The Last Days of Hitler/to the Bitter End

IN the late summer of 1945, Major H. R. Trevor-Roper of the British Intelligence, onetime Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, was directed by his chief to uncover, “step by step,” the events of Hitler’s last few weeks of life. Thus began one of the most macabre and complicated episodes in detective work, historical scholarship, psychological research, and archaeological inquiry the war produced.The Last Days of Hitler tells the story of what Major Trevor-Roper discovered.

Many strange books have emerged from the recent European war. None is stranger or more horribly fascinating than this footnote to history. Here indeed is one of those “journeys to the end of night.”in which reality eclipses completely such efforts as Celine’s fictional imaginings of pre-war days. The British Intelligence officer peels off, one by one, the bombastic vestures of deception with which both the Nazi Party and its Führer clothed themselves. Here they stand naked, amid their intrigues, personal feuds, and almost incredible obsessions, displayed for what they Were by the sordid, horrible sequence of their own activities during the final weeks of the war.

The Last Days of Hitler depicts a disintegration of character and personality which is nightmarish. It “sets the seal on Nuremberg,”as Marshal Tedder remarks quite truly in his preface; but it does more than that. From the initial chapter, in which “Hitler and His Court” are portrayed with keen discrimination on the eve of the defeat, to the final drama in the Bunker with its repetitious handshakings and farewells, its frenetic comings and departures, its suicides and its epilogue of the ineffable Himmler — the story moves as though through a Dantesque underworld presided over by the Furies. Dispassionate, pieced together from an amazing wealth of evidence and carefully evaluated testimonials, the book has an importance far beyond its immediate purpose — which is to narrate events and display characters of historical significance as they sank, engulfed in the debacle of Europe which they themselves engineered and which Hitler himself willed with a madman’s determination. Only the qualms of Speer, the Party War Engineer, thwarted that insane wish-fulfillment from becoming more devasting than it was.

Major Trevor-Roper has traced in these pages the world’s most terrifying example of the lengths to which nationalistic megalomania can go when led by the obsessed, abetted by the craven, and exploited by the greedy and opportunistic.

In his story of the opposition within Germany, between the winter of 1933 and the disastrous plot of July 20, 1944, Hans Gisevius presents ail invaluable supplement to the investigations of Trevor-Roper. To the Bitter End is the work of an insider whose tenacity of purpose in maneuvering against the Nazi regime was abetted by the fact that he occupied successive posts giving him entree to the innermost police circles of the Third Reich. In these pages he bares the evolution of the Nazi system of police terror, from the fantastic plot whose denouement was the burning of the Reichstag to the abortive putsch attempted by Colonel von Stauffenberg. The book is less a history of the Third Reich than a chronicle its conspiratorial side.

From the abundant testimony presented by Gisevius (himself the mainspring of one group of resisters) it is clear that a German anti-Nazi underground worthy of mention existed and that thousands of Germans paid for it with their lives. Yet it is equally evident that this underground bore little resemblance to the clandestine organizations that fought the Nazis in such occupied countries as France, Belgium, and Holland. The Resistance in these latter countries grew steadily in coherence and unity. The German underground moved in the opposite direction.

The dispersal of focus is traced with consummate skill from the very first chapters of Gisevius’s book — in which he recounts how he managed, with a few skeptical friends, to unravel the truth about the Goebbels-Göring plot to burn the Reichstag — through successive phases of domestic intrigue, to the amazing fumbles which thwarted the climactic plot against Hitler’s life in the summer of 1944.

The author spares no one, not even himself. His account has the inexorable march of a Greek tragedy: the drive of the Nazis for control over the political machinery of state; the campaign to “totalize” the people; the crisis resulting in the notorious blood purge; Himmler’s campaign to take over control of the Army (which culminated in the Fritsch crisis); the grand final maneuvering of the Nazi domestic policy by which Hitler cleared the path to the war he sought.

In each phase of the tragedy, various underground cliques sought, with uniform unsuccess, to set up roadblocks. Their most formidable opponent on the direct issue of war itself, this book makes clear, was not the Nazis, but the policy of the British under Chamberlain. Munich smashed the first real conspiracy of the German General Staff to rid Germany of the Nazis on the “peace issue.” At the eleventh hour, it provided Hitler with a success story which bowled the Army over completely. Thereafter, the time-serving attitude of the professional soldiers, together with their utter political ineptitude, brought frustration to every endeavor of the anti-Nazi underground.

There are strange omissions in Gisevius’s account. He makes only the scantiest passing reference to the role played by the German industrialists and financiers in the development of Hitler’s plans. This is the more astonishing because Hjalmar Schacht is presented as one of the leading supporters of Hitler in To the bitter End. In view of the trials MOW in progress at Nuremberg, at which I. G. Farben’s highest officials are under criminal prosecution for conspiracy and crimes against humanity, it would seem that the author is afflicted with a blind spot.

JAMES H. POWERS