A vivid reconstruction of the final weeks of Hitler’s regime.
In mid-April 1945, the Soviets launched an offensive against Berlin “with twenty armies, two and a half million soldiers, and more than forty thousand mortars and field guns”—an avenging force of an almost unimaginable size and scale. Hitler retreated into the Reich Chancellery, but not before warning that this “Asian onslaught” had to be stopped; if it were not, he warned, Germany’s “old people, men, and children will be murdered, and women and girls will be forced to serve as barracks whores.” Thus inspired, the Volksturm and Wehrmacht units charged with defending the city put up a stiff fight, even as Hitler continued to imagine that with Franklin Roosevelt’s death the Western Allies would realize that their enemy was Russia and join Hitler’s crusade. The fall of Vienna to the Soviets put an end to that vision, and Hitler—physically and mentally ill—waited out Marshal Zhukov’s arrival while gorging himself on chocolate cake. An inglorious end, that, and German historian Fest (Speer: The Final Verdict, 2002, etc.) surprises with a number of unreported or overlooked details—such as a letter that Albert Speer had written to Hitler only a few weeks before, chiding him “for equating the existence of Germany with his own life span, describing this as an egocentricity unparalleled in history.” For all that, Hitler shot his wife and then himself, leaving it to the handful of remaining stalwarts to burn their corpses.
I was with Speer when he paid his first visit to the Zeppelinfeld at Nürnberg, long after the war. It was an emotional moment for him: this ghost city was the place where the Nürnberg Rallies were held before the great catastrophe. In close order, drilled by military choreographers, the orders of German power from the pimply, white-kneed columns of Hitler Youth to the older ranks of Waffen SS, banners uncurling and trumpets blaring, would march up and down under the exigent eyes of Hitler.
We were climbing one of the seemingly interminable flights of limestone steps when Speer observed an enormous ragweed, an accursed thing the size of a sequoia, sprouting from a crack in the limestone cladding covering the reinforced concrete understructure. Speer hated that particular weed. The Zeppelinfeld was hairy with them, but that was his weed, his emblem of the decay of a utopian idea, and he would not let it survive. After much tugging, during which the former Generalbauinspektor of the Third Reich went nearly purple with effort, the ragweed gave way, and Speer stood there, panting, the earth crumbling from its defeated roots. "The Führer," he said, slowly, to no one in particular, "would have been very mad at me for this poor stone quality."
Most important, he was the man closest to Hitler; absurdly, and precociously so. Hitler's relationship to Speer has been called a love affair but, if there was a homosexual flavour to it, it was sublimated as an epic of narcissism with the young Speer cast as Hitler's unfulfilled other self. "Hitler quite often told me: 'You are fulfilling my dream. I would like to have been an architect. Fate made me the bildhauer Deutschlands, the sculptor of Germany. I would have liked to be Germany's architect. But I can't: you are. Even when I am dead you will go on, and I give you all my authority so that even after I am dead you will continue.' "
[ Ссылка ]
Hitler and Speer final meeting scene
Speer leaving the Bunker scene
Speer exiting Hitler's Bunker
downfall with english subtitles
