Hitler

further suffering until the war could be ended. The anniversary of the promulgation of the Party Programme had, until 1942, been traditionally the date of a big speech by Hitler in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. In 1945, as in 1942 and 1943, Hitler confined himself to a proclamation. Read out by Hermann Esser, one of his Munich cronies from the early days of the party, the proclamation was to prove Hitler’s final public statement to the German people.
    It amounted to no more than yet a further repeat of the long empty phrases of the old message. National Socialism alone had given the people the toughness to combat the threat to its very existence of an ‘unnatural alliance’, ‘a diabolical pact between democratic capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism’. The atrocities of Bolshevism – ‘this Jewish plague’ – were now being experienced directly in the eastern parts of the Reich. Only ‘extreme fanaticism and resolute steadfastness’ could ward off the peril of ‘this Jewish-Bolshevik annihilation of peoples and its west European and American pimps’. Weakness would and must perish. It was a ‘duty to maintain the freedom of the German nation for the future’ and – the unmistakable attempt to shore up fighting spirit through instilling fear – ‘not to let German labour be shipped off to Siberia’. Its fanatical hatred for ‘the destroyer of mankind’ bolstered by the suffering it had endured, National Socialist Germany would continue the fight until ‘the historical turning’ came about. It would be that year. He ended on a note of pathos. His life had only the value it possessed for the nation. He wanted to share the suffering of the people, and almost regretted that the Berghof had not been bombed, which would have enabled him to share the sense of loss of possessions. (On this, the Allies were ready to oblige a few weeks later.) ‘The life left to us,’ he declared at the close, ‘can serve only one command, that is to make good what the international Jewish criminals and their henchmen have done to our people.’
    A poignant commentary was voiced in the routine report of the SD station in Berchtesgaden, where once thousands of ‘pilgrims’ had poured in to try to catch a glance of the Führer during his stays at the Berghof. ‘Among the overwhelming majority of people’s comrades,’ the report ran, ‘the content of the proclamation whistled by like the wind in the empty boughs.’
    It was presumably Hitler’s sensitivity to his public image that made him refuse Goebbels’s request for a press report to shore up morale. He must have been alert to the inevitable derision that would be induced by reports of soldiers – many of them by now no more than boys – cheering him on a brief visit he and a small entourage had paid on 3 March to troops at Wriezen, some forty miles north-east of Berlin, just behind the Oder front. The news from the eastern front had left Hitler in a depressed mood, the shaking left hand more noticeable than ever, when the Propaganda Minister saw him the following evening. In Pomerania, Soviet tanks had broken through and were now outside Kolberg, on the Baltic. (When the town finally had to be evacuated later in the month, Goebbels suppressed the news because of the blatantly contradictory image of the nationalist epic colour-film he had had made on the town’s stand against Napoleon, meant to stir modern-day defiance against the Red Army.) Himmler, the commander of Army Group Vistula, responsible for Pomerania’s defence, had taken to his sick-bed – suffering, it seems, from nothing worse than a heavy cold on top of overwrought nerves – and retreated to the clinic at Hohenlychen, sixty or so miles north of Berlin, for convalescence. Hitler, as always, blamed the General Staff for the debacle. He was still hopeful of blocking the Red Army’s advance; Goebbels had his doubts. Further south, the Czech industrial areas were under dire threat. Without them, Goebbels could not see how minimal armaments demands could any longer be met. Hitler hoped they could hold out, there and in Silesia, and inflict serious reverses on the Red Army with a counter-offensive – to prove the last of the war – beginning on 6 March.
    In the west, Hitler was still optimistic about holding the Rhine. In reality, US troops were on the verge of entering Cologne, and only days later would take the bridge at Remagen and secure a foothold across the mighty artery.