Hitler's breakdown

On the afternoon of Sunday 22 April 1945, in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, a situation conference began that has gone down in history as the day of Adolf Hitler’s breakdown. When he heard that the attack from which he expected the salvation of Berlin had not even started, he flew into a rage, accused his generals of treachery and cowardice, and then, for the first time in the presence of his commanders, admitted that the war was lost. He declared that he would not leave for the south but would remain in the capital and die there. The same conference produced the last major operational orders of the Third Reich: General Walther Wenck’s 12th Army was to turn back from the Elbe and march to the relief of Berlin.

Two days earlier, on Hitler’s last birthday, most of the dignitaries had left the city, while Hitler himself put off deciding whether to move to the Berghof in the Alps. Since 21 April, with the storming of Berlin, Soviet troops had been fighting in the outskirts of the capital.

The order to Steiner

On 21 April Hitler was looking for a way to stop the troops of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, which were bypassing Berlin to the north. His eye fell on Armeeabteilung Steiner – an “army detachment” formed from the headquarters of the III SS Panzer Corps under SS-Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen-SS Felix Steiner, positioned around Eberswalde, north-east of the capital. Hitler ordered him to strike south into the flank of the Soviet wedge and cut off the troops that had broken into the northern suburbs. Every available force, including Luftwaffe ground personnel, was to be thrown into the attack; commanders who held their men back were threatened with death.

Popular chronologies note that Steiner’s scratch collection of units “was not fully manned”. That is something of an understatement. On the maps in the bunker “Group Steiner” looked like a formation capable of a counter-attack; in reality it had the remnants of a few divisions and battalions hastily cobbled together from sailors, airmen and men of the Volkssturm, with no tanks or heavy artillery worth mentioning. Steiner, formerly commander of the Wiking Division, considered the task impossible. His superior, the commander of Army Group Vistula, Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici, who a month earlier had replaced Himmler, shared this assessment and did not press for the attack to begin without the forces needed to carry it out.

The front outside Berlin

The situation reported in the bunker on 22 April was changing by the hour. In the north-east, the 3rd Shock Army and the 2nd Guards Tank Army of Zhukov’s front were entering the city’s outer ring, and further north they were bypassing it to the west, towards Oranienburg and Hennigsdorf. In the south, the tanks of the 3rd Guards Tank Army of Marshal Ivan Konev’s front, which the day before had passed through the abandoned OKH headquarters at Zossen, reached the Teltow Canal, the last water obstacle before the southern districts, while the 4th Guards Tank Army drove on Potsdam. The two arms of the Soviet pincers were now only a few dozen kilometres apart.

The main body of the 9th Army, which had been defending the Oder since 16 April, was thus cut off from Berlin and from the rest of the front. For several days Heinrici had been asking for permission to withdraw it while the road was still open, but Hitler, as throughout the war, refused to give up ground and demanded that “Fortress Frankfurt” on the Oder be held. The generals in the bunker knew that this army could neither hold its positions nor come to the capital’s aid. In Hitler’s eyes, therefore, the order to Steiner was the last chance to reverse the course of events without admitting that Berlin was lost.

The conference of 22 April

The conference began after 3 p.m. Among those present were the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Hans Krebs, Hitler’s chief adjutant, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, and the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann. Krebs reported that the Russians had broken through on the northern edge of the city and that Steiner’s attack had not got under way. It is often written that the attack was not launched “with Heinrici’s consent” and that Steiner’s units “were given permission to retreat”. Put that way, it is a simplification: on 22 April the point was above all that there had been no attack, and that Heinrici was in effect holding it back; it was his open authorisation of withdrawals against orders that led to his removal from command, but only on 28–29 April.

