'Hitler's Court'
'Hitler's Court'
The Inner Circle of the Third Reich and After
German historian Heike B. Gortmaker’s Eva Braun: Life with Hitler became a bestseller after it was first published in 2010, now available in fifteen languages. Her follow up study is of the wider group of people that Hitler spent time with during his ‘off duty’ hours. Hitler's Court: The Inner Circle of The Third Reich and After was published in English in 2021. A huge range of eyewitness accounts are brought together to paint a picture of Hitler’s personal life and the attitudes of those who were closest to him.
The following excerpt considers the situation in the first half of 1944:
Total War
Before the next great gathering at the Berghof in February 1944, the situation on all fronts had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Italy had capitulated after the Allies landed in the south, Mussolini had been overthrown, and the new government in Rome had declared war on Germany. On the Eastern Front the German plans for fresh offensives had long been abandoned, and in the West the invasion of the continent by Allied troops was at hand. As a result of the intensified bombing raids on German towns and cities, tens ofthousands had been killed, millions were homeless and the great cities of Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin had been destroyed beyond recognition.
On 24 February 1944, Hitler made an appearance before his old comrades in Munich to celebrate the founding of the Nazi Party. Afterwards, he took himself off to his Alpine residence for almost five months. Contrary to his custom, he no longer permitted his speech to be broadcast by radio. The few public statements he had made after the failure of the ‘Blitzkrieg’ against the Soviet Union at the end of 1941 had been weak and nervous, and on this occasion he left it to Hermann Esser to whip up emotions for forty-five minutes before speaking himself. But the aura of the inspired Fiihrer who had been chosen by fate had now given way to the shame of a loser.
Even Goebbels suspected afterwards that some of what Hitler had said, from which the old comrades had preferred to look away, would perhaps have been ‘badly taken’ by a broader public.
Yet his closest political colleagues, and the men and women of the inner circle, persisted to assert Hitler’s invulnerability, even though he was evidently no longer the orator he had once been, and was now increasingly ill and physically frail. He also refused to speak to the people in the ruined cities, contrary to the advice of the Propaganda Minister.
Since they owed him everything - career, social status and wealth - and their very existence was tied to him, none of them thought of simply pushing him aside. The war was lost, but only Hitler’s death could end it. All the more so did they defend their ‘Fuhrer’ and cling to the hope that defeat could be averted at the last moment.
The most powerful organizers of ‘total war’ were Goebbels, Speer, Bormann, Lammers and Himmler, Reich Minister for the Interior since August 1943. They called for a willingness for self-sacrifice, loyalty to the Fuhrer and to act in the sense of the motto ‘All or Nothing’.
They knew just as Hitler did that they were unlikely to live very long if the war were lost. In his weekly editorials, Goebbels consequently invented new slogans for perseverance, even claiming that Germany was prepared for an Anglo-American invasion. Since neither of these belligerents was conducting an ideological war, but were only interested in continuing mastery by the rich, Goebbels declared that landing operations would be ‘enormously reckless’.
Hopes for a ‘final victory’ were also nourished by Albert Speer, who stirred up illusions of the effectiveness of new weapons with Goebbels and Hitler.
Within two years Speer had been able to greatly increase the output of armaments production, mainly by recruiting foreign workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates into forced labour, which in the Reich area amounted to around 13.5 million persons.
At the beginning of 1944 he ordered increasing numbers of factories to close in order to free the German workforce for armaments production. He told Karl Brandt that these were the ‘last resource’ and even asked him to arrange for the sick to be written up as ‘fit for work’.
After the Allied landings in Normandy had opened a second Front in Western Europe, Speer wrote to Bormann on 19 June 1944 requesting the increased release of ‘female students’,by which measure ‘at least 30,000 intelligent, fully capable young women could be won over for the war effort’. As an immediate measure Speer also wanted to have available for employment girls in their final year at school, and asked Bormann for a ‘Fuhrer decision’ if necessary.
Himmler, who worked closely with Speer, pushed ahead at the same time with the deportation of Jews from the occupied territories into extermination camps, including those from Italy, France and Hungary. On several occasions he spoke to Wehrmacht generals about the need for the uncompromising eradication of Jewish women and children, since these threatened to be future ‘hate-filled avengers’ against Aryan children and grandchildren.
Ten months before the war ended, leading figures of the Nazi regime carried on their cruel struggle against these internal and external ‘enemies’, a struggle which had few frontiers.
Meanwhile, on the Obersalzberg, anti-aircraft batteries and an SS smoke company, capable of shrouding the whole terrain at a given alarm, protected the Berghof against air attacks and targeted bombing raids.
Bunkers 40 metres deep, built into the rock, interconnected with corridors still extant today, had service and accommodation rooms ready. Deeper installations for munitions and vehicles were under construction, but had not been completed by the war’s end. One could have lived ‘a peaceful life’ down there almost like before the war, noted von Below when reflecting on morale at the Alpine residence in the spring of 1944.
As in the previous year, Hitler celebrated his birthday there on 20 April and on 3 June arranged for the marriage of Margarete Braun to SS-Gruppenfiihrer Hermann Fegelein.
The bridegroom was a daredevil and notorious womanizer, and counted amongst the most brutal of Himmler’s henchmen. In 1941, during the attack on the Soviet Union, he had been the commander of two SS cavalry regiments which combed through swampy areas in search of so-called ‘partisans’. He and his horsemen shot dead everybody identified as ‘enemy’ or ‘Jewish’. The orders of SS-Reichsfiihrer Himmler, whose protege he was, were ‘sacred’ to him, as Fegelein informed Himmler in a letter in October 1943, shortly before he became his Liaison Officer to the Fuhrer.
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Anxiety for Hitler
Despite all warnings, Hitler transferred his HQ to Wolfsschanze again on 16 July 1944. Maria von Below remembered that on the evening before leaving she had been alone with Anni Brandt and Hitler in the basement of the Berghof. While he was looking at his private art collection, including works by Anselm Feuerbach, Paris Bordone and Lucas Cranach the Elder, he ‘wandered in a dreamlike state from portrait to portrait’, and had kissed their hands over and over again as he did so. Anni Brandt wept.
Four days later, on 20 July 1944, the Chief of Staff of the I Reserve Army, Oberst Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, planted a bomb to explode during a military conference at which Hitler would be present. This was seen by various resistance groups, both civilian and military, as the prelude to a coup d’etat. Hitler and the Nazi leaders were to be eliminated in order to bring the war and the mass killings to an end and so save the Reich at the last hour from defeat by a negotiated peace - or at least to set an example for posterity.
But Hitler survived with only minor injuries and the attempted coup failed. Stauffenberg and a number of his fellow conspirators were executed the same night.
‘What will become of us if Hitler is dead?’ "This question was the first horrified reaction by Christa Schroeder after the bomb exploded, according to the statement of the secretary Traudl Junge.
Eva Braun, who had remained on the Obersalzberg, already knew exactly what she would do in such an event. When she heard of the assassination attempt she rang FHQ Wolfsschanze at once. After speaking to Hitler, she told her female friends, pistol in hand, ‘If I had not been able to speak to him myself, I would no longer exist’.
© Heike B. Gortmaker 2021, 'Hitler's Court: The Inner Circle of The Third Reich and After’. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Swords Publishers Ltd
