p In the spring of 1945 the war started by Hitler was sweeping into Germany proper. The German imperialists, who had dreaded a war on two fronts, were between the hammer and the anvil. British and US troops were some 400 km away from Berlin. Soviet troops were nearer still—a mere 60 km away. Bombs showered on Berlin and obviously the city would be stormed at any moment.

p The political and military leaders of the Reich installed themselves deep underground in the subterranean vaults of the Imperial Chancellory. The imminence of retribution drove 220 them deep below the surface of the earth. Hitler was there, and Bormann, and Goebbels with his family. The group of fenerals was headed by Hitler’s relative, SS general Hermann egelein and Air General Robert Ritter von Greim. The Fuhrer’s entourage was fairly numerous, comprising his mistress Eva Braun, his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, his physician Theodor Morell, who plied him with stimulants, his cook, his secretary and stenographer, his aide-de-camps Otto Giinsche and Julius Schaub, the chief of his guard, his butler Heinz Linge, and Erich Kempka, head of the Fuhrer’s garage.  [220•1  In addition, there were bodyguards, and messengers who hurried back and forth with countless orders and instructions, frantically issued to protract the resistance.

p Germany’s true masters, the monopoly tycoons, had long since abandoned Berlin. Some went to Switzerland, others to Sweden, others still across the ocean, while some took up temporary residence in remote country retreats. Just one thing troubled them: what part of Germany would fall to the Soviet troops. They were least bothered by possible complications with British and US occupation authorities, certain that their colleagues in the United States and Britain would give them a helping hand.

p The atmosphere in the underground Chancellory was electrified by the tense waiting for the inevitable end. Its denizens appeared less and less frequently in the light of day. The evil spirits that they were, they dictated their will to the remnants of the German army and the civilian population from their subterranean hide-out. The ritual laid down by Hitler was pedantically observed. Each word he uttered was taken down conscientiously by his stenographer. And he utterec} many words: he had become loquacious, irrepressibly talkative, and all he said went down in the records. Bormann saw to it, for it was part of his duties to assure that the maniac Fiihrer’s heritage should be recorded for posterity.

p Hitler’s thinking in the last weeks of his life was totally unimaginative: he continued to prattle about his last trump — a possible falling out among the members of the anti-fascist coalition. Here, for example, is what he said to his entourage on February 6, 1945:

p "After fifty-four months of titanic struggle, waged on both sides with unexampled fury, the German people now finds 221 itself alone, facing a coalition sworn to destroy it.... The situation is serious, very serious. It seems even to be desperate. We might very easily give way to fatigue, to exhaustion, we might allow ourselves to become discouraged to an extent that blinds us to the weaknesses of our enemies. But these weaknesses are there, for all that. We have facing us an incongruous coalition, drawn together by hatred and jealousy and cemented by the panic with which the National Socialist doctrine fills this Jew-ridden motley.... While we keep fighting, there is always hope, and that, surely, should be enough to forbid us to think that all is already lost."  [221•1 

p This is an illustration of the foul methods of fascist propaganda that was straining to persuade all Germans that the anti-fascist coalition would wipe them out physically. To impute its own plans of genocide on others was a typical fascist dodge. And the neo-nazis in present-day West Germany are employing it just as keenly. .

p According to Tippelskirch, Hitler "thought he had to hold out only until matters would reach the inevitable split among his enemies".  [221•2  Even after the Soviet assault on Berlin began and the distance between the fighting lines and the Imperial Chancellory shrank to mere dozens of yards, Hitler kept on hoping that an armed conflict would flare up for the possession of the German capital between the Soviet Union and its Western allies.

p And he did everything within his means to encourage a breach.

The German Government’s refusal to surrender, even when Berlin was being stormed, caused immense and senseless losses. And this lunatic resistance was objectively encouraged by the governments of the United States and Britain, whose two-faced policies were for the nazis a source of hope, prompting them to hang on to the last.