How did the Germans defend Germany in 1945? We decided to look at the defeat of the Third Reich, relying solely on German sources, as well as on the research of Western historians with access to fascist archives.

Training

Major General Alfred Weidemann, in the analytical article "Every Man at His Post," cited the composition of the armed forces that were to defend the Third Reich. According to him, “in July 1944, the armed forces had the following strength: the active army - 4.4 million people, the reserve army - 2.5 million, the navy - 0.8 million, the air force - 2 million. , SS troops - about 0.5 million people. In total, 10.2 million people were under arms.”

Alfred Weidemann was sure that this number of soldiers was quite enough to stop the Russians on the German border. Plus, on July 22, 1944, Hitler instructed Goebbels to conduct a "total mobilization of resources for the needs of the war," which was done. This made it possible to compensate for the losses of the Wehrmacht in the second half of 1944.

At the same time, under the patronage of the Nazi Party, the Volkssturm was created - narrowly territorial formations from among men who were not drafted into the army due to age or illness, as well as from teenagers and specialists with "booking". These detachments were equated with units of the land army and subsequently defended East Prussia. It was about several million more men who, in the figurative expression of Alfred Weidemann, were supposed to "roll the cart over the mountain", decisively strengthen the armed forces.

Lines of resistance in Germany

The Nazis sought to cover the conquered territories, as well as their homeland, with an impregnable network of defensive structures. In the book "Fortification of the Second World War 1939-1945. III Reich. Fortresses, pillboxes, bunkers, dugouts, lines of defense,” written by military historians J. E. Kaufman and G. W. Kaufman, it is said that “Hitler created the most fortified country in the history of Mankind.”

From the East, Germany was defended by the "Pomeranian Wall", the key fortresses of which were the cities of Stolp, Rummelsburg, Neustettin, Schneidemuhl, Gdynia and Danzig. In the West, in 1936-1940, the "Siegfried Line" was built, 630 km long and 35-100 km deep. Of the defensive structures in the south, the Alpine Redoubt in the Bavarian Alps was most famous. To protect their capital, the Germans built three defensive rings, including directly in the center of Berlin. Nine defense sectors were formed in the city, which included 400 reinforced concrete long-term structures and six-story bunkers dug into the ground.

German city defense tactics

The tactics of defending German cities were based on the experience of previous battles with the Red Army. The German military theorist and staff officer Eike Middeldorf described the methods of capturing fortified German settlements by Soviet units in the following way:

“Most often this happened during the pursuit of the retreating units of the Wehrmacht with a sudden attack by tank groups with infantry landings. If it was not possible to capture the city on the move, the Russians "bypassed it from the flanks and rear, carried out systematic attacks or tried to take it by night assault." The main task of the defending units was to prevent the division of the all-round defense into separate centers. That is why the plans of strong points were carefully thought out. As a rule, battles were introduced from well-prepared structures with anti-tank protection. It was also ordered to make surprise attacks from ambushes with a short firing range with an immediate withdrawal to the main positions.

Panic and courts-martial

Meanwhile, such tactics, which proved effective in Russia in other occupied countries, failed in Germany. Casualties among the civilian German population, which were an inevitable companion of all wars, had a demoralizing effect on the Wehrmacht soldiers. “Sergeant Kurt saw a group of Russian soldiers who were hiding around the corner,” recalls one of the defenders of Rummelsburg, “he ran into their backs along the corridors of the long house and fired a burst from a room on the second floor. Two fell, and the third threw a grenade through the window. It is clear that the sergeant was not one of the newcomers and immediately jumped out. But at the last moment, he saw a beautiful woman and three cute children hiding in a corner. The explosion blew them to pieces. In Poland, Kurt would not have attached any importance to this, but in Rummelsburg he almost went crazy. He gave up the next morning." To suppress such panic in Germany, mobile courts-martial began to operate. “The first was sentenced to death and two hours later the general was shot, guilty of not blowing up the Remagen bridge. At least, at least some glimpse, ”Goebbels wrote on March 5, 1945.

Nazi media - the last breath

The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany - the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter also talked about this. How relevant this was, says its penultimate issue, published on April 20, 1945. The central article was titled "Rebellion of Cowardly Deserters Suppressed in Munich". In general, the fascist media tried to rally the Germans around Hitler. In particular, the speeches of the same Goebbels about the role of the Fuhrer were regularly quoted. There were even parallels between the leader of the Third Reich and the Almighty. "Whoever has the honor to participate in the leadership of our people, may consider his service to him as a service to God." To raise morale, articles about Frederick the Great were published daily as a symbol of German stamina, and the exploits of soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht were also told with pathos. Much has been said about the role of German women in the defense of Germany. “There is no doubt that due to voluntary recruitment alone, we would never have been able to create such a huge army of female soldiers, the number of which has not yet been precisely established,” a West German public women's organization said in an analysis of German newspaper publications in 1944-1945. “Service obligations and National Socialist legislation on the use of female labor made it possible, if necessary, to conscript women into military service by force.” The third most popular topic in the German media in 1945 was the horrors of the Bolshevik occupation.

Director: Ekaterina Galperina
Cast: Leonid Mlechin

A small documentary cycle of 4 episodes of 40 minutes each.

Hitler planned to leave Berlin and head to Obersalzberg on April 20, the day he turned 56, from there, from the legendary mountain stronghold of Frederick Barbarossa, to lead the last battle of the Third Reich. Most of the ministries have already moved south, transporting government documents and panic-stricken officials in overcrowded trucks, desperate to break out of doomed Berlin. Ten days earlier, Hitler had sent most of the domestic staff to Berchtesgaden to prepare the mountain villa Berghof for his arrival. However, fate decreed otherwise and he no longer saw his favorite haven in the Alps.

World War II should have ended earlier. Already in the autumn of 1944, the officers of the allied forces, who were bending over the map of Europe, were perplexed - why did the Germans not surrender? After all, the outcome of the war is a foregone conclusion, and Germany lost. What are the Germans hoping for, continuing to desperately resist? ..

The first film "Why did they resist for so long?" World War II should have ended earlier. Already in the autumn of 1944, the officers of the allied forces, bending over the map, were perplexed: why the Germans were resisting when the outcome of the war was a foregone conclusion: Germany had lost. What were the Germans hoping for?

The second film "Unnecessary Heroes. German Resistance". Nazi Germany is a state where everything was subject to the will of the leader. Kill him and that's it! Why did neither Stalin, nor Roosevelt, nor Churchill try to destroy Hitler in order to end the war as soon as possible? Why did the attempt on the Fuhrer, planned by opposition-minded German generals, fail?

The third film in the cycle - "The Unsolved Mystery of World War II". Secret negotiations in Stockholm at the very end of the war, when Nazi Germany was trying to conclude a separate peace, still excite historians and writers to this day. Few people know what really happened then. Did the participants in these negotiations take the secret of the Stockholm meetings with them to the grave?

The fourth series of the cycle - "Abmission of sins in the Vatican". All the years of the existence of the Third Reich, the church was silent, although the Pope was expected to condemn the inhuman Nazi regime. But he was obsessed with preserving German Catholicism as the best organized political bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism. A perfectly obvious question arises: did the prudent Pope sympathize with the prisoners of the concentration camps? Why did all the years of the existence of the Third Reich, the Vatican, the leadership of the Catholic Church showed affection for the leaders of Nazi Germany?

The war came to the territory of Germany itself.

Barely recovering from the shock of the July 20 bombing, Hitler faced the loss of France and Belgium and the vast territories he had conquered in the East. The superior forces of the enemy troops pressed the troops of the Reich from all sides.

By mid-August 1944, after summer offensive operations that unfolded one after another, the Red Army reached the borders of East Prussia, locking 50 German divisions in the Baltic. Its troops broke through to Vyborg in Finland, destroyed Army Group Center, which made it possible to advance on a front 400 miles wide to the banks of the Vistula near Warsaw within six weeks. At the same time, in the south, as a result of a new offensive that began on August 20, Romania was defeated with its oil fields in Ploiesti - the only major source of oil for the German armies. On August 26, Bulgaria officially withdrew from the war, and the Germans began to hastily leave the country. In September, Finland capitulated and opposed those German troops who refused to leave its territory.

In the West, France was quickly liberated. The newly formed 3rd Army was led by Panzer General Patton, who, in his assertiveness and ability to grasp the situation, reminded the Americans of Rommel during the African campaign. After being captured on 30 July, Avranches Patton left Brittany without realizing plans to capture it, and began a large operation to bypass the German forces in Normandy, moving southeast to Orléans on the Loire, and then east to the Seine, south of Paris. By August 23, his troops reached the Seine southeast and northwest of the capital, and two days later the great city, the glory of France, was liberated after four years of German occupation. When General Jacques Leclerc's French 2nd Panzer Division and the American 4th Infantry Division stormed into Paris, they found that the French Resistance was already in control of much of the city. They also saw that the bridges over the Seine, many of which were real works of art, survived (According to Speidel, on August 23, Hitler ordered all Paris bridges and other important structures to be blown up, "even if monuments of art may be destroyed." Speidel refused comply with the order, as did General von Choltitz, the new commandant of Greater Paris, who surrendered after firing several shots to clear his conscience.In April 1945, Choltitz was tried in absentia for treason, but friends at work managed to delay the process until the end of the war.Speidel also reported , that immediately after the surrender of Paris, Hitler ordered to destroy it with heavy artillery and V-1 shells, but he refused to fulfill this order (Speidel G. Invasion of 1944, p. 143–145). - Approx. ed.).

The remnants of the German armies in France began to withdraw along the entire front. Rommel's winner in North Africa, Montgomery, promoted to field marshal on September 1, having covered 200 miles in four days, transferred his Canadian 1st Army and the British 2nd Army from the lower Seine region to Belgium. Brussels surrendered to the mercy of the winner on September 3, Antwerp the next day. The offensive was so swift that the Germans did not have time to blow up the port facilities in Antwerp. For the Allies, this turned out to be a good gift, since this port, as soon as the approaches to it were cleared, was destined to become the main supply base for the Anglo-American armies.

Also rapidly advancing into the southeastern part of Belgium, bypassing the Anglo-Canadian forces to the south, was the American 1st Army under the command of General Hodges. She went to the Meuse River, from where a crushing German breakthrough began in May 1940, and captured the fortified areas of Namur and Liege, where the Germans did not even have time to organize defense. Further south, Patton's 3rd Army captured Verdun, surrounded Metz, reached the Moselle River and, near the Belfort Pass, connected with the Franco-American 7th Army, which, under the command of General Alexander Patch, landed on August 15 on the Riviera in southern France and quickly moved north through the Rhone Valley.

By the end of August, the German armies in the West had lost 500,000 men, half of whom were taken prisoner, as well as almost all of their tanks, artillery, and trucks. Little was left to defend the fatherland. The highly publicized Siegfried Line was in fact unmanned and without guns. Most German generals in the West believed that the end had come. "There were no more ground forces, let alone air forces," Speidel notes. "For me, the war ended in September," Rundstedt, who was reinstated on September 4 as commander-in-chief of troops in the West, told Allied investigators after the war.

But it didn't end for Adolf Hitler. On the last day of August, he chastised several generals at headquarters, trying to instill new strength and hope in them.

“If necessary, we will fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t matter where. As Frederick the Great said, under any circumstances we will fight until one of our hated enemies is exhausted and refuses to fight further. We will fight until we will not achieve a peace that will ensure the existence of the German nation for another fifty or a hundred years and which, above all, will not tarnish our honor a second time, as happened in 1918 ... I live only to continue this struggle, because I know that if she will not have an iron will behind her, she is doomed."

After a scolding of the general staff for lack of iron will, Hitler told the generals some of the reasons for his stubborn faith:

"There will come a time when the discord between the allies will become so serious that there will be a break. All coalitions in history fell apart sooner or later. The main thing is to wait for the right moment, regardless of any difficulties."

Goebbels was entrusted with the task of carrying out "total mobilization", and Himmler, the new commander of the reserve army, began to form 25 militia divisions to defend the western borders. Despite all the plans for "total war" for Nazi Germany, the country's resources were not totally mobilized. At Hitler's urging, throughout the war, the production of consumer goods was maintained at an astonishingly high level, ostensibly to maintain high morale. And he prevented the implementation of plans, developed even before the war, according to which women should be attracted to work in enterprises. In March 1943, when Speer wanted to mobilize women for work in industry, he declared: "It is too high a price to sacrifice our dearest ideals." The Nazi ideology taught that the place of a German woman was at home, and not at the factory, and therefore she was engaged in the house. During the first four years of the war, when 2.25 million women were employed in the military production of Great Britain, only 182,000 women were employed in the same jobs in Germany. The number of female domestic workers, 1.5 million, remained unchanged throughout the war.

Now that the enemy was at the gates, the Nazi leaders set to work. All teenagers aged 15 to 18 and men aged 50 to 60 were drafted into the army. Universities and high schools, institutions and enterprises were combed in search of recruits. In September - October 1944, 0.5 million people were mobilized for the army. But no one dared to offer to replace them in enterprises and institutions with women. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production, protested to Hitler about the conscription of skilled workers into the army, which seriously affected the production of weapons.

Since the Napoleonic Wars, German soldiers have not had to defend the sacred land of the Fatherland. In all subsequent wars of Prussia or Germany, the lands of other peoples were captured and devastated. Now, streams of appeals and appeals fell on the heads of the soldiers, pressed by the enemy.

Soldiers of the Western Front!

... I hope that you will defend the sacred land of Germany ... to the last breath!

Heil Fuhrer!

Field Marshal von Rundstedt

Army Group Soldiers!

... As long as we are alive, none of us will give up a single inch of German land ... He who retreats without a fight is a traitor to his people.

Soldiers! The fate of our country, the lives of our wives and children, is at stake.

Our Fuhrer, our dear and close ones are filled with faith in their soldiers ...

Long live our Germany and our beloved Fuhrer!

Field Marshal Model

However, when it smelled of burning, the number of deserters increased sharply, and Himmler took drastic measures to prevent this. On September 10, he issued the order:

Separate unreliable elements apparently believe that the war will end for them as soon as they surrender to the enemy ... Every deserter ... will receive just retribution. Moreover, his unworthy behavior will entail the most serious consequences for his family… She will be shot immediately…

A certain Colonel Hoffman-Shonforn from the 18th Grenadier Division brought the following to the attention of his unit:

Traitors have deserted from our ranks, going over to the side of the enemy… These bastards have given away important military secrets… False Jewish slanderers are mocking you, encouraging you to become bastards in their little books. Let them spew poison... As for the contemptible traitors who have forgotten about honor, let them know that their own families will pay in full for their betrayal.

In September, what skeptical German generals called a "miracle" happened. For Speidel, this was the "German version" of the French miracle on the Marne in 1914. Suddenly, the formidable Allied advance stalled. There is debate to this day among Allied commanders from General Eisenhower down as to why it stalled. For the German generals, it was simply inexplicable. By the second week of September, American armies reached the German borders in the area of ​​Aachen and the Moselle River. In early September, Montgomery urged Eisenhower to transfer all stocks and reserves to the Anglo-Canadian armies, as well as the American 9th and 1st Armies, to launch a wide offensive in the north under his command. This would make it possible to quickly break through to the Ruhr, deprive the Germans of their main arsenal, open the way to Berlin and put an end to the war. Eisenhower rejected the proposal ("I am sure," Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs (Crusade to Europe, p. 305), that Field Marshal Montgomery, in the light of the events, would agree that such a plan was wrong. "But the field marshal was far from such an assessment, which is well known those who read Montgomery's memoirs - Approx. He wanted to advance towards the Rhine on a broad front.

However, his armies broke away from the rear. Every ton of gasoline and ammunition had to be transported across the coastal sands of Normandy or through the only port, Cherbourg, and then transported by trucks to the advancing armies, covering a distance of 300-400 miles. In the second week of September, Eisenhower's armies began to stall due to lack of supplies. At the same time, they unexpectedly ran into German resistance. By concentrating available forces on two decisive sectors, Rundstedt by mid-September managed to stop, at least temporarily, Patton's 3rd Army on the Moselle River and Hodges' 1st Army at Aachen.

Eisenhower, prompted by Montgomery, finally agreed to his bold plan: to seize a bridgehead on the lower Rhine in the Arnhem region, which would allow him to reach a line from which he could bypass the Siegfried Line from the north. The purpose of the operation did not at all coincide with Montgomery's plan to break into the Ruhr and then into Berlin, but it made it possible to create a strategic base for such an attempt later. The offensive began on September 17 with a massive landing of two American and one British airborne divisions based in England. But due to bad weather and the fact that the paratroopers landed in the position of two SS Panzer divisions, whose presence they did not suspect, and also because of the lack of ground forces attacking from the south, the operation failed. After ten days of fierce fighting, the Allies withdrew from Arnhem. Of the British 1st Airborne Division, dropped near the city, only 2,163 out of 9,000 men remained. For Eisenhower, this failure was convincing proof that even more serious tests should be expected.

Nevertheless, he hardly thought that the Germans would be able to recover sufficiently and inflict a stunning blow on the Western Front on the eve of the Christmas holidays.

Hitler's last adventure

On the evening of December 12, 1944, a large group of German generals - the highest command of the Western Front - was summoned to Rundschgedt's headquarters. Having handed over their personal weapons and briefcases, the generals hardly settled into the bus that was waiting for them. After half an hour of driving in the dark through snowy terrain (to lose orientation), the bus finally stopped at the entrance to a deep bunker, which turned out to be Hitler's headquarters in Ziegenberg, near Frankfurt. Here they learned for the first time what had already been known to a handful of senior officers of the General Staff and army commanders for about a month: in four days the Führer would launch a powerful offensive in the West.

This idea originated with him in mid-September, when Eisenhower's armies were stopped on the German border west of the Rhine. Although in October the American 9th, 1st and 3rd armies tried to resume the offensive with the aim of "dragging", as Eisenhower put it, to the Rhine, progress was slow and difficult. On October 24, after a fierce battle, the 1st Army captured Aachen, the capital of Charlemagne's empire. It became the first German city captured by the Allies, but the Americans were unable to break through to the Rhine. Nevertheless, on their front - the British and Canadians were advancing north - they exhausted the weakening enemy during the fighting. Hitler understood that by fighting defensive battles, he was only delaying the hour of reckoning. In his inflamed brain, a bold and cunning plan was ripened to seize the initiative and strike, which would dismember the American 3rd and 1st armies and allow them to break through to Antwerp, depriving Eisenhower of the main supply port. It will also make it possible to defeat the British and Canadian armies on the flanks along the Belgian-Dutch border. Such an offensive, according to his calculations, would not only inflict a crushing defeat on the Anglo-American armies and avert the threat from the German border, but would then allow the troops to turn against the Russians, who, although they continued to advance in the Balkans, were stopped back in October on the Vistula and in East Prussia. A swift offensive would cut through the Ardennes, where a powerful breakthrough began in 1940 and where, according to German intelligence, only four weak American infantry divisions stood on the defensive.

