Alexander Stahlberg’s last reflections on the course of the Second World War, as seen from the level of high command on the German side, are taken from the moment of Nazi Germany’s defeat. Most of Germany has been occupied, by the British and Americans from the west, by the Russians from the east. The Battle of Berlin is raging in the ruins of the city, as the Red Army fights street by street against its last-ditch defenders towards the Reich Chancellery. The senior officers and officials of the regime are in flight to Schleswig-Holstein, where the provisional government of Grand Admiral Donitz, named second and last Führer of the Third Reich by Hitler, would find a brief refuge. Any German who could was seeking to surrender to the Western Allies or to find refuge in their zones of occupation, rightfully fearful of the vengeance the Red Army would take for the Nazi rape of its homeland. The last music Stahlberg hears on the German radio is Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, played at Hitler’s order to mourn the surrender of Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad twenty-two months earlier. It is a fitting epilogue to his regime of nihilism and to his own death by suicide in the Reich Chancellery bunker.
April 1945
In retrospect, events in Germany at that time seem unreal.
The British and American Armies have long since crossed the Rhine and penetrated deep into our country. In many places our troops are no longer offering any resistance. Elsewhere German units are still fighting the Allies with self-sacrificial devotion. It is almost incomprehensible that many German divisions in the West should be resisting as fiercely as others in the East. Again and again, vital bridges and strategically important viaducts are being blown up in the West to delay the Allies. Surely the most important thing now is who reaches Berlin first? After all, what matters now is the future of Germany after Hitler.
While the Western Allies have already reached the Weser, an entire Army Group under the command of Field Marshal Model has been surrounded in the Ruhr. On 10April, in Achterberg, when we hear that the American advance guard has already reached Hanover, Field Marshal von Manstein decides to leave Achterberg. He has no desire to present himself to the enemy troops as a ‘prize’ until an armistice has been declared.
Our first goal is a village near Bad Oldesloe in Holstein. The drive there in our two cars on 11 April is arduous. On the roads we are met by horse-drawn refugee columns from Pomerania and from East Prussia. The Manstein family, its escort and the luggage are distributed between two cars. I drive the BMW. As I make way for the refugees, I am often forced to take the ‘summer road’. Many of the draught horses have lost nails from their shoes and consequently several punctures follow, one after the other. With rolled-up sleeves, I change wheels and mend inner tubes.
On 13 April, in Oldesloe, we hear of the death of the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, but none of us feels that his death will alter the course of events in Germany now. On 16 April, we hear that the Soviets too have now launched their assault across the Oder. On 18 April, Army Group Model capitulates in the Ruhr pocket. Model, of whom Hitler had said to Manstein that he ‘whizzes all over the place with the troops’, which was more valuable than simply continuing to ‘operate’, shoots himself. But nowhere do we hear that anyone in Berlin is considering that the time may perhaps be ripe to put a stop to the fighting and the senseless bloodletting.
The Field Marshal asks me to find out by telephone where the Army Group headquarters responsible for North Germany is now quartered. On the morning of 19 April, he drives with me to Hamburg. In the Wohltorf district, near Bergedorf, we find the Headquarters of Army Group North-West, in a big old house. For a few days now it has been commanded by Field Marshal Busch, the same Busch who broke down in front of Breitenbuch and me last summer when I had to announce the destruction of his Army Group Centre. He has since been rehabilitated by Hitler, who has no doubt been told with what loyalty and devotion Busch had spoken by Schmundt’s coffin in the Tannenberg Monument. [Schmundt was Hitler’s adjutant, killed in the 20 July assassination attempt at Führer HQ; the Tannenberg Monument contained Field Marshal Hindenburg’s grave.] His new job is the equivalent of being appointed a gravedigger.
Two Field Marshals now stand before the situation map. Their opponent here is the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. It is clear to see that Montgomery will not make a frontal attack on Hamburg, but will circle to the south of the city, cross the Elbe and probably work towards the Baltic near Lübeck. For Manstein, this means that he will have to move from Oldesloe yet again, to avoid being taken prisoner before the end of the fighting.
The two Field Marshals discuss the hopeless situation of the Army Group. Suddenly I hear Busch asking if the Kiel Canal on either side of Rendsburg should be prepared to defend the Southern Front. It takes an effort of will to listen.
I take the opportunity for a private word with Busch’s new ADC, whom I know personally. He has taken the position with Busch that Eberhard Breitenbuch used to occupy. I ask him if he can advise me where to find a new refuge for the Manstein family further to the North, in the province of Schleswig-Holstein. He does not need to think for long: the widow of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, murdered in Bohemia [the brutal Deputy-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and, earlier, architect of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, had been assassinated in Prague in 1942 by Czech nationals parachuted in from Britain], lives on the Baltic island of Fehmarn, in a very beautiful and sufficiently large house with guest rooms, and the lady of the house is charming. One could certainly stay with her ‘until the military crisis is over’. I could mention his name to Frau Heydrich. My response could only be silence.
Suddenly the door opens and the Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Albert Speer, stands before us. He has come from Berlin, he says, and spoken to the Führer ‘for the last time’. We sit down and listen tensely.
He had flown to Hamburg to persuade the Gauleiter [provincial governor] Karl Kaufmann there, against the Führer’s orders, not to have the bridges across the Elbe blown up. The two Field Marshals listen, dumbfounded. ‘Against the Führer’s orders... ?’ Speer confirms : ‘Yes, against!’ The Field Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the Army Group — the only person with military responsibility here — hears the news after the Gauleiter of Hamburg! So chaos has already spread through the chain of command.
