last days in the fuhrer bunker

(extracted from the memoirs of Fritz Vilhof second assistant file clerk at the Reichskanzlei)

The Fuhrer was becoming increasingly agitated as the tides of war turned against Germany. The glory days when he'd first sent the Pansies into Poland against the express wishes of Guderian and the Army General Staff who would have preferred to use tanks, seemed long past. Hitler had rightly guessed that the macho Poles were deeply insecure about their sexual orientation and would flee at the first sight of waves of effeminate looking men in lederhosen bursting through their borders. The General Staff never quite recovered their equilibrium on being wrong about such a matter. And the Fuhrer taunted them mercilessly about it at every opportunity. But by 1945 this was all in the dead past. We now knew that the Fuhrer's grip on reality was fading. He insisted on naming the winter offensive in the west against Patton's Third Army, Operation Snuggle Butt Tailies. Even the most optimistic among us felt that this was a bad sign. Von Runstedt threatened to resign over the name. He said the Allies would die laughing. Hitler just gave him a knowing wink and said: "Exactly." Von Runstedt did not like being winked at by a man but there was nothing he could do since it was the Fuhrer himself who had done it. Officers of the Wehrmacht often tried to keep themselves aloof from members of the Nazi Party and so they felt being winked at or being compelled to risk their lives in an attack called Operation Snuggle Butt Tailies, was a personal jibe at them. Nor did they like the Fuhrer's insistence on controlling every aspect of strategic planning. Heinrici was appalled by the famous March Twelfth Directive which instructed all Germans of whatever age group and gender to "just run at the British." Other Wehrmacht officers were similarly discommoded by the infamous "Say Boo And Drop An Anvil On Them," Order Of Battle with which they had been expected to repel the D Day landings. Many senior officers stopped coming to meetings at the Fuhrer Bunker and made excuses about being prevented from reaching Berlin by sudden RAF bombings or fuel shortages or not having anything to wear or headaches or needing to wash their hair. Relations between senior staff officers became strained particularly when Von Klug did a Sieg Heil and hit Goebbels in the eye. Von Klug claimed it was an accident but Goebbels was not so sure. Goebbels flinched every time he met Von Klug in the corridor for weeks afterwards. There had been hints of this sort of tension at the High Command for years. But it had not gotten so bad since perhaps the withdrawal against the Fuhrer's direct orders of Kampfgruppe Steinervortzel from the Kursk Salient in 43. In the Russian theatre there were to be many indicators that Hitler was no longer the master strategist. He had called one of our winter campaigns Operation Uranus and nobody knew for sure if he meant the planet or a bum. Himmler ever the opportunist, responded to each new name by cringing and saying: "That's an excellent name Mein Fuhrer." Many of us found his behaviour gauche in the extreme. Guderian also was increasingly alienated from the war effort after travelling overnight from Frankfurt by armoured train for a conference at the Fuhrer Bunker and being unable to get served any food on the train except soggy wienerschnitzel sandwiches. In March of 1945, the Fuhrer began pronouncing his English sentences correctly. He would say: "The cat sat on the mat," instead of the more usual: "Ze cat sat on ze mat," and "We are all doomed," instead of "Vee are all doomed," and so on. The final Russian attack on Berlin came as something of a relief to most of us in the end.