It was a bold plan. As Hitler believed, he almost certainly allowed the Allies to be taken by surprise and defeated before they could recover (There was an interesting appendix to the plan, called "Operation Greif" (Condor), which, buzzing around, was the brainchild of Hitler. The Fuhrer entrusted Otto Skorzeny to lead its implementation, who, after the rescue of Mussolini and decisive actions in Berlin on the evening of July 20, 1944, once again distinguished himself in his usual field - he kidnapped the Hungarian regent Admiral Horthy in Budapest in October 1944, when he was ready to offer the surrender of Hungary Skorzeny was given a new task - to form a special brigade of two thousand English-speaking German soldiers, dress them in American uniforms and put them in captured American tanks and jeeps. rear, destroy messengers, confuse traffic and disorganize t yyl in general. Small units were supposed to get close to the bridges across the Meuse River and try to capture and hold them until the main forces of the German armored forces approached. - Approx. ed. ). But there was a significant flaw in the plan. The German army was not only weaker than the previous 1940s, especially in the air, but was also dealing with a much more resourceful and better armed enemy. The German generals did not fail to draw Hitler's attention to this fact.

“When I received this plan in early November,” Rundstedt later said, “I was stunned. Hitler did not bother to consult with me ... It was completely clear to me that the available forces were clearly not enough to carry out such a self-confident plan.” At the same time, realizing that it was useless to argue with Hitler, Rundstedt and Model proposed an alternative plan, which would perhaps meet the insistence of the supreme commander to go on the offensive, but would have a limited goal - to eliminate the American arc around Aachen. The commander-in-chief of German forces in the West had little hope that Hitler would change his mind, and he preferred to send Blumentritt, Chief of Staff, to a military conference on December 2 in Berlin. However, at the meeting, Blumentritt, Field Marshal Model, General Hasso von Manteuffel and SS General Sepp Dietrich (the latter two were to command powerful tank armies intended to develop a breakthrough) could not shake Hitler's determination.

For the rest of his time, he strove to scrape together resources throughout Germany for the last adventure. In November, he managed to collect almost 1,500 new or restored tanks and self-propelled guns, and in December another 1,000. For a breakthrough in the Ardennes, he formed almost 28 divisions, including 9 tank divisions, and an additional 6 divisions for a subsequent attack on Alsace. Goering promised three thousand fighters (The actual advancing German troops had about 900 tanks and assault guns, 800–900 aircraft. - Approx. tit. ed.).

This was an impressive force, although much weaker than Rundstedt's Army Group on the same front in 1940. And to send it to the Western Front meant to deny reinforcements to the German troops in the East, whose commanders believed that they were absolutely necessary to repel the Russian winter offensive expected in January. When Guderian, the Chief of the General Staff in charge of the Eastern Front, protested, Hitler scolded him sternly:

"You don't need to try to teach me. I commanded the German army during the war for five years and in that time gained more practical experience than any gentleman on the General Staff could ever hope to have. I studied Clausewitz and Moltke, read all the works of Schlieffen "I know the situation better than you."

Guderian objected that the Russians were about to go on the offensive with superior forces, and gave data on Soviet preparations, to which Hitler shouted: "Since Genghis Khan, this is the greatest bluff! Who composed all this nonsense?"

On the generals who gathered at the Fuhrer's headquarters in Ziegenberg on the evening of December 12, naturally without pistols and briefcases, the Nazi supreme commander, hunched in his chair, as Manteuffel later recalled, made the impression of a sick person: a stooped figure, a pale swollen face, shaking hands. Her left hand was cramping, which he carefully concealed. When walking, he dragged his leg.

But Hitler's spirit was still indomitable. The generals expected to hear an assessment of the situation and a presentation of the plan for the upcoming offensive. Instead, the supreme commander fell into political rantings and historical

"In history there has never been such a coalition as our opponents, a coalition made up of such heterogeneous elements v pursuing such different goals ... On the one hand, ultra-capitalist states, on the other - ultra-Marxist. On the one hand, the dying empire - Great Britain, on the other - a former colony that firmly decided to inherit it - the United States ... Entering the coalition, each partner cherished the hope of realizing their political goals ... America is striving to become the heir to England, Russia is trying to seize the Balkans ... England is trying to maintain its possessions ... in the Mediterranean Sea. Even now these states are in conflict with each other, and he who, like a spider, sits in the center of the web he has woven, watching events, sees how this antagonism grows with every hour. the common front may collapse with a deafening roar, but on the condition that Germany does not show weakness.

It is necessary to deprive the enemy of the confidence that victory is assured... The outcome of the war is ultimately decided by the recognition of one of the parties of the fact that it is not in a position to win. We must constantly inspire the enemy that he will never, under any circumstances, achieve our surrender. Never! Never! "

And although the empty speeches of the Führer still sounded in the ears of the generals dispersing from the meeting, not one of them, at least they said later, did not believe that the blow in the Ardennes would be crowned with success. Yet they were determined to carry out the order to the best of their ability.

And they managed to do it. The night of December 16 was dark and frosty. Under the cover of dense fog hanging over the snow-covered wooded hills of the Ardennes, the Germans advanced to their starting positions, stretching for 70 miles between Monschau south of Aachen and Echternach northwest of Trier. According to the forecast, such weather should have persisted for several days. All the while, as the Germans hoped, Allied aircraft would be chained to the airfields, and the German rear would be able to escape the hell they once experienced in Normandy. Five days in a row, Hitler was lucky with the weather. During this time, the Germans, catching the Allied high command by surprise, launched a series of frontal attacks starting on the morning of December 16 and broke through enemy positions on several sectors of the front at once.

On the night of December 17, a German panzer group approached Stavelot, eight miles from Spa, where the headquarters of the American 1st Army was located, it had to be urgently evacuated. Moreover, the German tanks were a mile away from the huge American field gas depot, where three million gallons of gasoline were concentrated. If the Germans had captured this warehouse, their armored divisions, constantly losing their pace of advance due to delays in the delivery of fuel, the shortage of which they already acutely felt, could have advanced faster and further. The so-called Skorzeny's 150th tank brigade advanced furthest, its personnel dressed in American uniforms and mounted on captured American tanks, trucks and jeeps. About 40 jeeps with soldiers managed to slip through the unoccupied sections of the front and advance to the Meuse River (on December 16, a German officer was captured, who had several copies of the order for Operation Greif with him, and the Americans, thus, became aware of everything. But this circumstance apparently did not put an end to the disorientation created by Skorzeny's men.Some of them, disguised as American military police, set up posts at crossroads and indicated the wrong direction of movement for American military vehicles.This did not prevent the intelligence department of the 1st Army from believing the tales of several captured Germans dressed in American uniforms that a large number of Skorzeny's thugs went to Paris to kill Eisenhower there.In a few days, American military police detained thousands of American soldiers as far as Paris, and they were forced to prove their nationality by answering questions such as: who won the US baseball championship and what the name of their state capital was, although some did not remember it or simply did not know. Many detainees in American uniforms were shot on the spot, the rest were court-martialed and executed. Skorzeny himself was tried by the American Tribunal at Dachau in 1947, but acquitted. After that, he went to Spain and then to South America, where he organized a thriving cement company and wrote his memoirs. - Approx. ed. ). However, the stubborn, albeit unprepared resistance of the scattered units of the American 1st Army slowed down the advance of the Germans, and the steadfastness of the Allied troops on the northern and southern flanks, respectively at Monschau and Bastogne, forced the Nazis to advance along a narrow, curved corridor. The staunch defense of the Americans at Bastogne finally sealed their fate.

The key to the defense of the Ardennes and the Meuse River was the fork in the road at Bastogne. Its strong holding made it possible not only to block the main roads along which the 5th Panzer Army of Manteuffel advanced to the Meuse River at Dinan, but also to tie down significant German forces intended to develop a breakthrough. By the morning of December 18, Manteuffel's tank spearheads were only 15 miles from the city, and the only Americans left there were officers and soldiers of the headquarters of one of the corps, preparing to evacuate. However, on the evening of the 17th, the American 101st Airborne Division, which re-equipped at Reims, was ordered to make a throw to Bastogne, located 100 miles away. Moving all night in trucks with headlights on, they reached the city in a day, managing to get ahead of the Germans. It was a decisive race, and the Germans lost it. Although they surrounded Bastogne, they barely managed to get their divisions into action to reach the river Meuse. In addition, they were forced to allocate large forces to block the fork in the road, in order to then try to capture Bastogne.

On December 22, General Heinrich von Lüttwitz, commander of the 47th Armored Corps, sent a written appeal to the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, demanding the surrender of Bastogne. He received the famous one-word reply: "Fuck you..." Christmas Eve was the turning point in Hitler's Ardennes adventure. The day before, a reconnaissance battalion of the German 2nd Armored Division had reached the heights three miles east of the Meuse in the Dinant area and, waiting for fuel for tanks and reinforcements, halted before rushing down the slopes to the river. However, neither fuel nor reinforcements arrived. The American 2nd Armored Division struck suddenly from the north. Meanwhile, several divisions of Patton's 3rd Army were already approaching from the south with the main task of releasing Bastogne. “On the evening of the 24th,” Manteuffel wrote later, “it became clear that the operation had reached its highest point. Now we already knew that we would never solve the task.” The pressure on the southern and northern flanks of the narrow and deep German penetration became too strong, moreover, two days before Christmas the sky finally cleared and the Anglo-American Air Force began to deliver massive attacks on German communications, on troops and tanks moving along narrow and winding mountain roads. The Germans made another desperate attempt to capture Bastogne. All through Christmas day, beginning at three o'clock in the morning, they made one attack after another, but McAuliffe's defending troops held out. The next day, an armored formation from Patton's 3rd Army attacked the city from the south. The Germans now faced the question of how to get the troops out of the narrow corridor before they were cut off and destroyed.

But Hitler did not want to hear about the retreat. On the evening of December 28, he held a military conference, at which, instead of heeding the advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel and withdrawing the troops from the ledge in time, he ordered to go on the offensive again, storm Bastogne and break through to the Meuse. Moreover, he demanded an immediate new offensive in the south, in Alsace, where the number of American forces was sharply reduced due to the transfer of several Patton divisions north into the Ardennes. Hitler remained deaf to the protests of the generals, who declared that the forces at their disposal were insufficient both to continue the offensive in the Ardennes and to strike in Alsace.

"Gentlemen, I have been in this business for eleven years and ... I have never heard from anyone that he is completely ready ... You are never quite ready. That's clear."

And he kept talking and talking. as he finished, the generals realized that their supreme commander had obviously lost his sense of reality and was heading in the clouds.

"The question is... does Germany have the will to live or will it be destroyed... Defeat in this war will lead to the destruction of its people."

Then followed a lengthy discourse on the history of Rome and Prussia in the Seven Years' War. At last he returned to the urgent problems of the day. Admitting that the offensive in the Ardennes "did not lead to the decisive success that could be expected," the Fuhrer declared that it led to "such a change in the whole situation, which no one considered possible just two weeks ago."

"The enemy was forced to abandon all his offensive plans ... He had to throw exhausted units into battle. We managed to completely overturn his operational plans. Sharp criticism fell upon him in the rear. This is a difficult psychological moment for him. He already had to admit that until August , or even before the end of next year, it is impossible to decide the fate of the war ... "

Was this last phrase an admission of final defeat? Recollecting himself, Hitler immediately tried to dispel this impression:

"I hasten to add, gentlemen, that ... you should not conclude from this that I even remotely admit the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bdefeat in this war ... I am not familiar with the word" capitulation "... For me, the current situation is nothing new. I have been in much I mention this only because I want you to understand why I pursue my goal with such fanaticism and why nothing can break me. will not change one iota in my determination to fight, until at last the scales tip in our favor."

After that, he called on the generals to strike again at the enemy with as much enthusiasm as they could.

"Then we ... completely crush the Americans ... And then you will see what happens. I do not believe that in the end the enemy will resist 45 German divisions ... We will still overcome fate!" Alas, too late. Germany no longer had the military power to do so.

On the first day of the new year, Hitler threw eight divisions into the offensive in the Saar, followed by a blow from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhine by the forces of the army under the command of Heinrich Himmler, which seemed to the German generals a cruel joke. Neither operation achieved much. The massive attack on Bastogne, undertaken on January 3, did not bring success either. The blow was delivered by at least two corps, consisting of nine divisions. He was destined to turn into the most fierce battle in the Ardennes operation. By January 5, the Germans had lost hope of capturing this key city. They themselves were now in danger of being surrounded as a result of the Anglo-American counterattack from the north, undertaken on 3 January. On January 8, Model, whose armies were in danger of being trapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, was finally allowed to withdraw. By January 16, exactly one month after the start of the offensive, for the sake of the success of which Hitler threw the last manpower, weapons and ammunition into battle, the German troops were driven back to their original lines.

They lost about 120 thousand people killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and self-propelled guns, 1600 aircraft and 6 thousand vehicles. The Americans also had serious losses: 8 thousand killed, 48 thousand wounded, 21 thousand captured or missing, as well as 733 tanks and self-propelled anti-tank installations (Among the killed Americans, there were several brutally killed prisoners. They were killed on December 17 near Malmedy by officers and soldiers of the combat group of Colonel Jochen Peiper from the 1st SS Panzer Division.According to the data given at the Nuremberg trials, 129 American prisoners were brutally tortured.In subsequent trials of the SS officers involved in this crime, this figure was reduced to 71. The meetings ended with a curious 43 SS officers, including Peiper, were sentenced to death, 23 to life imprisonment and 8 to shorter terms.Sepp Dietrich, commander of the 6th SS Panzer Army, who fought on the north side of the salient, received 25 years ; Kremer, commander of the 1st SS Panzer Corps, - 10 years old and Hermann Priss, commander of the 1st SS Panzer Division, - 18 years old.

Suddenly, indignantly tearful voices were heard in the US Senate, especially from the now deceased Senator McCarthy, who claimed that SS officers were allegedly used force to force them to confess their guilt. In March 1948, 31 death sentences were overturned and commuted to various terms of imprisonment. In April, General L. Clay canceled six more of the remaining 12 death sentences, and in January 1951, the American High Commissioner in Germany, John McCloy, under a general amnesty, commuted the remaining death sentences to life imprisonment. By the time this book is completed, all SS men have been released. Amid cries of alleged mistreatment of SS officers, irrefutable evidence that at least 71 unarmed American prisoners were brutally murdered in a snowy field near Malmedy on December 17, 1944, on the orders or at the instigation of several SS officers, was forgotten. - Approx. ed. ). But the Americans could make up for their losses, the Germans could not.

They have exhausted all their resources. This was the last major offensive of the German army in World War II. Its failure not only predetermined the inevitability of defeat in the West, but also doomed the German armies in the East, where Hitler's transfer of his last reserves to the Ardennes had an immediate effect.

As far as the Russian front was concerned, the lengthy lecture given by Hitler three days after Christmas to the generals of the Western Front sounded rather optimistic. In the East, the German armies, gradually losing the Balkans, held firm since October on the Vistula and in East Prussia.

"Unfortunately, due to the betrayal of our allies, we are forced to gradually retreat ... - said Hitler. - Nevertheless, in general, it turned out to be possible to hold the Eastern Front."

But how long? On Christmas Eve, after the Russians surrounded Budapest, and on the first day of the new year, Guderian vainly asked Hitler for reinforcements to take appropriate action against the Russian threat in Hungary and repel the Soviet offensive in Poland, which was expected in mid-January.

"I stressed," says Guderian, "that the Ruhr is already paralyzed by the bombing of the Western Allies ... On the other hand, I said, the industrial region of Upper Silesia can still operate at full capacity, since the center of German weapons production has moved to the East. The loss of Upper Silesia will lead to our defeat in a few weeks. But it was all in vain. I was rebuffed and spent a dreary and tragic Christmas Eve in a completely discouraging environment. "

Nevertheless, on January 9, Guderian went to see Hitler for the third time. He took with him the chief of intelligence in the East, General Gehlen, who, using the maps and diagrams he had brought, tried to explain to the Fuhrer the danger of the position of the German troops on the eve of the expected Russian offensive in the north.

"Hitler," recalls Guderian, "finally lost his temper ... declaring that the maps and diagrams were 'absolutely idiotic' and ordered me to put the man who prepared them in a lunatic asylum. Then I flared up and said: 'If you want to send General Gehlen to a lunatic asylum, then send me along with him."

Hitler retorted that on the Eastern Front "there has never been such a strong reserve as now," and Guderian snapped: "The Eastern Front is like a house of cards. If it is breached even in one place, everything else will collapse."

That's how it all happened. On January 12, 1945, the Russian Army Group Konev made a breakthrough on the Upper Vistula, south of Warsaw, and rushed into Silesia. Zhukov's armies crossed the Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on 17 January. Further north, two Russian armies captured half of East Prussia and moved to the Danzig Gulf.

It was the largest Russian offensive in the entire war. Stalin sent 180 divisions to Poland and East Prussia alone, mostly, surprisingly, tank divisions. It was impossible to stop them.

“By January 27 (only fifteen days after the start of the Soviet offensive), the Russian tidal wave,” recalls Guderian, “turned into a complete disaster for us.” By this time, East and West Prussia had already been cut off from the Reich. It was on this day that Zhukov crossed the Oder, advancing 220 miles in two weeks and reaching the lines just 100 miles from Berlin. The Russian seizure of the Silesian industrial basin had the most catastrophic consequences.

On January 30, the twelfth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer submitted a memorandum to Hitler emphasizing the significance of the loss of Silesia. "The war is lost," he began his report, and went on to explain why in a dispassionate and objective manner. After the massive bombing of the Ruhr, Silesian mines began to supply 60 percent of German coal. There was a two-week supply of coal left for railroads, power stations and factories. Thus, now, after the loss of Silesia, one can, according to Speer, count on only one-fourth of the coal and one-sixth of the steel of the volume that it produced in 1944. This foreshadowed disaster in 1945.

The Fuhrer, as Guderian later recalled, glanced at Speer's report, read the first sentence, and ordered that it be put in a safe. He refused to receive Speer in private, and said to Guderian:

"From now on, I will not receive anyone in private. Speer is always trying to give me something unpleasant. I can't stand it."

On January 27, in the afternoon, Zhukov's troops crossed the Oder, 100 miles from Berlin. This event caused an interesting reaction at Hitler's headquarters, which also spread to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. On the 25th, in desperation, Guderian went to Ribbentrop with an urgent request to try to immediately conclude a truce in the West, so that what was left of the German armies was concentrated in the East against the Russians. The Minister of Foreign Affairs immediately blabbed about this to the Fuhrer, who on the same evening chastised the Chief of the General Staff, accusing him of treason.

However, two days later, Hitler, Goering and Jodl, shocked by the catastrophe in the East, considered it superfluous to ask the West for a truce, since they were sure that the Western allies themselves would resort to them, afraid of the consequences of the Bolshevik victories. The surviving record of the meeting on January 27 with the Fuhrer gives an idea of ​​what scene played out at the headquarters.

Hitler: Do you think the British are delighted with the events on the Russian front?

Goering: Of course, they did not expect us to hold them back until the Russians conquered all of Germany ... They did not expect us to defend ourselves like crazy against them while the Russians were moving deeper and deeper into Germany and in fact captured it all ...

JODL: They have always been suspicious of the Russians.

Goering: If this continues, in a few days we will receive a telegram from the British,

And with this ghostly chance, the leaders of the Third Reich pinned their hopes.

In the spring of 1945, the Third Reich was rapidly approaching its end.

