James P. O’Donnell: The Bunker. The History of the Reich Chancellery Group. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. 399 pp. Ill.
Before the end of World War II, German migration had long been to the East, particularly towards the Southeast (Romania and beyond) or Northeast (East Prussia and beyond). The only modern mass exodus in the reverse direction, to the West, was already well underway when James O’Donnell arrived in Berlin on July 4, 1945. This made him one of the first Americans to enter Hitler’s bunker, though he apparently missed the opportunity to emerge with any significant souvenirs. The various Russians he encountered there were busy looking for Hitler’s corpse, ignoring for the moment all the paperwork lying about. On that day the seed was planted that decades later culminated in this book.
Looking back from the third decade of the 21st century, it may help to remember that O’Donnell was writing while the Wall still stood – and the remains of the Bunker were on the other side of it. The “Mauer” had been put up in 1961 along the demarcation line between the Soviet and the three Western zones of occupation at the war’s end. Established as a temporary measure, these boundaries would end up lasting for decades. “Berlin is a city in suspense; here, 1945 never really ended.” (pg. 4) Indeed, the end would only come in 1989 with German reunification.
The product of years of dedicated research, The Bunker is quite simply the best book on the topic of Hitler’s final days I have read. O’Donnell tells a story – whose outcome is of course known – so well that this Twilight of the Damned becomes gripping in its detail. While it may need correction and updating here and there, it remains invaluable for the simple fact that none of the witnesses he interviewed are still alive. “I am a journalist, not a historian. I ring doorbells; I do not haunt archives. What I was looking for is what I believe most people look for, psychological truth.” (pg. 15) His tale of tracking down surviving witnesses, starting with Sergeant Rochus Misch, is an adventure in itself. While the main plot addresses the question, “What happened in and around the Bunker?” the subplot is almost as interesting: “Here’s how I got the story and found the surviving witnesses.”
Speer
The most forthcoming of them was Albert Speer, “the Bunker Brutus” (Chapter III) whom he interviewed some 17 times in the course of his research. O’Donnell accepts at face value the familiar story of his alleged attempted assassination of Hitler using gas (pg. 69ff), which at most did not get much beyond the reconnaissance stage. While Speer sincerely believed it would be for the best if Hitler were dead, he had no real wish to kill him.
On the other hand he exerted himself to prevent the trees from being chopped down on Unter den Linden in the last days, though these efforts proved equally futile: “A tree, even a blasted tree, is mankind’s green symbol. It has roots in the past and spells a hope for the future… Perhaps we Germans, a forest people, have an ancestral thing about trees, what you Americans call a hang-up. If so, it is certainly not our worst national quality. … Martin Luther … once said that if God told him the end of the world was coming in eight days, he would still go out into his garden and plan an Apfelbäumchen, a little apple tree. – I am ashamed today of many things I did as a minister of the Third Reich. But not of my forlorn, perhaps sentimental, attempt to spare those trees.” (pg. 380)
Reading this book during the dying days of the Trump administration, parallels jump out on every page. Here is Speer’s take on Hitler’s Table Talk: “Hitler was not a stupid man, and from time to time he had shrewd insights, along with a truly remarkable memory for detail. But he was also a born dilettante, with a smattering of knowledge. He was that classic German type known as the Besserwisser, the know-it-all. His mind was cluttered with minor information and misinformation about everything.” (pg. 315)
Speer also provides this insight: “I knew that neither [General Hans] Krebs nor [Field Marshal Albert] Kesselring was a dunderhead. Nor were they nodding military-lackey types, like Field Marshal Keitel. They were playing these ridiculous wargames just to keep the Fuehrer occupied and distracted. Every day gained was a day closer to the end, and the end had to come any day.” (pg. 109) Indeed, most of the Bunker inmates were engaged in an ongoing “flight from realism,” and their final hours were filled with “manic expressions of bitterness, betrayal, self-pity, and despair.” (pp. 125, 131)
Hitler was obsessed with the idea that no one leave without permission, much less try to escape before the bitter end. But exactly when would that be? We now know that it came on April 30. Hitler himself stated shortly before then, “I had sincerely hoped to make it until May fifth. Beyond that date, I have no desire to live.” Why that day in particular? It turns out that was when Napoleon died in 1821. “Another great career that ended in total disappointment, disillusion, betrayal, despair.” (pg. 176) Hitler thought of himself as a visionary surrounded by incompetents, sabotaged by the old guard, betrayed by conspirators and leakers – among them Goering, Himmler and ultimately even Speer.
O’Donnell asks the same question posed by many in Hitler’s entourage, namely: Why did he choose to make his final stand in Berlin, instead of, say, the Bavarian Alps? After all, from 1939 on Hitler spent relatively little time in the capital, so his decision to face the end there was somewhat puzzling. The author is undoubtedly correct in saying the decision was not military but political and theatrical in nature, part of staging the last scene. “He was already planning his own death – as a symbolic act.” He probably reached his decision before his return in mid-January 1945, after the failure of the Battle of the Bulge.
