When Hitler triumphed in the summer of 1940 and the Germans welcomed him with overwhelming enthusiasm, his people saw him as an infallible genius endowed with extraordinary intelligence. But that image had been manufactured from nothing. The Führer who knew everything, who worked day and night, whose office light never went out, was the opposite of the truth. Hitler was an amateur, a man who had never worked in his life, who could not sustain prolonged intellectual effort, who could not read a document longer than twenty pages.
In reality, he preferred to withdraw into his refuge like an artist floating above the world. A small circle of collaborators worked in his place: Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer. It took Hitler more than fifteen years to recruit them. In the end, he proved a good personnel manager, surrounding himself with the right men, each of whom brought him something additional.
Around the Führer stretched a vast network of accomplices. There was first the personal protection team, the only ones with direct access to him. Among his loyal followers, a fundamental trio emerged. Hermann Göring was a giant who thought only of wealth, an opportunist, a drug addict who adored luxury and extravagance.
Joseph Goebbels was a failed writer whose crippled leg drove him to take revenge through extreme hatred; he lived only through his ideal, Hitler. Heinrich Himmler was a cold, narrow-minded, precise petit bourgeois who would become the century’s killer by organizing what the Nazis called the Final Solution. The second circle consisted of younger, more ambitious men who joined Hitler in the 1930s when he seized power and distributed ministries. Among them, Albert Speer rose to the top.
Presented as a distinguished architect, he was in fact a skilled manipulator who shared Hitler’s obsessive dreams of grandeur and was ready to do anything to become his favorite. Finally, at the bottom of the scale, were the men who carried out the crimes on the ground, the officials of the Third Reich who committed atrocities, such as Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, cold and utterly contemptuous. This father of a family settled with his wife and five children in a house on the edge of the camp, where he organized the extermination of 1. 1 million people.
Beside him stood Dr. Joseph Mengele, responsible for medical experiments, embodying Nazi brutality. This SS doctor carried out the most horrific mutilations in the camps, including on children. Without these men, the worst crimes could not have occurred.
To please Hitler, they competed with one another. Around Hitler, they all hated each other, a working method encouraged by Hitler himself, who fostered rivalry, competition, and emulation. In the early 1920s, Hitler began recruiting his partners in a Germany in turmoil. The losers of the First World War had been left with an army reduced to 100,000 men.
Everywhere, former soldiers formed mercenary groups, and the country feared sliding into civil war. In this procession, a small group from southern Germany had chosen a symbol, the swastika. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, born in Munich, attracted workers and the unemployed. In the front row of spectators stood Hitler, thirty years old, a minor army employee but not yet its leader, only the fifty-fifth member of the party.
This veteran of the First World War had fought on the front lines as a simple corporal. Since the defeat, he thought only of revenge for Germany. He quickly established himself as the leader of the small party by speaking in Munich’s beer halls, denouncing the humiliations suffered by his country. But to gain momentum, Hitler lacked representatives of higher standing.
In the autumn of 1922, when a prominent figure came to listen to him, he felt he had found the ideal candidate. Hermann Göring, twenty-seven years old, had been a fighter pilot during the First World War, shooting down twenty-one aircraft. He had been awarded the Pour le Mérite, the army’s highest decoration. He was practically the only hero that German propaganda had promoted.
After the war, with the German military air force dissolved, he was unemployed, but in Hitler’s eyes, Göring possessed another advantage: he had high-level connections. The skilled pilot had married a wealthy woman, Carin von Fock, who came from Swedish nobility. The couple moved in aristocratic circles, and Hitler needed donors to finance his small movement. From the moment he joined the party, Göring was immediately placed at the head of the armed militia known as the SA.
Less than a year later, in November 1923, the Nazi Party attempted to seize power through a coup in Munich. Gunfire broke out between Nazis and police; sixteen people died. For the Nazis, it was a disastrous failure. Hitler was imprisoned for eight months in the Landsberg fortress prison, and his party was dissolved.
In his cell, he wrote Mein Kampf. Göring, seriously wounded by gunfire, became a fugitive, banned from entering German territory. He needed surgery and received morphine to relieve his pain, becoming addicted to drugs. He took refuge in Stockholm, his wife’s country.
Without a profession and without a future, he suffered violent outbursts of anger. His wife preferred to place him in a mental asylum for treatment. According to his secret medical file, he was hospitalized for morphine poisoning. The following year, an amnesty allowed him to return to Germany.
Without his leader, Göring was worthless, and he hoped to regain his position in the party, but his relations with Hitler had collapsed. Hitler reminded him of the services he had rendered. Göring said he had lost everything, that he remained his most loyal collaborator, and that it was now Hitler’s turn to show gratitude. Hitler needed loyal men, so he found him a new place.
