Hitler leaves the Wolf's Lair

On the afternoon of Monday 20 November 1944 Adolf Hitler boarded his special train, standing in a siding in the forest at Görlitz – today Gierłoż – a few kilometres east of Rastenburg, today’s Kętrzyn. He was leaving the Wolf’s Lair – the headquarters from which for almost three and a half years he had directed the war in the east. According to his biographer Ian Kershaw, the train left at 3.15 p.m. and reached Berlin early on the morning of 21 November. Hitler never returned to East Prussia.

In some chronologies the name of the town appears as “Rastenberg”; the correct form was Rastenburg, and the headquarters itself lay not in the town but in the forest at Görlitz. It is also often added that in Berlin Hitler “soon” settled into the Führerbunker. That is a simplification: in November he went to the capital chiefly for a throat operation, in December he moved to a headquarters in western Germany from which he directed the Ardennes offensive, and he took up residence in the shelter beneath the Reich Chancellery only from mid-January 1945.

More than eight hundred days in the forest

Hitler arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on 24 June 1941, two days after the attack on the USSR. The headquarters, built by the Todt Organisation under the cover of an “Askania” chemical works, was meant to serve for a few weeks – as long as the campaign against the Soviet Union was planned to last. It became the headquarters Hitler used longest during the war: in all he spent more than eight hundred days there. The breaks were few – in the summer and autumn of 1942 and at the turn of winter and spring 1943 he stayed at the Werwolf headquarters near Vinnytsia, and from February to mid-July 1944 at the Berghof in the Alps, while new, massive reinforced-concrete bunkers were being built at Görlitz. About 20 kilometres away, at Mauerwald (Mamerki), was the headquarters of the Army High Command (OKH).

It was here that Hitler received his allies, including Benito Mussolini on several occasions, and here on 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a bomb during a staff conference. The 20 July plot failed, but Hitler emerged from it with perforated eardrums, burns and splinters in his legs. From then on his health and his trust in his generals deteriorated markedly.

The front at the gates of East Prussia

In the autumn of 1944 the war reached the borders of the Reich. After the destruction of Army Group Centre in the summer, the Red Army stood on the Niemen and on the border of East Prussia, and on 16 October the 3rd Belorussian Front launched the Gumbinnen–Goldap operation – the first attack on East Prussia. Soviet troops drove several dozen kilometres into the province, took Goldap and approached Gumbinnen. At Nemmersdorf Soviet soldiers murdered German civilians, and Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda used the crime to mobilise the population. The Germans halted the attack and retook Goldap on 5 November, but the Wolf’s Lair was now less than a hundred kilometres from the front. In the province the Volkssturm began to be called up, anti-tank ditches were dug and fortifications built.

According to accounts from Hitler’s entourage, his advisers, led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, had been urging him for weeks to leave. Hitler hesitated. Leaving East Prussia might be read as a signal that the province was doomed, and he himself declared that his presence sustained the resistance of the soldiers and the population. Building work on the new bunkers was still going on in the autumn, as if the headquarters was to remain in use. In the end two things decided the matter: Hitler’s health and the planned offensive in the west, which he wanted to direct from close at hand.

The claim found in some studies that on 20 November the Russians were already near Angerburg (Węgorzewo), a dozen or so kilometres from the headquarters, is inaccurate: in November the front came to a halt much further east, and the Red Army took Angerburg only on 24 January 1945.

An ailing leader

Hitler’s health in the autumn of 1944 was poor. After the assassination attempt he complained of headaches and earache, and the tremor in his left hand grew worse. At the end of September he fell ill with jaundice and was confined to bed for several days. His personal physician, Theo Morell, gave him daily injections and dozens of preparations, including anti-flatulence pills containing strychnine and atropine. When at the beginning of October other doctors in Hitler’s circle – Karl Brandt, Hanns von Hasselbach and the ear, nose and throat specialist Erwin Giesing – questioned this treatment, Hitler sided with Morell and dismissed his critics. Historians still argue over how far Morell’s drugs harmed his patient; what is certain is that Hitler grew increasingly dependent on them.

For several weeks Hitler had also been hoarse. It turned out that a polyp had grown on a vocal cord – similar to the one removed in 1935. The operation could only be carried out in Berlin. That was the immediate reason for the journey.

Berlin, Ziegenberg and the bunker

In Berlin Hitler lived in his rooms in the Reich Chancellery, already partly damaged by air raids. On 22 November the Berlin throat specialist Professor Carl Otto von Eicken – the same man who had operated on him in 1935 – removed the polyp from his vocal cord. Examination showed that the growth was benign, which reassured Hitler, who had feared cancer of the larynx, the disease that had killed Emperor Frederick III. For several days after the operation he was not allowed to speak; he communicated in whispers and on slips of paper. He had already stopped appearing in public: on the November anniversary of the Munich putsch his proclamation was read out by Heinrich Himmler, and abroad there were rumours that he was seriously ill or even dead.

The stay in Berlin also served to prepare the offensive that Hitler had announced to his generals on 16 September at the Wolf’s Lair: a blow in the Ardennes intended to split the British and American armies and recapture Antwerp. On the evening of 10 December he left by train for the west, arriving the next day at the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) headquarters at Ziegenberg near Bad Nauheim in Hesse. From there he directed the Ardennes offensive, launched on 16 December. When it collapsed and on 12 January 1945 the Red Army attacked from the Vistula, Hitler boarded a train for Berlin on 15 January and arrived there the next day.

From 16 January 1945 his seat was the Führerbunker – the shelter under the garden of the Reich Chancellery, enlarged in 1943–1944. At first Hitler still used rooms in the building itself, but after a heavy raid on Berlin on 3 February he spent more and more time underground. He never left the capital again. There, on 30 April 1945, he committed suicide.

The end of the headquarters

After Hitler’s departure documents and the more important equipment were removed from Görlitz, and only a garrison remained at the headquarters. According to some studies, an order to prepare the site for demolition was issued only a few days later. At the end of January 1945, during the East Prussian operation, it was briefly used by the staff of General Friedrich Hossbach’s Fourth Army, who on 22 January ordered a retreat from the Masurian Lakes without Hitler’s permission and was dismissed for it. On the night of 24/25 January German engineers blew up the bunkers; several tonnes of explosive were used on a single heavy bunker. Many of the reinforced-concrete structures merely cracked and shifted. On 27 January the ruins were occupied by units of the Soviet 31st Army. The area, sown with tens of thousands of mines, was being cleared until 1955.

Place in the war

Leaving the Wolf’s Lair was not in itself a military event, but it marked the end of an era. The headquarters in the Masurian forest had been a symbol of a war waged far from Germany – a war in which Hitler moved on his maps armies standing before Moscow, on the Volga and in the Caucasus. In November 1944 the front came almost to its perimeter fence, and the leader of the Reich, ailing and increasingly cut off from reality, withdrew to the capital in order to stake everything, from there and from Ziegenberg, on a single throw in the Ardennes. From then on decisions were taken in an ever narrower circle and ever closer to the ruins of Berlin, right up to the final weeks in the bunker.

For the inhabitants of East Prussia Hitler’s departure changed nothing at once – it was not announced, and the party authorities, headed by Gauleiter Erich Koch, forbade the evacuation of the population until the last moment. When in January 1945 the Red Army launched its decisive offensive, hundreds of thousands of civilians fled in the bitter cold, often too late. The ruins of the headquarters at Gierłoż, today within Poland’s borders, are one of the best-known traces of that war in the region.