The secure conference room deep within the Fura bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin was silent except for the sound of artillery fire rumbling overhead on the afternoon of April 22nd, 1945 as Adolf Hitler sat surrounded by the detailed military situation maps that documented with devastating clarity the complete encirclement of Germany by enemies advancing from all directions.
Soviet forces were within the city of Berlin itself, fighting block by block toward the government district. American and British forces had crossed the Elber River in the west and were halting their advance only because of political agreements, allocating occupation zones rather than because of German resistance.
Soviet forces were occupying Vienna and driving through Austria toward the Alps. Germany’s Italian allies had collapsed with Bonito Mussolini captured and executed by partisans. The yubot campaign in the Atlantic had been abandoned after unsustainable losses. German cities lay in ruins from years of strategic bombing and the industrial capacity that had sustained German military operations was destroyed or captured by advancing Allied forces.
General Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hitler’s Vermarked agitant, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Kitle, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, stood nearby, waiting for Hitler to acknowledge what the maps made undeniable, that Germany possessed no strategic options remaining, that relief of Berlin was impossible, because the armies Hitler kept ordering to break through to the capital existed only on paper and not in reality, that continued resistance would only prolong German suffering without affecting the inevitable outcome and that the choices
facing Germany were reduced to whether to surrender to Western allies, to surrender to Soviet forces, or to fight until complete destruction occurred. Hitler’s response to this strategic reality when it finally came after minutes of silence during which he stared at the maps showing the dispositions of forces that could not save him or the Reich he had created was the famous outburst that witnesses later described as Hitler’s final breakdown.
screaming that he had been betrayed by everyone, that the German people had proven unworthy of him, that the war was lost, that Germany deserved to perish if it could not achieve victory, and that he would remain in Berlin to the end rather than flee or surrender. The recognition that was finally penetrating even Hitler’s delusional consciousness was that the strategic situation he had created through 12 years of diplomatic miscalculation, military aggression, ideological fanaticism, and operational incompetence
had reached its inevitable conclusion in Germany’s total defeat, and that all the strategic options that might once have existed to avoid this outcome negotiated settlement with the Western powers. separate peace with the Soviet Union, defensive strategy that traded space for time, political accommodation that could have split the Allied coalition were foreclosed by decisions Hitler himself had made, and by the comprehensive nature of Germany’s crimes that made any settlement short of unconditional surrender politically impossible for the
Allies. The progression of strategic options available to Germany and their systematic elimination through the war’s course could be traced through the series of decisions and circumstances that had brought Germany from the position of apparent invincibility in 1940 to complete defeat in 1945. After the conquest of France in June 1940, Germany had possessed strategic choices including seeking negotiated settlement with Britain while Germany dominated continental Europe, focusing exclusively on defeating Britain through
combination of submarine warfare and invasion threat or turning eastward against the Soviet Union while Britain remained undefeated in the West. Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, while Britain remained undefeated committed Germany to two-front war that German strategy had sought to avoid since Bismar’s time.
And while initial German successes in 1941 created appearance that the Soviet Union could be defeated quickly, the failure to capture Moscow in December 1941 demonstrated that quick victory was impossible and that Germany faced prolonged war against an enemy whose resources and population exceeded Germany’s capacity to defeat.
The German declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, made immediately after Pearl Harbor in gesture of solidarity with Japan and in belief that American involvement was inevitable and that declaring war would demonstrate German strength represented perhaps the single most catastrophic strategic decision of Hitler’s career because it brought into the European War an industrial power whose productive capacity exceeded Germany’s.
by factors of three, four, or more across virtually every category of military equipment, and whose intervention made Allied material superiority so overwhelming that German tactical and operational excellence could not compensate. General France Halder, serving as chief of the army general staff until his dismissal in September 1942, had compiled intelligence about American industrial capacity and had warned that prolonged war against the United States was strategically unwinable.
But Hitler had dismissed these warnings and had convinced himself that American society was too divided and weak to sustain major war effort. The failure at Stalingrad in winter 1942 to 1943 where the entire German sixth army was destroyed in encirclement that represented Germany’s first major defeat and that demonstrated the Red Army had learned to conduct large-scale operations effectively eliminated the strategic option of defeating the Soviet Union through offensive operations and forced Germany into defensive posture on
the Eastern Front from which it would never recover. Field marshal Eric Fon Manstein’s attempts through 1943 to conduct mobile defense that might have prolonged German resistance were undermined by Hitler’s refusal to authorize tactical withdrawals and by the progressive deterioration of German strength relative to Soviet capabilities.
the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, where German offensive designed to regain initiative failed catastrophically and consumed German armored reserves that could not be replaced, marked the definitive shift of strategic initiative to the Soviet side. The Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the subsequent Italian campaign opened the second front that German strategy had sought to prevent, forcing Germany to defend simultaneously in the east against Soviet offensives and in the south against Allied advances up the Italian peninsula. The Italian surrender
in September 1943 and Italy’s switch to the Allied side eliminated Germany’s principal European ally and required Germany to occupy and defend Italian territory with forces that were desperately needed elsewhere. The strategic option of maintaining defensive perimeter in the east while concentrating forces in the west to defeat Allied invasion was eliminated by the reality that Germany lacked forces sufficient for both missions.