Göring would no longer fight in the streets; instead he had to conquer the salons of high society. He regained his rank only in 1928, when he entered the Reichstag, elected among the first twelve Nazi deputies. In 1932, he even became president of that assembly. Hitler’s second partner began his Nazi career at the age of twenty-nine.
Hitler entrusted Joseph Goebbels with a highly sensitive mission, sending him to Berlin, a city of four million inhabitants and the largest in Europe. It consisted of vast suburbs where workers were crowded together, and it was called Red Berlin because the communists had made it their stronghold. Hitler threw a huge challenge at this small, lame man: to make the Nazis the leading political force in Berlin. The Führer knew he could ask anything of Goebbels, a man who desperately craved recognition and found it in Hitler, whom he considered a fascinating, intelligent, superior man.
Between them grew a relationship that was almost romantic, a true emotional dependence on Goebbels’ part. He owed everything to Hitler, for until their meeting his life had been a series of failures. Afflicted by an illness in early childhood, Goebbels was disabled in one leg and felt ashamed of it. During the First World War, he had dreamed of becoming a soldier, but to explain his disability, he preferred to lie, claiming he had been wounded in the war and had been a hero, though he had never fought.
A university graduate with a doctorate in literature, he was a failed writer who could not find work to match his ambitions. Only Hitler gave meaning to his life. Immediately upon arriving in Berlin, the new leader found only about a hundred active members and small offices. Everything had to be built.
Goebbels began by creating a newspaper, Der Angriff. To force engagement, he chose a radical strategy: inciting hatred. Less than a week after his arrival, he sent his thugs to challenge the communists in their own territory. Violent clashes broke out, mass arrests followed, and the police banned the Nazi Party in the capital.
But that did not matter to Goebbels; the movement thrived on scandal. In 1930, a young activist, Horst Wessel, was stabbed to death by a communist. His grand funeral, attended by Hitler and Göring, gave the Nazis an opportunity for an impressive show of strength. Goebbels kept pouring oil on the fire.
As a reward, Hitler appointed him head of party propaganda. The third man in Hitler’s inner circle did not fit the usual stereotype of workers and unemployed joining Nazism. Heinrich Himmler was a young bourgeois obsessed with the superiority of the Germanic race. In 1929, he still appeared as a young, bespectacled junior secretary taking orders from his leader.
Others did not perceive his ambitions. He was the son of a professor of Latin and Greek, a well-integrated Catholic family man lacking nothing, but he was very young. He joined the most extreme racist groups. The three brothers of the Himmler family became radical Nazis.
Their ideology was close to a feeling of superiority, the belief that the German people were superior to others. This racist discourse also called for a return to the land. Himmler became an agricultural engineer and bought a small farm with his wife Marga, where they wanted to live self-sufficiently, protected from a world they considered corrupt. Beside Hitler, Himmler appeared submissive, but he had a real influence on him.
He defended his personal convictions and often obtained Hitler’s approval for his own ideas. Himmler believed in Nazi ideology but did not like mixing with the vulgar activists who formed the party’s core. In response, he created an elite club within the party, disciplined men dressed in black who formed a nobility under his authority. This unit was called the SS.
All its members had to be of pure Germanic origin, the most fanatical among the fanatics. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and once again he did not want to work as the role required. For him, being forced to work every day from nine in the morning to five in the evening was inconceivable. When he began his career as chancellor, he insisted at once that work was not his job.
Once in power, the division of roles among his partners created winners and losers. Goebbels did not become a minister immediately, but Göring triumphed. Hitler brought him into his first government in 1933, and no one would receive as many titles. During twelve years in power, one need only look at the variety of his official uniforms: President of Prussia, Grand Master of the Hunt of the Reich, Minister of Aviation, Reich Marshal.
This abundance of decorations aroused the jealousy of his eternal rival, Joseph Goebbels, who described Göring as an unbearable inflated balloon, swollen with vanity and arrogance, a vulgar, pleasure-seeking man, a nouveau riche who loved flashy things and strutted around in ridiculous outfits covered with medals and cords. But Göring was also a man of strong will. In 1933, he established dictatorship. When the Reichstag burned down under mysterious circumstances, Göring, president of the assembly, blamed the communists and became threatening.
A wave of repression swept Germany. More than three thousand opponents of Nazism were arrested without trial. Göring created a new political police force, the Gestapo. In 1933, the first concentration camp opened at Dachau, where opponents were subjected to forced labor.
