The Last Week of the Third Reich.
Eight days in May (Acht Tage in Mai) by Volker Ullrich: among chaos, myths and humanity of the Third Reich's last stand. Plus photos of the building where the Wehrmacht capitulation was signed.
The air waves pulsed with the bombastic notes of Wagner. It was 1 May 1945, and Radio Hamburg was making a grand announcement, punctuated not by news reports but by excerpts from Tannhäuser and Götterdämmerung.
Then the music suddenly stopped, a drum roll sounded and the excited voice of an announcer could be heard:
'It is reported from the Führer's Headquarters that our Führer Adolf Hitler died this afternoon in his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism for Germany.
This carefully orchestrated performance wasn't a celebration; it was a smokescreen to hide the fact that Hitler had died by his own hand, escaping responsibility by committing suicide and leaving a people and a country in ruins.
Volker Ullrich's "Eight Days in May" takes us on a raging tour of that chaotic week, the final death agony of the Third Reich.
We meet a cast of characters as diverse as the emotions surrounding them. In war-torn Sweden, a young Willy Brandt, soon to be a major figure in German politics, receives the news of Hitler's demise with a mixture of relief and trepidation. The writer Astrid Lindgren, also in Stockholm, notes in her diary: "Yesterday it was cold and rainy, but today it is spring. A very special spring, not just any spring, but the spring that brought peace. Heaven, how wonderful!
Meanwhile, Marlene Dietrich, a beacon of defiance against the Nazi regime, is reunited with her sister amid the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. Wernher von Braun poses for souvenir photos with his American guards. Konrad Adenauer resumes the office of Lord Mayor of destroyed Cologne. Communist leader Walter Ulbricht, returning to Germany from exile in Moscow, sacks the surviving German Communists - potential rivals to be liquidated immediately - in preparation for his ascension to head of party and state in the future GDR.
Ullrich masterfully weaves these personal stories with the grand narrative of political maneuvering.
Grand Admiral Donitz, Hitler's unlikely successor, desperately tries to surrender only to the Western Allies, a gambit fuelled by the desperate hope of a last-minute reprieve. In a Berlin reduced to ruins, the final act of the Nazi drama unfolds. The once-feared Führer Bunker becomes the scene of desperate escape attempts by Hitler's remaining loyalists, a stark counterpoint to the mass suicide that swept through the town of Demmin on the outskirts of Pomerania, where hundreds of inhabitants killed themselves in fear of retribution from the advancing Red Army.
The book also takes a scalpel to myths. We see the manipulative attempts of Gauleiter Kaufmann to portray himself as the saviour of Hamburg, a lie that would fuel the post-war legend of the city's 'relative sanity' (a little less Nazi, so to speak).
Who invented the Iron Curtain?
Even terms like "Iron Curtain" have a tortuous past, their origins bouncing between German and Allied camps before becoming a potent symbol of the Cold War thanks to Churchill's famous speech.
On 2 May 1945, Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Germany's finance minister from 1932 to 1945 and de facto chancellor of Germany in the last days of the Reich, used the term in a radio address in which he invoked the "heroic struggle" of the German people against the "red tide" of the advancing Soviet armies. Behind an iron curtain, Krosigk said, "the work of destroying the people who have fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks" continued unseen.
Ten days later, Winston Churchill used the phrase in a telegram to American President Truman, complaining about the Soviet ally: "An iron curtain is being drawn across their front."
Two and a half months earlier, in an editorial for the Nazi magazine Das Reich, Joseph Goebbels had spoken of an "iron curtain" behind which "the mass slaughter of peoples" would begin in the event of German surrender.
The metaphor of the Iron Curtain made the rounds in both German and Western Allied camps in the spring of 1945, until Churchill gave it the definition it still has today in his famous speech at Westminster College, Fulton, a year later:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "iron curtain" has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."
March 5, 1946 - Sir Winston Churchill at the Westminster College
Then, the brutal realities of war: the desperation of starving concentration camp prisoners forced on death marches, their bodies failing them just as hope seems to flicker on the horizon. The final battles of Berlin rage on, a senseless loss of life on both sides. And as the Red Army sweeps across the East, the joy of liberation is darkened by the terror of reprisals, with women and girls subjected to horrific abuse (see also The Bonfire Of Berlin, by Helga Schneider, a magnificent autobiographical book telling the story of a little girl abandoned by her Nazi mother who survives in bombed and then Red Army-occupied Berlin).
The end of the Reich and the start of a new Germany.
Two days after the capitulation, Thomas Mann, speaking to German radio listeners from his American exile, rightly said that the "most desirable thing" would have been for the Germans to have freed themselves from the "morbid monster called National Socialism".
"We know why the most desirable thing didn't happen," notes Ullrich. "Liberation had to come from outside, because the Germans did not have the strength to liberate themselves. Despite growing criticism of the NSDAP and its leaders, there was an astonishing degree of perseverance in the Wehrmacht and the population right into the agony of the 'Third Reich'".
For decades, many surviving Germans were as reluctant to admit that 8 May was not a defeat but a liberation as they were to admit that there had never been a "clean German Wehrmacht" during the war years.
Ultimately, Eight Days in May is a powerful, thought-provoking reminder of that historic low point:
"It would take time for democracy, which had been re-implanted under the guidance of the Americans, British and French, to take root among the population of the western zones".
Volker Ullrich's book ends with the sentences:
"One has to consider the extent of the devastation, both material and moral, to realise how improbable this must have seemed on 8 May 1945, and what an achievement it is to be able to live in a stable, free and peaceful country today. Perhaps it is time to remember.”
Today, two years into a new Europe that confronts us with the ghosts of our past, it is more necessary than ever.
The book.
Volker Ullrich
The place: Berlin Karlshorst.
The historic site where the German Wehrmacht signed the unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces on 8/9 May 1945 is now a museum which was jointly run by the German and Russian governments until 2022, when Germany took control of the museum and renamed it the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. Here you can visit the hall where the surrender agreement was signed, the office of Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the commander of the Soviet army in Germany, who accepted the German surrender, and a permanent exhibition documenting the German war and occupation of the Soviet Union, as well as Soviet society during the war, presenting perspectives from both sides of the conflict.
"1941 - 1945 СЛАВА ВЕЛИКОЙ ПОБЕДЕ"
"1941 - 1945 GLORY TO THE GREAT VICTORY"
MUSEUM BERLIN KARLSHORST Zwieseler Str. 4, 10318 Berlin