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Reich chancellery, Führerbunker
Berlin
A SMALL PLANE LANDED on an airstrip in the Tiergarten, a five-hundred-acre park roughly two hundred yards northwest of the chancellery grounds.
The war was lost, a fact that was undeniable to everyone, except the man now hunkered underground in a bunker beneath the Reich chancellery in Berlin known as the Führerbunker. Adolf Hitler refused to admit defeat or even discuss surrender.
Once Speer arrived, Hitler—who alternated between brooding mumblings and fiery, temperamental rants—summoned his two most trusted aides, Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, to join them in his private office, where he paced back and forth, beneath the portrait of Frederick the Great.
“We must inflict lasting damage,” he said. “Lasting and complete destruction.”
“Damage, mein Führer?” asked Speer, a longtime loyalist who’d overseen the rapid build-up of Germany’s armament production, largely by using Jews in concentration camps or slave labor from defeated countries.
But back in January, Speer had informed Hitler via memorandum that Germany had neither the resources—planes, tanks, subs, bombs, weaponry—nor the manpower to continue fighting.
At most, he estimated, Germany could hold out for another eight weeks.
Immediate surrender, he urged, was the only course of action to ensure the survival of the German people.
Hitler’s response then was that the German people had failed him in both courage and ruthlessness, and it was “not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival.”
He continued in that vein now.
“To these victors will belong no spoils,” said Hitler. “Railroads, bridges, water and electrical supplies, telephone and communication lines. All armament production facilities, too, naturally.”
Bormann and Goebbels looked at each other. They didn’t understand, either.
“Our factories,” Hitler continued. “Our mines. All our means of production.”
“Our factories?” asked Goebbels. “Our railroads? Our public utilities? You want to destroy Germany’s… infrastructure?”
“Why, yes, of course.” Hitler continued to pace. “Nothing will be spared. Our enemies may take our country, but it will be a country stripped of any usable resources.”
“But mein Führer.” Speer stood from his chair. “We should destroy our country? How will our citizens survive—”
“The Führer has spoken,” said Bormann, cutting off further conversation.
Speer quickly sat down. The room went silent, as Hitler continued to pace.
“This is what I want,” Hitler finally said.
“In that event, mein Führer,” said Speer, “I would request permission to oversee your edict, to be responsible for its execution.”
The decree was issued that day, Destructive Measures on Reich Territory. The Führer ordered the destruction of all means of production, all military, transportation, and communication facilities, all public utilities within Germany.
It was not the first time he’d had this impulse.
He’d done the same in France before the Nazis were driven out by the Allies, ordering the destruction of France’s most sacred monuments such as the Eiffel Tower.
And the same in the Netherlands before its liberation from Nazi rule.
In each of those cases, the commanding governors had ignored the directive and surrendered to the Allies without laying waste to the land.
The one exception was Warsaw, Poland, which the Nazis razed before withdrawing, demolishing or burning ninety percent of its buildings, including palaces and castles, museums and theaters, hospitals and churches.
As Albert Speer squeezed back into the tiny Fieseler and it sped down the runway in Tiergarten Park to fly him away, he knew he would never allow the implementation of Hitler’s “Nero Decree.” The onetime architect’s only contribution to the other side of the moral ledger would be his refusal to have Germany suffer any further destruction than the war had already inflicted.