Hitler's Court: The Inner Circle of The Third Reich and After

By Heike B. Görtemaker

This revelatory history examines the loyal inner circle that followed—and enabled—Hitler’s rise to power and continued on after WWII.

Hitler was not a lonely, aloof dictator. Throughout his rise in the NSDAP, he gathered a loyal circle around him, and was surrounded by people who celebrated, flattered and intrigued him. Who belonged to this inner circle around Hitler? What function did this court fulfill? And how did it influence the perception of history after 1945? Using previously unknown sources, Heike Görtemaker explores Hitler’s private environment and shows how this inner circle made him who he was.

Hitler’s inner circle, the Berghof Society, was his private retreat. But the court was more than that. It provided him with the support he needed to take on the role of “Führer” at all, while at the same time allowing him to use its members as political front men. Most of all, it represented a conspiratorial community whose lowest common denominator was anti-Semitism.

In this book, Heike Görtemaker asks new questions about the truth behind Hitler’s inner circle and, for the first time, also examines the “circle without leaders”; the networking of the inner circle after 1945.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526790712

Book preview

Hitler’s Court

Hitler’s Court

The Inner Circle of the Third Reich and After

HEIKE B. GÖRTEMAKER

Originally published by Verlag C.H.Beck oHG as Hitlers Hofstaat

Copyright © Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München 2019

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Pen & Sword Military

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Translation Copyright © Geoffrey Brooks, 2021

ISBN 978 1 52679 070 5

eISBN 978 1 52679 071 2

The right of Heike B. Görtemaker to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE HITLER’S CIRCLE

Chapter One Defeat and Flight

Chapter Two Forming the Circle

Chapter Three Seizing Power

PART TWO THE BERGHOF COMMUNITY

Chapter Four In the Führer’s ‘Restricted Area’

Chapter Five Witnesses and Believers

Chapter Six The Court at War

PART THREE THE COURT WITHOUT THE FÜHRER

Chapter Seven Confronting the Victors

Chapter Eight Criminal Prosecution and Integration

Epilogue

Endnotes

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

The Inner Circle in the Third Reich and After

In the spring of 2010, shortly after my biography of Eva Braun was published, a gentleman whose name awoke my immediate interest introduced himself to the Munich publishing house of C. H. Beck. He was Claus Dirk von Below, son of the former wartime Luftwaffe adjutant to the Führer and for many years Hitler’s confidant, Nicolaus von Below. The son wished to contact me, a meeting was arranged by telephone and a few weeks later we met at a café in Munich.

We spoke at first of the relationship of his parents to Hitler and Eva Braun and about their life within Hitler’s private circle at the Berghof. Almost in passing he mentioned, ‘I grew up in that circle’. According to Claus, the inner circle surrounding Hitler and Eva Braun had not broken up after the capitulation: the ties remained intact long after the setting up of the West German Federal Republic in 1949, and people kept in touch by correspondence, home visits and large organized get-togethers for special occasions. Of the release of Albert Speer from Spandau prison on 30 September 1966, Claus recalled: ‘We all attended the reception for him at Heidelberg; my parents were to their last breath convinced National Socialists.’¹

This statement made it clear to me at once that the ‘Führer’s circle’ to which Speer had alluded post-war continued to exist in the absence of Hitler, and for decades after his death he remained alive in the memory of its members.

The National Socialist dictatorship effectively ceased when Hitler put an end to his own life on 30 April 1945 in the bunkers of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, but most of his closest staff and intimate colleagues had survived. So who were the men and women who made up Hitler’s closest circle, often for many years? How did they fare subsequently? How did they gain access to the centre of power? Apart from a few exceptions, these courtiers were not numbered amongst the grandees of the Third Reich and were known disparagingly as his ‘chauffeuresque group’, an entourage which consisted of a mixture of bourgeoisie and semi-criminal rowdies,² who for the most part escaped perception by the public.

We lack a comprehensive picture of this secretive Berghof Society and its precursors who, after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, circulated in his private refuge on the Obersalzberg, and after 1945 continued with their normal lives, attracting little attention. Therefore this investigation also extends to those men and women, until now considered only as extras on the stage, whose post-war statements are employed nowadays to explain Hitler.

Hitler, so we are told, created a unique national powerhouse all by himself. He had no insight into the nature of people, nor any real kind of private life, in fact what amounted to no real human ties at all.³ Given that this is true, what use would Hitler have had for this close-knit, constantly available circle in which, unlike Stalin, he surrounded himself with a surprising number of women?

What criteria guided their selection; and once selected, what role did these people play in Hitler’s private and political life? To what extent might social relationships, little evaluated until today, have contributed to his personal position of power?

Neither the function nor the workings of this intimate circle has so far been investigated or taken into account. Hitherto it has been accepted - based primarily on the later memoirs - that those colleagues and political allies with ‘unlimited privileged access’ to Hitler never really penetrated the veil of the Führer-figure to come close to him, while he himself used his loyal followers in the same way as he did anybody else, casting them aside ‘as soon as they had fulfilled their purpose.’⁴ And so what were the true circumstances? What value did these loyal followers derive from their close tie to Hitler on the basis of the ‘dogma of faithfulness’? And in this connection, how is their individual guilt and complicity to be assessed?

These questions will be answered using hitherto well-guarded source material, including that now available in the form of bequests from literary estates including, for example, photographs preserved by the Hoffmann Photographic Archive at the Bavarian State Library. These constitute an important historical source and are on a par with the oral and written statements made by the protagonists regarding the actual network and lines of communication of the community and its involvement in the activities of the Nazi regime. For example, it allows us to reconstruct what occurred in Hitler’s immediate environs on the night of the pogrom of 9 November 1938.