Göring gained points in Hitler’s estimation. Joseph Goebbels finally obtained a position designed specifically for him: a large ministry of propaganda. The frustrated writer now had the power to choose which books were allowed and ban others. Books by Jewish writers or those considered decadent were burned in public ceremonies, such as that evening in May 1933 near the University of Berlin.
He was also a fanatical anti-Semite. When the Nazis came to power, Jews represented only 0. 8 percent of Germany’s population, but Goebbels imagined ways to persecute them. Trucks paraded through the streets spreading his message, and he began a boycott of Jewish businesses.
Goebbels wanted to impose his messages over the airwaves, so propaganda entered every home, and he even created a cheap radio specifically for this purpose. The climate he created in Germany was particularly oppressive in the small family of Margit, a five-year-old child living in Berlin. Her father was Jewish, a bookseller selling forbidden books. The family received the cheap radios from Goebbels’ people, and the child constantly heard, “The Jews are our misfortune.
” It was Hitler’s voice and Goebbels’ voice, and she had no idea what the word Jew meant. Goebbels controlled everything: theater, cinema, and news, reviewed by a censorship committee with absolute influence. He also staged a massive show for the regime, behind the scenes attending to every detail. Throughout the 1930s, at the huge rallies modeled on Hollywood productions, Hitler was presented to the people as a messiah.
Goebbels’ career reached its peak, but his tormented nature would take over again. He was only comfortable in situations of crisis, disaster, and calamity. The storm that would confront Goebbels came from his private life. He had married Magda in 1931, with Adolf Hitler as witness.
Their children were exploited over time through propaganda, forming the regime’s model family. All six children had first names beginning with H, in honor of Hitler. Magda Goebbels, honored by the regime, embodied the ideal Nazi mother. Every year, a short scene was staged to celebrate the father’s birthday.
Goebbels sought to project the image of a good family man, as on Christmas night 1936, when he was filmed distributing gifts to the poorest children in Germany. But reality had nothing to do with this perfect picture. Goebbels was known for his numerous love affairs. In 1936, he began a relationship with a young star of twenty-two, Lída Baarová.
This affair had repercussions on Goebbels’ career. To end the scandal, his wife Magda, in despair, threatened divorce and confided her secrets to the couple’s closest friend, Adolf Hitler. Hitler had no family, and the German family was that of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. When this family began to collapse, Hitler was not pleased.
He forced Goebbels to end the relationship and stop humiliating Magda. Within this network of collaborators, a newcomer would exploit this disgrace to achieve an exceptional rise. Albert Speer had a long road ahead. Among the men who joined Nazism later in life, in photographs from 1935, the complicity between Hitler and Speer was already evident.
Hitler drew beside him, and in his elegant suit stood Speer, a twenty-seven-year-old architect who had built nothing yet. In his youth, Hitler himself had drawn sketches of pharaonic buildings, always dreaming of seeing them rise from the ground once he came to power. Hitler and Speer had known each other for only a year, but they shared a common passion for architecture. Hitler saw in Speer the life he had dreamed of.
Their projects were always enormous, even insane. Speer’s career advanced rapidly. He became the architect of the vast Nuremberg rally grounds, copied from a temple dedicated to Zeus, capable of holding more than 340,000 people. Then he built the German pavilion at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for the 1937 Paris Exhibition.
In the same year, Hitler showed him his vision for Germania, the future capital of his empire. This colossal construction project was expected to last until 1950. The goal was to rebuild Berlin, with buildings larger than any ever built. For the inhabitants of Berlin, it would have been an earthquake: fifty thousand apartments were to be demolished, and nearly two hundred thousand residents would need to be relocated, even though there was already a severe housing shortage.
To test his architect’s speed, Hitler challenged Speer to build the first building of Germania in just one year. Eight thousand workers from all over Germany labored simultaneously, day and night, constructing the future Reich Chancellery. To please Hitler, Speer delivered the building two days ahead of schedule. Hitler took over his building, designed to impress ambassadors from around the world.
His chancellery was ostentatiously lavish, with a marble hall, a huge study for Hitler, and galleries twice the size of those at Versailles. Speer overtook all his rivals in Hitler’s esteem. Meanwhile, in Munich, Himmler had not obtained a ministerial position. He had just been appointed chief of police of Bavaria.
Ready to do anything, he led a bloody purge within the party known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler feared the power of another leader, Ernst Röhm, who was very popular and led the SA, the powerful Nazi militia distinguished by its brown shirts. Obeying orders, Himmler oversaw the assassination of Röhm and his entire general staff. Even if it cost blood, if a comrade stood in his way, he saw no problem in eliminating him.
