Hitler in Defeat

Abstract

Such was the setting of the stage, such the cast of the players, when the Allied breakthrough at Avranches in August 1944 opened the last act in the tragedy of Germany. The rest of the drama — the pace of the catastrophe, the interrelation and concatenation of events — was determined by an external, uncontrollable force: the advance of the Allied armies. With every new crisis, with the fall of each great fortress, the passage of each great river, a fresh fever seemed to break out in Rastenburg, Berlin or Bad Nauheim; but these were merely stages in the development of the drama not changes, or factors, in its course. Though strange errors still persisted in the politically illiterate court, though Himmler envisaged himself as a new colossus, and Ribbentrop to die last believed in an inevitable split between the Allies, in fact only two questions remained to which the answer was in any doubt: when would the end come, and how would the Nazi Party in general, and Hitler in particular, face it? For since the failure of the Generals’ Plot, it was he alone who would decide the matter. By that last victory he had gained, not indeed the salvation or even the reprieve of Germany, but at least the power to ruin it in his own way.