The corollary of that is, what did the members of Hitler’s personal staff and his closest social circle know of the intention to go to war, and what the aims of that war would be? What knowledge did they have of the politics of terror and murder? It is known that Albert Speer and Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, as ‘the Führer›s Special Commissioners’, were involved in crimes such as the deportation of Jews to death camps (Speer) or the killing of incurables and mentally handicapped (Brandt) at the latest after the war began.⁵ To what extent were other members of the entourage of doctors, adjutants, female secretaries, photographers, servants and long-term guests at the Berghof, who made up Hitler’s circle of loyal confidantes, also accomplices and accessories in what went on? They accompanied him to events varying from receptions to concerts, travels, Nuremberg rallies and State visits, experienced at first hand the hysteria of the ‘Führer-cult’, all impregnated with Hitler’s world view and his powerful appeal to the masses, and celebrated their Führer as a ‘mover of worlds’ (Speer) in the era of his greatest foreign policy successes.

At the time when the war broke out, the Allied secret services were already interested not only in Hitler and the Nazi elite, but in all persons surrounding Hitler in Berlin and on the Obersalzberg. Thus before US troops entered Germany in 1945, the OSS already had precise knowledge of the ‘Führer’s circle’, even though its members were not known generally to the German public.⁶

Therefore in the spring of 1945, the Americans could seize and interrogate the people they were interested in so as to satisfy themselves that Hitler was alive somewhere and had not fled. Once Berlin was surrounded, the Soviet anti-espionage services set out to capture members of Hitler’s loyal retinue, classified the bag as ‘Group Reich Chancellery’ and subjected the prisoners to year-long interrogations in Moscow. With the exception of Speer, after the collapse of the regime, the catastrophic end to the war and the occupation of Germany by the victorious Powers, the survivors of the close circle merged into the general public and most became forgotten.

At the end of April 1945, for those fleeing from the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin, or who had abandoned the Berghof, there followed automatic arrest, internment camp, interrogation by Allied intelligence officers, criminal trial or denazification proceedings. Who still belonged to that ‘Führer-less circle’, the composition and function of which had changed over the course of time? After the collapse of the Nazi regime, what kind of life did its members endure, either in the Western Zone, the DDR, or abroad? What did the great ‘Before and After 1945’ mean for them? How did they experience and overcome the transformation; occupation by foreign forces, the slicing up of Germany, the democratization process in the West, the Sovietization in the East? Did the members of Hitler’s personal staff, his adjutants, his social circle together with representatives of the former Nazi Party and military, succumb to the new way of how things were to be run, or did their identification with ‘the Führer’, the unconditional loyalty to Hitler, continue beyond his death, the ties that bind holding together those in whom he had once placed his trust.

Christa Schroeder, for example, who had been Hitler’s secretary constantly since 1933, stated under interrogation to an officer of the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) at Berchtesgaden in May 1945 that she had ‘taken a greater active part in the life of Hitler than a family member’.⁷ She also declared that post-war she had been ‘the key’ for access to the survivors of the inner circle, in particular for the British historian David Irving, and at the end of the 1960s for access to the closed society of the earlier Hitler confidants⁸ and also strengthened the Network. But how did the protagonists, as well as other historians and journalists, who used this corridor for their own purposes, view her own past?

It is important not to concentrate one’s search for connections solely on the tenacious Nazi-elite of state and party. The social and economic reintegration of former highly-placed Nazis began only in the Adenauer era of the West German Federal Republic after interrogations often lasting years. Accordingly one should not continue to overlook the until-now neglected group of former Hitler confidants with whom, shortly after 1945, so-called ‘Vergangenheitspolitik’⁹ came into being.

Difficult questions to be faced were thrown up by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and the Auschwitz trials at Frankfurt am Main between 1963 and 1968. What kind of effect did this confrontation with the past have on the former ‘Führer circle’? Did it splinter or hold firm, perhaps even agreeing to use a common prescribed phraseology when answering journalists and academics? The family of Eva Braun became another curiosity of worldwide interest, suspected to be part of the Network especially since Eva’s former biographer Nerin E. Gun was not only friendly with David Irving, but they both had access to the family and other members of the inner circle.

The re-appearance of Albert Speer in the late 1960s and his interpretation of his own history enabled the past to be re-evaluated to some degree, likewise the secretary Traudl Junge, with her memoir Im Toten Winkel (Blind Spot). Thus the development of Vergangenheitspolitik, so it seems, can be traced not least to the self-expression of Hitler’s former disciples who benefited from the public fixation on Hitler himself as the personification of evil and imagined themselves as somehow not really so involved. That was how Nazism was handled after 1945 and how Vergangenheitspolitik operated.

Did members of the so-called ‘magic circle’ referred to by David Irving take part in Vergangenheitspolitik off the stage and have some influence over political events in West Germany or the DDR? Did a kind of ‘knuckled-under opportunism’ succeed in imposing itself on the fragile and then increasingly stable democracy to create a ‘life after the end’? And would it have been possible in Communist East Germany?

The ties that bind, woven by the men and women of the Hitler circle before and after 1945, stretch into the generation of their grandchildren. The ties arrive with the legends disguising their grandparents’ past. By following these ties from the Third Reich into the post-war decades, a new view of the relationship with the past becomes possible.

