Hitler

optimistic. How far he was play-acting it is hard to decide. Looking back, I am inclined to think that he was literally obsessed with the idea of some miraculous salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a straw.’
    Whether genuine or contrived, Hitler’s jubilation did not last long. On 13 April, the news was given to him that Vienna had been taken by the Red Army. The following day, American attacks succeeded in splitting German forces defending the Ruhr. Within three days, the fighting in the Ruhr was over. Field-Marshal Model, a long-standing favourite of Hitler, dissolved his encircled Army Group B rather than offer formal capitulation. It made no difference. Around 325,000 German troops and thirty generals gave themselves up to the Americans on 17 April. Model committed suicide four days later in a wooded area south of Duisburg.
    On 15 April, in anticipation of a new Soviet offensive – which he thought, probably taken in by Stalin’s disinformation directed at the western Allies, would first sweep through Saxony to Prague to head off the Americans before tackling Berlin – Hitler had issued a ‘basic order’ for the eventuality that the Reich might be split in two. He set up a supreme commander – in effect his military representative – to take full responsibility for the defence of the Reich, should communications be broken, in whichever part he himself was not situated. Grand-Admiral Dönitz was designated for the northern zone, Field-Marshal Kesselring for the south. The implication was that Hitler was keeping the option open of carrying on the fight from the south, in the fastness of the Bavarian Alps.
    On the same day, Hitler issued what would turn out to be his last proclamation to the soldiers on the eastern front. It played heavily on the stories of Soviet atrocities. ‘For the last time, the Jewish-Bolshevik mortal enemy has set out with its masses on the attack,’ it began. ‘He is attempting to demolish Germany and to exterminate our people. Yousoldiers from the East know yourselves in large measure what fate threatens above all German women, girls, and children. While old men and children are murdered, women and girls are denigrated to barrack-whores. The rest are marched off to Siberia.’ It went on to alert the troops to the slightest sign of treachery, particularly – the long-standing exaggeration of the influence of the National Committee for a Free Germany, established in Moscow by captured German officers – troops fighting against them in German uniforms receiving Russian pay. Anyone not known to them ordering a retreat was to be captured and ‘if need be immediately dispatched, irrespective of rank’. The proclamation had its climax in the slogan: ‘Berlin stays German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.’
    It was to no avail. In the early hours of 16 April, a huge artillery barrage announced the launch of the awaited assault from the line of the Oder and Neisse rivers by over a million Soviet troops under Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev. The German defenders from the 9th Army and, to its south, the 4th Panzer Army fought tenaciously. The Soviets suffered some significant losses. For a few hours, the front held. But the odds were hopeless. During the afternoon, after renewed heavy artillery bombardment, the German line was broken north of Küstrin on the west bank of the Oder. The gap between the 9th Army and the 4th Panzer Army quickly widened. Soviet infantry poured through, rapidly followed by hundreds of tanks, and over the next two days extended and consolidated their hold in the area south of Frankfurt an der Oder. From then on the Oder front caved in completely. There could now be only one outcome. The Red Army drove on over and past the lingering defences. Berlin was directly in its sights.
    General Busse’s 9th Army was pushed back towards the south of the city. Hitler had ordered Busse to hold a line which his Army Group Commander, Colonel-General Heinrici, had thought exposed the 9th Army to encirclement. Ignoring Hitler’s orders, Heinrici nevertheless commanded withdrawal westwards. By that time, only parts of Busse’s army could evade imminent encirclement. Meanwhile, the German General Staff was forced to flee from its headquarters in secure bunkers at Zossen to the Wannsee – its column of retreating vehicles mistaken by German planes for part of a Soviet unit and attacked from the air as they went. To the