By the middle of March, he was all the more ready to contemplate alternatives after enduring an almighty dressing-down from Hitler over his failings as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula. (Hitler had apparently already in February rebuked Himmler as a ‘defeatist’. In his command of the defence of Pomerania, Himmler had actually been too weak to countermand tactical interference from Hitler which he knew to be catastrophic, as well as demonstrating that he had no knowledge of how to handle an army.117) Hitler, in his characteristic search for scapegoats, held Himmler personally responsible for the inability to hold the Red Army in Pomerania, reproaching him with ‘secret sabotage’ and direct disobedience. The Reichsführer was relieved of his command on 20 March. The retreat, against orders, of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS-Panzer Army in Hungary, resulting in Hitler’s furious demand that Himmler remove the insignia of the ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’, was a further humiliation for the Reichsführer. Guderian claimed to have tried on 21 March, just prior to his own dismissal, to persuade Himmler to use his foreign connections to try to secure an armistice.118 Himmler refused point-blank. He could still not risk an open breach with Hitler.
Himmler had the reputation of being the most feared man in Germany. But he himself knew that was not true. He was fully aware that he remained completely dependent on a higher power. He feared Hitler even at this stage—and with justification. But a serious estrangement had now clouded their relations. Himmler was practically in disgrace. His resentment must have encouraged him to take further his soundings with Bernadotte. Against Hitler’s wishes, he agreed to allow concentration camps to be handed over to the enemy (a promise he did not keep), and permitted small numbers of Jews and thousands of Scandinavian prisoners to be released. There was still no direct suggestion from Himmler that he might be involved in negotiations with the west. But by the beginning of April, Schellenberg—doubtless at Himmler’s prompting—was sounding out Bernadotte about the possibility of arranging a capitulation on the western front. Bernadotte refused, saying that the initiative had to come from Himmler. At this juncture it was still not forthcoming. But Bernadotte recalled Schellenberg telling him that Himmler had talked of a capitulation in the west and ‘but for Hitler’ would not have hesitated to ask him to approach the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower. It would not be long before Himmler made his move.119
In the meantime, one of Himmler’s former closest associates, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, head of his personal staff until being transferred in September 1943 to Italy as Supreme SS and Police Leader there, then from July 1944 as Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht (effectively German military governor in the occupied parts of the country), had already edged towards capitulation south of the Alps. Through intermediaries, Wolff had in February secured a link to the American secret service, the OSS, and arranged a clandestine meeting in Zurich on 8 March with its head of European operations, Allen W. Dulles. Another meeting followed on 19 March, when Wolff undertook to arrange for the unconditional surrender of German forces in Italy. Various interests pushed in the same direction. Wolff plainly had an eye on saving his skin through gaining immunity from prosecution for war crimes. The Wehrmacht leadership in Italy, certainly once Kesselring (who would not commit himself to Wolff’s move) had been replaced on 10 March by the more sympathetic if still highly cautious Vietinghoff, was favourably disposed to steps towards ending a conflict that could now be continued only at huge and senseless cost.
The Allies saw obvious gain in liquidating the front south of the Alps, where the two armies of Army Group C, around 200,000 men,120 were still fighting a tenacious rearguard battle, and eliminating the danger of continued resistance centred on the feared Alpine redoubt. Even Hitler, who seems to have had a vague indication of Wolff’s intentions (though not his detailed plans, which amounted to treason), was prepared to let him proceed—at least for the time being. He had been non-committal—taken by Wolff to be a tacit sign of approval—when the latter had, in early February in Ribbentrop’s presence, carefully hinted at negotiations through his own contacts to win time for Germany to develop its secret weapons and to drive a wedge through the Allied coalition. The use of Italy as a possible bargaining pawn in any dealings with the western powers meant that there was no attempt made from Berlin to halt Wolff’s manoeuvring.
Nor was Wolff, in fact, the only leading Nazi trying to secure a deal with the Allies in Italy. None other than the feared head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was at the same time taking his own secret soundings about a separate settlement with the western Allies. Nothing conclusive had materialized from either Wolff’s or Kaltenbrunner’s feelers by the end of March. Still, it was the case by now that the head of the SS, the head of the Security Police, and the SS leader in Italy were all, independent of each other, pursuing ways to avoid the Armageddon that Hitler was inviting. Mutual distrust and fear of Hitler ruled out any collaboration in either bypassing or confronting him. Nevertheless, the leadership of the Third Reich was starting to crumble.121
The most enigmatic member of Hitler’s court was also beginning to distance himself from Hitler. Over the previous months, Albert Speer had consistently tried to prevent the complete destruction of German industrial plant as the Wehrmacht retreated. This had an obvious rationale for the war economy: it meant production could continue as long as possible, and possibly be restored if lost territory were to be recaptured. But by the spring of 1945 other motives were taking over. Speer’s close connections with industrialists inevitably led him to look to a world beyond Hitler, where it would be necessary to rebuild their factories. He recognized that even after a lost war the country would require an economic infrastructure; the German people would survive their Dictator and need a functioning economy to support them. Not least (and increasingly), considerations of his own future after likely defeat—perhaps hoping to inherit what was left of power in the Reich—made him insist on temporary immobilization of industry, not its wanton destruction.122
Hitler’s thinking ran, as it always had done, along diametrically opposed lines. In his characteristic fashion of posing only stark alternatives he had early in his ‘career’ declared that Germany would be victorious or it would cease to exist. The more any semblance of victory had evaporated, the more his thoughts had turned to the opposite pole: defeat would be total, the German people would have deserved to go under through proving too weak, and there was, therefore, no need to make provision for their future. Destruction wherever and whatever the cost, to bar the enemy advance and its inroads into Germany, was what he wanted. Speer had often had to struggle to water down the orders for destruction of industrial plant, which the High Command of the Wehrmacht had been ready to pass on, to turn them merely into immobilization. Usually, as we have seen in earlier chapters, he had succeeded, pandering to Hitler’s lingering hopes, in persuading the Dictator to accede to his wishes by arguing that the Reich would need the industries again when it reconquered the lost territory. It was an argument, however contrived, to which Hitler was susceptible. But with the enemy now on Reich territory and the fiction of reconquest harder to uphold, the issue of destruction or immobilization was bound to arise again—and in radical fashion.