PART ONE

HITLER’S CIRCLE

At midnight on 29 April 1945, Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below left Hitler’s bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery for the inferno which awaited him outside. A block of flats was wrapped in bright flames: artillery fire demolished walls, near misses exploded on footpaths, the streets were raked by machine-gun fire from the Russian forward battle line, only 400 metres away. A thick pall of smoke lay over the city. From above, German transport aircraft dropped weapons and ammunition through the darkness to German troops fighting on the ground. Von Below had to find a way to leave the city, a conflagration beyond recognition, and through the Soviet encirclement. In his pocket he carried a suicide ampoule supplied by Hitler at his own request for use should he fall into Russian hands. He had no documents with him, only verbal instructions. His objective was the headquarters of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz in Schleswig-Holstein. His mission was to update Dönitz and Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, chief of Wehrmacht High Command, regarding the events of the last few days in Berlin, and to pass them Hitler’s final orders. The Führer intended to die where he was and had nominated Dönitz, known for his fanaticism, as his successor. Every man was to continue fighting until the last round.

Two days previously, von Below had sat with Hitler in his study in the bunker, and was greatly surprised to be told that Hitler was planning to give General Helmuth Weidling, military commander of Berlin, the order to withdraw from the capital with his troops, and von Below was to join him. Sitting in the corner of the sofa, looking fresh and lively as rarely before in recent times, Hitler described how he had become a lonely figure - abandoned even by most of his old companions. Von Below could therefore probably understand what it had meant for him that although against his expressed wishes, Fräulein Braun had come to Berlin just then, while Ministers and senior Nazi leaders made haste to get themselves away to safety. To von Below’s astonishment Hitler added, ‘Fräulein Braun will not survive me. Of her own free will she intends to accompany me into death, and she will do so as my wife.’¹

By this time, von Below himself had come to terms with his own death. Before moving into the Führer-bunker at the beginning of April, he had taken his leave of his wife and children with the words: ‘Should you hear in two or three weeks that Hitler is dead, then I shall also no longer be alive.’² But now, away from the narrow, stuffy bunker rooms, von Below breathed a sigh of relief. For him, life would go on.

CHAPTER ONE

DEFEAT AND FLIGHT

Five months previously, on 20 November 1944, Hitler had abandoned his HQ Wolfsschanze near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg and headed for Berlin with his staff aboard his blacked-out and crowded special train. He had spent three and a half years at Wolfsschanze with a number of extensive breaks. It was a camp installation set in an area of woodland, lakes and swamp, with a barracks able to accommodate 5,000 men. Divided by a system of barbed wire fencing into sealed compounds and a 50-metre wide minefield, it was camouflaged with netting and artificial trees, had air-raid bunkers, a conference hall, offices and guest houses, a cinema, teahouse and barber’s shop. Not far away were the field headquarters of Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler and Joachim von Ribbentrop. ¹

The war of annihilation which National Socialist Germany had unleashed from here to conquer living space had failed, and Hitler had no alternative but to fall back on the Reich capital 700 kilometres to the west before the advancing Red Army.

In the Bunker of the Reich Chancellery

After arriving at Grunewald station on the evening of 20 November, Hitler’s cavalcade of staff cars set off from there for the Reich Chancellery at Wilhelmstrasse 78, the route lined left and right by mountains of brickwork and rubble, as the then 24-year old secretary Gertraud (Traudl) Junge recalled.²

Nevertheless, Hitler insisted that victory against his enemies was still possible, and not quite three weeks after pulling out of Wolfsschanze, on 16 December 1944 the Wehrmacht called upon all its reserves for a desperate thrust to recapture Antwerp and Brussels, which had been occupied by German forces after the invasion of Belgium in 1940 but had now fallen under the control of the Western Allies. The so-called Ardennes Offensive had to be called off the same month, however, mainly for lack of fuel.³

Ilse Hess and Gerda Bormann, fanatical National Socialists from the beginning of the movement, compared the hopeless situation to the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - National Socialist German Workers Party) ‘era of struggle’ in the 1920s, when nobody had considered it possible then that Hitler could hold on to one day become Chancellor of the German Reich. Now they comforted themselves with the dream that it was still possible to win through, if only one believed in the possibility strongly enough.⁴ Only occasionally though, as Ilse Hess confessed in a letter to Emmi Kalla-Heger, daughter of a factory owner at Schmiedeburg in the Sudetenland, there were nights when she pictured what they would be facing should all the Führer’s endeavours come to naught and they met with defeat. Then ‘her anxiety and horror’ became very great.⁵

Ilse Hess was not alone in her fear of what the future might hold. The threatened occupation of the Reich by Allied troops awoke concerns in the Wehrmacht about the dreadful possibility of a ‘foreign conquest and occupation’, and this found expression in the appeal by Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt to his men on 11 February 1945.⁶ Rundstedt had been the Army commander for the Ardennes campaign. The defeat had resulted in a total of 20,000 soldiers on both sides dead and over 80,000 wounded, and the hoped-for peace soundings had not materialized. Instead, from now until the closing days of the war, the highest German military commanders continued to issue orders to attack based on non-existent instructions from Hitler. Therefore in the last ten months of the war, more soldiers and civilians lost their lives than in the previous four and a half years.⁷

In mid-January 1945, Hitler returned to the Reich Chancellery from his field headquarters at Bad Nauheim, apparently contemplating suicide at this time according to Nicolaus von Below.⁸ Nevertheless, he continued to reject any idea of capitulation, and in his last radio broadcast to the nation on 30 January 1945 he called upon ‘the Almighty’ to aid him to ‘keep the war going’ until victory was achieved.⁹ Meanwhile 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front had liberated Auschwitz and embarked on a major offensive towards Berlin.

