“That was close!” Hitler says to no one in particular.
Weak smiles fill the room, as yet another sign of defeat enhances the awkward sense of community. Just weeks ago such informality would have been an unforgivable lapse in protocol, but being fifty feet underground is taking its toll on Hitler’s staff. They live like a cave-dwelling prehistoric Germanic tribe, in a world where the walls are made of hard rock. The cement corridors are narrow, painted the color of rust, and the ceilings low. The rooms are all painted a dull gray, and the walls weep as moisture seeps through the rock. They have their own water supply, thanks to a deep artesian well. A sixty-kilowatt diesel generator provides energy for the switchboard, lights, and heating. The air comes from up above, through a filter to ensure its purity.
Yet the bunker is hardly pleasant. There are three separate security checkpoints just to get in, and all entrances are manned by security guards carrying machine pistols and grenades. In this way, Hitler’s headquarters is, in fact, a prison.
“The whole atmosphere down there was debilitating,” one German soldier who served in the bunker will later remember. “In the long hours of the night it could be deathly silent, except for the hum of the generator … Then there was the fetid odor of boots, sweaty woolen uniforms, acrid coal-tar disinfectants. At times toward the end, when the drainage backed up, it was as pleasant as working in a public urinal.”
The bunker’s residents can hear the air-raid sirens at ground level, but rarely go up to the garden to feel the sun on their faces. The Führer has banned smoking in the bunker, but breathing dank air that is fouled all too often by the Führer’s meteorism is an ordeal for all. As of late, the group has become so used to the sight of their Führer that even the lowest-level staffers no longer feel the need to cut short their conversations when he is in their presence.
Yet the informality belies the truth: everyone, with the exception of Adolf Hitler, is terrified. “You felt it to the point of physical illness,” one German officer will later write. “Nothing was authentic except fear.”
And yet Adolf Hitler is convinced that the war can still be won.
Aboveground, the Allies are bombing around the clock: the American Army Air Corps in the daylight and the British Royal Air Force by night. Berlin is a city in ruins. Of its 1,562,000 homes and apartments, one third have been completely destroyed. Almost 50,000 citizens have died, repaying the butcher’s bill of the German bombings of London five times over. The people sleep most nights in cellars or subways. Still, despite the mayhem, there is an amazing sense of routine to life on the streets of Berlin: mail is delivered each day, the Berlin Philharmonic performs at night, and the subway runs on time. Bakeries open their doors each morning, ensuring that the beleaguered populace can purchase their daily brot. And despite the drone of RAF Lancaster bombers, the bars are jammed each night with Nazi bigwigs and those businessmen wealthy enough, and lucky enough, to have escaped military service. The gossip, as always, centers on the bombing: who died, who lost their homes, whose job no longer exists because their place of business was been reduced to rubble.
One quiet reality, however, pervades life in Berlin: the city is mostly female. Able-bodied men have been called away to war. The Russian army is now less than forty miles from Berlin; refugees pouring into the capital from the east, seeking to escape these brutal oppressors, tell horror stories of murder and rape. They talk of a pamphlet that has been distributed to the Russian troops through Joseph Stalin’s propaganda ministry, directly threatening Germans of all ages, particularly women.
“Kill! Kill!” the leaflet reads. “Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the spirit of Germanic women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red Army.”
While some wealthy Berliners are secretly making plans to flee the city and perhaps find sanctuary in Switzerland, most citizens are stuck. They cannot run. So they remain through the bombings, going about their business as best they can.
The turning point of the war between the Russians and Germans took place in the city of Stalingrad. The fierce battle lasted for five and a half months, and saw the death of 1.2 million Russian soldiers and civilians and 850,000 German dead or wounded. The fighting was often in close quarters, within the houses and buildings of the city itself. The Germans were ruthless in their treatment of the Russian populace, murdering and raping with impunity.
Eventually, the German Sixth Army was cut off from supplies. German general Friedrich von Paulus implored Hitler to let his army withdraw. The Führer refused. This resulted in ninety-one thousand Germans being taken prisoner when the battle came to an end on February 2, 1943. Of that number, only six thousand survived the cruelty of their Russian captors and returned home alive after the war. From then on, the Soviet army steadily advanced westward, vowing to avenge the atrocities that the Germany army had inflicted upon the people of Russia.
The residents of Berlin will bear the brunt of this vengeance. They can only pray that the stories of rape and murder are mere rumors.
But those prayers will go unanswered.
* * *
On March 16, in a special ceremony, Hitler awarded Joachim Peiper and Otto Skorzeny the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. But his two favorite soldiers are soon to fight no more. In Vienna, Peiper and his SS Panzer division have been defeated and disgraced in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Russian advance. Furious, Hitler has ordered that Peiper and his men remove from their uniforms the armbands bearing his name. Shortly after that, Peiper flees west and is captured by the Americans.
Skorzeny, a native of Vienna, hears that the Russians are about to enter the city and races there on April 10 with a team of commandos. He finds Vienna in flames, but otherwise dark. Instantly recognizing that the city will fall by morning, he and his commandos retreat. Their war is over. Skorzeny orders his men to hide themselves, while he escapes into the Alps, where he vacillates between committing suicide and fleeing Germany while he can still get out alive.
Like Adolf Hitler, Skorzeny is planning a way to end the war on his terms. In time, he will surrender to the Allies.
* * *
In the pale artificial light of the bunker, Adolf Hitler continues to stare, hour after hour, at his map table, waiting for some sign of hope that all will soon be well. “Think of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans,” he tells his personal secretary, the despicable Martin Bormann. “It does not suit us to let ourselves be slaughtered like sheep. They may exterminate us, but they will not be able to lead us to the slaughter.”
Thus the Führer has begun a scorched-earth policy designed to deprive Germany’s approaching conquerors of a form of sustenance. His “Nero Command” of March 19 states, “All military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.”
This is all Hitler can do: prepare for the end.
Hitler passes the time in the bunker, sleeping most days and then staying up until dawn most nights to scrutinize plans for battles that will never be fought. His palsied tremors make it impossible for him to turn the pages of a book, so he commands that his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, read aloud to him from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century Prussian warrior king who has always been an inspiration to the Führer.