Chapter 97 Chapter Ninety-Six

Tragic ending (from Armin von Ren's "Military Leader Hitler") A Moment of Joy When the news of Roosevelt's death came on April 12, I was visiting the defense of Berlin, mainly to investigate for Speer how far preparations had been made for the sabotage plan.Once back in the bunker, I heard cheers echoing down the long staircase.I went in, and there was a party going on: champagne, cakes, dancing, music, jubilant toasts, you name it.Amid the jubilation and repeated toasts, Hitler sat there, smiling happily and looking at everyone, clasping his left hand tightly with his right hand to keep it from trembling.Goebbels, condescending to me, came to meet me, staggering along, waving a newspaper. "Look how happy everyone is here tonight, my good general! At last the tide has turned. The mad dog is dead."

It was for this that the banquet was held.Now the change that Germany expected has arrived, the "Miracle of the Brandenburg Royal Family" is being repeated, and the sudden death of the Russian Empress saved Frederick the Great from danger. All this happened again in 1945.The words of the astrologer really came true.They had long predicted that in mid-April, bad luck would turn into good luck, and that no one would be killed. The Russian army was gathering along the Oder River under Zhukov's command, and there was a place only thirty-five miles from the bunker; Eisenhower's troops went to The Elbe is advancing; the Anglo-American armies of the South are breaking through our Italian defenses; another Russian army under Konev is fighting hard in the Balkans, trying to reach Berlin faster than Zhukov and the American army; It was raining down all over Berlin.my country's military production has actually come to a standstill.Our troops everywhere are running out of gasoline and ammunition.Millions of refugees from east and west blocked the roads and prevented the movement of armed forces.The SS often ordered trains to be tuned here or there, which hindered rail traffic.However, what does all of the above matter in an environment like the concrete cavern under the Chancellery?It has become a land of dreams and illusions.Any excuses that could be found to comfort oneself were boasted as a "big turnaround," though none of them brought as much joy as the news of Roosevelt's death.

The next day, the Red Army occupied Vienna, which somewhat discouraged everyone.However, on that very day, when Speer and I were sitting there discussing the serious issue of destroying Berlin, the Nazi Labor Front leader Ley arrived and excitedly announced that some unknown genius in Germany had just invented "Death Ray"!It's as easy and cheap to make as a machine gun.Ley had seen the plans himself, and several eminent scientists had tested the weapon for him.If only Speer could put this weapon into mass production immediately, it would bring about a big change in the tide of battle.Speer put on a serious look and appointed Ley on the spot as the "Director of the Death Ray Manufacturing Bureau", with full power to expropriate all German industries to manufacture this magical weapon in the name of Speer.Ley walked out, gibbering with joy, and we went back to the vexing problem.

These "wonder weapons" and "secret weapons" of sheer nonsense have been embarrassing Speer, and I have been embarrassing me since I became his liaison officer with OKW.Some generals, factory directors, dignitaries in the political circles, and ordinary people would come up to me, nudge me, and wink at me. "Isn't it time for the Führer to use his secret weapon? When will he use it?" My wife, the daughter of a general and a true soldier's wife, also asked me this question with concern.Until now, Goebbels has been promoting this vicious fantasy by means of "official revelations" and side channels, just to keep people bleeding and the Nazi cancer to continue to spread.

The party took control of everything by 1945, that is, the cancer had spread to all parts of the motherland.The bastards and rascals in the party like Ley have taken over all the government and military establishments.The Waffen-SS had become a rival army, taking in the best recruits along with their equipment.In January, Hitler even sent Heinrich.Himmler went to command the Army Group on the Vistula River to meet the frontal offensive launched by the enemy Red Army after breaking through the Northern Front.The result, of course, was a fiasco.Himmler's method of directing operations was to shoot generals who could not hold their positions in desperate circumstances as he ordered.Later, he even threatened to execute the family members of those generals together.In the area under his jurisdiction, the dead bodies of German soldiers were hung from bridges and villages everywhere, and they were marked with the words "coward" or "deserter".

Needless to say, all these National Socialist "tricks" can only further weaken our army's depleted combat effectiveness.The Russians quickly broke through Himmler's lines and reached the Baltic, cutting off most of the German forces in East Prussia and Latvia.Thanks to Doenitz's ingenious sea evacuation, a forgotten rescue operation more difficult than Dunkirk, those troops and many civilians were saved.Later, it was discovered that Himmler was secretly conducting peaceful explorations alone through Sweden at that time, and at the same time he was arranging a negotiation in a whimsical way, preparing to release the Jews who survived the catastrophe in exchange for a huge ransom.