The agony began in March. By February, when most of the Ruhr lay in ruins and Upper Silesia was lost, coal production was one-fifth the level of the previous year. Only a very small amount could be transported, as the Anglo-American bombing raids disabled rail and water transport. At meetings with Hitler, the conversation was mainly about the lack of coal. Doenitz complained about the lack of fuel that had kept many ships laid up, and Speer calmly explained that power plants and factories were in the same position for the same reasons. The loss of Romanian and Hungarian oil fields and the bombing of synthetic fuel plants in Germany created such an acute shortage of gasoline that most of the now urgently needed fighters did not take off and were destroyed at airfields by Allied aircraft. Many tank divisions were inactive due to lack of fuel.

Hopes for the promised "miracle weapon", which for some time supported the people and soldiers, and even such sober-minded generals as Guderian, eventually had to be abandoned. The launchers of V-1 projectiles and V-2 missiles aimed at England were almost completely destroyed when Eisenhower's troops occupied the coast of France and Belgium. There are only a few installations left in Holland. Almost 8,000 of these shells and missiles were fired at Antwerp and other military targets after the Anglo-American troops reached the German borders, but the damage caused by them was insignificant.

Hitler and Göring expected that the new jet fighters would achieve air superiority over the Allied aircraft, and they would have achieved this, since the Germans managed to produce more than a thousand of them, if the Anglo-American pilots, who did not have such aircraft, had not taken successful countermeasures. Conventional Allied propeller-driven fighters could not withstand the German jet fighters, but only a few of them managed to take to the air. Oil refineries that produced specialty fuels were bombed out, and the extended runways built for them were easily spotted by Allied airmen, who destroyed the jets on the ground.

Grand Admiral Dönitz once promised the Fuhrer that new submarines with electric motors would perform miracles at sea, once again disrupt the Anglo-American vital communications in the North Atlantic. But by mid-February 1945, only two of the 126 new submarines commissioned were able to go to sea.

As for the German atomic bomb project, which had caused so much anxiety in London and Washington, it did not make much headway, because it did not arouse much interest in Hitler and because Himmler used to arrest atomic scientists on suspicion of disloyalty or to distract them to carry out ridiculous "scientific" studies that fascinated him. experiments, which he considered much more important. By the end of 1944, the governments of England and the United States learned with great relief that the Germans would not be able to create an atomic bomb and use it in this war. book "Alsos" by Professor Samuel Goudsmit "Alsos" was the code name for the group of American scientists he led and which followed Eisenhower's armies during their march into Western Europe.

On February 8, Eisenhower's armies, by this time numbering 85 divisions, began to concentrate on the Rhine. The Allies believed that the Germans would only conduct deterrent actions and save their forces, hiding behind a powerful water barrier, which was this wide and fast river. And Rundstedt suggested this. But in this case, as before, Hitler did not even want to hear about the withdrawal. That would mean, he told Rundstedt, "to move the catastrophe from one place to another." Therefore, at the insistence of Hitler, the German armies continued to fight in their positions. However, this did not last long. By the end of the month, the British and Americans reached the Rhine in several places north of Düsseldorf, and two weeks later they were firmly holding the left bank north of the Moselle. At the same time, the Germans lost another 350 thousand people killed, wounded or captured (the number of prisoners reached 293 thousand), as well as the bulk of weapons and equipment.

Hitler was furious. On March 10, he removed Rundstedt (for the last time), replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had resisted so long and stubbornly in Italy. Back in February, the Führer, in a fit of rage, found it necessary to denounce the Geneva Convention in order, as he stated at a conference on February 19, "to make the enemy understand that we are determined to fight for our existence with all the means at our disposal." He was strongly advised to take this step by Dr. Goebbels, a bloodthirsty type who proposed immediately, without trial or investigation, to carry out mass executions of captured pilots in response to reprisals for the terrible bombing of German cities. When some of the officers present presented legal arguments against such a move, Hitler angrily cut them off:

"To hell ... If I make it clear that I do not intend to stand on ceremony with enemy prisoners, that they will be treated with no regard for either their rights or possible reprisals against us, then many (Germans) will think twice before deserting ". This statement was one of the first indications that showed his henchmen that Hitler, whose mission as the conqueror of the world had failed, was ready to rush into the abyss, like Wotan into Valhalla, dragging not only enemies, but also his own people. At the end of the meeting, he demanded that Admiral Doenitz consider all the pros and cons in connection with this step and report to him as soon as possible.

Doenitz, as was characteristic of him, arrived with an answer the next day.

"The negative consequences will outweigh the positive ... In any case, it would be better to keep up appearances, at least outwardly, and implement the measures that we consider necessary without announcing it in advance."

Hitler reluctantly agreed, and although, as we have seen, there was no wholesale extermination of captured airmen or prisoners of war other than Russians, a few were still killed, and the civilian population was incited to lynch Allied aircrews landing by parachute. One captured French general (Mesny) was deliberately killed on Hitler's orders, and a large number of Allied prisoners of war died when they were forcibly driven over long distances without food or water. They made these long marches along roads that were attacked by British, American and Russian aircraft. They drove them into the interior of the country in order to prevent the liberation by the advancing Allied troops. Hitler's desire to make German soldiers think twice before deserting had its reasons. In the West, the number of deserters, or at least those who surrendered at the first opportunity, immediately after the start of the Anglo-American offensive became staggering. On February 12, Keitel issued an order in the name of the Führer that any soldier who fraudulently obtained a release note, received leave, or traveled on false documents would be "punished by death." And on March 5, General Blaskowitz, commander of Army Group X in the West, gave the following order:

"All soldiers ... found outside their units ... as well as all those who claim that they have fallen behind and are looking for their units, will be immediately court-martialed and shot."

On April 12, Himmler contributed to this order by announcing that a commander who failed to hold a city or an important communications center would be shot. The order was immediately carried out in relation to several officers who failed to hold one of the bridges over the Rhine.

On the afternoon of March 7, the advance elements of the American 9th Panzer Division reached the heights near the city of Remagen, 25 miles north of Koblenz. To the surprise of the American tankers, Ludendorff's railway bridge was not destroyed. They quickly descended the slopes to the water. The sappers hastily cut any wire that could lead to the planted mine. A platoon of infantrymen rushed across the bridge. When they ran up to the right bank, one explosion followed, then another. The bridge shook, but it did not collapse. A small group of Germans, covering it on the other side, was quickly driven back. Tanks rushed forward through the spans of the bridge. By evening, the Americans had established a strong foothold on the right bank of the Rhine. The last serious natural frontier on the way to West Germany was overcome (Hitler ordered the execution of eight German officers who commanded the few forces that covered the Remagen bridge. They were judged by the special mobile tribunal of the Western Front established by the Führer, chaired by a fanatical Nazi general named Hübner. - Approx. author . ).

A few days later, late in the evening of March 22, Patton's 3rd Army, having crossed the Saar-Palatinate Triangle, in a brilliant operation, in cooperation with the American 7th and French 1st Armies, organized another Rhine crossing at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. By March 25, the Anglo-American armies reached the left bank of the river along its entire length, creating fortified bridgeheads in two places on the right bank. In a month and a half, Hitler lost in the West more than a third of his own and most of the weapons, sufficient to equip half a million people.

At 2.30 am on March 24, at his headquarters in Berlin, he convened a council of war to decide what to do next.

HITLER: I consider the second bridgehead at Oppenham to be the greatest danger.

Hevel (Ministry of Foreign Affairs): The Rhine is not too wide there.

Hitler: A good two hundred and fifty meters. But at the river boundary, it is enough for only one person to fall asleep for a terrible disaster to happen.

The Supreme Commander-in-Chief asked if "there was a brigade or something like that that could be sent there." The adjutant replied:

"At present, there is not a single unit available that could be sent to Oppenheim. There are only five anti-tank installations in the military camp on the Seine, which will be ready today or tomorrow. They can be put into battle in a few days ... "

A few days! By this time Patton had established a bridgehead at Oppenheim seven miles wide and six miles deep, and his tanks were rushing east toward Frankfurt. And indicative of the predicament in which the once powerful German army found itself, whose vaunted tank corps cut Europe from end to end in bygone years, was the fact that the supreme commander himself was forced to deal with five knocked out anti-tank installations that could be obtained and put into battle only a few days later to stop the advance of a powerful enemy tank army (Transcript of the military council held by the Fuhrer on March 23, the last of the relatively undamaged by fire. It can be judged from the actions of the distraught Fuhrer and his obsession with insignificant details at the moment when they began to crumble For an hour he discussed Goebbels' proposal to use the wide avenue in Berlin's Tiergarten as an airstrip. mentioned about the Indian Legion.

Hitler declared: “The Indian Legion is not serious. There are Indians who are unable to kill even a louse. They would rather let themselves be eaten. They are not able to kill an Englishman either. something like that, they would be the most indefatigable workers in the world ... "And so on until late at night. Dispersed at 03.43. - Approx. ed. ).

Now, by the beginning of the third week of March, when the Americans were already on the other side of the Rhine, and a powerful allied army of the British, Canadians and Americans under the command of Montgomery prepared to cross the Lower Rhine and rush to the North German plain and Ruhr, which they did on the night of March 23 , vengeful Hitler fell on his own people. The people supported him during the greatest victories in German history. Now, in a time of trials, the Fuhrer no longer considered the people worthy of his, Hitler's, greatness. “If the German people are destined to be defeated in the struggle,” he declared in a speech addressed to the Gauleiters in August 1944, “then he is obviously too weak: he could not prove his courage before history and is doomed only to destruction.” The Fuhrer quickly turned into a ruin, and this poisoned his judgment even more. The tension required to lead the war, the upheaval caused by defeats, an unhealthy lifestyle without fresh air and movement in the underground headquarters bunkers that he rarely left, the inability to control his increasingly repeated outbursts of anger, and not least the harmful drugs he took every day. at the insistence of his doctor, the charlatan Morell, undermined his health even before the explosion on July 20, 1944. During the explosion, his eardrums burst in both of his ears, exacerbating his vertigo attacks. After the explosion, the doctors advised him to take a long rest, but he refused. "If I leave East Prussia," he told Keitel, "she will fall. As long as I am here, she will hold on."

In September 1944, he suffered a nervous breakdown, accompanied by a breakdown, and he fell ill, but by November he recovered and returned to Berlin. However, he could no longer contain his anger. As the news from the fronts got worse and worse, he became more and more hysterical. This was invariably accompanied by trembling in the arms and legs, which he could not control. General Guderian left several descriptions of such moments. At the end of January, when the Russians reached the Oder, only 100 miles from Berlin, and the Chief of the General Staff demanded that several divisions cut off in the Baltic be evacuated by sea, Hitler attacked him in anger.

"He stood in front of me and threatened me with shaking fists. My kind chief of staff, Thomals, saw fit to grab me by the tails of my tunic and drag me back so that I would not become a victim of physical pressure."

According to Guderian, a few days later, on February 13, 1945, due to the situation on the Russian front, there was another skirmish that lasted two hours.

“In front of me stood a man with raised fists and cheeks purple with anger, trembling all over ... and losing all control over himself. After each outburst of indignation, Hitler walked with long steps along the edge of the carpet, then suddenly stopped in front of me and threw a new portion of indignant people in my face He almost squealed, it seemed that his eyes were about to pop out of their sockets, and the veins that were swollen at the temples would burst.

And in this state, mental and physical, the German Fuhrer made one of the last important state decisions. On March 19, he signed a directive that all military, industrial, transport and communications facilities, as well as all material resources of Germany, should be destroyed so as not to fall into the hands of the enemy. The execution was entrusted to the military together with the Nazi Gauleiters and Defense Commissars. The directive ended with the words: "All orders contrary to this order are invalid."

Germany was going to be turned into a vast desert. Nothing was to be left behind that could help the German people somehow survive their defeat.

The frank and direct Albert Speer, Minister for Armaments and War Production, foresaw this barbaric directive from previous meetings with Hitler. On March 15, he drew up a memorandum in which he strongly opposed this criminal step and confirmed that the war was lost. On the evening of March 18, he introduced her to the Fuhrer.

“The complete collapse of the German economy,” Speer wrote, “should be definitely expected in the next four to eight weeks ... After this collapse, it will become impossible to continue the war by military means ... We must do everything to preserve to the end, even in the most primitive way, the basis for the existence of the nation ... At this stage of the war, we have no right to cause destruction that can affect the lives of the people. If the enemies want to destroy our nation, which fought with unfathomable courage, then let this historical shame fall entirely on them. Our duty is to preserve for nation any possibility of rebirth in the distant future… "

But Hitler, having decided his own fate, was no longer interested in the continued existence of the German people, for whom he always expressed such boundless love. And he said to Speer:

"If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This is its inevitable lot. There is no need to deal with the foundation that a people will need to continue the most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be much better to destroy all these things with our own hands, because the German nation will only prove that it is weaker, and the future will belong to a stronger eastern nation (Russia). In addition, after the battle, only inferior people will survive, because all the full-fledged will be killed. "

The next day, the Supreme Commander openly proclaimed his shameful "scorched earth" doctrine. On March 23 came the equally monstrous order of Martin Bormann, the mole-man, the first among Hitler's satraps, with whom at present no one could compare in position. Speer described it this way at the Nuremberg Trials:

"Bormann's decree provided for the concentration of the entire population from the West and from the East, including foreign workers and prisoners of war, in the center of the Reich. Millions of people had to move to the gathering place on foot. No provision of food and essentials was provided due to the current situation. Traffic conditions were not allowed to take anything with them. The result of all this could be a terrible famine, the consequences of which are difficult to imagine. "

And if all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann - and many more additional directives were issued - were carried out, the millions of Germans who remained alive by that time would certainly have died. Testifying at the Nuremberg trials, Speer tried to summarize the various orders and orders that demanded the transformation of the Reich into a "scorched earth".

Destruction, according to him, was subject to: all industrial enterprises, all important sources and means of transmission of electricity, water pipes, gas networks, food and clothing warehouses; all bridges, all waterways, ships and vessels, all trucks and all locomotives.

The end of the German army was approaching.

While the Anglo-Canadian armies of Field Marshal Montgomery crossed the Lower Rhine in the last week of March, advanced in a northeasterly direction towards Bremen, Hamburg and the Baltic coast in the Lübeck region, the American 9th Army of General Simpson and the 1st Army of General Hodges quickly covered the Ruhr, respectively. from the north and from the south, on April 1, they joined at Lippstadt. Army Group B, under the command of Field Marshal Model, consisting of the 15th and 5th Panzer Armies, numbering approximately 21 divisions, was trapped in the ruins of Germany's largest industrial region. She held out for 18 days and surrendered on April 18. Another 325,000 Germans were captured, including 30 generals. The model was not among them. He chose to shoot himself.

The encirclement of Model's armies in the Ruhr exposed the German front for a large stretch in the West. The American 9th and 1st Armies, which had freed themselves in the Ruhr, moved into the resulting gap 200 miles wide. From here they rushed to the Elbe, to the very heart of Germany. The road to Berlin was opened, because between these two American armies and the German capital there were only a few randomly scattered, disorganized German divisions. On the evening of April 11, having covered about 60 miles since dawn, the advanced units of the 9th Army reached the Elbe near Magdeburg, and the next day they organized a bridgehead on the other side. The Americans were only 60 kilometers from Berlin.

Eisenhower's goal now was to split Germany in two by linking up with the Russians on the Elbe, between Magdeburg and Dresden. Despite sharp criticism from Churchill and the British military leadership for not taking Berlin before the Russians, although they could easily have done so, Eisenhower and his staff worked like hell on an urgent task. Now, after linking up with the Russians, it was necessary to move immediately to the southeast in order to capture the so-called National Fortress, where, in the rugged Alpine mountains of Southern Bavaria and Western Austria, Hitler was gathering his remaining forces at the last line of defense.

The "national fortress" was a mirage. It never existed, except in the propaganda tirades of Dr. Goebbels and in the minds of Eisenhower's overcautious staffers who fell for this bait. As early as March 11, intelligence from the High Command of the Allied Expeditionary Force had warned Eisenhower that the Nazis planned to create an impregnable fortress in the mountains and that Hitler would personally direct its defense from his hideout in Berchtesgaden. According to intelligence reports, the ice-covered mountain cliffs were practically impassable.

“Here,” the intelligence report stated, “under the cover of natural defensive obstacles reinforced by the most effective secret weapons ever created by man, the surviving forces that have hitherto led Germany will begin her rebirth; here in factories located in bomb shelters, weapons will be made; food and equipment will be stored in vast underground niches, and a specially formed corps of young people will be trained in guerrilla warfare, so that a whole underground army can be trained and sent to liberate Germany from the forces occupying it.

It seemed that the British and American masters of detective novels had infiltrated the intelligence department of the headquarters of the Allied High Command. In any case, these fantastic fabrications were taken seriously at the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, where Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, puzzled over the terrible possibility of a "protracted campaign in the Alpine regions", which would entail huge casualties and lead to an indefinite prolongation of the war. (“Only after the end of the campaign,” General Omar Bradley later wrote, “did we realize that this fortress existed in the imagination of a few fanatical Nazis. It turned into such a scarecrow that I simply marvel at how we could so naively believe in its existence. But while it existed, the legend of the fortress was too ominous a threat to be neglected, and as a result, in the last weeks of the war, we could not ignore it in our operational plans "(Bradley O. Notes of a Soldier, p. 536). "A great many everything was written about the Alpine fortress, - Field Marshal Kesselring remarked with a grin after the war, - and mostly nonsense "(Kesselring. Pos puddle list of a soldier, p. 276). - Approx. ed. ). Once again - for the last time - the resourceful Dr. Goebbels managed to influence the course of military operations through a propaganda bluff. And although Adolf Hitler at first admitted the possibility of retreating into the Austro-Bavarian Alps in order to take refuge and give the last battle in the mountains near which he was born, where he spent many hours of his life, where in the mountain resort of Obersalzberg, beyond Berchtesgaden, he built a house that could call his own, he hesitated for a long time, until it was too late.

On April 16, the day American troops entered Nuremberg, the city of loud gatherings of the Nazi Party, Zhukov's Russian armies rushed forward from the bridgehead on the Oder and reached the suburbs of Berlin on April 21. Vienna fell on 13 April. At 16.40 on April 25, the forward patrols of the American 69th Infantry Division met with the forward elements of the Russian 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe, about 75 miles south of Berlin. A wedge was driven between North and South Germany, and Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The days of the Third Reich were numbered.

Part 31. The last days of the Third Reich

Hitler planned to leave Berlin and head to Obersalzberg on April 20, the day he turned 56, from there, from the legendary mountain stronghold of Frederick Barbarossa, to lead the last battle of the Third Reich. Most of the ministries have already moved south, transporting government documents and panic-stricken officials in overcrowded trucks, desperate to break out of doomed Berlin. Ten days earlier, Hitler had sent most of the domestic staff to Berchtesgaden to prepare the mountain villa Berghof for his arrival.

However, fate decreed otherwise and he no longer saw his favorite haven in the Alps. The end was approaching much faster than the Fuhrer expected. The Americans and Russians were rapidly advancing towards the meeting point on the Elbe. The British stood at the gates of Hamburg and Bremen, threatening to cut Germany off from occupied Denmark. In Italy, Bologna fell, and the allied forces under the command of Alexander entered the Po valley. Having captured Vienna on April 13, the Russians continued to move up the Danube, and the American 3rd Army marched down the river to meet them. They met in Linz, Hitler's hometown. Nuremberg, in the squares and stadiums of which throughout the war there were demonstrations and rallies, which should have meant the transformation of this ancient city into the capital of Nazism, was now besieged, and parts of the American 7th Army bypassed it and moved on to Munich - the birthplace of the Nazi movement. In Berlin, the thunder of Russian heavy artillery was already heard.

