Book Six: The Fall of the Third Reich
- The last three weeks of the Second World War were also the final three weeks of the Nazi Reich.
- Allied and Soviet troops continued to sweep through Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe.
- In Berlin, the Fuehrer was commanding the armed forces from a bunker fifty feet underground—below the Chancellery, which had been destroyed by Allied bombing.
- In worsening physical and mental health, the Fuehrer and Goebbels, were reassuring themselves that things would still turn out in their favor.
- Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, came to join her partner in Berlin.
Hitler's Last Great Decision
- Hitler's final birthday gathering took place in the underground bunker on April 20, 1945.
- Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler left Berlin that night, each believing that the Fuehrer would be dead soon, and that they'd succeed him.
- Hitler wasn't dead yet, though; he ordered a counter-attack on April 21.
- Nothing ever came of it. When Hitler learned that the Russians had finally broken through to Berlin, the news propelled him into a furious rage.
- Shirer believes that it was around this time that Hitler decided to stay in Berlin and go down with his rapidly-sinking ship.
- He started to get his affairs in order. He arranged for certain documents to be destroyed, and he ordered Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Alfred Jodl to take command of the armed forces.
- Hitler's decision to stay in Berlin had more than a few consequences for the Nazi Reich.
Goering and Himmler Try to Take Over
- Goering, the Number-Two Nazi in the Reich, suddenly found himself accused of treason.
- Hitler had mentioned offhandedly to Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl that Goering should probably handle the peace negotiations when the time eventually came.
- When Goering learned that, he assumed that Hitler wanted him to take over right away. Just to be sure, he sent a telegram to Hitler to ask if he had heard right.
- When Goering's tentative telegram reached the underground bunker, Hitler threw a fit.
- It didn't help that his scheming deputy leader, Martin Bormann, insisted that Goering's telegram was an ultimatum, and that Number-Two was trying to unseat the Fuehrer from his underground throne.
- Although Hitler decided not to order Goering's immediate arrest, Bormann went behind the Fuehrer's back and ordered it anyway.
- In less than twenty-four hours, Goering was a prisoner of the S.S.
The Last Two Visitors to the Bunker
- Life was increasingly strange in the bizarre atmosphere of the Fuehrer's bunker.
- Hitler had some visitors, including Hanna Reitsch, a famous test pilot, and General Ritter von Greim, whom Hitler appointed Goering's successor as Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe.
- Neither Reitsch nor Greim is particularly important to Shirer's narrative, but because they were witnesses to some of Hitler's last days on earth, their testimonies helped to supply Shirer with valuable information for his account.
- Shirer draws on Reitsch's memories especially as he describes Hitler's rapidly-shifting moods during those last few days in the bunker.
- The Fuehrer was still waiting impatiently for Germany's armies to liberate Berlin, and he seemed clueless about how bad the situation out there actually was.
- Unbeknownst to Hitler, Heinrich Himmler had been negotiating with the Allies.
- Hitler learned of Himmler's treason in late April 1945, when the Propaganda Ministry picked up a broadcast from the BBC announcing Himmler's offer to surrender the armies.
- As you might imagine, Hitler's reaction was over-the-top.
- Hitler also got the news that the Soviet army was now just a few blocks away from the bunker.
- Shirer believed all this news caused Hitler to make the final decisions of his life.
- Two of those decisions were particularly important: Hitler ordered Himmler's arrest, and he decided to marry Eva Braun right then and there.
- There was a bare-bones wedding between Hitler and Braun in the wee hours of the morning on April 29, followed by a not-so-celebratory breakfast afterward.
Hitler's Last Will and Testament
- Shirer now offers a detailed account of the last will and testament of Germany's Nazi Fuehrer, arguing that the documents reveal that this powerful dictator, who'd ruled over much of Europe for four years, had learned absolutely nothing.
- The documents contain all of the typical anti-Semitic hatred that Hitler had spewed over the course of his reign, and they urge Germany, in his absence, to stay on the path he'd set for it.
- Goebbels made an addition to Hitler's testament after the Fuehrer had finished it.
- In his addendum, the Propaganda Minister explained why he and his wife had decided to kill themselves—and their six children—so that they could die by Hitler's side when their beloved Fuehrer ended his own life.
- Yeah, you heard that right.
- Shirer then explains how Goebbels arranged for Hitler's last will and testament to be delivered to Admiral Karl Doenitz, the current Commander in Chief of the German Navy, whom Hitler had named his successor.
- A slow trickle of men left the underground bunker, as a number of young military adjutants decided to take their leaves rather than taking their lives.
- In the last message that Hitler sent to Field Marshal Keitel, he announced his imminent suicide and, just for good measure, got in a few final jabs at the German Army, which he blamed for losing the war.
The Death of Hitler and His Bride
- Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were executed by Italian partisans on April 27.
- When Hitler heard about Mussolini's death, he started planning his own.
- In the final hours of his life, Hitler said his goodbyes to the cohort of people who were with him in the underground bunker.
- He then describes the deaths of Adolf and Eva Hitler in the mid-afternoon on April 30, 1945, along with the Viking-style funeral that was given to them as their bodies were burned in the garden behind the Chancellery.
- If the scene feels a little anti-climactic to you, that's because the war wasn't over yet, and the news of Hitler's death was kept secret for a little while longer.
- Martin Bormann soon got off a telegram to Admiral Doenitz, informing him that he was now in charge of Nazi Germany.
- Next, Bormann and Goebbels decided to reach out to the Russians to see what their terms of surrender would be.
- Russians demanded the unconditional surrender the Fuehrer and everyone in the bunker, as well as all the German troops left in Berlin.
- But by the time their answer came through to Bormann, he had already made other plans.
- So had Goebbels.
- Shirer offers a grim account of the death of the Goebbels family. The six children were poisoned by their parents, who then killed themselves.
- Some of the remaining people in the bunker them managed to escape Berlin by sneaking through the Russian lines; others didn't make it.
- Bormann was among the group who didn't. Drawing on witness testimony, Shirer records that he seems to have committed suicide when he saw that his chances of escape were about zero.
The End of the Third Reich
- The Third Reich survived for seven days after the death of its Fuehrer.
- Hitler's death was broadcast to the German public on the night of May 1, 1945.
- The broadcast neglected to tell the truth about Hitler's suicide, and instead described the Fuehrer as having fought bravely against Bolshevism to his last moment.
- The German Army and Navy had been making isolated surrenders throughout Germany and Europe in the last days of the war.
- The final surrender came on May 7, 1945.
- He describes the "strange but welcome silence" which then "settled over the Continent for the first time since September 1, 1939," and takes stock of the staggering toll that the past five years had taken upon human lives. (6.31.237-238)
- Shirer compares the German defeat in 1918 to the Third Reich's defeat in 1945, and ends with the following words: "The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished. But the Third Reich had passed into history." (6.31.240-42)