Finally, unfortunately it was too late, and Hitler sent General Reich to replace this cowardly and incompetent villain.However, at this time Hitler himself exposed his authentic Nazi qualities.When the Americans took the Remagen bridge in a surreptitious surprise attack, Hitler became furious and ordered the shooting of four good officers for not being able to blow up the bridge in time.One of these people happened to be my brother-in-law, and in that case it was difficult to keep your oath of allegiance. Speer and Hitler Ever since I became Speer's liaison officer, I found my allegiance tested the most because I was on a sabotage mission right in the middle of the conflict between Speer and Hitler.The Führer is promulgating a "scorched earth plan" in the face of enemy attacks from east to west.We must use our own explosives to blow up all major public facilities in Berlin.When the armed forces in all places retreat, they should blow up bridges, railways, waterways, and roads, leaving only a "desert where boats and vehicles disappeared"; we will flood the coal mines in the Ruhr area, explode steel factories, power plants, gas plants, The dam, in fact, is to make Germany an uninhabitable area for a hundred years.Speer tried to dissuade them, but Hitler simply swore that the Germans had proved themselves unworthy of existence anyway, or some such irrational, heartless nonsense.

Speer was as loyal as all Nazis.His dog-like flattery of Hitler will always disgust me; yet, at the same time, he is a modern craftsman, responsible for the country's military production, which must keep a clear head.Knowing that the war was lost, he had been risking his life for months trying to dismantle Hitler's order of destruction.Sometimes, by coaxing and coaxing, he finally reversed these orders, insisting that we would need all those bridges and other facilities before long to help carry out the Fuehrer's magic trick, to counterattack and recover lost ground.There were also times when he falsified Hitler's order to blow up only one or two bridges while leaving the rest of an area intact.

Unfortunately, his double-faced approach put me in a difficult position, because I had to deal with the generals who took orders from Hitler.I must induce them to delay the execution of these orders.Since the execution of the four Remagen officers, it has become even more difficult to convince these generals.So, at the council of war, I was obliged to exaggerate the sabotage that had been done, and to avoid talking about the rest.Like Speer, I was playing with my life.Fortunately, the Führer has already fallen into a deep dream at this time, so you can use your own luck to answer one or two questions randomly at each meeting, and just get by like that.

Besides, I was not the only one who lied to him at this time.These meetings in April had been reduced to talk, without ever getting in touch with the dire reality beyond the bunker.Hitler was always engrossed in those maps, dispatching shadow divisions, directing massive counter-offensives, arguing over details of retreats, all ostensibly as he had done before, but in fact not a single one of these things happened.We all tacitly agreed to coax him with some comforting empty words.Yet he himself still retains our sworn allegiance to him.Jodl and Keitel issued a series of orderly and practical orders to salvage a situation that was collapsing, lest we perish with the glory of Germany.Of course, this situation cannot continue.Reality is sure to come to break through this dream.