The Normandy invasion in June 1944 represented the opening of the decisive Western Front that would destroy German defensive capabilities in France within 3 months and would bring Allied forces to Germany’s western frontier by September. Field marshal Irwin RML’s attempts to defeat the invasion on the beaches failed because German forces lacked the strength, mobility, and air cover necessary to counterattack Allied beach heads before they were consolidated.
And Field Marshal Ger Fon Runstead’s mobile reserve strategy failed because Allied air superiority made daylight movement of German armor suicidal. The rapid allied exploitation from Normandy across France demonstrated that German forces in the west could no longer conduct effective defensive operations against enemies who possessed overwhelming material superiority and operational competence.
The Soviet operation bation in June to July 1944 launched simultaneously with fighting in Normandy and designed to destroy German army group center in Bellarus represented the Soviet Union’s most devastating offensive of the entire war and eliminated approximately 28 German divisions in encirclements and retreats that exceeded even Stalingrad in their completeness.
The destruction of Army Group Center opened the road to Poland and East Prussia and demonstrated that Soviet forces had achieved operational capabilities that exceeded German defensive capacity. General Gautard Hinrichi and other defensive specialists could delay Soviet advances through tactical skill, but they could not prevent them with the forces available.
The failed July 20th, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler represented the final opportunity for German military leadership to remove Hitler and seek negotiated settlement before Germany’s position became completely hopeless. The conspirators led by Colonel Klaus von Stafenberg understood that Germany was heading toward total defeat and that only Hitler’s removal could create conditions for ending the war on terms short of unconditional surrender.
The failure of the plot and the subsequent executions of hundreds of officers involved in the conspiracy eliminated the internal opposition to Hitler and ensured that Germany would continue fighting under Hitler’s leadership until complete destruction. The Arden offensive in December 1944, Hitler’s final major counteroffensive in the west designed to split Allied armies and recapture Antwerp, represented desperation attempt to achieve strategic reversal through operational success when Germany’s overall strategic
position made such reversal impossible. The offensive consumed Germany’s last operational reserves, the armor, fuel, ammunition, and trained personnel that might have been used for mobile defense in operation that achieved tactical surprise and initial success, but that failed to achieve strategic objectives and that left German forces in the west even weaker than before the offensive began.
Field Marshal Walter Modle, commanding forces in the West after the offensive, understood that German defensive capabilities had been so weakened that Allied spring offensives would break through German positions and penetrate deep into Germany. The Soviet Vistula Odor offensive in January 1945, which carried Soviet forces from the Vistula River in Poland to the Oda River 60 mi from Berlin in less than 3 weeks, demonstrated that German defenses in the east had collapsed beyond any possibility of reconstitution.
General Hines Gdderian serving as acting chief of the army general staff had warned Hitler that Soviet offensive was coming and that German forces lacked the strength to contain it. But Hitler had refused to authorize withdrawals that might have preserved some German forces and had insisted on holding forward positions that were overrun in the Soviet offensive first days.
The crossing of the Rin River by Allied forces in March 1945 achieved at Remigan through capture of an intact bridge and through Patton’s rapid assault crossing at Oppenheim marked the breaching of Germany’s last major natural defensive barrier in the west and opened Germany’s interior to Allied exploitation. Field Marshal Albert Kessler, commanding in the west after Fon Runstead’s final dismissal, reported to Hitler that the Rine barrier could not be restored and that Allied forces would advance into Germany’s heartland with only scattered
resistance possible. The encirclement of the RUR in April 1945, trapping Field Marshall Models Army Group B and over 300,000 German troops in a pocket that was systematically reduced by American forces, eliminated the last significant German force in the West and demonstrated that organized German resistance had collapsed.
Model’s subsequent suicide and his authorization for his forces to surrender rather than continuing futile resistance represented acknowledgment by one of Germany’s most capable commanders that the war was lost and that further fighting served no purpose. The Soviet offensive against Berlin beginning April 16th, 1945 represented the final strategic operation of the European War and made explicit what had been implicit for months that Germany would be conquered, occupied, and divided by the Allied powers and that no German strategic
options remained. Marshall Georgie Zhukov’s first Bellarussian front and Marshall Ivan Kv’s first Ukrainian front totaling over 2 million troops supported by thousands of tanks and artillery pieces attacked the CEO heights and other defensive positions protecting Berlin with overwhelming force that German defenders could contest but not contain.