Western Allied air attacks against the German capital now increased in ferocity. On 3 February 1945, when the USAF spent ninety minutes dropping 1,800 tonnes of high explosives on the city, Hitler and his entourage were forced to shelter for the night in the bunker below the New Reich Chancellery gardens. The city centre, the newspaper district, Kreuzberg and Wedding were all severely damaged. The death toll remains uncertain to this day, but this air raid alone probably killed more than 2,000.¹⁰ In the Reich Chancellery gardens great craters had been blasted by near misses, and uprooted trees lay scattered where they fell. The ‘Führer-apartment’ in the Old Reich Chancellery Palace at Wilhelmstrasse 77 was badly damaged; the Winter Garden and Dining Hall reduced to sections of wall. Lighting, electric current and the water supply had all been lost and telephone connections severed.

Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary and factotum with the authority of a Reich Minister, sat clad in a fur coat in the unheated office of the Party Chancellery.¹¹ Finally, even he withdrew - with Hitler’s valet, bodyguard and Eva Braun, who had arrived from Bavaria two weeks earlier with her sister - to a room in the bunker completed by the firm Hochtief AG in October 1944. It had at least thirteen living rooms and ceilings 3.5 metres thick.¹²

On the evening of 5 February, even though it was close to the burnt-out Führer-apartment, Eva Braun gathered around herself some guests in a room on the first floor of the Old Reich Chancellery which had survived the bombing unscathed, the purpose being to celebrate her thirty-third birthday the next day. Hitler, Bormann and Armaments Minister Speer were present¹³ and even Hitler’s long-serving personal surgeon Karl Brandt and his wife Anni. After an altercation with Hitler’s physician Theodor Morell, he had been released from attending Hitler, but as the Führer’s Reich Commissioner for Health, he still counted amongst the most powerful personalities in the National Socialist State.¹⁴ Thus for the last time, the nucleus of the ‘court’ as it had existed since 1933 met with Speer, Brandt and Bormann present, who all owed their careers solely to their personal closeness to Hitler and their special relationship of loyalty to him.

As Bormann informed his wife briefly afterwards,¹⁵ everybody was nervous and on edge because Eva Braun had criticised various people ‘with an outspokenness not known of her previously’. Apparently she condemned those who had already evacuated Berlin to reach somewhere safer, while she herself was resolved to die at Hitler’s side. She now expected of others this same faithfulness unto death.¹⁶ It was in fact seen in following weeks that rather than having a moderating effect on Hitler, she strengthened in him his long-held suspicions of being surrounded by ‘traitors’.¹⁷ As equally uncompromising as Eva Braun was Gerda Bormann. From the Obersalzberg she urged her husband not to give up but to keep fighting, even if only one of their nine children should survive ‘the world in flames’.¹⁸

Despite the hopeless situation, military situation conferences continued to be held daily in Hitler’s study in the New Reich Chancellery. As a rule they were attended by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reichsführer-SS Himmler, who had recently taken command of various Army Groups, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Gestapo and security services, and generals bringing reports from the front, although as Luftwaffe adjutant von Below noted,¹⁹ mention was only made of troops no longer available or unfit for combat.

In the city itself, meanwhile, despite the air attacks the appearance of normality had been preserved; trams were still running, newspapers being printed, the postal service functioned, and certain banks and official offices kept working. As with other cities, however, Berlin had begun to fill with refugees, wounded soldiers from the front and the ‘bombed-out’ homeless, while the victims and opponents of the Nazi regime looked forward to its end.

Meanwhile, Hitler frequently spent the whole day with his faithful followers in the bunker. Towards the end of February all retired underground - not without having been threatened first. In a one-hour long radio broadcast, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels warned that everybody not filled with a greater desire to die rather than capitulate could expect to have ‘the noose put around his neck coldly and mercilessly’.²⁰ In this speech, in which he preached ‘holy hate’ and called for the struggle to go on unceasingly, he also announced his personal determination to go down fighting with his family. In case the Reich lost the war against the United States, he told his listeners in a calm almost monotonous voice, the ‘goddess of history’ would show herself to be ‘a whore for money’, and he considered that life in the coming world would no longer be worth living - neither for himself, his children or for anybody else he loved. He would cast aside such a life ‘joyfully’.²¹

Retreats and Betrayal

It had not come that far yet, however, and Goebbels went on to write articles for the weekly journal Das Reich on holding out - the example on 4 March being entitled ‘Watching the Coxswain without Emotion’. A few days later he made his last public speech in the town hall at Görlitz, East Prussia.²² Hitler ‘the coxswain’ on the other hand had long since refused to speak publicly or meet people. The Führer, who had once undertaken great journeys without a second thought, and on a single day had made three major appearances at different venues, mostly accompanied by his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, was now a mere shadow of his former self. His left arm trembling permanently, stooping, his movements sluggish - and not only at the map table - he took flight into an imaginary world taking comfort and reassurance from historical figures, particularly King Frederick II of Prussia, upon whom he had modelled himself since the beginning of his political career, and whose famed portrait by Anton Graff he took with him from his apartment to the bunker. The ultimate triumph of King Frederick II in the Seven Years’ War after years on the verge of defeat was taken by Hitler as the example that it was always possible to snatch victory from a hopeless situation.²³ At the same time he avoided being alone all night and would keep the closing situation conference of the day going into the early hours, so that between two and five in the morning, or even later, he could call co-workers to join him for tea and talk. The secretaries Johanna Wolf, Christa Schroeder, Gerda Christian and Gertraud Junge knew this habit from his field headquarters, where they often went to bed after breakfast and slept into the afternoon.²⁴ Now Eva Braun and Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, would appear occasionally at the nightly tea sessions, Morell by then being a chronical invalid and scarcely able to practise.