On April 20th, at the dismal birthday party held by a handful of people for Hitler, Jodl informed me to leave there immediately to form a Northern Supreme Command with Doenitz's staff.The meeting of the U.S. Army and the Russian Army on the Elbe River will cut off all our land transportation.Therefore, the direction of our battle will undergo a ninety-degree change; instead of meeting the enemy on the east and west fronts, we will open up two "battlefields" in the north and south!There were no words to express all the sadness and terror at the time.Therefore, I did not see the historic "explosion" at the military conference on the 22nd, after which Hitler decided to die in Berlin; no longer fly to Obersalzburg, Go to the southern stronghold to continue commanding operations. In an article analyzing the Battle of Berlin I described in great detail what happened on the 22nd as a result of the Shadow Offensive "Steiner Offensive".This time, Hitler could no longer be coaxed away by a few consoling lies, as Russian shells kept falling on the Chancellery, shaking the bunker.He had ordered SS General Steiner to launch a massive counter-offensive from the southern suburbs.The staff officers continued to reassure him with the same rhetoric, saying that the offensive was in progress.So, he asked, where did Steiner go?Why haven't the Russians been repulsed yet? When Hitler finally faced the real situation and knew there was no offense from Steiner, he went berserk, and the scene was horrific; no one who was there could ever write or narrate it exactly.It seemed to be the last eruption of a dying volcano; after this terrible explosion, all that was left of him was the dead body that I later saw with my own eyes; for three hours, he kept screaming Yelling, scolding those around him for plotting to betray, being cowardly and incompetent, which made him unable to use his genius, and finally lost the war and destroyed Germany.He made the decision to commit suicide on the spot.After that nothing can change his opinion.As a result, a large number of people left the bunker the next day.Jodl and Keitel went to the northwest to meet Dönitz, and most of the Nazis were scattered, and fled west to this or that hole for their lives! Last conversation with Hitler On the 24th, I met Hitler again.During this time, things are getting pretty messy.Personnel Secretary Bormann, the most annoying guy who was inseparable from Hitler, sent me an urgent teletype ordering me to report to the Chancellery.At that time, the Russian army had surrounded the city, and the sky was densely packed with their fighter jets, and their cannons flashed circles of brilliant fire, but you can still fly over their front lines in the dark by luck, at the point of red The East-West Axis of Lights avenue lands not far from the Chancellery.Without thinking about my own safety, I went to a young Luftwaffe pilot who "seemed such a thing as a gamble. He got a small reconnaissance plane and sent me to the Got there and took me out again. I will never forget how I flew in over the Brandenburg Gate in the green light of the Russian flares. Here, by the way, that pilot is now a Munich A prestigious newspaper publisher. Hitler received me in his private room.He asked me about the situation at Doenitz's headquarters in Ploen, the efficiency of his staff, the communications there and to the south, Doenitz's state of mind, and so on.Presumably he was making a decision on the selection of an heir.It was past one o'clock at night, and I was dying of sleepiness, but he was full of energy, and he talked on and on.His eyes were glazed, and his face was pale with livid streaks.He was sitting slumped in an armchair, spinning a stubby pencil in his left hand. His eyes glared at me viciously from under his eyebrows, and he said that on that very day Speer had confessed to him that he had deliberately disobeyed his orders for the past few months not to do sabotage. "You have a part in this, and you shall be punished," he said, in a brutish and brusque tone, as aggressive as ever.In that harrowing moment I guessed that this time I was being called to be shot, as I had seen so many of my comrades do, and I wondered if Speer was still alive.Then Hitler went on: "But I pardon Speer, because he has done something to Germany. I pardon you, because although you have the inferiority of the damned bad breed, although I have repeatedly seen You make mistakes, but on the whole you are a loyal general." As soon as these words started, Hitler would impassionedly repeat the platitudes, blaming the German staff for losing the war.He's a guy who doesn't talk to people at all.He can only say some monologues, and whenever someone mentions him, he will repeat it over and over again, like a chatterbox has been opened, and it seems like an actor is performing a whole set of programs.So, despite his quick wit and his crude jokes, as some memoirs describe, you can always feel very dull in his company. He began by stressing that since 1939 we had been betraying him, deceiving him, and dismantling him; after that he went on talking to himself, describing the whole course of the war in great detail, repeating His favorite complaints about the generals: from Brauchitsch and Halder to Manstein and Guderian, all these unlucky fellows are responsible for his mistakes.His great strategy, as he describes it, could not have failed, had it not been for the incompetence and willful treachery of our staff.On any issues where there were differences of opinion, it was later proved that his views were correct and the generals' ideas were wrong; he invaded Poland, attacked France, and ordered to hold on to Russia in December 1941. All the minor tactical controversies and ensuing setbacks enumerated by his remarkable memory up to this Steiner counteroffensive. That was my last impression of "Military Leader Hitler"—a paranoid man sitting in an underground bunker in Berlin shaken by Russian shells, babbling, explaining for the thousandth time: Our country was attacked Nobody but himself was to blame for such a catastrophe; he, the ever-planning dictator, never made a single mistake. In a document found after the war, in his last will, he blames the Jews for being bad.He indignantly accused our staff officers.But, to the last breath, one thing is perfectly clear: he is Adolf.Hitler