“During the week,” noted in his diary for April 23, Count Schwerin von Krosig, the frivolous Minister of Finance, who fled headlong from Berlin to the north at the first report of the approach of the Bolsheviks, “nothing happened, only Job’s messengers arrived in an endless stream (According to biblical legends, messengers of trouble. - Approx. ed.) Apparently, our people have a terrible fate."

The last time Hitler left his headquarters in Rastenburg was on November 20, as the Russians were approaching, and from then until December 10 he stayed in Berlin, which had hardly been seen since the beginning of the war in the East. He then proceeded to his western headquarters at Ziegenberg near Bad Nauheim to direct the colossal adventure in the Ardennes. After her failure, he returned on January 16 to Berlin, where he remained until the end. From here he led his crumbling armies. His headquarters was located in a bunker located 15 meters below the Imperial Chancellery, whose huge marble halls were left in ruins as a result of Allied air raids.

Physically, he noticeably deteriorated. The young army captain, who first saw the Fuhrer in February, later described his appearance as follows:

"His head was shaking slightly. His left hand hung like a whip, and his hand was shaking. His eyes sparkled with an indescribable feverish brilliance, causing fear and some strange numbness. His face and bags under his eyes gave the impression of complete exhaustion. All movements betrayed him as a decrepit old man ".

Since the attempt on his life on July 20, he has ceased to trust anyone, even his old party comrades. "I'm being lied to from all sides," he indignantly told one of his secretaries in March.

"I can't rely on anyone. I'm betrayed all around. I'm just sick of all this ... If something happens to me, Germany will be left without a leader. I have no successor. Hess is crazy, Goering is unsympathetic to the people, Himmler will be rejected by the party, besides, he is not at all artistic. Break your head and tell me who can be my successor. "

It seemed that at this historical period the question of a successor was purely abstract, but this was not so, and it could not have been otherwise in the crazy country of Nazism. Not only did the Fuhrer suffer from this question, but, as we shall soon see, the leading candidates for his successor.

Although Hitler was already physically a complete ruin and faced with impending disaster, as the Russians advanced towards Berlin and the Allies devastated the Reich, he and his most fanatical minions, Goebbels above all, stubbornly believed that a miracle would save them at the last moment.

One fine evening in early April, Goebbels read aloud to Hitler his favorite book, The History of Frederick II by Carlyle. The chapter recounted the dark days of the Seven Years' War, when the great king felt the approach of death and told his ministers that if there was no turn for the better in his fate before February 15, he would surrender and take poison. This historical episode, of course, evoked associations, and Goebbels, of course, read this passage with a special, inherent drama...

"Our brave king!" Goebbels continued reading. "Wait a little longer, and the days of your suffering will be behind you. The sun of your happy fate has already appeared in the sky and will soon rise over you." Queen Elizabeth died, and a miracle happened for the Brandenburg dynasty."

Goebbels told Krosig, from whose diary we learned about this touching scene, that the Fuhrer's eyes filled with tears. Having received such moral support, and even from an English source, they demanded to bring them two horoscopes, stored in the materials of one of Himmler's numerous "research" departments. One horoscope was compiled for the Fuhrer on January 30, 1933, the day he came to power, the other was compiled by a famous astrologer on November 9, 1918, the birthday of the Weimar Republic. Goebbels later reported to Krosig the result of a re-examination of these amazing documents.

"A striking fact was discovered - both horoscopes predicted the beginning of the war in 1939 and victories until 1941, as well as the subsequent series of defeats, while the heaviest blows were to fall in the first months of 1945, especially in the first half of April. In the second half of April we will have temporary success. Then there will be a lull until August, and then peace will come. During the next three years, Germany will have to go through hard times, but from 1948 it will begin to revive again."

Encouraged by Carlyle and the startling predictions of the stars, Goebbels issued an appeal to the retreating troops on April 6:

"The Fuhrer said that this year there should be a change in fate ... The true essence of a genius is foresight and firm confidence in the upcoming changes. The Fuhrer knows the exact hour of their onset. Fate sent us this person so that we are in the hour of great internal and external upheavals witnessed a miracle...

Barely a week had passed when, on the night of April 12, Goebbels convinced himself that the hour of the miracle had come. On this day, new bad news came. The Americans appeared on the Dessau-Berlin highway, and the high command hastily ordered the destruction of the last two gunpowder factories located nearby. From now on, German soldiers will have to make do with the ammunition they had available. Goebbels spent the whole day at the headquarters of General Busse in Kustrin in the Oder direction. As Goebbels told Krosig, the general assured him that a Russian breakthrough was impossible, that he "would stay here until he received a kick in the ass from the British."

“In the evening they sat together with the general at the headquarters, and he, Goebbels, developed his thesis that, according to historical logic and justice, the course of events should change, as miraculously happened in the Seven Years' War with the Brandenburg dynasty.

"Which queen will die this time?" the general asked. Goebbels did not know. "But fate," he replied, "has many possibilities."

When the Minister of Propaganda returned to Berlin late in the evening, the center of the capital was on fire after another British air raid. The fire engulfed the surviving part of the office building and the Adlon Hotel on Wilhelmstrasse. At the entrance to the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels was greeted by a secretary who told him the urgent news: "Roosevelt is dead." The minister's face lit up in the glow of the fire that engulfed the office building on the opposite side of the Wilhelmstrasse, and everyone saw it. "Bring me the best champagne," exclaimed Goebbels, "and put me in touch with the Fuhrer." Hitler waited out the bombing in an underground bunker. He went to the phone.

“My Fuhrer!” Goebbels exclaimed. “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! The stars predicted that the second half of April would be a turning point for us. Today is Friday, April 13. (It was already past midnight.) This is the turning point!” Reaction Hitler's reaction to this news is not recorded in the documents, although it is not difficult to imagine, given the inspiration that he drew from Carlyle and in horoscopes. Evidence of Goebbels' reaction has survived. According to his secretary, "he fell into ecstasy." His feelings were shared by the well-known Count Schwerin von Krosig. When Goebbels' secretary of state informed him by telephone that Roosevelt had died, Krosig, according to the entry in his diary, exclaimed:

"This is the angel of history! We feel the flutter of his wings around us. Isn't this the gift of fate that we have been waiting for with such impatience?!"

The next morning, Krosig called Goebbels, conveyed his congratulations to him, which he proudly wrote in his diary, and, apparently not considering this sufficient, sent a letter welcoming Roosevelt's death. "God's judgment ... God's gift ..." - so he wrote in a letter. Government ministers like Krosig and Goebbels, educated at the oldest universities in Europe and long in power, seized on the predictions of the stars and rejoiced wildly at the death of the American president, considering it a sure sign that now, at the last minute, the Almighty would save the Third Reich from inevitable disaster. . And in this atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, as the capital engulfed in flames seemed to be, the last act of the tragedy was played out until the moment when the curtain was supposed to fall.

Eva Braun arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on 15 April. Only a very few Germans knew of her existence and few of her relationship with Hitler. She had been his mistress for over twelve years. Now, in April, she has arrived, according to Trevor-Roper, for her wedding and ceremonial death.

The daughter of poor Bavarian burghers, who at first strongly objected to her connection with Hitler, although he was a dictator, she served in the Munich photograph of Heinrich Hoffmann, who introduced her to the Fuhrer. This happened a year or two after the suicide of Geli Raubal, Hitler's niece, for whom, alone in his life, he apparently had a passionate love. Eva Braun was also driven to despair by her lover, though for a different reason than Geli Raubal. Eva Braun, although she was given spacious apartments in Hitler's Alpine villa, did not tolerate long separation from him well and in the first years of their friendship tried to commit suicide twice. But gradually she came to terms with her incomprehensible role - not a wife, not a lover.

Hitler's last major decision

Hitler's birthday, April 20, passed quietly enough, although General Karl Koller, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, who attended the celebration in the bunker, noted it in his diary as a day of new disasters on rapidly collapsing fronts. In the bunker were the Nazis of the old guard - Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop and Bormann, as well as the surviving military leaders - Doenitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs - and the new chief of the general staff of the ground forces. He congratulated the Fuhrer on his birthday.

The Supreme Commander was not, as usual, gloomy, despite the prevailing situation. He still believed, as he had told his generals three days earlier, that on the outskirts of Berlin the Russians would suffer the most brutal defeat they had ever suffered. However, the generals were not so stupid and at a military meeting held after the festive ceremony, they began to persuade Hitler to leave Berlin and move south. "In a day or two," they explained, "the Russians will cut the last withdrawal corridor in this direction." Hitler hesitated. He didn't say yes or no. Obviously, he could not comprehend the terrifying fact that the capital of the Third Reich was about to be captured by the Russians, whose armies, as he assured many years ago, were "completely destroyed." As a concession to the generals, he agreed to form two separate commands in case the Americans and Russians linked up on the Elbe. Then Admiral Doenitz will lead the northern command, and Kesselring the southern one. The Fuhrer was not quite sure of the suitability of the latter's candidacy for this post.

That evening began a mass exodus from Berlin. The two most trusted and trusted associates - Himmler and Goering were among those who left the capital. Goering was leaving with a column of cars and trucks filled to the brim with trophies and property from his fabulously rich Karinhalle estate. Each of these Nazis of the old guard left Berlin in the belief that his beloved Fuhrer would soon be gone and that he would come to replace him.

They did not get to see him again, nor did Ribbentrop, who hurried to safer places that same day, late in the evening.

But Hitler still did not give up. The day after his birth, he ordered SS General Felix Steiner to launch a counterattack on the Russians in the area south of the suburbs of Berlin. It was supposed to throw into battle all the soldiers that could be found in Berlin and its environs, including those from the ground services of the Luftwaffe.

“Each commander who evades the order and does not throw his troops into battle,” Hitler shouted at General Koller, who remained in command of the Air Force, “will pay with his life for five hours. You are personally responsible for ensuring that everything to the last soldiers were thrown into battle.

All that day and most of the next, Hitler waited impatiently for the results of Steiner's counterattack. But no attempt was even made to carry it out, since it existed only in the inflamed brain of a desperate dictator. When the meaning of what was happening finally reached him, a storm broke out.

April 22 marked the last turn on Hitler's path to collapse. From early morning until 3 pm, like the previous day, he sat on the phone and tried to find out at various CPs how Steyier's counterattack was developing. Nobody knew anything. Neither the planes of General Koller, nor the commanders of the ground units were able to detect it, although presumably it was supposed to be applied two to three kilometers south of the capital. Even Steiner, although he existed, could not be found, let alone his army.

A storm erupted at a 3 o'clock afternoon meeting in the bunker An angry Hitler demanded a report on Steiner's actions. But neither Keitel, nor Jodl, nor anyone else had information on this score. The generals had news of a completely different nature. The withdrawal of troops from positions north of Berlin to support Steiner weakened the front there so much that it led to a breakthrough by the Russians, whose tanks crossed the city limits.

For the Supreme Commander, this turned out to be too much. All survivors testify that he has completely lost control of himself. So he never got angry. "This is the end," he shrieked shrilly. This is where I will meet my end."

Those present protested. They said that there was still hope if the Fuhrer retreated to the south. Field Marshal Ferdinand Scherner's army group and Kesselring's significant forces are concentrated in Czechoslovakia. Dönitz, who had traveled to the northwest to take command of the troops, and Himmler, who, as we shall see, were still playing his own game, telephoned the Fuehrer, urging him to leave Berlin. Even Ribbentrop contacted him by phone and said that he was ready to organize a "diplomatic coup" that would save everything. But Hitler no longer believed any of them, not even the “second Bismarck,” as once, in a moment of disposition, he, without thinking, called his foreign minister. He said he had finally made up his mind. And, to show that this decision was irrevocable, he called the secretary and in their presence dictated a statement that was to be read immediately over the radio. It said that the Fuhrer remained in Berlin and would defend it to the end.

Hitler then sent for Goebbels and invited him, his wife and six children, to move into a bunker from his heavily bombed house in the Wilhelmstrasse. He was sure that at least this fanatical follower would stay with him and his family until the end. Then Hitler took care of his papers, selecting those that, in his opinion, should have been destroyed, and handed them over to one of his adjutants, Julius Schaub, who carried them out into the garden and burned them.

Finally, in the evening, he summoned Keitel and Jodl to him and ordered them to move south and take direct command of the remaining troops. Both generals, who were next to Hitler throughout the war, left a rather colorful description of the last parting with the supreme commander. Keitel, who never disobeyed the Führer's orders, even when he ordered the most vile war crimes to be committed, remained silent. In contrast, Jodl, who was less of a lackey, replied. In the eyes of this soldier, who, despite fanatical devotion and faithful service to the Fuhrer, still remained faithful to military traditions, the supreme commander abandoned his troops, shifting responsibility on them at the time of the catastrophe.

"You can't lead from here," said Jodl. "If you don't have a headquarters near you, how can you manage anything at all?"

"Well, then Göring will take over the leadership there," objected Hitler.

One of those present remarked that not a single soldier would fight for the Reichsmarschall, and Hitler interrupted him: "What do you mean by 'fight'? How much is left to fight? Nothing at all." Even the mad conqueror had finally lifted the veil from his eyes.

Or the gods sent him enlightenment for a moment in these last days of his life, similar to a waking nightmare.

The Fuhrer's violent outbursts on 22 April and his decision to remain in Berlin were not without consequences. When Himmler, who was in Hohenlichen, northwest of Berlin, received a telephone report from Hermann Fegelein, his liaison officer from the SS headquarters, he exclaimed in the presence of subordinates: "Everyone has gone crazy in Berlin. What should I do?" Go straight to Berlin," Gottlieb Berger, SS chief of staff, one of his chief aides, replied. Berger was one of those simple-hearted Germans who sincerely believed in National Socialism. He had no idea that his venerable chief Himmler, instigated by Walter Schellenberg, had already established contact with the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte regarding the surrender of the German armies in the West. "I'm going to Berlin," Berger told Himmler, "and your duty is the same."

That same evening Berger, not Himmler, went to Berlin, and his trip is of interest because of the description he left as an eyewitness to Hitler's momentous decision. When Berger arrived in Berlin, Russian shells were already exploding not far from the office. The sight of Hitler, who appeared to be "a broken, broken man," shocked him. Berger dared to express admiration for Hitler's decision to remain in Berlin. According to him, he said to Hitler: "It is impossible to leave the people after they have held on so long and so faithfully." And again these words infuriated the Fuhrer.

“All this time,” Berger later recalled, “the Fuhrer did not say a word. Then he suddenly shouted:“ Everyone deceived me! Nobody told me the truth. The armed forces lied to me." And then louder and louder in the same vein. Then his face turned purple-purple. I thought that at any moment he might have a stroke. "

Berger was also Himmler's head of administration for prisoners of war, and after the Führer calmed down, they discussed the fate of eminent English, French and American prisoners, as well as Germans such as Halder and Schacht, and the former Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg, who were transferred to the south east to prevent their release by the Americans advancing deep into Germany. That night, Berger was to fly to Bavaria and deal with their fate. The interlocutors discussed, in addition, reports of separatist actions in Austria and Bavaria. The idea that a rebellion might break out in his native Austria and in his second homeland - Bavaria, again caused convulsions in Hitler.

“His arm, leg and head were shaking, and, according to Berger, he kept repeating: “Shoot them all! Shoot them all! "

Whether this order meant to shoot all the separatists or all the eminent prisoners, or maybe both, Berger was not clear. And this narrow-minded person, obviously, decided to shoot everyone in a row.

Goering and Himmler's attempts to take power into their own hands

General Koller refrained from attending a meeting with Hitler on 22 April. He was responsible for the Luftwaffe, and, as he notes in his diary, he could not bear to be insulted all day long. His communications officer in the bunker, General Eckard Christian, telephoned him at 6:15 p.m. and said in a broken voice, barely audible: "Historic events are taking place here that are decisive for the outcome of the war." About two hours later, Christian arrived at the headquarters of the Air Force in Wildpark-Werder, located on the outskirts of Berlin, to personally report everything to Koller.

"The Führer is broken!" Christian, a committed Nazi who is married to one of Hitler's secretaries, gasped. It was impossible to make out anything other than the fact that the Fuhrer had decided to meet his end in Berlin and was burning papers. Therefore, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, despite the heavy bombing that the British had just begun, urgently flew to headquarters. He was going to look for Jodl and find out what happened that day in the bunker.

He found Jodl in Krampnitz, located between Berlin and Potsdam, where the high command, having lost the Fuhrer, organized a temporary headquarters. He told his friend from the Air Force the whole sad story from beginning to end. In secret, he also told something that no one had yet told Koller and that should have led to a denouement in the coming terrible days.

"When it comes to negotiations (about peace)," the Fuhrer once said to Keitel and Jodl, "Goering is more suitable than me. Goering does it much better, he knows how to get along with the other side much faster." Now Jodl repeated this to Koller. The Air Force General realized that it was his duty to immediately fly to Goering. It was difficult, and even dangerous, to explain the current situation in a radiogram, given that the enemy was listening to the air. If Göring, whom Hitler officially appointed as his successor a few years ago, is to enter into peace negotiations, as the Fuehrer proposes, then there is not a moment to lose. Jodl agreed with this. At 3:20 am on April 23, Koller took off in a fighter jet, which immediately headed for Munich.

In the afternoon he arrived at Obersalzberg and delivered the news to the Reichsmarschall. Goering, who, to put it mildly, had long looked forward to the day when he would succeed Hitler, nevertheless showed more discretion than one might have expected. He did not want to become a victim of his mortal enemy - Bormann. The precaution, as it turned out, was well justified. He even broke into a sweat, solving the dilemma that confronted him. "If I start to act now," he told his advisers, "they may brand me as a traitor. If I do nothing, they will accuse me of not doing anything in the hour of trial."

Goering sent for Hans Lammers, Secretary of State of the Reich Chancellery, who was in Berchtesgaden, to seek legal advice from him, and also took from his safe a copy of the Führer Decree of June 29, 1941. The decree defined everything clearly. It provided that in the event of Hitler's death, Goering would become his successor. In the event of Hitler's temporary inability to lead the state, Goering acts as his deputy. Everyone agreed that, left to die in Berlin, deprived in his last hours of the opportunity to direct military and state affairs, Hitler is unable to perform these functions, therefore Goering's duty according to the decree is to take power into his own hands.

Nevertheless, the Reichsmarschall compiled the text of the telegram very carefully. He wanted to be firmly convinced that power was really transferred to him.

My Fuehrer!

In view of your decision to remain in Fortress Berlin, do you agree that I immediately take over the overall leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action in the country and abroad, as your deputy in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If there is no reply by 10 p.m. today, I will take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action and that the conditions for the entry into force of your decree have arisen. I will also act in the best interests of our country and our people. You know what feelings I have for you at this difficult hour of my life. I don't have words to express it. May the Almighty protect you and send you here as soon as possible, no matter what.

Loyal to you

Hermann Goering.

That same evening, several hundred miles away, Heinrich Himmler met with Count Bernadotte at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck on the Baltic coast. "Faithful Heinrich", as Hitler often affably addressed him, did not ask for power as a successor. He had already taken her into his own hands.