After spending another four weeks in Munich, on 7 March Eva Braun had come back to Berlin and was the first member of the ‘court’ to return to the bunker with the intention of remaining at Hitler’s side until the end.²⁵ This had apparently made him very happy, Gertraud Junge told the British TV producer Michael Darlow a quarter of a century later. Hitler’s eyes had been so full of joy, when she came.²⁶

Previously, at the beginning of February in a cellar of the New Reich Chancellery, Eva Braun and Hitler, together with Albert Speer, had admired a gigantic model by Hermann Giesler of the ‘Führer-city’ Linz, which was to have been converted into the European metropolis of art by 1950. Linz was to become Hitler’s residential seat to where he would retire with his female friend after the Final Victory.²⁷ Giesler, one of Hitler’s favourite architects, had been commissioned to proceed with the restructuring work even during the war. Hitler had gazed upon the model ‘entranced’, almost ‘lost in a dream world’ as Giesler recalled many years later, when Hitler had shown it to his guests as a ‘Promised Land’.²⁸

Albert Speer did not share in this rapture. At the latest after the occupation of Upper Silesia by the Soviets in January 1945, when it became clear to him that the war could no longer be won, he had begun thinking about the end of the National Socialist regime.²⁹ In contrast to Hitler and Goebbels, he was not intending to die in ‘the final battle’ or imperil his family, but as a close friend of the Führer, General Buildings Inspector for the Reich capital and above all as Armaments Minister, he could see the threat of a trial for himself looming after the Allied victory. In the second week of February 1945, while Speer, Hitler, Bormann and Eva Braun were admiring Giesler’s plans for Linz, the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were confirming their intention to put German war criminals on trial as had been agreed previously between them on 30 October 1943 in the Moscow Declaration.³⁰ Even if Speer was not aware that he would be on trial for his life, he knew at least that he had to act to protect himself once the new era arrived. Therefore in the spring of 1945, even while forcing through war measures, he put pen to paper building up the defence which he hoped would exonerate him later; that he had only been an unpolitical architect; that he had not carried out Hitler’s ‘Nero order’ to destroy all industrial and supply locations in the Reich, and that he had even broken with the Führer. He also arranged his personal affairs, not least the financial ones, and cared for his family by removing them at the beginning of April from the marital home on the Obersalzberg only a few hundred metres from Hitler’s Berghof, resettling them safely at Kappeln in Schleswig-Holstein.³¹ At the same time he was cautious enough to remain personally in Berlin or its environs so as not to expose himself to an accusation of defeatism.

On 11 April 1945, four days before the Red Army reached the city limits, Speer even organized a final performance of the Berlin Philharmonic.³² In the unheated, poorly lit, mahogany-panelled Beethoven Hall, near the remains of the Old Philharmonic on the Bernbergerstrasse, destroyed in an air raid on 30 January 1944, the concert began significantly with the finale from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. It was followed by Beethoven’s only violin concerto and Bruckner’s 8th Symphony in C-minor, also known as the ‘Apocalyptic’.³³ More pathos and self-elevation were scarcely possible. In his book Erinnerungen, Speer later deprecated the event as a ‘melancholy gesture to the end of the Third Reich’,³⁴ though in reality the ‘star of the entourage’ was enacting the swansong of National Socialism, just as up to the Nuremberg Rally of 1938 he had effectively set the scene for the Nazi ‘Idea of State’ from the unity of the godlike Führer and his community of the people.

Meanwhile, the human structure of the Reich had begun to crumble even though now, as then, orders continued to be issued to defend the ‘Heimatfront’ with steadfastness and fanaticism, people were sacrificed senselessly and ‘traitors’ received death sentences. With the exception of the Propaganda Ministry, all Reich ministries had already been transferred to southern Germany where they practically ceased to function. The head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, who no longer wished to remain in ‘chaotic Berlin’, went off to take the cure at Berchtesgaden on 27 March armed with a certificate from his doctor and never returned.³⁵ Reich Press chief Otto Dietrich, who at Goebbels’ urging had been sent on leave by Hitler at the end of March, also repaired to a hotel at Berchtesgaden. At the beginning of April, Karl Brandt released those co-workers and doctors who had worked under him from their service duties,³⁶ while Himmler and Ribbentrop made clandestine attempts to contact the Western Powers through neutral Sweden in the hope of negotiating acceptable post-war conditions for the Reich and themselves. Other major personalities of the Reich, amongst them Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg, sat close to their luggage should the Russians be reported to be closing in.

The Berghof as a Place of Retreat

The calm before the storm reigned for the time being at Hitler’s Alpine residence. The Berghof was almost deserted. Only Eva Braun’s sisters - Margarete Fegelein, who was expecting a child, and Ilse Fucke-Michels, who had fled from Lower Silesia - lived there with a few staff. Ilse and her husband Walther, a Nazi cultural functionary, had been permitted to leave Breslau after the city was declared a ‘fortress’ by Gauleiter Karl Hanke, Walther’s immediate superior.³⁷ Gerda Bormann and her eight children lived nearby, as did Emmy Göring, who had arrived from Berlin at the end of January. A bare 10 kilometres away at Schönau, on the Königssee in Berchtesgaden province, lived Himmler’s partner Hedwig Potthast with their two children, from where occasional visits were made to her friend Gerda Bormann.³⁸ The Obersalzberg had not yet been attacked by enemy bomber aircraft, although Berchtesgaden came under attack on 20 January, an event which apparently could be watched from the panoramic window of the Great Hall at the Berghof. While observing it, Eva Braun had suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown, as reported to her family post-war by the official of the Reich Security Service appointed at that time to guard her.³⁹ The RAF had already fixed its sights on Hitler’s possible presence there, and in January had flown reconnaissance and photographic survey missions.⁴⁰ The Obersalzberg and Hitler’s house were widely known pre-war from articles in pictorial magazines.⁴¹ They had gained the reputation of being an ‘Alpine fortress’ to which Hitler could withdraw and continue fighting to the last breath. However, no plans existed for a military ‘fortification’ nor was the place sufficiently well-armed for an effective defence.

