Göring's telegram

On 23 April 1945, with Soviet troops already fighting in the outskirts of Berlin, a telegram from Bavaria reached the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. In it Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, for years Adolf Hitler’s formal successor, asked whether, in view of the leader’s decision to remain in the besieged capital, he should take over “the total leadership of the Reich”. If he received no reply by 10 p.m., he would assume that Hitler had lost his freedom of action and would himself begin to act as his deputy.

The telegram was worded cautiously and loyally, but in the atmosphere of the bunker it sounded like an ultimatum. Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, Göring’s rival of many years, presented it as an attempted coup. That same evening Hitler accused the Reich Marshal of treason and demanded that he resign all his offices, and SS men on the Obersalzberg placed him under house arrest. On the same day the Armaments Minister Albert Speer flew into the bunker for the last time, and three days later Hitler appointed a new commander of the Luftwaffe in Göring’s place – General Robert von Greim, who reached Berlin wounded, in an aircraft piloted by Hanna Reitsch.

The successor of 1941

Göring’s position as the “second man” of the Third Reich had a legal basis. On 1 September 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag on the day of the attack on Poland, Hitler announced that if anything happened to him, Göring would be his successor. Two decrees of 29 June 1941, issued a week after the attack on the Soviet Union, confirmed this in writing. The first named Göring as successor in the event of Hitler’s death. The second provided that if Hitler were “prevented”, even temporarily, from carrying out his duties and unable to issue other instructions, Göring would deputise for him “in all his offices”. Both documents were kept in sealed envelopes.

From then on Göring’s importance steadily declined. The Luftwaffe failed to win the Battle of Britain, failed to supply the army encircled at Stalingrad from the air, and failed to protect German cities from bombing. Hitler blamed the Reich Marshal ever more openly, and Göring was successfully outdone in the competition for access to the leader by Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Speer and above all Bormann, who as head of the Party Chancellery and Hitler’s personal secretary controlled access to him. Göring, dependent on painkillers, spent more and more time at his estate of Carinhall near Berlin, occupying himself with works of art looted across Europe. Formally, however, he was still Reich Marshal, commander of the Luftwaffe and the designated successor.

Leaving Berlin

On 20 April 1945 Göring came to Berlin for Hitler’s last birthday. He had already ordered Carinhall to be blown up and had sent his art collections south by train. After the official reception and the situation conference he took his leave of Hitler, explaining that urgent tasks awaited him in southern Germany, and that same evening left the city for Berchtesgaden. Himmler and many other dignitaries left the capital the same day. It seemed that Hitler too would move his headquarters south, to the so-called Alpine redoubt.

That did not happen. The Red Army, which had launched the Berlin offensive on 16 April, broke through the front on the Oder and the Neisse within a few days and on 21 April reached the outskirts of Berlin. At the conference of 22 April, on learning that the attack he had ordered by Felix Steiner’s SS group had not begun, Hitler broke down. According to witnesses, he shouted that everyone had betrayed him, that the war was lost and that he would stay in Berlin and die. Asked about further orders, he is said to have replied that Göring could issue them, and when someone remarked that no soldier would fight for the Reich Marshal, to have retorted that it was no longer a question of fighting, and that if it came to negotiations, Göring would do it better than he could.

The telegram from the Obersalzberg

Hitler’s words reached Göring by a roundabout route. That same night the Luftwaffe liaison officer, General Eckhard Christian, and then the chief of the Wehrmacht operations staff at the OKW, General Alfred Jodl, reported them to the Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, General Karl Koller. On 23 April Koller flew to the Obersalzberg and told the Reich Marshal everything. Göring hesitated. He feared that if he did nothing he would be accused of inaction, and if he acted, of treason. He summoned the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, who confirmed that the 1941 decree was in force and had not been revoked. Göring suspected that Bormann, who had remained in Berlin, might prove to be his only real opponent.

The text of the telegram was drafted jointly. Göring wrote that, following Hitler’s decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, he was asking whether the leader agreed that he, in accordance with the decree of 29 June 1941, should immediately take over, as his deputy, the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad. If he received no reply by 10 p.m., he would take it that Hitler had been deprived of his freedom of action, would consider the conditions of the decree fulfilled and would act “for the good of the nation and the fatherland”. He ended by assuring Hitler of his feelings, “which cannot be expressed in words”. Accounts of when it was sent differ: according to some sources the first radio message went out during the night, while according to most studies the telegram reached the bunker in the afternoon or evening of 23 April. Strictly speaking, then, Göring was not asking to be recognised as successor – he had been that since 1941 – but asking whether he should now assume the deputyship provided for in the decree.

At the same time Göring sent a telegram to the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, announcing that if he received no other instructions by midnight he would take over the leadership, and summoning the minister to join him. It was these telegrams that Bormann used as proof that the Reich Marshal was preparing a coup.

Hitler’s rage

According to the accounts of people in the bunker, Hitler received the first telegram with apathy. Bormann insisted that it was an ultimatum and treason, and when the message to Ribbentrop arrived, Hitler flew into a rage. Speer, who was in the bunker at the time, described in his memoirs how the leader shouted that he had long known Göring was lazy, corrupt and a morphine addict – and then suddenly calmed down and said that Göring might as well negotiate the surrender, since it no longer made any difference.

The reply, drafted with Bormann’s involvement, stated that Göring’s conduct was high treason, punishable by death, but that in view of his past services Hitler would waive the penalty if the Reich Marshal resigned all his offices, officially on grounds of ill health. Göring agreed at once. On his own initiative, however, Bormann instructed the commander of the SS detachment on the Obersalzberg to arrest the Reich Marshal. On the evening of 23 April SS men placed Göring, his family and his entourage under house arrest. A few days later German radio announced that the Reich Marshal had stepped down because of serious heart disease.