"The great life of the Fuhrer," he informed the Swedish count, "is drawing to a close. In a day or two, Hitler will die." Himmler then asked Bernadotte to immediately inform General Eisenhower of Germany's readiness to capitulate in the West. In the East, he added, the war would continue until the Western powers themselves opened a front against the Russians. Such was the naivete, or stupidity, or both, of this SS arbiter of destinies, who, at the moment, was seeking dictatorial powers for himself in the Third Reich. When Bernadotte asked Himmler to put his offer to surrender in writing, the letter was hastily drafted. This was done by candlelight, since the British air raids that evening deprived Lübeck of electrical lighting and forced the deliberators to go down to the cellar. Himmler signed the letter.

But both Goering and Himmler acted, as they quickly realized, prematurely. Although Hitler was completely cut off from the outside world, except for limited radio communication with the armies and ministries, since by the evening of April 23 the Russians completed the encirclement of the capital, he still sought to show that he was able to rule Germany by the sheer strength of his authority and suppress any treason, even from especially close followers, for which one word was enough, transmitted over a crackling radio transmitter, the antenna of which was attached to a balloon hanging over his bunker.

Albert Speer and one witness, a very remarkable lady, whose dramatic appearance in the last act in Berlin will soon be outlined, left a description of Hitler's reaction to Goering's telegram. Speer flew into the besieged capital on the night of April 23, landing a tiny plane at the eastern end of the East-West motorway - a wide street that ran through the Tiergarten - at the Brandenburg Gate, a block from the chancellery. Learning that Hitler had decided to stay in Berlin until the end, which was not far off, Speer went to say goodbye to the Führer and confess to him that "the conflict between personal loyalty and public duty," as he called it, was forcing him to sabotage the "scorched earth" tactics. He believed, not without reason, that he would be arrested "for treason" and possibly shot. And it certainly would have happened if the dictator knew that two months ago Speer made an attempt to kill him and everyone else who managed to escape the Stauffenberg bomb. The brilliant architect and minister of armaments, although he always prided himself on his apolitical nature, finally had a belated epiphany. When he realized that his adored Fuhrer intended to destroy the German people through scorched earth decrees, he decided to kill Hitler. His plan was to inject poisonous gas into the ventilation system of a bunker in Berlin at the time of a major military meeting. Since they were now invariably attended not only by generals, but also by Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, Speer hoped to destroy the entire Nazi leadership of the Third Reich, as well as the high military command. He got the right gas and checked the air conditioning system. But then he discovered, as he later said, that the air intake in the garden was protected by a pipe about 4 meters high. This pipe was recently installed on Hitler's personal order to avoid sabotage. Speer realized that it was impossible to supply gas there, since this would be immediately prevented by the SS guards in the garden. Therefore, he abandoned his plan, and Hitler again managed to avoid an assassination attempt.

Now, on the evening of April 23, Speer admitted that he did not obey the order and did not carry out the senseless destruction of objects vital to Germany. To his surprise, Hitler showed neither indignation nor anger. Perhaps the Fuhrer was touched by the sincerity and courage of his young friend - Speer had just turned forty - to whom he had a long attachment and whom he considered a "comrade in art." Hitler, Keitel noted, was strangely calm that evening, as if the decision to die here in the coming days brought peace to his soul. This calm was not so much the calm after the storm as it was the calm before the storm.

Before the conversation ended, he dictated a telegram, prompted by Bormann, accusing Göring of committing "high treason" for which only death could be the penalty, but given his long service to the Nazi Party and state, his life could be spared if he immediately resign from all posts. He was asked to answer in monosyllables - yes or no. However, this was not enough for the toady Bormann ... At his own peril and risk, he sent a radiogram to the SS headquarters in Berchtesgaden, ordering Goering to be immediately arrested for treason. The next day, before dawn, the second most important person in the Third Reich, the most arrogant and richest of the Nazi bosses, the only Reichsmarschall in German history, the commander-in-chief of the Air Force, became a prisoner of the SS.

Three days later, on the evening of April 26, Hitler spoke out against Goering even more harshly than in the presence of Speer.

The last visitors to the bunker

In the meantime, two other interesting visitors had arrived at Hitler's madhouse-like bunker: Hannah Reitsch, a brave test pilot who, among other virtues, had a deep hatred of Göring, and General Ritter von Greim, who was ordered on 24 April. come from Munich to the supreme commander, which he did. True, on the evening of the 26th, when they flew up to Berlin, their plane was shot down over the Tiergarten by Russian anti-aircraft guns and General Greim's leg was crushed.

Hitler came to the operating room, where the doctor was dressing the general's wound.

Hitler: Do you know why I called you?

Greim: No, my Fuhrer.

Hitler: Hermann Goering betrayed me and the fatherland and deserted. He made contact with the enemy behind my back. His actions can only be regarded as cowardice. Against orders, he fled to Berchtesgaden to save himself. From there, he sent me an irreverent radiogram. This was…

"Here," recalls Hannah Reich, who was present at the conversation, "the Fuhrer's face twitched, his breathing became heavy and intermittent."

Hitler: ... Ultimatum! Rough ultimatum! Now there's nothing left. Nothing got past me. There is no such betrayal, such betrayal, which I would not have experienced. They are not faithful to the oath, they do not value honor. And now this too! Nothing left. There is no evil that has not been done to me.

I ordered Goering to be immediately arrested as a traitor to the Reich. Removed him from all posts, expelled him from all organizations. That's why I called you!

After that, he appointed the discouraged general, who was lying on his bed, the new commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. Hitler could announce this appointment over the radio. This would have allowed Greim to avoid injury and be at the headquarters of the Air Force - the only place from where it was still possible to direct what was left of the Air Force.

Three days later, Hitler ordered Greim, who by this time, like Fraulein Reich, expected and wished for death in a bunker next to the Fuhrer, to fly to the place and deal with a new betrayal. And treason among the leaders of the Third Reich, as we have seen, was not limited to the actions of Hermann Goering.

During these three days, Hannah Reitsch had ample opportunities to observe the life of madmen in the underground lunatic asylum and, of course, to participate in it. Since she was emotionally as unstable as the high-ranking owner who sheltered her, her notes are ominous and at the same time melodramatic. And yet, in the main, they are obviously true and even quite complete, since they are confirmed by the testimonies of other eyewitnesses, which makes them an important document in the final chapter of the history of the Reich.

On the night of April 26, after her arrival with General Greim, Russian shells began to fall on the office, and the dull sounds of explosions and crumbling walls from above only exacerbated the tension in the bunker. Hitler took the pilot aside.

My Fuhrer, why are you staying here? she asked. - Why should Germany lose you?! The Fuhrer must live so that Germany can live. This is what the people demand.

No, Hanna, - answered, according to her, the Fuhrer. - If I die, I will die for the honor of our country, because, as a soldier, I must obey my own order - to defend Berlin to the end. My dear girl," he continued, "I didn't expect it to happen like this. I firmly believed that we would be able to defend Berlin on the banks of the Oder ... When all our efforts ended in nothing, I was more horrified than everyone else. Later, when the encirclement of the city began ... I thought that by staying in Berlin, I would set an example for all ground troops and they would come to the rescue of the city ... But, my Hannah, I still hope. General Wenck's army is approaching from the south. He must - and will - drive the Russians far enough to save our people. We will retreat, but we will hold on.

Hitler was in this mood at the beginning of the evening. He still hoped that General Wenck would liberate Berlin. But just a few minutes later, when the Russian shelling of the office intensified, he again fell into despair. He handed Reich the poison capsules, one for herself, the other for Greim.

“Hannah,” he said, “you are one of those who will die with me ... I don’t want even one of us to fall into the hands of the Russians alive, I don’t want them to find our bodies. Eve’s body and my body will be burned. And you choose your path."

Hannah took the poison capsule to Greim, and they decided that if "the end really comes," they would swallow the poison and then, to be sure, pull the pin from the heavy grenade and hold it tightly to themselves.

On the 28th, Hitler seemed to have new hopes, or at least illusions. He radioed Keitel: "I expect the pressure on Berlin to ease. What is Henry's army doing? Where is Wenck? What is happening to the 9th Army? When will Wenck link up with the 9th Army?"

Reich describes how, on that day, the Supreme Commander restlessly paced "around the hideout, waving the road map that was rapidly spreading in his sweaty hands, and discussing with anyone who was willing to listen to him, Wenck's campaign plan."

But Wenck's "campaign," like Steiner's "strike" a week earlier, existed only in the Führer's imagination. Wenk's army was already destroyed, as was the 9th Army. North of Berlin, the army of Heinrich (Himmler - Approx. per.) quickly rolled back to the West to surrender to the Western allies, and not to the Russians.

All day on April 28, the desperate inhabitants of the bunker waited for the results of the counterattacks of these three armies, especially Wenck's army. The Russian wedges were already several blocks away from the chancellery and were slowly approaching it along several streets from the east and north, as well as through the Tiergarten. When no news was received from the troops coming to the aid, Hitler, instigated by Bormann, suspected new perfidy. At 8 pm Bormann sent a radiogram to Doenitz:

"Instead of urging the troops to move forward in the name of our salvation, the responsible persons remain silent. Apparently, betrayal has replaced loyalty. We remain here. The office lies in ruins."

Later that night, Bormann sent another telegram to Doenitz:

"Scherner, Wenck and others must prove their loyalty to the Führer by coming to his aid as soon as possible."

Bormann now spoke in his own name. Hitler decided to die in a day or two, but Bormann wanted to live. He probably could not be Hitler's successor, but he wanted to be able in the future to press the secret springs behind the back of anyone who comes to power.

On the same night, Admiral Foss sent a telegram to Doenitz, informing him that communication with the army was broken, and demanded that he urgently report on the fleet's radio channels about the most important events in the world. Soon some news arrived, not from the Navy, but from the Ministry of Propaganda, from its listening posts. For Adolf Hitler, the news was devastating.

In addition to Bormann, there was another Nazi figure in the bunker who wanted to stay alive. It was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's representative at headquarters, a typical example of a German who came to the fore under Hitler's rule. A former groom, then jockey, completely uneducated, he was the protégé of the notorious Christian Weber, one of Hitler's old party comrades. After 1933, through the machinations of Weber, he amassed a solid fortune and, being obsessed with horses, started a large stable of horses. With the support of Weber, Fegelein managed to rise high in the Third Reich. He became a general of the Waffen-SS troops, and in 1944, shortly after Himmler's appointment as liaison officer at the Fuhrer's headquarters, he further strengthened his position at the top by marrying Eva Braun's sister Gretel. All the surviving SS leaders unanimously note that Fegelein, having agreed with Bormann, did not hesitate to betray his SS chief Himmler to Hitler. This infamous illiterate and ignorant man, such as Fegelein, seemed to have an amazing instinct for self-preservation. He knew how to determine in time whether the ship was sinking or not.

On April 26, he quietly left the bunker. The next evening, Hitler discovered his disappearance. The Fuhrer, already wary, had a suspicion, and he immediately sent a group of SS men to search for the missing person. He was found already in civilian clothes at his home in the Charlottenburg region, which was about to be captured by the Russians. He was taken to the office and there, stripped of the rank of SS Ober-Gruppenführer, was put under arrest. Fegelein's attempt to defect made Hitler suspicious of Himmler. What was the SS chief up to now, having left Berlin? There has been no news since his liaison officer, Fegelein, left his post. Now the news has finally arrived.

April 28, as we have seen, was a difficult day for the inhabitants of the bunker. The Russians were getting closer. The long-awaited news of Wenck's counterattack still did not arrive. In desperation, the besieged inquired over the radio network of the Navy about the situation outside the besieged city.

A radio eavesdropping post at the Propaganda Ministry picked up a report from the BBC radio station in London about events taking place outside of Berlin. On the evening of April 28, the Reuters news agency transmitted such a sensational and incredible message from Stockholm that one of Goebbels' assistants, Heinz Lorenz, rushed headlong through the area riddled with shells into the bunker. He brought several copies of this message to his minister and the Fuehrer.

The news, according to Hannah Reich, "fell like a mortal blow on society. Men and women screamed with rage, fear and despair, their voices merged into one emotional spasm." Hitler had it much stronger than the rest. According to the pilot, "he raged like crazy."

Heinrich Himmler, "faithful Heinrich", also fled from the sinking ship of the Reich. The Reuters report spoke of his secret negotiations with Count Bernadotte and the readiness of the German armies in the West to surrender to Eisenhower.

For Hitler, who never doubted Himmler's absolute loyalty, this was a severe blow. “His face,” Reich recalled, “became crimson red and literally unrecognizable ... After a rather long bout of anger and indignation, Hitler fell into some kind of stupor, and silence reigned in the bunker for a while.” Goering at least asked the Führer for permission to continue his work. And the "faithful" SS chief and Reichsführer treacherously made contact with the enemy, without a word notifying Hitler of this. And Hitler declared to his henchmen, when he came to his senses a little, that this was the meanest act of betrayal that he had ever encountered.

This strike, along with the news received a few minutes later that the Russians were approaching Potsdamerplatz, located just a block away from the bunker, and would probably begin their assault on the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, that is, 30 hours later, meant that the end was coming. This forced Hitler to make the last decisions of his life. Before dawn, he married Eva Braun, then laid out his last will, made his will, sent Greim and Hannah Reitsch to collect the remnants of the Luftwaffe for a massive bombardment of Russian troops approaching the office, and also ordered the two of them to arrest the traitor Himmler.

"After me, there will never be a traitor at the head of the state! - said, according to Hanna, Hitler. - And you must ensure that this does not happen."

Hitler burned with impatience to take revenge on Himmler. In his hands was the liaison officer of the SS chief Fegelein. This former jockey and current SS general was immediately taken from the cell, carefully interrogated for Himmler's treason, accused of complicity and, on the orders of the Fuhrer, was taken to the garden of the office, where he was shot. Fegelein did not help even the fact that he was married to the sister of Eva Braun. And Eve did not lift a finger to save the life of her son-in-law.

On the night of April 29, somewhere between one and three, Hitler married Eva Braun. He fulfilled the desire of his mistress, crowning her with legal bonds as a reward for loyalty to the end.

Hitler's last will and testament

As Hitler wished, both of these documents survived. Like his other documents, they are essential to our narrative. They confirm that the man who ruled Germany with an iron fist for more than twelve years, and most of Europe for four years, learned nothing. Even failures and crushing defeat did not teach him anything.

True, in the last hours of his life, he mentally returned to the days of his reckless youth, which passed in Vienna, to noisy gatherings in Munich pubs, where he cursed the Jews for all the troubles in the world, to far-fetched universal theories and lamentations that fate again deceived Germany , depriving her of victory and conquest. This farewell speech, addressed to the German nation and the whole world, which was supposed to be the final appeal to history, Adolf Hitler compiled from empty phrases calculated for a cheap effect, pulled from Mein Kampf, adding to them his own false fabrications. This speech was a natural epitaph for a tyrant whom absolute power had completely corrupted and destroyed.

The "political testament," as he called it, is divided into two parts. The first is an appeal to descendants, the second is his special attitudes for the future.

“More than thirty years have passed since I, as a volunteer, made my modest contribution to the First World War imposed on the Reich.

Over these three decades, all my thoughts, actions and life have been guided only by love and devotion to my people. They have given me the strength to make the most difficult decisions a mortal has ever made...

It is not true that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was coveted and provoked by those statesmen of other countries who either themselves were of Jewish origin or worked in the name of the interests of the Jews.

I have made too many proposals for the limitation and control of armaments, which posterity will never be able to discount when it is decided whether I am responsible for starting this war. Further, I never wanted a second world war to follow the terrible first world war, be it against England or against America. Centuries will pass, but hatred will always rise from the ruins of our cities and monuments for those who bear full responsibility for this war. The people we have to thank for all this are international Jewry and its collaborators."

Hitler then repeated the lie that, three days before the attack on Poland, he had offered the British government a reasonable solution to the Polish-German problem.

"My proposal was rejected only because the ruling clique in England wanted war, partly for commercial reasons, partly because they succumbed to the propaganda spread by international Jewry."

He placed all responsibility, and not only for the millions who died on the battlefields and in the bombed-out cities, but also for the mass extermination of Jews on his personal order, on the Jews themselves.

This was followed by appeals to all Germans "not to stop fighting." In conclusion, he was forced to admit that National Socialism was done away with for a while, but he immediately assured his compatriots that the sacrifices made by the soldiers and himself would sow seeds that would one day sprout "a truly united nation reborn in the glory of the National Socialist movement" .

The second part of the "political testament" deals with the question of a successor. Although the Third Reich was on fire and shattered by explosions, Hitler could not afford to die without naming a successor and dictating the exact composition of the government that he would have to appoint. But first he tried to eliminate the former successors.

“On the verge of death, I expel the former Reichsmarschall Goering Hermann from the party and deprive him of all the rights that were granted to him by decree of June 20, 1941 ... Instead, I appoint Admiral Doenitz President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

On the verge of death, I expel the former Reichsführer-SS and Minister of the Interior Himmler Heinrich from the party and from all government posts.

The leaders of the army, air force and SS, as he believed, betrayed him, stole the victory from him. Therefore, only the leader of the fleet, who represented a very insignificant force to play a large role in the war of conquest, can become his only successor. This was the last mockery of the army, which bore the brunt of the battles and which suffered the greatest losses in the war. This was also the last reproach of two persons who, along with Goebbels, were his closest henchmen from the first days of the party's existence.

"Not to mention the treachery towards me, Goering and Himmler stained the entire nation with indelible shame by secretly entering into negotiations with the enemy without my knowledge and against my will. They also tried to illegally seize power in the state."

Having expelled the traitors and appointed a successor, Hitler began to instruct Doenitz as to who should enter his new government. All these, according to him, are "worthy people who will carry out the task of continuing the war by all possible means." Goebbels was to become chancellor, and Bormann to take the new post of party minister. Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian quisling and a recent executioner of Holland, was to become foreign minister. The name of Speer, like that of Ribbentrop, was not mentioned in the government. But Count Schwerin von Krosig, who had been finance minister since Papen's appointment in 1932, now retained his post. This man was stupid, but, it must be admitted, he had an amazing talent for self-preservation.

Hitler not only named the composition of the government under his successor, but also gave the last instruction, typical for him, regarding his activities.

"Above all, I demand that the government and the people defend racial laws to the maximum and mercilessly oppose the poisoner of all nations - international Jewry."

And then a parting word - the last written evidence of the life of this mad genius.

"All the efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war are so great that I cannot even admit the thought that they were in vain. Our goal must continue to be the acquisition of territories in the East for the German people."

The last phrase is taken straight from Mein Kampf. Hitler began his life as a politician with the obsession that it was necessary for the chosen German nation to conquer territories in the East. With the same idea, he ended his life. Millions of Germans killed, millions of German houses destroyed by bombs, and even the crushing defeat of the German nation did not convince him that the robbery of the lands of the Slavic peoples in the East, not to mention morality, was a futile Teutonic dream.

Death of Hitler

On April 29, in the afternoon, the bunker received the latest news from the outside world. Fellow in the fascist dictatorship and partner in aggression, Mussolini found his death, which was shared with him by his mistress Clara Petacci.

On April 26, they were caught by Italian partisans. It happened at the moment when they were trying to escape from their refuge in Como to Switzerland. Two days later they were executed. On Saturday evening, April 28, their bodies were transported by truck to Milan and thrown from the body directly into the square. The next day, they were hung by their feet from lampposts. Then the ropes were cut, and for the rest of the day off they lay in the gutter, given to the Italians for reproach. On May 1, Benito Mussolini was buried next to his mistress in Milan's Simitero Maggiore cemetery, on a plot for the poor. Having reached the last degree of degradation, the Duce and fascism have sunk into oblivion.