For its inhabitants, however, the Obersalzberg itself had been considered safe for some years on account of the extensive subterranean bunker installations hewn deep into the rock. Hitler’s architect Gerhaldine ‘Gerdy’ Troost, a veteran party member and confidante, had furnished and fitted out its rooms for over a decade. In common with friends and acquaintances of the Führer from Munich, she had some illusions about how the war would turn out, and was now considering using Hitler’s absence in February to redecorate the Berghof Hall.⁴² The food compounds were well stocked and remained so until the end. The most modern signals technology installed in the bunkers would even enable the war to be continued and directed from Obersalzberg. Since the military leaders were planning to use it as a refuge of last resort, the authorities had been instructed not to accept evacuees or refugees into the Berchtesgaden region. An edict issued by the President of the Upper Bavarian government on 26 March 1945 ruled that the area was prohibited for such persons and not until mid-April did the pressure for shelter become so urgent that the town of Berchtesgaden arranged quarters for refugees. By that time. US forces had already reached Northern Bavaria.⁴³

Meanwhile Hitler’s staff in Berlin were hoping that all of them would be withdrawn to the Obersalzberg sooner rather than later.⁴⁴ Hitler himself rarely left the labyrinthine bunker world with its iron doors beneath the Reich Chancellery garden. While his adjutants occupied a room in the New Reich Chancellery,⁴⁵ he slept below, guarded by detectives of the Reich secret service and attended by his SS-valet Heinz Linge, dietician-cook Constanze Manziarly, his female secretaries and personal physician Theodor Morell. Eva Braun, constantly at his side, wrote to her friend Herta Schneider on 19 April 1945 that she would be spending the rest of her time there: ‘Getting out by car’ from Berlin she considered almost impossible.⁴⁶

That same day, Joseph Goebbels took his seat at the microphones of Reichsender Berlin in the control centre of Greater Germany Radio in the Masuren-Allee: his broadcast could only be heard in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Bremen and Flensburg because Wehrmacht demolition squads had blown up most of the signals network as enemy forces advanced.⁴⁷

In view of the fact that the German people, as he said, had never before had to fight for ‘their bare lives’, he resorted to calm and resigned tones to expound the balance sheet of his years with Hitler and spoke as a man determined to put an end to his life when the time came (thus avoiding his accountability). Instead of confessing his own guilt, he laid the blame on foreigners - the ‘hate and envy-filled world’ - who had interrupted Hitler’s ‘blossoming work’ in September 1939 in order to destroy it, and he called ‘defiantly’ for the struggle to continue: to hoist ‘the old swastika banner’ instead of the ‘white flag of subjection’. He closed his speech with a colloquial expression meaning ‘we shall neither waver nor fall back’.⁴⁸

The next day, 20 April, the most powerful politicians and military men in the collapsing Third Reich hurried to the Reich Chancellery to offer Hitler congratulations on his 56th birthday. National Socialist Germany had now been involved in a war of its own making for five years and eight months, which had been unwinnable at the latest by February 1943 when the 6th Army capitulated at Stalingrad. The war and murderous racial ideology of Nazism had claimed millions of lives, while the murder of the European Jews carried out systematically since 1942 had made any hope of a negotiated peace with Britain and the United States impossible.⁴⁹ Each of the high ranking guests present at the birthday celebration that day must have had a foreboding that escape was not going to be easy.

Heinrich Himmler made the ninety minute journey from the Hohenlychen Clinic sanatorium in Uckermark to the rubble of Berlin. Fearing for his own fate, since February 1945 he had been playing a double game by holding secret conferences with the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, Graf Folke Bernadotte, negotiating the release of 20,000 concentration camp inmates apparently in the hope of organizing a basis for talks with the Western Powers.⁵⁰ Even on 20 April, Hitler was not aware of Himmler’s action. Ribbentrop and Göring, the designated successors to Hitler as Führer and Reich Chancellor, also mulled over the possibility of a partial capitulation in the West.