General Gotard Hinriishi’s attempts to conduct mobile defense were overruled by Hitler’s orders to hold every position, ensuring maximum German casualties for minimal delay of Soviet advances. The situation conference on April 22nd, where Hitler acknowledged that the war was lost, occurred after 5 days of Soviet offensive that had broken through German defenses and penetrated to Berlin’s suburbs after reports that Field Marshal Ferdinand Sherner’s army group center could not relieve Berlin from the south.
that SS Oberg Group and Furer Felix Steiner lacked the forces Hitler imagined for attacks from the north that General Walter Wenk’s 12th army was engaged against American forces and could not reach Berlin and after the reality became undeniable even to Hitler that the phantom armies he had been moving on maps did not exist. The outburst that followed, Hitler’s screaming that he had been betrayed, that the war was lost, that he would stay in Berlin, represented not sudden realization, but final acknowledgment of reality he had been denying for months.
The strategic options that Germany might have pursued at various points in the war to avoid total defeat had been foreclosed by Hitler’s decisions and by the nature of Nazi ideology that made negotiated settlement impossible. A negotiated peace with Britain in 1940 might have been achievable if Hitler had been willing to accept limits on German expansion, but Nazi ideology required continued expansion and conquest.
A decision not to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 would have avoided two-front war, but anti-communism and the quest for living space in the East were central to Nazi ideology and could not be abandoned. A decision not to declare war on the United States in December 1941 would have delayed American military intervention in Europe, but Hitler’s contempt for American power and his solidarity with Japan led him to make the declaration.
A willingness to accept realistic defensive strategy trading space for time might have prolonged German resistance, but Hitler’s refusal to authorize withdrawals and his insistence on holding every position meant that German forces were destroyed in place rather than preserved through tactical retreat. The possibility of splitting the Allied coalition through separate negotiations with either Western powers or the Soviet Union had been considered by some German officials through 1944 and into 1945, but was made impossible by the
Casablanca Conference decision requiring unconditional surrender and by the comprehensive nature of Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust, that made any negotiated settlement political. ically impossible for allied governments to accept. Joseph Gerbles’s propaganda had emphasized divisions between capitalist democracies and communist Soviet Union and had predicted that the alliance would fracture.
But the Tehraran, Yala, and Potam conferences demonstrated allied commitment to coordinated strategy and Germany’s total defeat. The Morganthaw plan and other proposals for harsh treatment of post-war Germany that were discussed among Allied leaders in 1944 to 1945 reflected the determination that Germany would be so thoroughly defeated and occupied that it could never again threaten European peace.
And these plans made clear that no strategic options existed for Germany short of unconditional surrender and Allied occupation. The knowledge that surrender would mean occupation, division, and likely harsh treatment contributed to Hitler’s determination to fight to the end. But this determination only increased German casualties and suffering without affecting the war’s outcome.
Admiral Carl Dunitz, whom Hitler would appoint as his successor in the final hours before Hitler’s suicide, understood that Germany’s strategic situation was hopeless, but attempted after assuming leadership to prolong fighting in the east while negotiating surrender to Western allies, hoping to allow as many German soldiers and civilians as possible to flee westward to surrender to Americans and British rather than to Soviets.
This strategy, while tactically rational given the different treatment prisoners could expect from Western versus Soviet captives, could not change the fundamental reality that Germany would be defeated, occupied, and divided regardless of to whom individual German forces surrendered. Field Marshal Wilhelm Kitle’s signing of Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8th, 1945 at Soviet headquarters in Berlin represented the formal acknowledgment of what had been evident for months, that Germany possessed no strategic options
except complete surrender to the Allied coalition and acceptance of whatever terms the victors chose to impose. The strategic situation that Hitler had created through his decisions and that he had refused to acknowledge until the final days in the bunker had reached its inevitable conclusion in Germany’s total defeat.
occupation by foreign powers, division into zones controlled by victorious allies, and beginning of process that would reshape Germany fundamentally in ways designed to prevent recurrence of the aggression and criminality that characterized the Nazi period. When Hitler realized Germany had no strategic options left, whether this realization came on April 22nd when he acknowledged the war was lost, or whether it came only in the final hours before his suicide on April 30th, he was realizing what military commanders and realistic observers had understood for
months or years, that the strategic decisions he had made since 1933, the wars he had started, the enemies he had made, the crime crimes he had committed and the military campaigns he had conducted had led Germany to a position where total defeat was inevitable and where no strategic alternatives existed except the manner and timing of surrender.
The options that had existed at various points to avoid this outcome. Negotiated settlement in 1940 avoiding war with the Soviet Union. Avoiding war with the United States. accepting defensive strategy that traded space for time, seeking separate peace with either west or east had all been foreclosed by Hitler’s decisions, by Nazi ideology that required continued expansion and conquest, and by the comprehensive nature of Nazi criminality that made Allied political leaders unable to contemplate any settlement short of Germany’s unconditional surrender and
occupation. The final realization in the bunker was simply the acknowledgment of strategic bankruptcy that had been building throughout the war and that Hitler’s refusal to accept reality had prevented him from acknowledging earlier. Yeah.