How detailed the circumstances of such a shameful end to the Duce were reported to Hitler remained unknown. One can only assume that, if he knew about them, it would only hasten his determination not to allow himself or his bride, dead or alive, to become part of the "spectacle put on by the Jews for the entertainment of the Jewish hysterical masses", as he just wrote in his will.

Bormann was not like that. This dark personality still has a lot to do. His own chances of surviving seem to have diminished. The time interval between the death of the Fuhrer and the arrival of the Russians, during which he would have been able to flee to Doenitz, could be quite short. If there were no chances, then Bormann, while the Fuhrer remained alive, could issue orders on his behalf and had time at least to recoup the "traitors". That last night he sent another dispatch to Doenitz:

"Dönitz, every day we have the impression that the divisions in the Berlin theater of operations have been inactive for several days already. All reports that we receive are controlled, delayed or distorted by Keitel ... The Führer orders you to act immediately and mercilessly against any traitors" .

And then, although he knew that Hitler had only a few hours to live, he added a postscript: "The Fuhrer is alive and directing the defense of Berlin."

But it was no longer possible to defend Berlin. The Russians occupied almost the entire city, and the question could only be about the defense of the office. But she was also doomed, as Hitler and Bormann learned about it on April 30 at the last meeting. The Russians approached the eastern outskirts of the Tiergarten and broke into Potsdamerplatz. They were only a block away from the bunker. The hour had come when Hitler had to carry out his decision.

Hitler and Eva Braun, unlike Goebbels, had no problems with children. They wrote farewell letters to relatives and friends and retired to their rooms. Outside, in the aisle, Goebbels, Bormann and several other people were waiting. A few minutes later, a pistol shot rang out. They waited for the second, but silence reigned. After waiting a little, they entered the Fuhrer's room. The body of Adolf Hitler lay prostrate on a couch, bleeding from it. He committed suicide with a shot in the mouth. Eva Braun lay next to him. Both pistols lay on the floor, but Eve didn't use hers. She took poison.

It happened at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Hitler turned 56 and exactly 12 years and 3 months after he became Chancellor of Germany and established the Third Reich. The latter was destined to outlive him by only a week.

The funeral was carried out according to the custom of the Vikings. No speeches were made: the silence was broken only by the explosions of Russian shells in the chancery garden. Hitler's valet Heinz Linge and an attendant at the entrance carried out the Fuhrer's body, wrapped in a dark gray army blanket that hid his mutilated face. Kempka recognized the Fuhrer only by the black trousers and boots sticking out from under the blanket, which the supreme commander usually wore with a dark gray tunic. Bormann carried the body of Eva Braun uncovered into the corridor, where he handed it over to Kempke.

The corpses were transferred to the garden and, during a lull, were placed in one of the funnels, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Those saying goodbye, led by Goebbels and Bormann, took refuge under the canopy of the emergency exit from the bunker and, while the flames rose higher and higher, stood stretched out and raised their right hand in a farewell Nazi salute. The ceremony was short, as the Red Army shells again began to explode in the garden, and all who were still alive took refuge in the bunker, trusting the flames of the fire to completely erase the traces of Adolf Hitler and his wife on earth (Later, the remains could not be found, and this gave rise to rumors after the war that Hitler survived. But the interrogation of several eyewitnesses by British and American intelligence officers leaves no doubt about this. Kempka gave a fairly convincing explanation why the charred remains were not found. "All traces were completely destroyed," he said interrogated - by the incessant fire of the Russians. "- Approx. Aut.).

Goebbels and Bormann still had unresolved tasks in the Third Reich, which had lost its founder and dictator, although these tasks were different.

Too little time passed for the messengers to reach Dönitz with the Führer's will, in which he, Dönitz, was appointed his successor. Now the admiral had to be informed of this by radio. But even at this moment, when power slipped from Bormann's hands, he still hesitated. It was not easy for someone who had tasted power to part with it so quickly. Finally he sent a telegram:

Grand Admiral Doenitz

Instead of the former Reichsmarschall Göring, the Führer appoints you as his successor. Written confirmation has been sent to you. You must immediately take all necessary measures dictated by the current situation.

And not a word about Hitler's death.

The admiral, who was in command of all the armed forces in the north and therefore moved his headquarters to Plön in Schleswig, was struck by this appointment. Unlike the party leaders, he had not the slightest desire to become Hitler's successor. As a sailor, this thought never occurred to him. Two days before, believing that Himmler would be Hitler's successor, he went to the SS chief and assured him of his support. But since it would never have occurred to him equally to disobey the Führer's order, he sent the following reply, believing that Hitler was still alive:

My Fuehrer!

My devotion to you is boundless. I will do everything in my power to come to your aid in Berlin. If, however, fate commands me to lead the Reich as your appointed successor, I will follow this path to the end, striving to be worthy of the unsurpassed heroic struggle of the German people.

Grand Admiral Doenitz

That night, Bormann and Goebbels had a new idea. They decided to try and negotiate with the Russians. The chief of the general staff of the ground forces, General Krebs, who was in the bunker, was at one time a military attache in Moscow and spoke some Russian. Maybe he can get something out of the Bolsheviks. More specifically, Goebbels and Bormann wanted to secure a guarantee of their own immunity, which would allow them to take the posts intended for them according to Hitler's will in the new Doenitz government. In return, they were ready to surrender Berlin.

Shortly after midnight on May 1, General Krebs went to meet with General Chuikov (And not with Marshal Zhukov, as most testimonies say. - Approx. Aut.), the commander of the Soviet troops fighting in Berlin. One of the German officers accompanying him recorded the beginning of their negotiations.

Krebs: Today is the first of May, a big holiday for both our nations 2.

Chuikov: Today we have a big holiday. And how are you - it's hard to say.

The Russian general demanded the unconditional surrender of all those in Hitler's bunker, as well as all the troops remaining in Berlin.

Krebs was delayed. It took him a long time to complete the mission, and when he did not return by 11 am on May 1, an impatient Bormann sent another radiogram to Doenitz:

"The will has entered into force. I will come to you as soon as I can. Until then, I recommend that you refrain from public statements."

This telegram was also ambiguous. Bormann simply could not bring himself to announce that the Fuhrer was dead. He wanted at all costs to be the first to inform Doenitz of this important news and thus enlist the favor of the new supreme commander. But Goebbels, who was preparing to die soon with his wife and children, had no reason to hide the truth from the admiral. At 3:15 p.m., he sent his dispatch to Doenitz, the last radiogram transmitted from the besieged bunker in Berlin.

Grand Admiral Doenitz

Top secret

Yesterday, at 15.30, the Fuhrer died. According to the will of April 29, you are appointed Reich President ... (Then followed the names of the main members of the government.)

By order of the Fuhrer, the will has been sent to you from Berlin ... Bormann intends to go to you today to inform you about the situation. The time and form of the press release and address to the troops is at your discretion. Confirm receipt.

Goebbels.

Goebbels did not see fit to inform the new head of state of his own intentions. He carried them out at the end of the day on May 1. It was decided to first poison the six children with poison. Their game was interrupted and each was given a lethal injection. Obviously, this was done by the same doctor who had poisoned the Fuhrer's dogs the day before. Goebbels then called his adjutant, Hauptsturmführer Gunther Schwegermann, and instructed him to find gasoline. "Schwegerman," he told him, "the greatest betrayal has taken place. All the generals have betrayed the Fuhrer. All is lost. I am dying with my family. (He did not tell the adjutant that he had just killed his children.) Burn our bodies. You can do it ?"

Schwegerman assured him that he could, and sent two orderlies to get gasoline. A few minutes later, at about 8.30 pm, when it was already beginning to get dark, Dr. and Frau Goebbels proceeded through the bunker, saying goodbye to those who were at that moment in the corridor, and climbed the stairs to the garden - here, at their request, the duty officer the SS finished them off with two shots to the back of the head. Four canisters of gasoline were poured over their bodies and set on fire, but the cremation was not completed. Everyone who still remained in the bunker had no time to wait for the dead to burn. They rushed to escape, joining the mass of fleeing people. The very next day, the Russians discovered the charred bodies of the Minister of Propaganda and his wife and immediately identified them.

Around 9 pm on May 1, the Fuhrer's bunker caught fire, and about 500 or 600 people from Hitler's retinue, the survivors, mostly SS men, began to rush around the building of the new chancery that served them as a shelter in search of salvation, "like chickens with their heads cut off," as he later put it. Fuhrer's tailor.

Seeking safety, they decided to move on foot through the subway tunnels from the station under Wilhelmsplatz, opposite the Chancellery, to the Friedrichstraße station in order to cross the river Spree and seep north of it through the Russian positions. Many succeeded, but some, including Martin Bormann, were not so lucky.

When General Krebs finally returned to the bunker demanding General Chuikov's unconditional surrender, Hitler's party secretary had already concluded that his only chance of escape was to merge with the mass of refugees. His group tried to follow the German tank, but, as Kempka, who was also there, later said, he was hit by a direct hit by a Russian anti-tank shell and Bormann was almost certainly killed. There was also the leader of the "Hitler Youth" Axman, who, wanting to save his own skin, abandoned a battalion of teenagers on the Pichelsdorf bridge to the mercy of fate. He later testified that he had seen Bormann's body lying under the bridge, at the point where the Invalidenstrasse crosses the railroad tracks. Moonlight fell on his face, but Axman did not notice any signs of injury. He suggested that Bormann swallowed the poison capsule when he realized that there was no chance of getting through the Russian positions.

Generals Krebs and Burgdorf did not join the mass of fugitives. It is believed that they shot themselves in the basement of the new office.

End of the Third Reich

The Third Reich survived its founder by exactly seven days.

Shortly after 10 p.m. on May 1, as the bodies of Dr. and Frau Goebbels burned to death in the Chancellery garden, and the inhabitants of the bunker crowded in search of salvation at the entrance to the underground tunnel, Hamburg radio interrupted the broadcast of Bruckner's solemn Seventh Symphony. There was a beat of military drums, and the announcer spoke:

"Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30, the Fuhrer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz as his successor. Listen to the appeal to the German people of the Grand Admiral and successor of the Fuhrer."

The Third Reich, having begun its existence with an outright lie, left the stage with a lie. Not to mention the fact that Hitler died not on this day, but the day before, which in itself is not significant, he did not fall at all, "fighting to the last breath." However, spreading these lies over the radio was necessary if his heirs were to perpetuate the legend and also to keep control of the troops, who were still resisting the enemy and who would certainly think that they had been betrayed if they knew the truth.

Dönitz himself repeated this lie at 10.20 pm on the radio and called the Fuhrer's death "heroic". At that moment, he did not yet know how Hitler met his end. From Goebbels' radiogram, he only knew that the Fuhrer had died the night before. But this did not prevent the admiral, resorting to lies, as in other cases, to assert just that. He did everything he could to further confuse the already confused German people in the hour of tragedy.

“My first task,” he said, “is to save Germany from destruction by the advancing enemy, the Bolsheviks. For the sake of this goal alone, the armed struggle will continue. As long as the achievement of this goal is hindered by the British and Americans, we will be forced to continue defensive battles against them. Under the circumstances, however, the Anglo-Americans will wage war not in the interests of their peoples, but solely for the sake of spreading Bolshevism in Europe."

Empty words. Doenitz knew that German resistance was running out. On April 29, the day before Hitler's suicide, the German armies in Italy surrendered unconditionally. This news did not reach Hitler due to communication breakdowns, which probably saved him from unnecessary worries in the last hours of his life.

On May 4, the German high command ordered all German troops in northwest Germany, Denmark and Holland to surrender to Montgomery's troops. The next day, Kesselring's Army Group G, located north of the Alps, surrendered as part of the German 1st and 9th armies.

On the same day, May 5, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg, the new commander-in-chief of the German fleet, arrived in Reims, at the headquarters of General Eisenhower, to negotiate a surrender. The aim of the Germans, as the latest documents of their high command clearly show, was to drag out negotiations for several days, thus gaining time and enabling the maximum number of troops and refugees to escape Russian captivity and surrender to the Western Allies.

The next day, General Jodl also arrived in Reims to help his colleague, the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, drag out negotiations on the terms of surrender. But the tricks of the Germans were in vain. Eisenhower saw through their game.

“I asked General Smith,” he later wrote, “to inform Jodl that if they do not stop looking for excuses and stalling for time, I will immediately close the entire Allied front and stop the flow of refugees through the location of our troops by force. I will not tolerate any further delays” .

At 1.30 am on May 7, Doenitz, having learned from Jodl about Eisenhower's demands, radioed the general from his new headquarters in Flensburg, on the Danish border, that he was given full authority to sign the document of unconditional surrender. The game is over.

At the small red school in Reims, where Eisenhower had set up his headquarters, on May 7, 1945, at 2:41 am, Germany surrendered unconditionally. On behalf of the Allies, the act of surrender was signed by General Walter Bedell Smith, General Ivan Susloparov (as a witness) for Russia, and General Francois Sevez for France. From Germany, it was signed by Admiral Friedeburg and General Jodl (The act of surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany was signed on the night of May 9, 1945 in Berlin (Karlshorst). By agreement between the governments of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain, an agreement was reached to consider the procedure in Reims preliminary. Nevertheless, in Western historiography, the signing of the surrender of the German armed forces, as a rule, is associated with the procedure in Reims, and the signing of the act of surrender in Berlin is called its “ratification.” Unfortunately, all this is done in order to belittle the decisive contribution of the USSR to achieving victory over Victory Day in Europe is celebrated in Western countries on May 8. - Approx. tit. ed.).

On the night of May 9, 1945, gunfire stopped in Europe and bombs stopped exploding. For the first time since September 1, 1939, a long-awaited silence descended on the continent. Over the past 5 years, 8 months and 7 days, millions of men and women have been killed on hundreds of battlefields, in thousands of bombed cities. Millions more died in Nazi gas chambers or were shot at the edge of ditches by special operations teams in Russia and Poland. And all this in the name of Adolf Hitler's irrepressible thirst for conquest. Most of Europe's most ancient cities lay in ruins, and as the spring air warmed, an unbearable stench began to emanate from the rubble from countless unburied corpses.

The streets of Germany will no longer echo with the echo of the forged boots of the attack aircraft marching at a goose step, dressed in brown shirts, the echo of their triumphant cries, the heart-rending cries of the Fuhrer carried by the loudspeakers.

After 12 years, 4 months and 8 days, the era of the dark Middle Ages, which turned into a nightmare for all but the Germans, the peoples of Europe, and now for the Germans as well, is over. The "thousand-year" Reich ceased to exist. He lifted, as we have seen, this great nation and this talented, but, alas, gullible people to heights of power and victories unknown to them before, and suffered such a swift and complete collapse, which has almost no parallel in history.

In 1918, when the Kaiser fled after a final defeat, the monarchy collapsed, but all the traditional institutions that supported the state remained. The government, elected by the people, continued to function, as did the core of the German armed forces and general staff. But in the spring of 1945, the Third Reich really ceased to exist. Not a single German authority remained at any level. Millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors became prisoners in their own land. Millions of citizens down to the villagers were now ruled by the occupying troops, on whom not only the maintenance of law and order depended, but also the provision of food and fuel to the population so that they could survive the coming summer and the harsh winter of 1945. Hitler's madness, and their own, brought them to such a state. After all, they blindly followed him, and sometimes with enthusiasm. And yet, when I returned to Germany that same autumn, I hardly met any Germans who condemned Hitler.

The people remained, and the earth remained. People - stunned, exhausted and hungry, and with the advent of winter - shivering in rags and hiding in the ruins that their houses had become as a result of the bombing. The earth is a vast desert covered with heaps of ruins. The German people were not destroyed, as Hitler wanted, who sought to destroy many other peoples, and when the war was lost, his own. But the Third Reich has gone into oblivion.

Brief epilogue

That same autumn I returned to that once proud country, where I spent most of the short life of the Third Reich. It was difficult to recognize her. I have already talked about this return. Now it remains to tell about the fate of some of the survivors who occupied a significant place on the pages of this book.

The remnants of the Doenitz government established in Flensburg were dissolved by the Allies on May 23, 1945, and all its members were arrested. Heinrich Himmler was removed from the government on May 6, on the eve of the signing of the surrender at Reims. Doenitz hoped that this move would allow him to ingratiate himself with the Allies. The former head of the SS, who for so long controlled the life and death of millions of people in Europe, wandered around Flensburg until May 21, when he decided, together with eleven SS officers, passing through the location of the British and American troops, to get into his native Bavaria. Himmler, for all his pride, decided to shave off his mustache, pull a black patch over his left eye and put on a private uniform. The company was detained on the first day at the English checkpoint between Hamburg and Bremerhaven. During interrogation, Himmler identified himself as a captain in the British army, who sent him to the headquarters of the 2nd Army in Lüneburg. Here he was searched, dressed in an English military uniform in case he could not get poisoned if he hid poison in his clothes. But the search was not thorough. Himmler managed to hide an ampoule of potassium cyanide between his teeth. When a second British intelligence officer arrived from Montgomery's headquarters on May 23 and ordered a military doctor to check the arrestee's mouth, Himmler bit through the ampoule and died twelve minutes later, despite desperate attempts to restore him to life by gastric lavage and the administration of an emetic.

The rest of Hitler's henchmen lived a little longer. I went to Nuremberg to see them again. I saw them more than once in their time of power at the annual congresses of the Nazi Party, held in this city. Now, in the dock before the International Tribunal, they looked completely different. An amazing metamorphosis has taken place. Dressed in rather shabby suits, hunched over and fidgeting nervously on the bench, they did not at all resemble the impudent leaders of the past. They seemed like some colorless bunch of nonentities. It was hard to even imagine that such people until very recently possessed such a monstrous power that allowed them to subjugate a great nation and most of Europe.

There were twenty-one sitting in the dock (Dr. Robert Ley, head of the Labor Front, who was also supposed to sit in the dock, hanged himself in his cell before the trial began. He made a noose from a towel torn into strips and tied it to a sewer pipe - Approx. Aut.) Among them - Goering, who lost eighty pounds in comparison with how I last saw him, dressed in a shabby Luftwaffe uniform without insignia and, obviously satisfied with this, occupied the first place in the dock the place is something like a belated recognition of his primacy in the Nazi hierarchy, when Hitler was no longer alive. Rudolf Hess, once, before the flight to England, man number three, with an exhausted face, deep sunken eyes and a blank look, feigning memory loss, but undoubtedly a broken man; Ribbentrop, who has lost his impudence and pomposity, turned pale, bent over, beaten; Keitel, who has lost his former self-satisfaction; "Party philosopher" Rosenberg is a muddler whom the events have finally brought back to reality. Julius Streicher, an ardent anti-Semite from Nuremberg, was also among the accused. This pornography-loving sadist, whom I once saw pacing the streets of an ancient city, brandishing a whip menacingly, must have lost heart. On the bench sat a bald, decrepit old man who was sweating profusely and, glaring angrily at the judges, convinced himself, as the guard told me, that they were all Jews. Fritz Sauckel, the boss of forced labor in the Third Reich, was also there. Small slit eyes made him look like a pig. He was probably nervous and therefore swayed from side to side. Beside him sat Baldur von Schirach, the first leader of the Hitler Youth, and later Gauleiter of Vienna, more American than German, who looked like a penitent student expelled from college for hooliganism. Walter Funk was also there - a nonentity with roguish eyes, who had replaced Shakht in his time. There was also Dr. Schacht himself, who had spent the last months at the behest of the Führer he once adored in a concentration camp and feared the execution that could happen every day. Now he was indignant that the Allies were about to try him as a war criminal. Franz von Papen, who more than anyone else in Germany was responsible for Hitler's rise to power, was rounded up and was also among the accused. He looked very old, and his face, wrinkled like a baked apple, seemed to have frozen the expression of an old fox who had managed to get out of the trap more than once.