O’Donnell is at his most insightful – and depressing – when it comes to the murder of the Goebbels children, which he interprets as coup de théâtre staged by their mother. “Frustrated Magda was a natural actress, as theater-minded as her husband. And she knew how to forge for herself a bogus martyr’s crown.” By murdering all six of them, she was proving that her devotion to Hitler ran even deeper than Eva Braun’s. “Only by her children could this woman achieve a morbid, Medea-like triumph over her childless, younger blond rival.” (pp. 245, 246)
L’affaire Fegelein
The book’s most serious shortcoming is its neglect of code-breaking in contributing to Hitler’s defeat. Virtually the only reference to espionage comes in a single footnote : “For all of the many books on the triumphs of wartime espionage, I have come to no conclusive evidence that either the western powers or the Soviets knew, for sure, where Hitler was during the last hundred days. They almost certainly did not know about the bunker. This despite the fact that the security measures surrounding the Fuehrer were so cumbersome that they should have been easy for any skilled operator to penetrate.” (pg. 33) This slighting of espionage has consequences for O’Donnell’s interpretation.
Take the case of SS General Hermann Fegelein, briefly Hitler’s brother-in-law (by virtue of his having married Eva Braun’s sister). O’Donnell is convinced that Fegelein was executed in the final hours because Hitler had learned he was the source of alleged leaks from inside the Bunker that explained the failure of all his plans in the final years. O’Donnell buys the theory that Fegelein was not just a coward and would-be deserter, but a security risk because of the pillow talk he engaged in with his girlfriend, a mysterious Hungarian beauty who disappeared while he was being detained and has never been found – or even identified. Once Bormann convinced Hitler that Fegelein’s indiscretions had frustrated all his plans, he insisted on the punishment being execution, not just demotion and being sent to the front.
At the same time, O’Donnell also reports that the story of Fegelein’s girlfriend being the leak was a legend, cleverly planted by Soldatensender Calais. This underground radio station, supposedly run by dissident SS officers (but actually by British counter-intelligence), broadcast black propaganda directed at German army listeners with the intent to demoralize them. Oddly, for someone whose background is Sigint, O’Donnell never considers the possibility that the leaks came not from someone within the Bunker (that was just a cover story), but from deciphered intercepts.
Summary
After boring down into the Bunker, in the Epilogue O’Donnell steps back and casts an eye over the legacy of Hitler, Stalin, and the incipient Cold War: “It had already begun before the hot war was officially ended. It began with a Byzantine mystification over the circumstances of Hitler’s death” – that is, the myths about what really happened. (pg. 363) He summarizes “… the official Soviet line, which persists to this day, that Adolf Hitler chose ‘the coward’s death’ in the sense that he did not shoot himself” but rather had an aide administer the final shot. (pg. 234) This theory, though incorrect, was actually somewhat closer to the truth than the earlier versions peddled by Stalin.
Here O’Donnell shows himself a shrewd judge of character. Stalin, never one to accept alleged facts at face value, initially suspected Hitler had escaped and was being harbored by the Western Allies to unleash a new assault on the U.S.S.R., this time with their backing. “Stalin repeated to President Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, and Admiral Leahy, what he had been whispering to Harry Hopkins earlier in Moscow. Hitler was alive, he stoutly insisted, and was residing in Spain or maybe Argentina.” (pg. 370) Even if he did not believe this, he found it useful to insinuate it and so cause confusion and doubt in the West. Stalin was nothing if not a master mischief-maker. What this meant for the Soviet team that compiled the Hitler Book (NY, 2005 – reviewed elsewhere at this site), based on their debriefing of the Bunker survivors they had captured, was that they were in real danger, because the truth they found might well displease the leader.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, the author of the first essential book on the topic (The Last Days of Hitler, 1947), naturally had access to few of the Bunker eye-witnesses, most of whom were already in Russian hands at that time. O’Donnell, who was able to talk to most of them after their release, confirms Trevor-Roper’s overall findings: “The fact remains that it was a Briton, not a Russian, who gave the world the first authentic no-nonsense version of what had happened in Berlin on Monday, April 30, 1945.” (pg. 372f) What O’Donnell did was to provide much greater depth and detail, based on personal contact. In short, while more documents may come to light and details may need to be corrected, a perspective such as his cannot be replaced or replicated.
Errata
The general who surrendered at Stalingrad is here called “von” Paulus (pg. 327) – apparently an inevitable mistake among most American and British writers, who think all German Field Marshals must be members of the nobility. His full name was simply Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus (1890-1951).
Hitler’s personal protection unit was known officially as Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. Often shortened just to Leibstandarte, this term is not well translated with “lifeguards” instead of “bodyguards.” Lifeguards are Rettungsschwimmer and wear bathing trunks.
© Hamilton Beck
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