Himmler emerged as the clear winner from this massacre. His organization, the SS, the black order, no longer had any rival. For Himmler, the SS was a true political project. He worshiped the Germanic race and described Hitler as the heir of a medieval king.
Himmler wanted to build a new, extremely racist society where pure-blooded Germans would be the only masters for centuries to come. To make the superior race multiply on a large scale, he created specialized maternity hospitals where SS members could abandon newborns who would be raised by the regime. To prove racial superiority, the Nazis also wanted to eliminate what they called lives unworthy of life. From 1935 onward, horrendous propaganda films were shown in all cinemas, depicting disabled people in frightening ways.
The regime wanted to justify the crimes it was planning. From 1939 onward, real killing programs were implemented, targeting people with physical and mental disabilities. Himmler never stopped wanting to reshape everything, even the beliefs of his SS men. Strange rituals were held in the castles of the SS training center, with the black sun as a hidden symbol.
Himmler himself celebrated weddings and baptism ceremonies according to SS rites. The Nazis wanted to eliminate all existing religious beliefs. In secret, in the mid-1930s, Hitler made a strategic decision, shared initially with his right-hand man. He said Germany needed to be ready for war within four years.
To implement this program, he created a new administration with a four-year plan, headed by Hermann Göring. Overnight, in 1936, Göring was pushed to the head of German industry, with unlimited financial capacity. His orders mobilized more than 228 factories, a unique firepower in the world at that time. The Germans, deprived of their armies since the defeat of the First World War, were preparing their revenge.
These new functions also allowed Göring to enrich himself. On his birthdays, industrialists showered him with gifts, including works of art and precious stones. The corrupt system he established was well organized. Göring played at being a Roman emperor; he loved extravagance, such as posing with a lion cub.
Hitler appointed Göring as his successor. Since the death of his first wife Carin, who had died of cancer, the Germans lacked a first lady, so his second marriage in Berlin deserved to be royal. Thirty thousand soldiers lined the road, and Hitler attended. This lavish wedding served to conceal his private life.
To receive guests, Göring developed his vast estate on the outskirts of Berlin, where hundreds of works of art covered the walls. A young man who met Göring several times described how he would only need to choose a path free of puddles and mud so that this heavy, fat man could walk, and that his soldiers were no longer obliged to stand at attention after he passed. If he occupied the front of the scene, Göring had great difficulty containing Hitler. The Führer was now ready to start the war and regularly attended battle rehearsals.
Despite these enormous exercises, Göring struggled to restrain his impatience, for he knew the preparations to equip Germany for war were behind schedule. At that moment, he explained to Hitler that Germany was not yet ready. Still a year ahead of the schedule of the plan he had set, Hitler ordered the attack to begin. For Hitler and his partners, entering the war in 1939 was disturbingly easy.
The German army seemed invincible. After only a year of fighting, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands were conquered, and France was invaded. Half of Europe collapsed. The empire was divided, and the rivalry among Hitler’s partners became bloody.
The great plundering began. Göring made Paris his hunting ground. He arrived in an open limousine, toured the streets, and stayed at the Ritz hotel. He helped himself to French museums: Matisse, Monet, Cézanne, hundreds of paintings seized to complete his immense collection.
In the same year, Hitler also arrived in Paris, with his architect Albert Speer at his side. Speer promised to copy the most beautiful monuments of the French capital for future Germania. Hitler was so impressed by Paris that he wanted to reproduce it all in Berlin, on a much larger scale. Back in Berlin, Marshal Göring triumphed in the front row.
He was responsible for managing military operations, yet he hid the truth from Hitler. From the public’s point of view, his rise was meteoric, but from the point of view of the head of the economy, it was a catastrophe. After a few weeks of fighting, Germany no longer had any bombs, ammunition, or very few planes. Fearing to anger Hitler, Göring said nothing.
Boastfully, he promised instead that he would crush England in only three weeks. Himmler established an empire for himself in Eastern Europe, where he oversaw a hateful extermination policy with total coldness. From 1939 onward in Poland, then from 1941 in the Soviet Union, the Nazis experimented with assassination policies and mass deportations. On Himmler’s orders, they built their domain, a colonial empire inhabited by slaves and rid of its Jews.
This project would lead to the death of tens of millions of people from starvation. Meanwhile, in Ukraine and the Baltic states, small mobile groups of SS killers called Einsatzgruppen operated. The atrocities occurred at a frenzied pace; more than a million people would be exterminated by shootings. In August 1941, Himmler traveled to Minsk, Belarus, to personally assess this killing strategy.