Speer describes his last visit to the underground bunker at the Berlin Reich Chancellery: in the office a trembling, wasted wreck of a sick man sits under the portrait of Frederick the Great, scarcely listening to his visitor. He is clutching the bundle of writing and drawing implements from the desk tray in front of him in one hand and driving them incessantly into the table top, until the points are broken and the table top deeply punctured. Beside him lies an issue of the VölkischerBeobachter, now only a few pages long. It lies open at the final part in the series of ‘Personal reports by Frederick the Great from the Seven Years War’. Only one book, a volume of Thomas Carlyle’s The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, lies near by.
Speer speaks of the two army leaders on whom the Führer’s last hopes rest: Generals Wenck and Busse.
We sit up: Wenck? — Busse? — Is it pure chance that two General Staff Officers from the school of Field Marshal Manstein should be the ones to rise to the rank of Army Commanders-in-Chief at the eleventh hour?
Wenck, on whom all eyes turned in November 1942, when he succeeded by a trick in ‘capturing’ two Romanian armies fleeing westward from the Stalingrad area, a coup that had brought him promotion from Colonel on the General Staff to Major-General. And Busse, Manstein’s former Ia [First General Staff Officer] and later — in preference to Tresckow — Manstein’s last Chief of Staff: had not General Fellgiebel and our Army Group Communications Chief Major-General Ernst Mueller warned me in 1943 to be careful in Busse’s presence, because he telephoned his brother-in-law, General Burgdorf, at the Führer’s headquarters almost every night? Now Burgdorf was Hitler’s Chief Adjutant and Busse had been chosen to defend his home town of Frankfurt-on-Oder as Commander-in-Chief of the Ninth Army, and when that was lost, the capital itself.
Speer speaks of the situation around Berlin: they are now expecting the city to be encircled in a matter of days. He asks the Field Marshals if they think it possible that Wenck could push through from the south-west as far as the capital. No answer.
Speer reports frankly that the Führer has ordered him to ensure that all major factories in the German Reich are destroyed before the arrival of the enemy. Under these auspices, he has been travelling from factory to factory for weeks now, urging the directors not to carry out the order. The two Field Marshals remain silent, shaking their heads.
Our programme for this 19 April is not yet finished. Field Marshal von Manstein takes me on one side and asks if I know of a first-class restaurant in Hamburg where one could at least have one more good lunch. I suggest the ‘Ehmke’ in Gänsemarkt, which looked to me as if it was still open when I drove by. Ehmke also had elegant private rooms on the first floor. He asks me to reserve a private room and to let Frau von Manstein know.
In fact the Ehmke restaurant is still standing and the food is even now like an excursion into ‘the good old days’. On that April day, too, Ehmke justifies its fine reputation. While we are celebrating the gastronomic arts of old, we speak freely, as soon as the frock-coated waiters have left us, about Albert Speer and his unexpected disclosures. Scarcely anyone had ever before spoken so freely and openly before two of Hitler’s Field Marshals at once.
We are unaware that at this moment Speer is already on his way back to Berlin — after all, he has only just told us that he has been with Hitler ‘for the last time’. He certainly had the courage to speak up unequivocally against Hitler in front of two Field Marshals, but he had not dared to say that he wanted to revisit Hider that very day, to ‘see him once again’. So Albert Speer is not yet free of his lord and master, who sits in his underground bunker, surrounding himself to the last with ‘Frederick the Great’, revealing that the tyrant has never understood, but has only ‘used’ and hence abused, Prussia and her great king.
From Oldesloe I drive northward on my own at random to find new accommodation. My old friend Irmgard Georgius, Germany’s best woman equestrian competitor in the 1930s, gives me some tips in Waldhof. Most of the estates are already overcrowded with refugees from the Eastern provinces and in one of the manor houses the door is shut in my face. ‘And now a Field Marshal on top of everything! Wouldn’t think of it!’
On the roadside two naval officers wave to me, asking to hitch a ride. One, a U-boat captain, is wearing the Knight’s Cross. They want to go to Plön and I am happy to have someone to talk to, though I find it difficult to believe that a U-boat captain, who can steer his submarine through minefields to the east coast of America, is incapable of finding his way on the map through Schleswig-Holstein. However, the other proves to be an extremely useful aerial observer, as British fighter aircraft sweep along the roads, hunting for prey.
For three days I drive from place to place without finding anything suitable. In the twelve years of the ‘Third Reich’ one has developed a nose for whether the house one is entering is a ‘Nazi house’. I do not wish to spend the end of the war in a house with a National Socialist bias.
And then, after all, I find the goal of my desires. In Weissenhaus, on the Baltic, not far from Oldenburg, I meet the owner and his wife: Graf [Count] Clemens Platen invites me in at once for tea, so that we can talk things over together.
We walk through the lovely, big house, its ground floor stuffed to bursting with furniture and cases: the stocks of the Kiel Landes-museum. Almost buried under cases of paintings is a black concert grand. I open the lid over the keys, pick up a lovingly worked piece of embroidery and read the music of a theme from Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. The Platens explain: Humperdinck composed that wonderful opera on this piano. Weissenhaus will be our quarters when the end of the war comes. On 30 April we move in.
In the attics of the Weissenhaus manor four carpets are hung up for me as a substitute for four walls. A mattress, a box or two — and I have a comfortable ‘room’.
The next day — it is 1 May 1945 — I switch on my radio to the first notes of the second movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony on the Hamburg radio. ‘Very solemnly and very slowly’ the tubas and violas join in. I think I know the recording: Furtwängler with the Berlin Philharmonic. It does me good to be listening to this symphony again after all this time.
Suddenly I am seized with suspicion. Why are they broadcasting Bruckner’s Seventh today? When the movement ends I know the answer: in an emotional voice the speaker announces:
‘It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, died this afternoon for Germany at his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism. On 30 April the Führer named Grand Admiral Dönitz as his successor.’