never made a single mistake. Years of writing have finally come to an end.I believe that, through military analysis, I have made a due appraisal of some of the characteristics of this strange historical figure.Generally, works that trace Hitler's deeds will later have contradictory arguments, because the authors who describe "Hitler" regard him as the same person.In reality, however, Hitler was not the same person. Early Hitler, as I have described before, was undeniably the soul of Germany". He fully expressed the strong desire of our people: to occupy a superior position, to maintain a healthy German culture, free from any poisonous pollution , including communism in Asia, materialism in the west, and Friedrich. Nietzsche pointed out the weak and negative aspects of Judaeo-Christian morality. His domestic policy brought prosperity and stability. His foreign policy convinced the world The most powerful nations in the world, the ones who have recently defeated us. When he led us into war, our staff warned against it because we were not ready, but our country won a brilliant military victory. I admit it; no one can deny that he has both risk and timing in military strategy. However, the late Hitler was born in Stalingrad.Here's another guy, a crazy monster.With the subsequent setbacks, it became more and more obvious that he was such a monster: the glory of the early Hitler disappeared, and the various masks he painted himself fell off one by one, and he finally degenerated into me. The depressed, slurred guy you saw in the movie. In making my final judgment on this character, I must put aside the aloof attitude that military historians hold when criticizing characters, and pour out a few words from the heart of a soldier. He took that kind of self-destructive way, which exposed his true nature.A general can die with his sword at the end of a war, and a captain can die with his ship in the bottom of the sea, but a head of state is different.At the moment when the motherland was suffering the most, he gave up his duties, left his disaster and guilt for others to eliminate, shot his dog, poisoned his mistress, and went to the gun to find Wangchuan: Could it be? Is this what a head of state should do in time of war?Those who defended him called this suicide "Roman death."Actually it was the death of a coward. After Napoleon's success or failure, he showed the kind of style worthy of a head of state.In the past two decades, he has also stained the whole of Europe with blood.Now, however, he faced his victory d, accepted the sentence they had handed him, and cleared France of his crimes.He is a soldier.Not Hitler, despite his blah blah blah about his exploits in the trenches. The indiscriminate Nuremberg trials proved only one thing: our enemies' rage over their failure to capture Hitler.It was a scandal in which justice was neglected for the sake of vengeance, and it punished the people of the country for the impunity of one man, and hanged or imprisoned those generals whom honor obliged to obey him.If Hitler had gone out and appeased the victors by letting Dönitz surrender and be brought to justice, this heroic display would have largely atoned for his fault.If he had done this, I would not be writing this book in a cell now; I am sure of that.As a master demagogue, Hitler gained power over Germany by deceit; then, as our Supreme Commander, he betrayed our trust. The conclusion is that our country has enormous potential and it is unlikely that it will not recover anytime soon.No matter how badly we fail, the Germanic spirit will continue to flourish.To use modern strategies and to have sufficient energy, we have to pin our hopes on the splitting of the atom, which is a scientific invention in Germany.The Americans were able to walk on the moon alone because they reached there using an improved German V-2 rocket as a propeller, which was the realization of a plan formulated by the Germans.The Red Army, which the Soviet Union used to control Europe, was organized after the German system and managed by German methods.Looted German science and engineering enriched Russia enough to rival the United States with intercontinental missiles armed with atomic bombs. In terms of international politics, the nationalism advocated by Hitler, coupled with socialism, including revolutionary egalitarian propaganda, terrorist organizations, and one-party dictatorship, formed a worldwide political trend.It affects Russia, China, and most developing countries.Perhaps this is nothing to brag about, but it is true.The ideas of the great German philosopher Hegel were once convinced of his doctrine by the German Jew Karl.What Marx popularized and distorted is now becoming a new Islam. In art, those in the West who distort form and beauty indiscriminately are merely imitating the avant-garde abstractionists and decadent works of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s.They are doing nothing now that our little talented decadents had already done in the chaotic period half a century ago when Hitler was to come to power. We Germans have led the way throughout the twentieth century, both in our victories and in our tragedies.Although our valiant attempt to build a world empire failed, our great march to the Atlantic, the Volga, the Caucasus, etc. will forever be remembered in the annals of war. However, we can never forget a historical fact, that is: when our country's power was at its peak, we gambled our fate and exhausted all our strength just for an ordinary coward.Napoleon rests in his imposing tomb in the Invalides.It has become a holy place where people from all over the world visit.Hitler ended up being a scorched corpse in the flames of gasoline.Only Shakespeare could have written him a proper epitaph: Nothing in his life could have been more fitting for him than such a death. Translator's note: According to Long, the early Hitler, the "Dr. Jekel", was a perfect man until he marched on Stalingrad.It was only there that he became "Mr. Hyde."I believe this is Long's view.The Battle of Stalingrad began at the end of 1942.However, Hitler had led his people to commit all those crimes long before that, so that Nazi Germany was reviled by people all over the world.He was still winning.According to Takashi, it wasn't until he started beating that he became "a crazy monster".