Neurath, Hitler's first foreign minister, of the old school, a man of shallow convictions, not distinguished by scrupulousness, seemed completely broken. Not so was Speer, who gave the impression of being the most outspoken of all. In the course of a lengthy process, he gave honest evidence, without making any attempt to absolve himself of responsibility and guilt. Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian quisling, Jodl and two grand admirals, Raeder and Doenitz, were also in the dock. The Fuhrer's successor in his overalls looked like a shoemaker's apprentice. There was also Kaltenbrunner, the bloody successor of Heydrich the Hangman, who denied any guilt during his testimony, and Hans Frank, the Nazi inquisitor in Poland, who partially admitted his guilt and repented of sin after, according to him, he regained the Lord, whom he prays for forgiveness, and Frick, the same colorless on the verge of death as he has been all his life; and finally, Hans Fritzsche, who made a career as a radio commentator due to the fact that his voice resembled the voice of Goebbels, who took him into the service of the propaganda ministry. None of those present at the trial, including Fritzsche himself, could understand why he, being too small a fry, ended up there, and he was acquitted.

Schacht and Papin were also acquitted. All three were later sentenced by a German denazification court to lengthy prison terms, although they ultimately only spent a week in prison.

Seven defendants were sentenced to prison in Nuremberg: Hess, Raeder and Funk - for life, Speer and Schirach - for 20 years, Neurath - for 15, Doenitz - for 10. The rest were sentenced to death. Ribbentrop ascended the platform of the gallows in a special cell in the Nuremberg prison at 1:11 a.m. on October 16, 1946. He was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl.

But Hermann Goering escaped the gallows. He tricked the executioner. Two hours before his turn, he swallowed a poison capsule that was secretly delivered to his cell. Following his Führer Adolf Hitler and his rival in succession to power Heinrich Himmler, he chose their path at the last hour to leave the land on which he, like them, had left such a bloody trail.

V. DYMARSKY: Hello. I greet the audience of the Ekho Moskvy radio station and the RTVi TV channel. This is another program from the series "The Price of Victory" and I, its host, Vitaly Dymarsky. My partner, partner Dmitry Zakharov left for a while due to the start of summer holidays. Someday it will be our turn to rest, and then we will make others work. Well, today we are making it work ... I wanted to say, our regular guest and author, although we have not seen you for a long time. This is what I say to Elena Syanova, historian and writer. Good evening.

E. SYANOVA: Good evening.

V. DYMARSKY: I say, we haven't seen each other for a long time.

E. SYANOVA: Well, while they fought, a woman, in general, is not very handy.

V. DYMARSKY: Well, today we continue to fight, by the way. And the theme of our program today is the last days of the Third Reich. Naturally, I must also remind you of the number +7 985 970 4545, this is for your SMS messages. And warn that a webcast has already begun on the website of the Ekho Moskvy radio station. Or has it not started yet? No, it hasn't started yet. We are turning it on right in front of everyone's eyes. And now it has definitely begun. And so we can now begin our conversation with Elena Syanova. "The Last Days of the Third Reich" - sounds very good. If someone is waiting for us to talk about the individual fates of the leaders of the Third Reich, about Nazi criminals, then I think that these stories are quite well-known, although sooner or later they must be repeated, and we will also talk about them. But I would be more interested today in a conversation with you, Len, about the fate of the Third Reich as a state, if you like. It is a well-known case that Hitler committed suicide, poisoned himself and poisoned the entire Himmler family ...

E. SYANOVA: Goebbels. Himmler himself.

V.DYMARSKY: Goebbels. All the other Nazi leaders were out of the game in one way or another, so to speak. Someone either ran away, or didn’t run away, someone ended up in the hands ... In general, it’s understandable approximately. Did the Third Reich still exist after that? And if it existed, how long? Because Hitler committed suicide - it was still April.

V. DYMARSKY: By the way, on April 30 the flag was hoisted over the Reichstag.

E. SYANOVA: In principle, this is probably how it would be correct to count. Hitler is gone...

V. DYMARSKY: Yes, and it's all over. But it turns out not?

E. SYANOVA: The spinal cord fell out, that's all.

V.DYMARSKY: But it turns out, no?

E. SYANOVA: Again, how we want to count. Perhaps that would be fair. Still, the Fuhrer leaves, and then all this agony begins. But one can, for example, consider one of the capitulations - well, probably, our capitulation on May 8 in Karlhorst - to be considered final.

V. DYMARSKY: Ours - in the sense, capitulation to us.

E. SYANOVA: I mean the main document signed by the Soviet side.

V. DYMARSKY: Although, this is a well-known thing, there was another capitulation.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, well, we'll talk about it. But actually officially the Third Reich existed. Existed and functioned. There was a question about how long all the political and state institutions of the Third Reich functioned. Until May 23rd. May 23 - the official death of the Third Reich. Therefore, I think that it makes sense, probably, to stay a little bit in the Reich Chancellery, in the bunker, literally there are a few fundamental moments, and then move on to this period, which is somehow not very well known, I guess. Because it is known that the Dönitz government was in Flensburg. What happened there? If you believe the memoirs of Speer, for example, who describes all this very ironically ... well, in general, of course, it is difficult to believe Speer, but still there was some kind of activity there. But in fact, nothing ironic and funny happened there. It was a very stressful time for us. Well, I think that let's start all the same from April 22. This is such a radical, very significant day when Hitler announces to his associates that he remains in Berlin. And the most knowledgeable...

V. DYMARSKY: Were there any offers for him to leave Berlin?

E. SYANOVA: Yes, of course. They will continue to be given to the end.

V. DYMARSKY: And what were the proposals?

E. SYANOVA: Well, firstly, to evacuate, calmly leave to the south, to the so-called. "Alpine fortress", which was actually not a fortress, but they equipped some kind of headquarters. The archives went there, a lot of documentation and officials were evacuated there. It was possible to settle there, it was quite possible to establish some kind of leadership there, they pushed him to this. In general, it would be a reasonable step in terms of continuing some kind of struggle. You know, this has been described several times, this scene, when he is sitting over the map at the afternoon meeting on the 22nd, the operational map, and in his eyes the understanding suddenly appears that the Red Army created the conditions for the encirclement of Berlin. That is, in fact, it has already been done. His famous hysteria. He shouts that I was not informed that way, I was not informed. In fact, he was, of course, informed. And Keitel tried, and Wenck tried to tell him something, but it doesn't matter. It suddenly dawned on him that this was a disaster. Map - everything is visible on it.

V. DYMARSKY: Were there any illusions before that?

E. SYANOVA: Well, here he saw breakthroughs - from the north, from the west, from the east. Here they are, breakthroughs. Now you need to close it, and that's it. Actually, what is left? He makes a fairly sound decision at this meeting, they worked out the only possible, probably, course of action, that is, it was necessary to deploy Wenck's army, which was from the west, against the Americans, turn it back to the Americans and move to Berlin. From the north - Steiner. And from the south was Busse's 9th Army, and Wenck was to link up south of Berlin with Busse's army. This, as Hitler imagined, was a fairly significant force. In fact, of course, someone asked about the army of Wenck - that the army of Wenck, that the army of Busse, these are, of course, some remnants already. There were no tanks... Then, they were burdened with a huge number of refugees. Still, it was the only sound solution. You could try. And Hitler on the 22nd is still in control of the situation after all. He still has the will, they still listen to him. He so convinced everyone of the possibility of implementing this plan, its implementation, that many in the bunker were sure that it had begun, this movement towards Berlin had already begun with a large army. Well, of course, Goering, Bormann, Himmler were better informed. They understood, of course, that if Hitler remained in Berlin, that was the end. Well, both left on the 23rd and 24th. This is a famous story. Himmler sat out somewhere in a sanatorium until May 15, Goering - we'll talk about him a little later, but he also tried to play some kind of independent game. And here was the question here about betrayal, who, in fact, betrayed whom. Now, if we talk about personal betrayal, then yes, Goering and Himmler personally betrayed Hitler, but they did not betray the state, they tried to act, they tried to find some options. So they are by no means state traitors.

V. DYMARSKY: Lena, I'm sorry, I'll interrupt you. Thus, you answer the question of the builder from Tver, he was just asking about the betrayal of Goering and Himmler.

E. SYANOVA: Yes. So, within 5-6 days, many in the bunker were sure that this whole plan was being implemented gradually, after all, a real breakthrough was expected, the connection of the 12th and 9th armies and a breakthrough to Berlin. By the way, it was the 28th when it became known about the negotiations between Himmler and Bernadotte. There was a question there about the son-in-law of Eva Braun, Fegelein - they shot him or he fled. Well, he couldn't run anywhere, it's a known fact - he was shot. But they shot him, by the way, not even entirely because he fled. The fact is that Fegelein, being Himmler's representative at headquarters, made a report to his boss on the situation. We do not know the report, but how this report was handed over to Hitler can be guessed. And Hitler had a big grudge against Fegelein, starting with this phone conversation. Then, when he decided to run away, well, that's all. Because it is not entirely clear what this Fegelein was like, what kind of person he was ... And then there was irritation on his boss. Well, you can't get Himmler, at least shoot the representative. So, on the 29th, another well-known such sacramental scene, when Hitler shouts in hysterics where Wenck is. In fact, there is nothing so fantastic, hysterical here. Indeed, Wenck, in theory, should have somehow already declared himself. Well, in general, yes. By the way, he did it. Wenk is generally an amazing person. This is a talented person, he did the almost impossible. He succeeded in breaking through to Potsdam, an absolutely incredible operation. But she didn't give anything. And on the 28th, Hitler once again realizes that the attempt took place, but it did not give anything. Here's the map again, here's all the breakthroughs again. And before that there was a meeting on the Elbe, and the connection of fronts. All. Basically, everything is finished. From the 28th, probably, Hitler experienced such a real turning point, when he realized that this was a collapse - the collapse of the state, the collapse of an idea, this was his personal collapse. And he made the decision to commit suicide. And endlessly sending him somewhere to Argentina, to Shambhala, of course, is absolutely stupid. The man was just consistent. Let's not deny him this.

V. DYMARSKY: Although it must be repeated once again that he was still persuaded to leave.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, he was persuaded to the last. They persuaded, for example, to try to fly away, it was still possible.

V. DYMARSKY: Where to?

E. SYANOVA: To the south. The main thing is to break through our air blockade. And he didn't believe it. He was very afraid of captivity. He was afraid that he would be shot down, like Greim, wounded, imprisoned somewhere, and then what? So, basically, he didn't have an option. And on the 29th we have a marriage with Eva Braun, on the 30th - suicide. How did he kill himself? Let's confess, finally tell the truth that we do not know and will never know thoroughly, for certain. All examinations do not give ...

V.DYMARSKY: Potassium cyanide…

E. SYANOVA: You know, there's probably a 90% chance - after all, he put a capsule in his mouth and shot himself in the mouth. Probably, there was some kind of closing, and she was crushed simply from the impact. He remembered how Robespierre tried to commit suicide when he shot himself in the mouth, shot through his jaw, then suffered terribly for several days. So he put the capsule down just in case. Well, that's the most likely way. Probably so it was. Even though they don't say anything.

V.DYMARSKY: Was it without witnesses?

E. SYANOVA: The witness was Eva Braun, all the others were outside the door.

V. DYMARSKY: First… We also don’t know who is first and who is second, right?

E. SYANOVA: Again, logically, of course, first she, then he. But nonetheless. Then we have May 1st. This is the sad fate of the Goebbels family. By the way, why Goebbels committed suicide was the question. Briefly. Look here. Goering represented a real force, Goering had contacts with the West, he had trump cards, he had something to defend himself. Borman. Bormann receives official succession power in the party from Hitler. He knew perfectly well that the Fuhrer-principle was so arranged that he would actually become the head of state, the Fourth Reich, he was like the head of the party. Himmler. Well, Himmler had a lot of things at his disposal, this is generally a separate conversation. And, again, some contacts have been established. And this is not fiction, and not the notorious Odessa group, an organization that has existed quite realistically since 1945, an organization that has done a lot of things to transport SS men - mainly, of course, to Latin America. Then, Himmler also had troops, in principle, SS troops. They were in excellent condition. That is, all these people had some kind of cards. And what did Goebbels have? After all, he was the Minister of Propaganda, and all propaganda burst like a soap bubble with the onset of the Red Army. And Goebbels also burst. He understood this very well too. Was he a fanatic? Yes, there was. But he left because he is just like Hitler, in fact... It was a crash.

V. DYMARSKY: Yes. But, on the one hand, still leave on your own, but also drag you along with you.

E. SYANOVA: Well, you know, I have my own version of this. I cannot prove it, because there are only indirect, of course, confirmations. I don't think that Magda herself put the capsules in their mouths or gave them injections. I think it was the doctor of this family who did it.

V. DYMARSKY: All right, but the doctor did it on their instructions, anyway.

E. SYANOVA: This does not diminish this nightmare. It's just that he later blamed it on Magda during interrogations. You understand, the Goebbelses were dead, and he still had to live. In principle, poisoning children is a crime by all standards. He just whitewashed himself, so to speak. There were no witnesses. But this is just my version. In no way am I forcing it on anyone.

V. DYMARSKY: By the way, here is an interesting question: “Did Hitler find out that a red flag was hung over the Reichstag?” So what happened before?

E. SYANOVA: Yes, it's interesting. Don't know. Most probably not.

V. DYMARSKY: When did he commit suicide? In the morning?

E. SYANOVA: Yes, somewhere at night. Oh no, it's the day! Three PM.

V.DYMARSKY: Because the first flag was, judging by what we were told here, at 2:25 pm. Coincidence.

E. SYANOVA: But I don't think he knew, of course. Yes, coincidence.

V. DYMARSKY: And then - these are different districts of Berlin, the chancellery and the Reichstag.

E. SYANOVA: No, I didn't know, I guess. Here we stopped. Well, we have Bormann. Bormann was also sent everywhere ...

V. DYMARSKY: Well, yes, it must be said about Bormann that there were the most persistent rumors that he was in Latin America.

E. SYANOVA: Yes. By the way, I recently read such an interesting document. After Hitler's suicide, they found somewhere in his documents or in some of his papers a photograph of a boy. And there was a version that this is a son. We dealt with this for a very long time. Then they found out that this was Martin Bormann Jr., Hitler's godson. And so it was. Well, about Bormann, of course, there were rumors - the body was not found. There were a lot of testimonies about Bormann. Someone saw him lying in one place, someone in another. And now, apparently, Axman gave the most accurate testimony, since he described the lying Bormann and next to Dr. Stumpfeger. And when these two skeletons were found in the 80s, it turned out that way, they were identified - Bormann and this doctor. Somewhere very, very early in the morning, an hour or two with something on the morning of May 2 - Bormann went to the next world.

V.DYMARSKY: Are you sure about that?

E. SYANOVA: I am sure of it. But I understand that this is such a topic that it will still be possible to compose a lot of things here.

V. DYMARSKY: We have a few minutes left. Let's pedal.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, Bormann managed to inform Dönitz that he was receiving successive legitimate power from Hitler's hands as Reich President. Moreover, he signed this telegram himself, he did not give it to Goebbels. And, of course, he said that he, Bormann, would soon arrive in Flensburg as head of the party. And here begins, probably, this Flensburg story, that is, the functioning of the Dönitz government, which was absolutely officially engaged in the implementation of official activities.

V. DYMARSKY: That is, it controlled what was left of the country.

E. SYANOVA: Well, yes, and not only.

V. DYMARSKY: Not from the country as from the territory, but as from certain state structures.

E. SYANOVA: You know, it was impossible to govern the country, of course. But all the structures functioned simply because the all-clear was not given, they were not turned off, they worked automatically. And Dönitz basically tried to somehow preserve the largest groupings that still existed, military groups. This is Scherner's Army Group Center. Or, in my opinion, she was called "A" in the 45th year. This is Narvik. By the way, Scherner had a million soldiers. This is Narvik, Austria, part of Army Group E, this is the Baltics. Enough such weighty forces were still there. And at the same time, the government tried to establish ties with the allies. Naturally, behind the back of the Soviet Union.

V. DYMARSKY: Two more minutes. To finish with Hitler. Here is this story, around which a lot of things are also twisted - about the burning of his body.

E. SYANOVA: Well, you can imagine it. He was taken out, doused with gasoline, lit it all. But all around there is a terrible shelling - and explosions, and fragments are pouring. He probably didn’t quite, of course, manage to burn out. I don't see any contradictions here. I think it's all described.

V. DYMARSKY: No, no, not a contradiction. Because Stalin really wanted to get the remains, right?

E. SYANOVA: Well, what do we have? We really have this jaw here.

V.DYMARSKY: Does it really exist?

E. SYANOVA: Yes. By the way, no one denies this. And the Americans, by the way, never encroached on her. Another thing is that no one has ever claimed in our country that we have Hitler's skull. We have never stated this. But for some reason, one of the Americans came, did some scrapings. It turned out to be the skull of a woman. Well, we didn’t pretend that it was Hitler’s skull. And the jaw is interesting. You know, I found a very funny remark on the Internet: if we really have his jaw, no one disputes this, but at the same time they say that he is in Argentina, but how did he live without a jaw? Not quite clear.

V.DYMARSKY: Yes, this is to refute this Argentine version. Well, let's go to all the other questions related to this topic, and maybe we can really move away from personalities and generally talk about government structures in a few minutes, after a short break. In the meantime, we will reflect on the questions that we have already been asked. "Why the Reich President and not the Reich Chancellor?" - Ilya from Tula asks. This is after a short break.

NEWS

V. DYMARSKY: Once again I welcome our audience on television and radio, we continue the program "The Price of Victory". My name is Vitaly Dymarsky, and my guest today is Elena Syanova, writer, historian. And we are talking about the last days of the Third Reich. Still, we have not fully completed our program. We wanted to finish before a short break with personalities, but you still wanted to say something about ... Here, in fact, one question came to us - apparently, they are correcting you that you said something wrong in the program, Ivan writes to us from Orenburg, you said that seven children were poisoned. And who is the seventh?

E. SYANOVA: Well, yes, it was one of the little tragedies. It did not say that the child was poisoned. It was just the child of the woman who was doing the laundry. Therefore, there were seven children there. That's all.

V.DYMARSKY: I see. Everything, we have cleared this matter. Of course, the jaw aroused everyone. The jaw is separate from the skull.

E. SYANOVA: This is a dark story. There will be so many more speculations here, they will all look for it, find it, prove it or not prove it. And no matter how many last points you put, there will still be one more last one. Well, it's a timeless story.

V. DYMARSKY: So, Hitler is gone, Goebbels is gone, the second person.

E. SYANOVA: In fact, no one became.

V.DYMARSKY: Well, not right away.

E. SYANOVA: A succession government has appeared. Head of government - Dönitz, Flensburg.

V. DYMARSKY: Which, as we managed to say, began to collect the remains, or rather, not so much to collect, but to at least understand where they are and what they are.

