Berlin and Auschwitz

Bored with Auschwitz? Can’t stand any more about trains and gas chambers? I sympathise. It’s hard to think of a more distasteful subject when the surf is up, and the sun is shining, and next weekend’s travel arrangements are being planned. So just for a change let’s get away from the death throes of Hitler’s victims, and watch the death throes of the Nazi leadership instead.

It’s April 1945, and the scene is the hole where they’re hiding—a concrete bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Inside the bunker Goebbels is about to poison his wife and her six children, the “grave-digger of the Germany army” Field Marshal Keitel is ordering half-starved adolescents into battle against Russian tanks, while the deranged dictator, the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler himself, goes more and more round the bend.

Reichsfuehrer S.S. Himmler, the Nazi prince of darkness responsible for millions of hideous deaths, is lying low. A sickly chinless creature peering myopically through thick lenses, a man living in the shadows, a sinister black human fungus touching everything with its fatal toxicity, he wears on his cap the proud symbol of the S.S.—a skull and crossbones. The obese sensualist Hermann Goering is in Bavaria. And the incurable fantasist Albert Speer, a moth drawn back again and again to the flame of his megalomaniac hero, comes and goes.

The atmosphere in the bunker is poisonous. A vicious opportunism prevails, and they’re turning on each another, or fleeing, or secretly trying to do deals to save their skins, or planning suicide. When Goering in Bavaria tries to take over the Nazi leadership, Hitler strips him of all titles and offices, and insinuates that execution could be next. When Hitler finds that Herbert Fegelein, Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, has packed his bags and is preparing to run away, he is seized and unceremoniously marched into the Reich Chancellery garden and shot. On April 22 the Fuehrer discovers that the Russians have entered Berlin: “he began to scream and yell. Now the S.S. was betraying him as well as the army… Eventually he collapsed into an armchair, drained and weeping.”

* * *

As the situation worsened Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge was shocked to stumble upon scenes of moral disintegration in the bunker’s underground hospital:

An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.

Antony Beevor, whose Berlin: the Downfall of 1945 I am freely drawing on here, adds that SS officers “had been tempting hungry and impressionable young women back to the Reich Chancellery with promises of parties and inexhaustible supplies of food and champagne. It was the apocalypse of totalitarian corruption, with the concrete submarine of the Reich Chancellery underworld providing an Existentialist theatre set for hell.” (344)

* * *

As the Wehrmacht retreated before the Soviet army through the forests near Teupitz, south of Berlin, it was hell there too. The Russian writer Konstantin Simonov saw a sight he would never forget:

“In that place there was thick forest on both sides of the autobahn, half coniferous, half deciduous, already becoming green. A cutting, not wide, led through the forest on both sides of the motorway, and one wasn’t able to see its ends… It was packed with a terrible jam of cars, trucks, tanks, armoured cars, vehicles, ambulances, all of them not only pushed closely against one another, but literally jammed on top of each other, overturned, standing on end, upset, breaking the surrounding trees.”

“In this mess of metal, wood and something unidentifiable was a dreadful mash of tortured human bodies. And all this went along the cutting into infinity. In the surrounding forest—corpses, corpses, corpses, mixed with, I suddenly noted, ones who were still alive. There were wounded people lying on greatcoats and blankets, sitting leaning against trees, some in bandages, others still without any.”

“Some even lay on the edge of the autobahn, which was half-blocked by debris and covered in oil, petrol, and blood. One of the officers explained that this group had been caught by the massed fire of several regiments of heavy artillery and katyushas.”

* * *

Back in the bunker cyanide is tested on Hitler’s dog. In Italy Mussolini’s cadaver has been displayed hanging upside down, and Hitler fears that could happen to him. He shoots himself, Eva Braun takes poison, and both corpses are carried outside and burnt. Next day Magda Goebbels supervises the killing of her children in their beds. They first get tranquillizing morphine injections from SS doctor Kunz, and then have ampoules of poison forced into their mouths and crushed by Dr Stumpfegger.

There is evidence that the eldest girl, Helga, may have struggled to resist her murderers. Her face was later found to be badly bruised. Goebbels and his wife then take cyanide and are also shot “as a precautionary coup de grace” by a third party, Goebbels’ adjutant Gunther Schwaegermann, who then throws petrol over them and lights the funeral pyre.

It’s a free country. If you’d rather not think about Auschwitz that’s your privilege. It’s hard to say whether the showing of the NPD in Dresden was a straw in the wind, the tip of an iceberg, or something of no significance at all. But simply for our own self-preservation, we who enjoy the benefits of western civilization should now and then contemplate its deepest stain, the Nazi era, and do what we can to ensure it is never repeated.

February 2005