After the congratulations and a five-hour long situation conference which lasted until 19:00 hrs, most of the higher ranking guests including Göring, Speer and Himmler departed by way of streets still open within the encircled, burning Reich capital.⁵¹ Not until now, when it was clear that the attack on the city centre was imminent, did Hitler take the necessary steps for the members of his personal staff to escape the inferno. The secretaries Christa Schroeder and Johanna Wolf, the photographer Walter Frentz, personal adjutant Albert Bormann, naval adjutant Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer,⁵² Hitler’s personal physician Theodor Morell and many others including shorthand writers and security officials, were flown in the following nights from Berlin to the government Reichenhall-Berchtesgaden airport at Ainring or to Salzburg, and brought from there to the Obersalzberg.⁵³ Exactly who was amongst them, what documents were hurriedly packed and taken and what until then had really gone on around Hitler in the bunker is fragmentary. The written accounts are almost exclusively of post-war origin, when those involved had already kept back as much as they possibly could from Allied interrogators and even years later kept their own counsel and never spoke about events and things they had heard. Accordingly, it is not clear what happened on the Obersalzberg after 21 April when the evacuees met the Eva Braun clan awaiting them: her mother Franziska Braun, her sisters Margarete and Ilse, and her best friend Herta Schneider. As the highest ranking Nazi politician, Hermann Göring had also dug in with his family at his villa on the Obersalzberg and had even had his art collection brought in several special trains from his country-seat at Karinhall to Berchtesgaden, where Otto Dietrich and Hans Lammers also had quarters.⁵⁴

Everybody waited anxiously for news and instructions from Berlin flown out by courier aircraft to Salzburg. Thus, on 22 April, a letter from Eva Braun reached the Berghof in which she advised her friend Herta of her own death and that of Hitler. The end ‘was coming ever closer’, she wrote, and this would probably be ‘the last sign of life’ from her, for the Führer had ‘lost his belief’. At the same time she asked that the others should not be told, but just await the official notification of Hitler’s end.⁵⁵ What lay behind the letter was the total mental breakdown of the Führer in a situation conference that afternoon, when he learned that a counter-attack he had ordered carried out by SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner had not taken place. After an outburst of rage lasting half an hour, he had flopped down in his chair and declared that the war was lost, everybody should clear out of Berlin, but he would stay.⁵⁶ Next day, however, in a letter to her sister Margarete, Eva Braun retracted her report about the impending end and stated that Hitler had ‘a brighter outlook than yesterday about the future’ and that there was still hope but that ‘obviously’ she would on no account ‘allow herself to be taken alive’.⁵⁷

In his villa on the Obersalzberg Hermann Göring doubted meanwhile that the Führer in burning Berlin was in any position to lead the fortunes of the Reich. He did not know the content of Eva Braun’s letter, but through his Chief of Staff, General Karl Koller, he had discovered that Hitler had now given up and intended to kill himself. The information seemed reliable, coming as it did from his deputy, Luftwaffe Generalmajor Eckart Christian, whose wife, Hitler’s secretary Gerda Daranowski, had personally experienced Hitler’s breakdown in the bunker.⁵⁸ Göring therefore sent a signal to Hitler requesting that ‘if he had been deprived of his freedom of action’ he should cede to Göring, his designated successor as Führer and Reich Chancellor, overall leadership of the Reich. Hitler, who had meanwhile managed to pull himself together, was reported to have gone into a rage since he, with Bormann’s help, viewed Göring’s high-handed intervention as ‘treason’. He cabled a reply from his subterranean concrete bunker that there could be no talk of his being ‘deprived of his freedom of action’ and had Göring arrested by the SS.⁵⁹

Only a few hours later, on the morning of 25 April, 359 RAF Lancaster bombers attacked the Obersalzberg and forced its inhabitants to move into the air raid bunkers. The Berghof itself was more or less spared any bombing.⁶⁰ Shortly afterwards, Hitler’s personal adjutant Julius Schaub appeared and on the instructions of the Führer, destroyed the contents of the armoured safes. Christa Schroeder recalled looking on as in silence he set fire on the terrace to letters, files and books.⁶¹ Later it was clear to everybody that Hitler would not be coming back. Besides Göring, who was brought by the SS from their fortress at Mauterndorf, 60 kilometres from Salzburg, others also abandoned the Obersalzberg as US troops approached Berchtesgaden.⁶²

The End in Berlin

On 25 April the Soviet Army completed the encirclement of Berlin and headed for the city centre. During their advance they were met by units of the Wehrmacht, SS, Volkssturm and Hitler Youth, who engaged them in street and house fighting entailing much blood and heavy losses. The Wehrmacht High Command, no longer in the city, broadcast by radio that ‘every inch of ground has to be fought for’. The so-called Battle of Berlin lasted a week while Hitler and the last of his faithful few maintained their hunt for ‘traitors’ in their own ranks.

On 16 April, a week before the SS had taken Göring into custody, Karl Brandt had been arrested by the Chief of Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, competent for the ‘special treatment’ of political enemies of the State, and sentenced to death by a drumhead court-martial headed by Goebbels, although this was never carried out.⁶³ Here again the accusation was high treason. Brandt had described plainly in a report for Hitler the catastrophic situation regarding medical supplies, and apparently at the beginning of April taken it upon himself to more or less abandon the work of the General Commissioner for Hygiene and Health and send the staff on leave.⁶⁴ He was also accused of having sent his wife and son to Thuringia, which had been occupied by US forces since 1 April, in order that his family, and eventually he himself, could surrender to them.⁶⁵ Thinking of one’s own survival and getting to safety were seen by Hitler as a breach of loyalty, his political co-workers being obliged to follow the guideline which he had set out at the beginning of the war: ‘Victory or death - Fight to the Last’. Brandt moreover had not only sworn an oath to the Führer, but was also a member of the SS, duty bound to remain true to the motto ‘My honour is loyalty’.⁶⁶