What happened next is known from the accounts of several participants and witnesses – Keitel and Jodl (given after the war, partly in captivity and at Nuremberg), Krebs’s adjutant Major Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, the Luftwaffe liaison officer General Eckhard Christian, who that same night related everything to the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, General Karl Koller, and the secretary Traudl Junge. The accounts differ in details and wording but agree on the course of events. Hitler leapt up from his chair and shouted that everyone had betrayed him and lied to him – the army, the SS, the Luftwaffe – and that he was surrounded by cowards and failures. After the outburst he slumped back into his chair and said that the war was lost. He declared that he would stay in Berlin, lead its defence in person and shoot himself at the last moment, because he could not fight and did not want to fall into enemy hands. He told the others to leave for the south; when those present began to protest, he replied that he had nothing left to order, and that if there had to be negotiations, Hermann Göring would do it better.

This declaration is often called a “vow”. It was not, however, a vow in the strict sense, but a statement made in anger before a dozen or so people – though one that Hitler treated as binding: from then on, despite the pleas of his entourage and offers to fly him out that were repeated over the following days, he did not change his mind. What those present remembered above all was that for the first time he had said aloud what had been obvious to everyone around him for weeks.

It was that last remark, passed on to Koller and by him to Göring on the Obersalzberg, that the next day became the basis for Göring’s telegram demanding the transfer of power. Junge recalled that after the conference Hitler summoned the secretaries and Eva Braun, told them that all was lost and offered to fly them south; the women refused. The same day Hitler dismissed his physician, Theo Morell, who flew out of Berlin, while Joseph Goebbels, with his wife and six children, moved into the bunker. The following day propaganda announced that the Führer was in Berlin and directing its defence.

Wenck, Busse and the turn to the west

That evening Keitel and Jodl tried to give the leader’s decision some military sense. Jodl pointed out that since Hitler was staying in the capital, the front could be turned round: the troops facing the Americans on the Elbe could be turned against the Russians, on the assumption that the Americans would advance no further. The nearest such formation was General Walther Wenck’s 12th Army, formed in April from young recruits, cadets and the remnants of other units, which was holding the line of the Elbe. Hitler agreed. The 12th Army was to attack eastwards, towards Potsdam and Berlin, and link up with General Theodor Busse’s 9th Army, whose main body, beaten on the Oder, was stuck in the forests south-east of the capital and being cut off by Zhukov’s and Konev’s troops.

Keitel left that night for Wenck’s headquarters in a forester’s lodge near Wiesenburg and in the early hours of 23 April handed him the order. According to the accounts of Wenck and his staff, the army command regarded the relief as an illusion from the outset and decided to attack only far enough to open a corridor through which the soldiers of the 9th Army and refugees could escape westwards, to the Americans. In the bunker, meanwhile, Wenck’s name became the last hope: over the following days Hitler kept asking where Wenck was.

What came of it

Both Steiner’s attack and Wenck’s relief ended in failure. In the days that followed, Steiner’s units managed only to establish small bridgeheads over the canals near Oranienburg and did not break the encirclement. The 12th Army set off on 24 April, and by the end of the month its spearheads had reached Beelitz and the lakes outside Potsdam, about 30 kilometres from the Reich Chancellery, but could break through no further. The 9th Army, encircled in the forests around Halbe, fought its way west from 26 April to 1 May; in the Battle of Halbe, according to estimates, several tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed, and between 25,000 and 30,000 people, depending on the source, reached Wenck’s lines. At the beginning of May both armies crossed the Elbe at Tangermünde and surrendered to the Americans.

The decision of 22 April also sealed Hitler’s own fate. From then on there was no more talk of leaving for the Alps or of an “Alpine Fortress”. The disintegration of the Reich’s leadership, which had begun with the departures of 20 April, accelerated: Göring concluded that Hitler had lost the capacity to act, Himmler sought an agreement with the West on his own initiative, and the bunker was left to those who were to see out the end with their leader – Goebbels, Bormann, Krebs and Burgdorf. Hitler lived for another eight days in the shelter, increasingly cut off from reality, issuing orders to armies that for the most part now existed only on the map.