He first inspected Soviet prisoners and witnessed executions by firing squad. One hundred Jews were executed to show Himmler how it worked. Himmler fainted at the sight. Not out of pity for the Jewish victims, but because the spectacle was psychologically traumatic for the killers.
As head of the SS, Himmler cared only about the psychological trauma of his men. In the wake of the Minsk massacre, he asked his men in Berlin to find a way to protect the killers. In 1941, different methods of mass killing coexisted, but at the end of the year, an order from Hitler himself unified the procedures. Three years earlier, Hitler had warned that if war became a world war, he would carry out his threat.
The entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 motivated his final decision. The Final Solution was decided by Hitler. At that time, mass executions were being carried out. For Himmler, killing millions of people through mass shootings was inconceivable.
That is why the use of gas was seen as an effective means of solving the problem, and to protect the killers. The poison gases were not introduced to kill more people; the gas chambers had one major advantage: they absolved the killers. There was no longer any contact with the victims, no longer witnessing death. The bodies were collected at the end.
Himmler then decided to concentrate all these new extermination policies in one place, a huge site that would become the largest concentration and extermination camp, a place to which 1. 3 million people would be deported. It had to be a central location within the Nazi empire, well connected to all of Europe, and equipped with a killing facility that was quick and extremely efficient. The chosen place was Auschwitz.
Himmler entrusted Auschwitz to a field officer, one of the worst camp specialists, named Rudolf Höss, who at the age of forty became the director of one of the largest projects of the Third Reich. Himmler chose Höss because he was a man with a record of murder. In 1923, Höss had killed a man, a communist, and was imprisoned for five years. After his release, Himmler took him under his wing and found him a new career.
Höss first served at the Dachau concentration camp for four years, then became head of detention, then deputy director of Sachsenhausen camp, and in 1940, thanks to Himmler, he was appointed directly as commandant of Auschwitz. When he arrived in the town of Auschwitz in 1940, he found only a small town of 15,000 inhabitants plus former Polish army barracks, where he established the first detention center, Auschwitz I. He also noticed a villa adjacent to the camp, and Höss took over this house, whose Polish owners had their property confiscated. On the second floor, from the window of his office, the sloping view of the crematorium did not disturb him.
The commandant settled into the villa with his wife Hedwig and their five children. The family thought only of improving their social status. The garden, surrounded by a high wall, became the children’s favorite playground. Thanks to the concentration camp, the Höss family lived a comfortable life with a workforce turned into slavery.
He had a prisoner working as a gardener and prisoners serving as servants inside the house. Höss wrote in his memoirs that it was paradise. Like all Nazi SS officials, Höss constantly drew motivation from Himmler, whose arguments were recorded for internal use. From 1941 onward, Himmler ordered Höss to expand Auschwitz on an industrial scale to receive more and more convoys.
The red-brick buildings of the old barracks were no longer sufficient. Three kilometers from the first site, construction began on Birkenau, a huge concentration and extermination camp where deportees were sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival. Höss also used prisoners to provide labor for an entire industrial complex. A huge chemical plant was built, at the forefront of technology at the time, manufacturing, among other things, the rubber used to make tires.
The Auschwitz complex, meaning the camps, the city, and the factories, was a permanent, continuous construction site from 1940 until almost the end of the war. The camp continued to diversify its activities. After this enormous factory, Höss developed a huge agricultural project with Himmler, who shared his passion. From 1943 onward, Birkenau became immense, and a new agricultural center was built in a small village.
During the war, Auschwitz became a model city for the Nazis, its population quadrupling. Inside the camp, alongside Rudolf Höss, another major Nazi criminal exploited the convoys arriving at Auschwitz. Dr. Joseph Mengele, the son of wealthy industrialists, conducted medical experiments.
Mengele carried out official research within the official framework of the concentration camp. He ran it like a butcher’s shop. In the medical services of the camps and in medical academies, Nazi doctors performed horrendous mutilations, especially on the bodies of Jewish and Roma deportees. These doctors were given absolute authority over individuals who were no longer considered human beings but as human material for all the research deemed necessary to advance medicine.
Mengele’s experiments required children. Among the young survivors, two little twin sisters, Hungarian Jews named Miriam and Eva, held hands. In 1944, when they descended onto the platform of the Auschwitz-Birkenau station with five members of their family, Eva had to undergo selection by the SS as soon as she got off the train. One Nazi was running and shouting in German, “Twins, twins!
” He noticed that she and Miriam were dressed alike, asked their mother if they were twins, and when she said yes, another Nazi immediately pushed their mother in one direction and the children in the other. Four members of her family were sent to the gas chamber. If Eva and her sister survived, it was to be used in Dr. Mengele’s experiments.