Hitler’s impression that he had been abandoned and was surrounded by traitors seems to have been heightened by Bormann and Goebbels, the latter of whom had joined him in the bunker with his wife and six children, and not least Eva Braun - cut off from the outside world and with her own death in sight. ‘Why is Brandt not here?’ Hitler had demanded, as Gertraud Junge recalled later. And of Speer: ‘But he was your friend’.⁶⁷ Nicolaus von Below, who had followed Hitler with firm conviction into his last HQ below ground, also shared the impression that the Führer had been betrayed and went even further. After he had left the bunker with a mission given to him by Hitler, and while fleeing from the Allies, he made a handwritten note months later that ‘just as in the Generals’ revolt of 20 July’ Hitler had been betrayed by his generals and by his own people in the party, starting with Gregor Strasser, Ernst Röhm and Rudolf Hess, then later Göring and Himmler. While Hitler had remained loyal to everybody for too long, it was this loyalty which had brought him down, and the others had not repaid his loyalty. Moreover, he had been falsely advised and his orders had not been passed on correctly. Even Speer had not been a reliable advisor but had only buttered him up, while Göring, whom von Below called a ‘phoney’, had only used the old friendship for his own purposes.⁶⁸

Nevertheless, Speer, seen in a such a poor light by von Below, did pay a last visit to Hitler in the bunker if only to salve his conscience, and flew from Rechlin, the central experimental station of the Luftwaffe in Mecklenburg, to the artillery-bombarded city centre of Berlin on 23 April 1945. In his Erinnerungen, the once protected and pampered friend of Hitler touched upon the dramatic circumstances of his last meeting only briefly, remarking tersely that he wanted to ‘see’ the Führer just once more and ‘take his leave of him’.⁶⁹ Five years later, however, during work on his Spandauer Tagebücher in September 1974, under pressure from the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler and editor Joachim Fest, he decided that after years of friendship he had ‘not wanted to simply decamp’. He reported how he met those women once more whose trusted friend he had been, Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels, who were now resolved to die: and he had seen the mortal fear of Bormann who would have liked nothing better than to join his family on the Obersalzberg.⁷⁰

Next he wrote of a highly emotional conversation with Hitler lasting several hours, in which Hitler bit his fingernails and cried, finally asking him, Speer, to stay.⁷¹ How this affair really played out and what was discussed only Speer knew, since he was the only surviving witness. The only thing certain is that after another talk with Hitler, Speer slipped out of the bunker unnoticed, without being accused of ‘treason’. Once back at Rechlin he did not leave at once for the undamaged Hotel Atlantic at Hamburg, where he lived in luxury, but went first to see Himmler at Hohenlychen and later Admiral Dönitz at Flensburg.⁷² For Speer, the post-Hitler era had already begun.

Hermann Fegelein on the other hand, Himmler’s liaison officer at Führer-HQ and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, who three years before had been decorated by Hitler with the Knights Cross and was now attempting to find a way to avoid his own death in the bunker, was located by officers of the Reich Security Service at his Charlottenburg flat, arrested and executed by firing squad on Hitler’s orders on 28 April. Immediately before, the report had been received in the bunker that Himmler had been negotiating with the Western Powers and had offered Great Britain and the United States unconditional surrender. Hitler was convinced that Fegelein must have known of these talks and was therefore a member of the ‘traitorous clique’ around Himmler.⁷³ Whether the report was also received next day respecting the death of Mussolini, shot dead with his paramour Clara Petacci by Communist partisans at Lake Como, the two corpses then being exhibited for the edification of the public hung upside down from a roofing beam at an Esso filling station in Milan, is uncertain.⁷⁴ If they knew, it must have given the occupants of the bunker food for thought. It was feared that Soviet soldiery could penetrate the bunker and so poison ampoules were distributed. Hitler and Eva Braun, who had married during the night, prepared for their suicide pact and the Führer, who did not wish their dead bodies to fall into enemy hands, gave instructions that the corpses were to be consumed by fire.⁷⁵

The report of Hitler’s death reached the Berghof on the evening of 1 May 1945 when Reichssender Berlin announced that the Führer had ‘fallen for Germany at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism’.⁷⁶

Wilhelm Nettersheim, an officer of the Reich Security Service, part of the team who a few days before had been responsible for the personal protection of Hitler in the bunker, had been flown out to Salzburg around 23 April and heard the news from his senior officer, who had gone through the floors of the SS barracks on the Obersalzberg shouting, ‘The Chief is dead. The oath is lifted. Every man for himself’.⁷⁷ The oath of allegiance to the Führer and Nazi regime had now lost its binding force. The Führer-State had ceased to exist, and the circle which had built up around Hitler since the early 1920s was from now on leaderless. For almost twenty-five years the alignment on Hitler’s person had given National Socialism its structure - just as in reverse Hitler needed a ‘court’ in order to be able to play his role as leader.

So how had this all begun? How had that group of persons come together from which later the ‘inner circle’ would emerge? And how did the composition of the circle change on the way to becoming the ‘Berghof Society’?

CHAPTER TWO

FORMING THE CIRCLE

On the evening of 22 September 1920, the Festival Hall at the Munich Hofbräuhaus was filled to overflowing. Several thousand people waited in a thick haze of beer, smoke and cooked food for the beginning of an NSDAP meeting. Only a single speaker was listed: Adolf Hitler. He would address the subject, ‘Peace of Reconciliation or Force’ and above all denounce the ‘infamous peace treaty of Versailles’ and the ‘enslavement of the German people’. When the Austrian entered the hall at eight that evening, he was greeted with stormy applause.

He did not come alone. Two days before, in the Kindl-beer cellar, he was surrounded by a clique of loyal followers; Christian Weber, Hermann Esser, Ernst Röhm, Dietrich Eckart, Rudolf Hess, Emil Maurice, Alfred Rosenberg and Ulrich Graf. They formed a kind of entourage for the most capable propagandist of the small political party, watched over his appearances, protected him and supplied him with important