The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

As some Nazi paladins lost face, others profited from the adversity. Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, could exploit more than ever his constant proximity to Hitler, controlling the portals to the Dictator’s presence and serving as his master’s mouthpiece. Bormann, born in 1900, an unpretentious figure in his ill-fitting Party uniform, short, squat, bull-necked, with thin, receding hair, was hated and feared in equal measure by leading Nazis, well aware of his ruthlessness, capacity for intrigue, and his opportunities to influence Hitler. He had long been Hitler’s indispensable man behind the scenes, for years managing his private financial affairs and in the mid-1930s organizing the building of the Berghof, the Dictator’s palatial retreat on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. His absolute trustworthiness in Hitler’s eyes was his prize asset. Bormann had risen almost unnoticed in the Party’s central office in Munich, where, through tireless energy and efficiency, along with the necessary ‘elbow power’, he attained mastery of the Party’s bureaucratic apparatus. He was, however, no simple functionary. He had been involved in anti-Semitic and paramilitary organizations in the 1920s before he found his way to Hitler, and had served time in prison for his involvement in a political murder. His ideological fanaticism never wavered to the end.

In 1929 he had married Gerda, herself a fanatical Nazi and daughter of the head of the Party Court (which adjudicated on matters of Party discipline), Walter Buch. Together they had ten children (nine of whom survived, all but one of them after the war becoming Catholics, one even a priest, despite—or because of—their parents’ radical detestation of the Church). The Bormanns appear, from their surviving letters, to have been devoted to each other. Yet the marriage was far from conventional. Gerda positively welcomed Martin’s news in January 1944 that he had succeeded in seducing the actress Manja Behrens, hoped that she would bear him a child, and even went so far as to draft a proposed law to legalize bigamy.

By this time Bormann was one of the most powerful men in Germany. In the immediate aftermath of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941, he had been the obvious choice to take over the running of the Party and, once Hitler made him head of the Party Chancellery, rapidly consolidated his control over its bureaucracy. His role as Hitler’s trusted factotum finally gained its formal recognition when in April 1943 he was granted the title of ‘Secretary of the Führer’. As Germany’s fortunes declined, Bormann used his command of the Party’s central administration, backed by the fanatical Robert Ley, the Reich Organization Leader (and head of the German Labour Front), to reinvigorate the Party and extend its reach, underpinning his second source of power and making him a figure of crucial importance.⁴

There were limits, nevertheless, to Bormann’s power. He could not prevent other leading figures in the regime having direct access to Hitler and exerting their own influence on him. And even within the Party organization, he faced constraints. He was not wholly successful in extending his power over the forty or so regional Party bosses, the Gauleiter. Though nominally his subordinates, some of the Gauleiter, trusted ‘old fighters’ who had proved their worth since the early days of the Party, in many cases had a direct line to Hitler which limited Bormann’s control. One Gauleiter who epitomized the difficulties in imposing any centralized control—or any control at all, for that matter, even from the Wehrmacht authorities in his region—was Erich Koch, who ran his domain in East Prussia as if it were his personal fiefdom.⁵

Like most other Gauleiter, Koch had been appointed a Reich Defence Commissar, giving him extensive powers in the organization of civil defence and the possibility, therefore, which he readily exploited, to interfere in non-Party matters in his province. Already in mid-July 1944 Koch was using his direct access to Hitler to block a proposal by Goebbels, which the Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin had negotiated with the railway authorities, to evacuate from the endangered East Prussia around 170,000 Berliners who had taken refuge there from the bombing in the capital city. Koch gained Hitler’s approval to restrict the evacuation to 55,000 women and children from a small number of districts most threatened by Soviet air raids. It was the first of a number of interventions by Koch to prevent evacuation from his region, causing administrative confusion and, more importantly, with fateful consequences for East Prussians.⁶