Every day they were taken to the medical section of the camp he ran. He drew blood from her left arm and gave her at least five injections a day in her right arm. These injections made Eva seriously ill and caused a very high fever. The next day, Dr.
Mengele arrived with four other doctors. He did not examine her; he merely looked at her temperature chart and said, mockingly laughing, what a pity she was so young and had only two weeks to live. These experiments on twins played a strategic role for the Nazis. At the heart of Nazi ideology was the idea that Aryan blood was rare and everything must be done to promote reproduction and allow the growth of the Aryan population, so they tried to find a way to allow the birth of twins or triplets.
They were trying to marry twins to each other at reproductive age, to see if the girl would become pregnant and perhaps give birth to twins. They wanted to increase the number of the Aryan race. Eva and her sister survived, permanently marked by serious physical disabilities. One million one hundred thousand people died at Auschwitz.
Since the end of 1941, Hitler and his partners had suffered their first setbacks. Göring thought it was madness to wage war simultaneously in Western and Eastern Europe, but again he did not confront Hitler. Göring was initially very skeptical about an attack to the east, then quickly realized Hitler had made his decision. For Göring, that was the law.
If Hitler had made a decision, he had to obey orders. Göring was right. Against the Soviet Union, the German army did not fully realize the severity of the winter. The troops began to feel exhausted.
Before Stalingrad, the losses were enormous. The Germans lacked the necessary weapons, but Hitler refused to listen. He sought among his inner circle a partner capable of promising him a miracle. Göring, who had previously headed the armaments industry, came forward, but Hitler preferred a more enthusiastic collaborator: he chose his architect, Albert Speer.
Hitler told Speer he should become Minister of Armaments. Speer said he had no training in this field, but Hitler insisted he would do it. Without Speer, the war would not have lasted this long. Hitler ordered him to double production rates, and from the start, for Speer, the problem seemed complex.
Men were being sent to the front; women replaced them in the arms factories. Still, this was not enough to reach the extravagant goals dictated by Hitler. Speer also took charge of supervising the development of secret weapons that were supposed to change the course of the war, including the V1 and V2 rockets, the first ballistic missiles in history, capable of striking England. Against all odds, Speer accomplished the miracle.
While the country was being bombed in 1943, he managed to double arms production. Guns and tanks were assembled on assembly lines in enormous factories where workers worked more than seventy hours a week. But his miracle also had a hidden side. Because of Allied bombing, city centers and some industrial sites had been destroyed.
At that moment, the idea crystallized of moving production underground. In central Germany, in a forested region 150 kilometers from Hanover, a sprawling project was buried under a hill. The Nazis conceived a network of tunnels extending more than 12 kilometers that crossed the entire Mittelbau-Dora mountain range. This maze consisted of 45 bays, the largest underground factory in the world, where workers assembled the famous V2 rockets.
Thousands of deportees from concentration camps were locked there day and night to work as slaves. Of the 60,000 prisoners in the tunnel, 20,000 lost their lives, including more than two thousand French citizens. Speer always claimed he knew nothing of these brutal living conditions. Hitler considered him an organizational genius and decorated him.
Speer’s ambition stoked his rivals’ resentment. He managed to use the camp system as a tool for the arms industry, and we know that apart from Hitler, Himmler particularly feared the existence of a rival, and that was Speer, because he always succeeded in winning Hitler’s favor. Speer’s miracle was not enough. News from the Russian front became increasingly catastrophic for the Germans.
Two hundred thousand soldiers were captured. Göring now bore the burden of defeat physically. His drug addiction increased considerably. Bloated, with glassy eyes, weighing more than 120 kilograms, he felt useless.
He tried to calm himself with medication, dependent on morphine or other substances. At that point, people began mocking him more and more, not only the German public, but Hitler himself became increasingly critical. On the Eastern Front, when Marshal Göring inspected the panzer division bearing his name, all the soldiers still had to pretend to believe in victory. Among the fighters in this unit was the young Dieter.
Among themselves, they knew the war was lost, but they could not say it publicly. If someone had said the war was lost and everything was over, they would reportedly have been shot. To limit this demoralization, Hitler needed a collaborator capable of rallying the Germans behind him. It was time for his most fanatical partner to return to the full light.
The Berlin Sportpalast, 18 February 1943. Goebbels ran a public relations campaign. He gathered a crowd of enthusiastic Nazis as well as wounded soldiers returning from the front. He had carefully chosen his audience of 14,000 spectators.
