rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

GOETTERDAEMMERUNG: THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH997She was very slender, elegant appearance, quite nice legs – one couldsee that – reticent and retiring and a very, very nice person, darkblond. She stood very much in the background and one saw her veryrarely. 1332The daughter of lower-middle-class Bavarian parents, who at first strenuouslyopposed her illicit relation with Hitler, even though he was the dictator,she had been employed in the Munich photograph shop of Heinrich Hoffmann,who introduced her to the Fuehrer. This was a year or two after the suicideof Geli Raubal, the niece of Hitler, for whom, as we have seen, he had the onegreat passionate love of his life. Eva Braun too, it seems, was often driven todespair by her lover, though not for the same reasons as Geli Raubal. Eva,though installed in a suite in Hitler’s Alpine villa, couldn’t endure the long separationswhen he was away and twice tried to kill herself in the early years oftheir friendship. But gradually she accepted her frustrating and ambiguous role– acknowledged neither as wife nor as mistress – content to be sole woman companionof the great man and making the most of their rare moments together.She was now determined to share his end. Like Dr. and Frau Goebbels,she had no desire to live in a Germany without Adolf Hitler. ”It would not befit to live in for a true German,” she told Hanna Reitsch, the famed Germanwoman test pilot, in the shelter just before the end. 1333 Though Eva Braun hada birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all – perhapsthis is one reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women – it isobvious that his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.HITLER’S LAST GREAT DECISIONHitler’s birthday on April 20 passed quietly enough, although, as GeneralKarl Koller, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who was present at the celebration inthe bunker, noted in his diary, it was a day of further catastrophes on the rapidlydisintegrating fronts. All the Old Guard Nazis, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler,Ribbentrop and Bormann, were there, as well as the surviving military leaders,Doenitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs – the last-named the new, and last, Chief ofthe Army General Staff. They offered the Fuehrer birthday congratulations.The warlord was not unusually cast down, despite the situation. He wasstill confident, as he had told his generals three days before, that ”the Russianswere going to suffer their bloodiest defeat of all before Berlin.” The generalsknew better, and at the regular military conference after the birthday partythey urged Hitler to leave Berlin for the south. In a day or two, they explained,the Russians would cut off the last escape corridor in that direction. Hitlerhesitated; he would not say yes or no. Apparently he could not quite face theappalling fact that the capital of the Third Reich was now about to be capturedby the Russians, whose armies, he had announced years before, were as goodas destroyed. As a concession to the generals he consented to setting up twoseparate commands in case the Americans and Russians made their junction onthe Elbe. Admiral Doenitz would head that in the north and perhaps Kesselringthe one in the south – he was not quite sure about the latter appointment.That night there was a general getaway from Berlin. Two of the Fuehrer’smost trusted and veteran aides got out: Himmler and Goering, the latter in