On 25 April British bombers attacked the Obersalzberg, destroying among other things the Berghof, Göring’s house and the SS barracks. The Reich Marshal survived the raid in a shelter, and his guards then took him to Mauterndorf castle in Austria, which belonged to him. In his political testament, drawn up on 29 April, Hitler formally expelled Göring from the Nazi Party and stripped him of all rights deriving from the 1941 decree and from the speech of 1 September 1939. As his successor, as Reich President and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, he named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. The expulsion from the party thus came only in the testament, not on 23 April – on that day Hitler stripped Göring of his offices and had him detained. According to accounts, Bormann ordered the SS men to shoot the Reich Marshal after the fall of Berlin, but the order was not carried out. Freed by Luftwaffe soldiers, Göring gave himself up to Americans of the 36th Infantry Division at the beginning of May 1945.

Speer’s last visit

A witness to these scenes was Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and from 1942 Minister of Armaments and Munitions, who in recent years had directed the German war economy, which relied to an enormous extent on forced labour. On 23 April he flew from Hamburg, via the airfield at Rechlin, into Berlin as it was being encircled, covering the last stretch in a light aircraft that landed on a broad avenue in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate. He spent several hours in the bunker, talked to Hitler, Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels, and flew out in the early hours of 24 April.

The background to this visit was the so-called Nero Decree of 19 March 1945. In it Hitler ordered that all industrial, transport, supply and power installations that might be of use to the enemy be destroyed before the enemy arrived. Speer, convinced that Germany would need this infrastructure after losing the war, opposed it and on 30 March obtained a partial relaxation from Hitler: industrial plants were only to be put out of action, and the execution of the order passed into his hands. In practice he and the Gauleiters, industrialists and officers who worked with him sabotaged the destruction in many places. A day later, on 31 March, Dwight Eisenhower issued an appeal to the Germans, calling on them to cease resistance.

According to Speer’s memoirs, published in 1969, during their last conversation he confessed to Hitler that for the past few weeks he had not been carrying out his destruction orders, and Hitler, to his astonishment, took this without anger and was moved. This scene, repeated in many chronicles of the war, was accepted as fact for decades. Historians, however, treat it with great caution. No other witness confirms it, and Speer’s biographer Magnus Brechtken argues that the motif of the confession in the bunker was first invented in 1952 by a French journalist and that Speer adopted it for his memoirs. Brechtken, like Gitta Sereny before him, has shown how after the war the minister built up the legend of an “apolitical technocrat” who knew nothing of the crimes. What is certain is that Speer appeared in the bunker on 23 April and that this was his last contact with Hitler. The next day he also met Himmler, and then joined Dönitz in Schleswig-Holstein.

A new commander for the Luftwaffe

Göring’s removal left the air force without a commander-in-chief. On 24 April Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, passed on an order summoning to the bunker Colonel General Robert Ritter von Greim, commander of Luftflotte 6, who was in the Munich area. Greim, a fighter ace of the First World War who had known Hitler since 1920, when during the Kapp Putsch he had flown him to Berlin, took with him Hanna Reitsch – the celebrated test pilot, one of the few women awarded the Iron Cross First Class, and a fanatical devotee of the leader.

On 25 April the two of them flew from Bavaria to Rechlin, and on 26 April, in a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter – Reitsch curled up in the fuselage behind the cockpit – to Gatow airfield on the western edge of Berlin, escorted by a dozen or so fighters. From there they went on in a Fieseler Storch liaison aircraft. Over the Grunewald they were hit by Soviet anti-aircraft fire; Greim was seriously wounded in the right foot. Reitsch took over the controls and landed on the makeshift strip on the avenue in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate, from where the two of them made their way to the bunker.

Hitler appointed Greim Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and promoted him from Colonel General to Field Marshal. Contrary to a frequently encountered description, Greim was not a field marshal when he was summoned – he received the rank only in the bunker, the last officer in the history of the German armed forces to do so. He commanded an air force that had practically ceased to exist: there was no fuel, there were no airfields and no aircraft. During the night of 28/29 April, after news of Himmler’s negotiations, Hitler ordered him to leave Berlin, arrest the traitor and throw the remnants of the Luftwaffe into support of the armies marching to relieve the capital. Reitsch flew the wounded field marshal out from the same makeshift strip in an Arado Ar 96. On 8 May Greim was taken prisoner by the Americans in Austria, and on 24 May 1945 he committed suicide in prison in Salzburg.

Significance

Göring’s telegram was the first in a series of events in which the supreme leadership of the Third Reich fell apart in the last days of April 1945. During the night of 23/24 April Himmler, behind Hitler’s back, passed an offer of surrender to the Western Allies through the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte. Hitler, shut up in the bunker and surrounded by the Red Army, considered himself betrayed by his closest associates – the very men who for twelve years had built and exercised his power. In his testament of 29 April he expelled both of them, Göring and Himmler, from the party. None of the old paladins became his successor; power passed into the hands of Dönitz and Goebbels.

The episode also shows how the Nazi state worked right up to the end. The fate of the second man in the state was decided not by any procedure but by the dictator’s mood and the intrigues of his entourage. Bormann, who controlled access to Hitler, within a few hours stripped of power the man who was formally to succeed the leader. The succession decrees, issued at the height of the Reich’s power, proved worthless.

Göring himself survived the war and, as the highest-ranking of the captured leaders, appeared before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL). Contrary to his expectations, he was treated there as the principal defendant rather than as a partner for talks. Sentenced to death, he committed suicide on the eve of his execution, 15 October 1946. Speer received 20 years’ imprisonment at Nuremberg, largely thanks to his pose as a repentant technocrat, which historians challenged only years later. Greim and Reitsch got out of Berlin a few days before it surrendered.