He claimed the English said the German people opposed his government’s measures of total war, and he asked them: do you want total war? He created a climate of hysteria in Germany. That evening, Goebbels was in a trance. He would achieve what he considered the most successful performance of his career.
“Total war! We want it! ” Germany must sacrifice itself to the last man. It would never surrender.
Goebbels was intelligent enough to realize the situation was difficult, perhaps desperate. If victory was possible, it would be thanks to energy, will, and sacrifice. If defeat was inevitable, the Nazis would disappear with great fanfare, a great catastrophe, a resounding end; at least they would immortalize themselves through sacrifice. His eternal rival, Göring, had finally fallen into disgrace.
Goebbels returned to the spotlight. He showed extraordinary energy, visiting victims of bombed cities, listening to complaints, awarding medals, visiting soup kitchens. He raised the mobilization age for all Germans. Men could now be conscripted up to the age of sixty, and the minimum age was lowered to just sixteen.
The new recruits headed to the front lines in their everyday clothes, with whatever weapons were available. Goebbels named the operation “Peoples’ Storm. ” In devastated Berlin, where residents were forced to search through garbage for food, this latest news shook Nazi morale. In Normandy, the Allies had just landed.
Day by day, the specter of the Reich’s collapse became clearer. Little Margit was living in hiding in Berlin. To escape the Nazis, her father, who was Jewish, had gone into exile in China. From her hiding place, in July 1944, the little girl regained hope when she heard the news on the radio.
On 20 July 1944, there was an attempt to assassinate Hitler, and the first thing she heard was Hitler’s voice saying that providence had saved him. In this completely destroyed room at his headquarters, Hitler miraculously survived a bomb attack. Four people around him were found dead, and nine were seriously injured. The attack was organized by high-ranking officers who wanted to negotiate Germany’s surrender with the Allies.
This conspiracy against Hitler led to the arrest of thousands, torture, and assassinations. Speer, Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels now all knew what they risked if they betrayed him. But they would make very different choices. In March 1945, Hitler sat before a map, confronting paralyzed generals who dared not speak of defeat.
He controlled them, silenced them, reproached them, screamed at them. But in the spring of 1945, he was moving flags and pawns that no longer existed. On 20 April 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, was the last time they were filmed together. Göring and Himmler wandered about, seeming to smile.
But this was now just an illusion. A few hours later, they hastily abandoned Hitler. Göring learned that Hitler had decided not to leave Berlin. Göring left for southern Germany.
He fled. At that point, staying in Berlin meant death. In the bunker beneath the enormous Chancellery building, among the three main accomplices, only Goebbels remained hidden with Hitler. With the fall of the empire, the fanatical Goebbels delivered a final radio address to the Germans on 21 April, declaring that the moment of truth was approaching, that he was in Berlin with all his staff, and that his wife and children were also there and would remain.
While the city fell under Soviet control, on 30 April 1945 at three in the afternoon, Hitler committed suicide. According to his last will, he designated Joseph Goebbels as his official successor. But Goebbels was chancellor for only a few hours. When the Soviets reached the Chancellery gardens, they discovered the charred bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, along with the bodies of their six children, whom they had poisoned before their suicide.
The couple agreed there was no future, no possible world without Nazism, so they killed their children and wiped out the next generation. Throughout Germany, the Allies discovered the same scene: thousands of anonymous Nazis who refused to surrender committed suicide as families. Unlike Goebbels, Himmler and Göring were ready to negotiate. They remained politicians to the end, people who kept all options open, who calculated, who wanted to survive.
Hermann Göring retreated to his residence on the border between Germany and Austria. Before his death, Hitler had dismissed him. The Führer had designated him as his successor, then on 23 April 1945, Göring sent him a secret telegram offering to replace him. He asked if Hitler was no longer able to make decisions, and claimed it was now his turn to take over his duties.
Hitler considered this telegram an act of high treason, and Göring was stripped of all his positions. Finally, in May 1945, Göring surrendered to the Americans. He was still convinced he would be able to negotiate an honorable surrender; he was a marshal, the highest military rank. But he was told he would be treated as a criminal.
He understood from one minute to the next that he had no chance to negotiate anything, because it was unconditional surrender that the Allies had demanded for years. Hitler had also been betrayed by his loyal ally Heinrich Himmler. The head of the SS had fled. Since February 1945, to save himself, Himmler had made secret contacts with the Allies to negotiate surrender.
He even allowed the use of the White Buses of the Red Cross to save more than 13,000 prisoners he had freed from the camps. Himmler played a double game at the end of the war, negotiating with the Allies behind Hitler’s back. He was detached from reality, truly believing the Allies were ready to accept him in a position of power. When he realized he was not trustworthy, Himmler hid among German soldiers who had fallen into captivity.
