would slump down into it, bent almost double with his head sunk between his shoulders. As he pointed to something on the map his hand would tremble.
¹⁸

Hitler was physically weak, his hearing was impaired, and he suffered from jaundice and bouts of depression. One visitor was profoundly shocked, seeing him as a broken-down old man with festering sores. “I was really almost sorry for him,” he recalled, “because he looked horrible…. He was bloated…. His left eye dropped a little to the left.”
¹⁹
One of the bunker doctors concurred. Hitler, he remembered, “was a palsied, physical wreck, his face puckered now like a mask, all yellow and grey.”
²⁰

By the end of April, Hitler appeared emaciated, his complexion was pallid, and his eyes were glazed. His once commanding voice had weakened to a hoarse croak, and his once pristine uniform bore numerous food stains. On one of his last sorties from the bunker on 20 April, he had received a delegation of Hitler Youth boys in the Reich Chancellery garden. The newsreel images showed a man visibly diminished since the previous summer. He stooped, trembled, and bore the jowly, toothless grin of a man much older than his fifty-six years.

Mentally, too, he was at the end of his tether. One of his secretaries recalled: “We could see Hitler falling apart—he trembled, he cried, he was constantly mumbling.”
²¹
Another described his growing apathy, his “pathological” craving for chocolate cake, and the increasing monotony of his conversation. “In the last few weeks,” she remembered, he had “talked only about dogs and dog training, food and nutrition and the stupidity and wickedness of the world.”
²²

With the collapse of his armies, his violent temper and inveterate paranoia had worsened still further. The forced inaction of
life in the bunker had done little to improve his temper. He paced the corridors, often clutching a tattered road map of Berlin, his mood swinging between resignation, impotent fury, and a curiously infectious and evangelical optimism. Pointless situation conferences were held, in which Hitler directed his nonexistent armies, raged about the failure of the expected relief force, and threw delusional tantrums about the betrayals that he saw all around him.

As far as can be ascertained, Hitler’s logic in April 1945 was quite simple. He appeared to believe—influenced, perhaps, by Stalin’s decision to stay in Moscow in 1941—that if he remained in his capital, then it would not, indeed
could not
, fall to the enemy.
²³
It was this thinking that surfaced again and again in the situation conferences, exuding confidence in “wonder weapons,” sure of the imminent collapse of the alliance ranged against him, and a fervent belief in ultimate victory. Yet, unlike Stalin in 1941, Hitler had no fresh troops and no debilitating winter snows with which to halt the enemy advance. His much-vaunted relief force was practically nonexistent and was too busy fighting for its own survival to the west of Berlin to mount any viable offensive operation.

In fact, in the very cockpit of his power, Hitler was effectively impotent. His control of the military had already slipped from his grasp. On 22 April, in a tumultuous situation conference, he had finally been told the unglossed truth about the failure of the expected relief force. With that, he had exploded into an uncontrollable rage, pacing the room, gesticulating wildly, and shouting himself hoarse about betrayal, corruption, and cowardice. Finally, he slumped back into his chair, pale-faced and shaking, his eyes fixed straight ahead. The war was lost, he said; the Third Reich was a failure, and all that was left for him now was to die.
²⁴

Though he soon regained his composure, his authority over his subordinates was crumbling. His own would-be brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, was arrested in civilian clothes in the Berlin suburbs, preparing to flee to Switzerland.
²⁵
Degraded in rank and brought back to the bunker under armed guard, Fegelein would face a makeshift firing squad. When Hitler summoned
General Karl Koller, his Luftwaffe chief of staff, to Berlin from Bavaria, he was rebuffed. Koller pleaded ill health and privately complained that the trip would be suicidal. And by the time he finally relented, passage to the capital had become impossible. Even within the environs of Berlin, Hitler’s orders were being openly disobeyed. SS General Felix Steiner, for example, commander of one of the forces intended to relieve the capital, was formally removed from his command on 27 April after failing to make any headway whatsoever against the Soviets. Yet, rather than submit to his demotion, Steiner merely persuaded his intended replacement to allow him to remain in charge.
²⁶
Elsewhere, the conscientious sought to preserve their troops from further risk in hopeless battles. Hitler’s writ no longer ran uncontested.

Göring was the first of the inner circle to break ranks. On the twenty-third, he sent a telegram from Berchtesgaden in response to Hitler’s decision to remain in Berlin. In it, he claimed that Hitler no longer enjoyed freedom of action and that he, as Hitler’s anointed successor, was thus empowered to make contact with the Allies. His actions provoked rage in the
Führerbunker.
He was condemned by Hitler as “corrupt, and a drug-addict,” and was to be placed under arrest for high treason.
²⁷

The following day, Speer arrived, driven by his own ego, or by some residual loyalty, to see Hitler one last time. Though he embellished the meeting in his published memoirs with confessions and tearful farewells, the truth was more prosaic. Hitler, he recalled, “showed no emotion at all…he was empty, burnt out, lifeless.”
²⁸
Speer, too, was strangely unmoved:

While he spoke of his suicide and all that, I had the feeling I was speaking with someone who was already dead. And the truth is that nothing he said provoked any feelings in me, positive or negative…It was nothing. And that was the tragic end of it all.
²⁹

When they finally parted, later that night, the mood was scarcely better. Hitler, Speer recalled, was “prematurely aged” and “trembling” but “showed no emotion.” “His words were as cold as his
hand: ‘So you’re leaving? Good.
Auf Wiedersehen.
’ No regards to my family, no wishes, no thanks, no farewell.”
³⁰
With that, Speer was dismissed and left Berlin.

Himmler was next. In the late afternoon of the twenty-eighth, word of Himmler’s peace feelers to the Americans was received in Berlin. Like Göring, the
Reichsführer-SS h
ad proclaimed himself as Hitler’s successor and had proposed negotiations with the Western Allies. Again, Hitler was incensed. Himmler would be arrested and expelled from the Nazi Party. Yet this was far more serious than Göring’s defection. Hitler had utilized Göring’s flair and aura of respectability, but had rarely seen the
Reichsmarschall
as anything more than a bloated dilettante. Himmler, however, was a man of a different stamp. He was a committed National Socialist and was viewed as the personification of loyalty. If
der treue Heinrich
—”faithful Heinrich”—had also succumbed to defeatism, then all really was lost. In his fury, Hitler finally made up his mind.