Page 34 - All About History - Issue 186-19

bureaucrat and murderous head of the SS and
Gestapo; Rudolf von Ribbentrop, ex-champagne
salesman and now ignored Nazi Foreign Minister;
Goebbels, Speer, Bormann, the heads of all three
armed services, and Hitler’s senior adjutant,
General Wilhelm Burgdorf. Not present was Heinz
Guderian, who after one too many arguments
with his Führer had been sent ‘on leave’ and
replaced by the military pigmy that was General
Hans Krebs. During the conference Hitler was
repeatedly urged by the gathered bigwigs, several the Waffen-SS (armed SS) and now commander
of whom had known him since the beginning, of Army Detachment Steiner (Armeeabteilung
to leave Berlin while he still could and continue Steiner) – to attack south from its positions to Back in the bunker, Hitler’s grip on reality was
the fight from outside the city. He refused. When destroy the Soviet pincer curling around the north fast disappearing. For the past few years he had
the conference ended and with Berlin about to of the capital. Positive that his steadfastly loyal increasingly overestimated the strength of his own
be encircled, the majority of attendees fled the Waffen-SS would come to the rescue, Hitler roared forces and dismissed any contradictory opinion,
capital, leaving the Nazi dictator to his fate. that: “Any commander who holds back his troops and never more so than now as he waited for the
The following day, Hitler ordered SS- will forfeit his life.” Knowing his rag-tag command attack from Steiner that he confidently predicted
Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner – along with was vastly outnumbered and would be annihilated would save him and the Third Reich, just as his
Paul Hausser one of the original architects of if it attacked, Steiner sat on his hands. hero Frederick the Great had been saved by his

Soviet soldiers and a civilian try to move
a fallen giant eagle and swastika inside
the ruins of the Reich Chancellery

A beaten and
demoralized German
soldier in the
rubble of the Reich
Chancellery

This 1942 Soviet
propaganda
poster declares
4x © Getty Images ‘Let us put our
flag of victory
upon Berlin’

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