He wanted to blend into the crowd, disguised under a false identity. He was finally recognized near Hamburg, and at the moment he was searched in a house, he bit a cyanide capsule that he had hidden in his mouth. He died instantly. The killer of the century would never be held accountable.
On the same day, in Flensburg, in northern Germany, the last Nazi leaders were arrested, including Hitler’s ally, Albert Speer, the architect and armaments minister. In the summer of 1945, among the accomplices of Hitler’s inner circle, only Göring and Speer survived. At the bottom of the scale, Höss also survived. At Nuremberg, on 20 November 1945, the trial of the century began.
American, British, Russian, and French judges had to pass judgment on the twenty-four greatest surviving Nazi criminals. They all faced the death penalty, and for the first time in history, they were held accountable for a new crime: a crime against humanity. The first defendant was Hermann Göring, thinner and recovered from his drug addiction, who showed a particular taste for confrontation. He handled the trial seriously, as a battle.
From the very beginning, he wanted to impose himself. According to American procedure, all the defendants had to do was plead guilty or not guilty, but he had prepared a long speech. “Before answering the court, whether I am convicted or acquitted… ” The president rebuked him, informing the defendants they were not allowed to make a statement.
Göring replied, “In response to these accusations, I plead not guilty! ” After him, all the defendants pleaded not guilty in turn. During the trial, Göring was the center of attention. He still believed he could escape the death penalty through his strategy.
He wanted to defend Hitler’s plan for Germany. The judges planned a shocking treatment: the Nazi criminals had to be confronted in open court with the unbearable images filmed during the liberation of the camps, footage shot by Americans and Russians to bear witness forever to the atrocities committed by the defendants. During the screening, Göring averted his gaze. He realized his defense was collapsing.
The shocking testimony of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, further incriminated the defendants. To the end, they defended the Nazi regime, but at Nuremberg, only one man wavered and claimed to know nothing about the Holocaust, even though he had been one of Hitler’s closest associates: Albert Speer, the architect. He claimed he had always distanced himself from Hitler and had even thought of assassinating him. On 1 October 1946, after ten months of trials at Nuremberg, the verdict was delivered: “Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Göring, the international court condemns you to death by hanging.
” Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. Speer’s strategy had paid off; he was sentenced to only twenty years in prison. Göring did not want to be hanged like a common criminal but to die as a soldier, shot by a firing squad. The court refused his request.
So, as a last provocation, a few hours before the execution of the sentence, with the complicity of one of his American guards, Göring obtained a poison capsule and killed himself in his cell. He was still convinced that he would leave his mark on history. He had explained that he would be condemned, but in about fifty years, statues of Hermann Göring would stand in all German apartments. The officials responsible for Auschwitz were handed over to the Polish justice system because the atrocities had taken place on Polish soil.
Among them was Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant. He was tried in Warsaw and sentenced to be hanged at the camp, at the scene of his crimes. His coldness was frightening; he showed no real remorse for the killings, claiming he was only following orders. The years passed, and within Hitler’s inner circle, only one survived and became an expert in lying.
When he was released from Spandau prison on the outskirts of Berlin in 1966, Albert Speer was only sixty-one. Hitler’s architect and minister attracted media from around the world. After twenty years of imprisonment, he was the only one who could tell the story from the inside, the mechanisms of power under Hitler. When Speer was released from prison, he had already signed a very lucrative contract to write his memoirs.
Over the following two years, he became a successful author; his memoirs, written in prison, were translated into fourteen languages and sold more than a million copies. He was a star, interviewed on television programs around the world. He continued to present himself as an architect who had been ignorant of the regime’s worst crimes. According to his statements, he knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews.
In the 1970s, Speer gradually began to catch up by revealing his involvement in the Holocaust. Notably, thanks to a photograph, we know he visited the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943, where more than 200,000 people died, and that he heard Himmler speak of the extermination of the Jews. If we had known then what we know today, he would reportedly have been sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Under his bourgeois mask, he hid his true nature as a ruthless politician.
Speer would avoid the truth until the end. The last of Hitler’s inner circle died in his bed of a heart attack in 1981. Josef Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz, nicknamed the Angel of Death, died in 1979 in Brazil, never captured by the law. None of these great criminals who worked hard under Hitler have graves today.
Their ashes were scattered or their remains buried anonymously to avoid any gathering of enthusiasts of the past. Their traces gradually fade. At the end of this path, lost in the forest, without any indication, the ruins are left to decay.
That was the home of Adolf Hitler, where all his partners once gathered.