E. SYANOVA: Yes. Here is an interesting moment. He had the list of the government, he had Hitler's will, they left him. Actually, he had all the instructions on how to act in the near future. But Dönitz gradually got a taste, began to show some kind of his own initiatives, me members of the government. But his main task was, of course, to hold on and play for time. Because the main calculation of the Dönitz government is the conflict between the Allies and the Soviet Union. Hitler was counting on this, in fact, only Dönitz and company could count on this. And, of course, there were trump cards. I will repeat these large groups: the north-west of Europe, Norway, Denmark, the Baltic States - all these are large forces that could be trumped up. Well, maybe a little more about Bormann to finish. Actually, after all, they waited for a very long time, but did not wait. And by the way, Himmler visited governments. Yes, Himmler visited on the 20th of some date.

V. DYMARSKY: From far away.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, he stayed until the 15th in his sanatorium somewhere, and then he nevertheless appeared there. But this is probably a little later. So, it is interesting that on the 4th, a representative of the Dönitz government was sent to the Allies with a request for a tactical truce, a purely military truce.

V.DYMARSKY: Some respite.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, so that these large groups in the north can be preserved, restrained, not disarmed. Eisenhower firmly said no, only three parties should be involved in any negotiations. And Montgomery, who did not claim a political role, agreed to this. And this truce came into force at about 8 a.m. on May 5th. Of course, we were very indignant about this. Well, the next two capitulations: on May 7th - this is Reims, the surrender was signed by Jodl. By the way, it was called preliminary, and it was considered that way - as a preliminary surrender. And on May 8th - the main one.

V. DYMARSKY: But our officer, who signed it, in my opinion, paid for it?

E. SYANOVA: No, you mean General Susloparov. Yes, I specifically dealt with this person. He was a witness, he had the status of a witness from the Soviet side. In fact, there certainly was a dramatic story. He sent a request to Moscow, but did not have time to receive precise instructions on how to act, and he acted at his own peril and risk, signing this document. This, of course, is a very strong man, very insightful, very wonderfully feeling the moment, because he acted perfectly, as Stalin later considered. He acted the way he was supposed to act. No separate peace was signed. Let as a witness, but we were declared here. And then this capitulation was called preliminary, and then the main one took place. He didn't pay the price. He was transferred to a teaching job, so to speak. Basic surrender - Karlhorst, 8th, signed by Keitel. That's interesting: what do you think, where did Keitel go after the signing of the surrender in Karlhorst? And the second question: what was Walter Schellenberg doing at that time, what was he doing? Now, if you answer these two questions, it immediately becomes clear what the ambiguous situation was.

V. DYMARSKY: Regarding Schellenberg, I will answer you with a note, a text message sent to us by one of our listeners: "Schellenberg refused the post of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and left as Dönitz's special envoy for negotiations in Sweden."

E. SYANOVA: Well, why did you refuse, why? This is how he wrote it, apparently. Hard to say. We don't know this. He was indeed appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. A somewhat strange appointment to such a post in the SS. Yes, he left for another meeting with Bernadotte, but this time he got a turn from the gate. Because Bernadotte understood perfectly well that now these contacts would lead to nothing. So where did Keitel go after all? When I was at school, I was sure that he was signing, suppose they celebrated something symbolically there, but he must have already been arrested, right? No. Both Keitel and Jodl returned to Flensburg. And starting from the 9th, they return to the head of their government, they hold a series of meetings with him, they decide how to act in this situation, make plans, perform some functions.

V. DYMARSKY: Excuse me, what are the allies doing at this time? I mean both Soviet and American.

E. SYANOVA: The British somehow allowed the creation in this Flensburg of a provincial, quiet, calm, clean town, everything was preserved there, all hung with flags with a swastika, SS posts everywhere, since the SS, great Germany, carried out the establishment of order, all this were SS. Officers, soldiers - all walk around with perfectly polished weapons. That is, the British allowed the creation of such a German enclave in this Flensburg.

V. DYMARSKY: Nobody touched them?

E. SYANOVA: Well, everything for the time being. Here we are talking about some days. Here are the 9th, 10th. In general, until the 11th, the Dönitz government had something else to trump with, something to operate on. But on the 11th...

V. DYMARSKY: And what, excuse me?

E. SYANOVA: With these large groups.

V. DYMARSKY: All right. The surrender has already been signed.

E. SYANOVA: It doesn't matter that it is signed.

V. DYMARSKY: The groups were ordered to stop resisting.

E. SYANOVA: It doesn't matter. They didn't actually have an order. Who gave them the order?

V. DYMARSKY: The same Dönitz.

E. SYANOVA: No. You forget that our tanks only entered Prague on the 9th. Here it is, Army Group "Center" or "A". They fought there for two more days.

V.DYMARSKY: Well, it has its own history.

E. SYANOVA: They have their own history, but no one listened to the order. This millionth army capitulated only on the 11th. It was a very loud surrender. But it was forced, because everyone was smashed. Well, Narvik capitulated. It is less numerous, but also on the 11th. In fact, since the 11th, Dönitz has had nothing. There were some disparate groups. By the way, some SS groups, there is such a version and there is such information, it is not entirely direct, there are such indirect confirmations - they have been wandering around Germany all summer. By the way, there was such a Soviet film. Either in May, or in June, after all the capitulations there, ours stumble upon such a grouping making its way to the west. They all made their way to the allies.

V. DYMARSKY: Are they already some kind of partisans?

E. SYANOVA: Well, probably. Actually, they did not partisan, they just made their way to the west. So, the task of the Dönitz government was to transfer, deliver or save the largest possible German contingent for the Western allies. Do you know how many aircraft were handed over to the Allies during the Dönitz government? 2.5 thousand. 250-something warships. True, we later also made claims, and they were satisfied. But nonetheless. Here is what they actually did.

V.DYMARSKY: But our ships also received, and not only the military, by the way, passenger ships too. The same "Russia" went along the Black Sea.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, then, of course, we had to share. And on the 12th, after the defeat, after the surrender of the main forces, Dönitz addresses the German people on the radio and declares that he, as head of state, will exercise all the powers that were given to him by the Fuhrer, until the moment when the German people elect the revered Fuhrer.

V. DYMARSKY: And exactly the Fuhrer?

E. SYANOVA: Yes, exactly the Fuhrer. This is from his statement. What impudence!

V. DYMARSKY: Maybe the person had no other schemes in his head at all.

E. SYANOVA: No, he understood very well that he had support in the West. After all, Churchill was still active during this period. Churchill, in my opinion, also sends a telegram to Truman on the 12th or 13th that the moment has come when you need to stop reckoning with the Russians. That is, now, he says, the Soviet threat dominates. The Nazi threat has been practically eliminated, now we have the Soviet threat. I'm not talking about the "Unthinkable" plan, this is generally a separate conversation. No fantasy. Everything is declassified, the whole plan hangs on the Internet. The British themselves have already admitted that it was. Well, now it's safe to admit. This plan was put on the table on May 22 to Churchill. Well, briefly. There the military opposed, of course. There was no way to implement it. Then Churchill resigned, and the plan was sent to the archive. But still it is done, still it is done. And the Germans know this. The Germans know that work is underway, that the allies are somehow trying to preserve the remnants of this statehood of theirs. At least for the transitional period. That is, there is still some possibility for the Dönitz government to survive this transitional period and leave with dignity, not to Nuremberg, there still seems to be, there is still hope for this.

V. DYMARSKY: And what happened on May 23? Why do you think this is the last day of the Third Reich?

E. SYANOVA: You know, before May 23 there were a few more interesting moments. Firstly, she arrived in Flensburg, to be fair, the Allied Control Commission, to figure out what was happening there. But until May 17, in my opinion, our representative appeared there, that is, he entered the control commission, all these flags, all these SS posts in Flensburg existed. And, by the way, in my opinion, there was such a question about greetings.

V. DYMARSKY: "Heil" - was it only Hitler who was welcomed?

E. SYANOVA: Yes. So, in Flensburg, SS men from great Germany greeted each other "Heil, Dönitz." It's fixed. So you see, in general, what impudence. I'm just saying this out of outrage. And, by the way, Stalin was also indignant - he called Zhukov and ordered him to figure out what was happening there. And Zhukov proposed to send Major General Trusov as a representative, so that he would enter this control commission and finally dot the i's. Trusov showed up there, he was very tough. He was given authority, he was instructed to act no matter what. He even managed to get a meeting with Dönitz, although the allies, of course, prevented this with all their might. This conversation took place in the presence of the British and Americans, and Trusov was quite tough. By the way, Dönitz told him at that moment that he had Himmler here with proposals, and he, Dönitz, sent him, roughly speaking, sent him, and he departed in an unknown direction. Well, we know where he went - to Montgomery's headquarters. By the way, in my opinion, the 23rd is the last day of Himmler's life. It’s also a fairly well-known story, it’s not worth repeating it, how he was arrested, how at the last moment, fearing the shame of captivity, he bit through this capsule. At least, Himmler's corpse with this red spot in the middle of his forehead, with a hemorrhage from the action of potassium cyanide, bypassed the press. So death is fixed. Nobody ever sent Himmler by any rat trails to any Latin America. So, the will of Stalin, in general, worked here. And from the 21st to the 23rd, active work begins to prepare for the arrest of the Dönitz government. On the 23rd this arrest finally took place in the presence of our representatives. Therefore, no worthy ...

V.DYMARSKY: Were the allies arrested?

E. SYANOVA: Yes, the British, the Americans and our representatives arrested. That is, the outcome, at least ...

V. DYMARSKY: And after that, power in the country passed to the occupation administrations in the respective zones - in the British, American and Soviet?

E. SYANOVA: On the 23rd, this shutdown of the former state structures is officially taking place.

V. DYMARSKY: The switch was turned off.

E. SYANOVA: The switch is turned off, yes. This does not mean at all that they all ceased to function at once at their own peril and risk.

V. DYMARSKY: No, but how? Here are even utilities in cities ...

E. SYANOVA: The administration used to fix things there.

V. DYMARSKY: Did the local administrations continue to operate?

E. SYANOVA: Of course, yes.

V. DYMARSKY: There was no central government and no central apparatus.

E. SYANOVA: There was none. This is where the whole program of occupation comes into play, and the division into zones comes into force, begins to operate. By the way, it is interesting that all the time they tried to somehow set the local population on the Red Army, on some of our representatives. And Dönitz was very raging about when he was informed that the metro was already operating in Berlin, cinemas were operating in Berlin, the Soviet administration was establishing a peaceful life there, but he really hoped that ... in general, they were counting, of course, on resistance, on more resistance from the Germans, from the civilian population. Well, there was a calculation for the partisan movement, but they did not have time to really organize it. But you know, I would not say that there was no resistance at all. There were pockets of resistance, there was sabotage, there were explosions at enterprises.

V. DYMARSKY: By the way, Evgeny writes to us. Well, all this is impossible to verify, these messages. “On a peninsula in the Baltic, three SS divisions were destroyed only by October 1945.”

E. SYANOVA: Yes, it is quite possible. Surely it was.

V. DYMARSKY: In Western Ukraine, the story is somewhat different. There were no Germans there, of course, but there were also battles, skirmishes.

E. SYANOVA: Yes, but it must be said that on the 23rd, not only the Dönitz government went under arrest, but such a systematic, roughly speaking, capture of this entire Nazi company began. Goering was arrested, arrested ...

V. DYMARSKY: Here Peter asks: What kind of operation was in Switzerland "Sunrise"? Have you heard?

E. SYANOVA: If he clarifies what he means...

V. DYMARSKY: Peter, please clarify. And what kind of people in masks were allegedly taken away by German submariners? This means an expedition to Antarctica, or what?

E. SYANOVA: No. You know, you understand, there are not even versions, but such plans as, for example, the Unthinkable or the Calypso plan, announced by the British, which for some reason was also considered some versions for a long time. This is when it was necessary to create an intermediate German military organization under the command of the aged Bush in order to somehow involve the Germans in this process. You see, these are not versions, these are facts. But when it starts about people in masks, about Shambhala and about Antarctica… As a writer, I am actively working with this material, it is very interesting. Do you know what's the matter? In fact, these projects really existed. If you look at the documents of Ananerbe, there were so many amazingly interesting projects there, but this does not mean that they were implemented. Most of them simply, roughly speaking, were not given any funding, they remained in the papers. But to dream up how they could be realized, how they could be launched, we love this.

V.DYMARSKY: Alas, we have to finish. Here the question is why Schellenberg was not tried in Nuremberg. By the way, he was tried in Nuremberg. He got 4 years, as far as I remember. And he was buried in Switzerland. Coco Chanel buried him.

E. SYANOVA: Yes. But Schellenberg left an extremely false memoir.

V.DYMARSKY: Well, you know, few people have true memoirs.

E. SYANOVA: He continued to cover his tracks even after his death.

V. DYMARSKY: It was Elena Syanova. This concludes this part of the program. Another - a portrait of Tikhon Dzyadko. And we'll see you in a week.

PORTRAIT

In the well-known photograph of the first five marshals of the Soviet Union, Alexander Yegorov is the first on the right, Tukhachevsky and Voroshilov are sitting with him, next to him are Budyonny and Blucher. Yegorov did not live long after this picture was taken. His fate is a clear indicator of how the Soviet machine swept away even the people it needed so much, real professionals. And Yegorov, without a doubt, was exactly that. A career officer, he became a colonel even before the revolution. With the advent of the new government, he immediately joined the Red Army. Hero of the Civil War. As you know, these indicators were not the main ones for Stalin. He valued personal devotion and political reliability above military leadership talents, believing that the correct policy of the country's leadership compensates for the lack of bright military leadership talents among disciplined red military leaders. Speaking in January 1938, he made this very clear, and later confirmation appeared in the form of specific destinies. Marshal Alexander Yegorov, not only his career, but also his life, was worth a country trip and lunch in Sosny. The denunciation of him was written by the chief personnel officer of the Red Army - Yefim Shchadenko. A denunciation that Yegorov is not satisfied with how his merits during the years of the Civil War are covered. Retribution followed fairly quickly, although not as instantly as in some other cases. Yegorov was accused of having groundlessly dissatisfied with his position in the Red Army and knowing something about the conspiratorial groups existing in the army, he decided to organize his own anti-party group. In March 1938, he was arrested. Four months later, Yezhov submitted to Stalin for approval a list of persons to be shot, which included 139 names. Stalin crossed out the name of Yegorov from the list, but he was shot anyway - on the day of the Red Army, February 23, 1939.

We all celebrate Victory Day on May 9, but most of us absolutely do not think about this date, established by the decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 8:

It turned out like this because of the difference between Moscow and Central European time, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Already at the end of April, the days of the Reich were numbered, the Soviet troops were taking Berlin, and everyone who had something in their heads other than fanaticism was only thinking about how it would be more profitable to surrender. In principle, you can choose almost any date for the beginning of the end of the fascist empire, but April 28, 1945 is the best for this.

On this day, the Italian partisans shot Mussolini, and Himmler:
"I established contact with the head of the Swedish Red Cross Society, Count Folke Bernadotte, for negotiations with the Western powers on a separate peace. Himmler informed Count Bernadotte that the Fuhrer was blocked in Berlin and, moreover, was suffering from brain disorders." (c)

British news agency Reiter reported. At that time, Hitler’s head was really so-so, he could not get to Heinrich Himmler and shot his representative at headquarters, his brother-in-law SS Gruppenfuehrer Hermann Fegelein.

Fegelein was in love with Eva Braun, although he was married to her younger sister, on the night of April 28, he offered her to escape from besieged Berlin together, but she refused. The next day, Fegelein was arrested in his apartment and, unfortunately, some “red-haired woman” turned out to be in it, Eva Braun found out about this and immediately informed Hitler about the nightly conversation. Fegelein was shot in the garden of the Imperial Chancellery. A few days later, his legal wife, Gretel Brown, gave birth to a girl, who, ironically, was named Eve.

This "insanely romantic story" would not have been of great historical value if it had not resulted in the deprivation of Himmler of all powers and the "political testament" signed by Hitler on April 29 at four o'clock in the morning. Hitler appointed Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels as his successor as Chancellor of Germany.

On May 1, Goebbels decided to enter into negotiations with the Soviet troops, who were already 200 meters from him, and offered them ... a truce. The USSR demanded not a "truce", but "complete unconditional surrender". Goebbels refused this and committed suicide, taking his wife and six children into the next world. At 18.00, the Soviet troops continued the assault, and on May 2, "unconditional surrender" was received, it was signed at 6 o'clock in the morning by General of Artillery Weidling, who surrendered.

At the same time, starting from April 30, Karl Dönitz, commander-in-chief of the navy, became the actual leader of the Reich. On May 2, Dönitz published an Appeal to the German People:

German men and women, soldiers of the German Wehrmacht! Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler is dead. The German people bow in the deepest sorrow and reverence. He recognized in advance the terrible danger of Bolshevism and devoted his life to this struggle. At the end of this struggle and his unshakable direct life path stands his heroic death in the capital of the German Empire. His life was the only service for Germany. Moreover, his participation in the struggle against the Bolshevik storm tide concerned Europe and the entire cultural world.
The Fuhrer has designated me as his successor. Responsibly, I accept the leadership of the German people in this fateful hour. My first assignment is to save the Germans from annihilation by the advancing Bolshevik enemy. The armed struggle will continue only for this purpose. If and for as long as the achievement of this goal is hindered by the British and Americans, we will have to continue to defend and fight against them as well. The Anglo-Americans in this case continue the war no longer for their own peoples, but only for the spread of Bolshevism in Europe.
What the German people, fighting, did in the battles of this war and endured in their homeland, has no analogues in history. In times of the coming calamity of our people, I will strive to create acceptable living conditions for our brave women, men and children, as far as it is in my power.
For all this I need your help! Give me your trust, because your path is also my path! Maintain order and discipline in the city and the countryside! Let everyone do their duty in their place! Only in this way will we alleviate the suffering that the coming years will bring to each of us, and we can prevent the crash. If we do what is in our power, the Lord God will also not leave us after such great grief and sacrifice.
Grand Admiral Dönitz.
Berlin, 1945.
Fuhrer headquarters
("The Kiel Gazette", Wednesday, May 2, 1945)

Himmler tried to enter the Dönitz government, but was sent away and for a long time, after which he fled to Denmark, where he surrendered and poisoned himself.

On May 4, Admiral of the Fleet Hans-Georg Friedeburg, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, signed the act of surrender of all German armed forces in Holland, Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and North-West Germany to Field Marshal B. Montgomery's 21st Army Group.

On May 5, Infantry General F. Schultz, who commanded Army Group G, operating in Bavaria and Western Austria, surrendered to the American General D. Devers.

Dönitz's representative, Alfred Jodel, signed on May 7 in Reims the "Act of Surrender of Germany", and on May 8, at the request of the USSR, his representative, Field Marshal Keitel, re-signed the "Act of Unconditional Surrender". Both documents came into force at 23:01 CET on May 8, 1945. This is 1.01 May 9, 1945 in Moscow. That is why we celebrate Victory Day on May 9th.

The fate of all the surviving participants in these events turned out differently: Jodel and Keitel were hanged by the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Dönitz served 10 years and died a natural death at the age of 89.

With the signing of the acts of surrender, the war on the Eastern Front ended on paper, but even after that, some parts of the Wehrmacht and the SS continued to resist. I will cover this in more detail in the next post.