Hitler's last birthday

On Friday 20 April 1945 Adolf Hitler turned 56. For years the Führer’s birthday had been a state holiday in the Third Reich, with parades, flags in the streets and a speech by Joseph Goebbels on the eve. This time, too, Goebbels gave a radio address on the evening of 19 April, calling on Germans to keep faith in the Führer, but the occasion itself took place in an entirely different setting. Hitler spent it in the Führerbunker – the shelter dug beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery – while a few dozen kilometres east of the city Soviet troops were breaking through the last lines of defence on the Oder.

War chronologies record that Hitler “celebrates his 56th birthday in a bunker in Berlin” and that, according to accounts, he was “in poor health, nervous and depressed”. This agrees with what witnesses from his entourage described. It should only be added that “celebration” is hardly the word: it was a day on which the regime’s highest dignitaries offered their good wishes, but also the day on which most of them decided to leave Berlin.

The leader in the bunker

Hitler returned to Berlin on 16 January 1945, after the collapse of the Ardennes offensive; earlier, in November 1944, he had left the Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia, for good. At first he still worked in the Chancellery building, but the bombing meant that he spent more and more time underground, and from February he lived in the shelter permanently. The Führerbunker was a cramped concrete structure of a few dozen small rooms, several metres below ground. The rhythm of the day was inverted: situation conferences went on late into the night, and Hitler went to bed towards dawn.

Since 16 April the Red Army’s Berlin offensive had been under way, following its opening on the Oder. By 19 April the troops of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front had broken through the defences on the Seelow Heights, and the tanks of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had crossed the Lusatian Neisse and were driving north towards the southern outskirts of the capital. On 20 April their spearheads approached Zossen, where the headquarters of the Army High Command (OKH) was housed in underground complexes; the staff was evacuated in haste, and its chief, General Hans Krebs, moved to Hitler’s bunker. The same day Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front went over to the attack on the lower Oder, north of Berlin.

Good wishes and a conference

At midday the people of Hitler’s inner circle and the leading dignitaries of the state gathered in the bunker and in the surviving rooms of the Chancellery: Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Goebbels, the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Armaments Minister Albert Speer, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Alfred Jodl, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery Martin Bormann, the head of the RSHA Ernst Kaltenbrunner and the Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann. One after another they offered Hitler their good wishes. In the afternoon the usual situation conference was held, at which the position on every front was reported – and it was hopeless.

Most of those present, according to the accounts of Speer, Keitel and staff officers, urged Hitler to leave Berlin for the south that day or in the next few days, for the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, while the road was still open. Some of the staff and documents were already being flown out to Salzburg and Munich. Hitler replied that he would decide later. That day he settled only the division of command in case the Reich was cut in two by American and Soviet forces meeting on the Elbe: Dönitz was to command in the north and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in the south. Within a day Dönitz left Berlin for his headquarters at Plön in Schleswig-Holstein.

Departures

That evening several of the regime’s most important men left Berlin. Göring, who had already shipped wagonloads of works of art out of his Carinhall residence near Berlin and ordered the building to be blown up before the Russians arrived, took his leave of Hitler, explaining that he had urgent tasks in southern Germany. Speer remembered Hitler shaking his hand with indifference, as if barely aware of his presence. Göring’s convoy of cars set off that same night towards the Obersalzberg. Himmler drove north of Berlin; during the night of 20/21 April, on the Hartzwalde estate belonging to his masseur Felix Kersten, he met Norbert Masur, a representative of the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress who had flown in from Stockholm – one of Himmler’s first steps towards talks with the Western Allies behind Hitler’s back, in which Count Folke Bernadotte acted as intermediary. Speer also left the capital, although on 23 April he flew back to the bunker once more to say goodbye to Hitler. Ribbentrop lingered a few days longer.

For those who stayed in Berlin, the departing convoys of dignitaries were a telling signal. The first shells from Soviet long-range artillery were reaching the city. According to Soviet sources, the guns of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army opened fire on Berlin that day, and the reports stressed that the salvoes had been fired for Hitler’s birthday. Sources differ on the time of the first shots – from late morning to early afternoon. From 21 April the shelling of the city centre was continuous.

The last time above ground

The best-known image of the day is a brief scene in the ruined Chancellery garden. Hitler climbed the steps from the bunker to inspect a line of Hitler Youth boys, presented to him by Axmann as having been decorated in the fighting against the Red Army, and soldiers of SS units who had arrived from the front. He walked along the line, shaking hands and patting the boys’ cheeks. According to his biographers, among them Ian Kershaw, this was Hitler’s last appearance before people from outside his immediate circle; after that he left the shelter only briefly.

The scene is often confused with the well-known footage from the Die Deutsche Wochenschau newsreel, but the two are not the same. The shots in which Hitler pats the cheek of a twelve-year-old Hitler Youth boy were filmed in the same garden a month earlier, on 20 March 1945, and shown in the newsreel in March. What survives from 20 April is chiefly photographs. The two scenes resemble each other, which encourages the mistake.

His health

The remarks about Hitler’s poor condition rest on the consistent accounts of people who saw him at the time: staff officers, secretaries, Speer. They described a stooped man who seemed to have aged by years, dragging one leg, with a trembling left hand that he tried to hold still with his right. He spoke quietly, tired quickly, and his mood swung from apathy to outbursts of rage. Many doctors and historians – including after the war, on the basis of records and film – linked the tremor in his left hand, which had grown worse since 1944, together with his stiffness and slow movements, to Parkinson’s disease; there is, however, no certain diagnosis. Some of the symptoms were also attributed to the after-effects of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt, to exhaustion and to medication.

For years he had been treated by his personal physician, Theo Morell, who gave him daily injections of vitamins, glucose and hormone preparations, as well as various stimulants and sedatives. Their effect on Hitler’s condition is disputed: some authors, drawing on Morell’s notes, credit him with administering the powerful opioid Eukodal among other drugs and speak of addiction, while other historians and doctors regard such claims as exaggerated. Two days later, on 22 April, Hitler dismissed Morell and ordered him to leave Berlin.

What came of it

The birthday of 20 April was the last day on which the whole elite of the Third Reich gathered around Hitler. The departure of Göring, Himmler and Dönitz from Berlin in practice marked the beginning of the disintegration of the centre of power: the leaders scattered across the country, and each began to act on his own account. A few days later Göring demanded that Hitler hand power over to him, Himmler opened negotiations with the West, and Dönitz – appointed to command in the north – was soon to become Hitler’s successor.

Hitler himself was still wavering over whether to stay in the capital. The matter was decided two days later, at a stormy conference at which he admitted that the war was lost and declared that he would remain in Berlin to the end. Meanwhile Zhukov’s and Konev’s troops were already approaching the city; on 21 April fighting began in its outskirts.