Arriving at Kransberg Castle late at night after fleeing Houffalize, Speer and his aide were shown to their quarters, where they freshened up before driving over to Adlerhorst to celebrate the coming year—1945—with Hitler. When Speer arrived at the Eagle’s Nest at 2:30 a.m. on January 1, Hitler, who never drank, appeared drunk. “He was in the grip of a permanent euphoria,” remembered Speer. Hitler made a toast and promised that the present low point in the war would soon be overcome. “His [Hitler’s] magnetic gifts were still operative,” Speer later recalled. In the end Germany would be victorious, Hitler said. This was enough for Speer to change his mind about losing the war.
Two weeks later, on January 15, with the war allegedly still winnable, Adolf Hitler boarded his armored train and began the nineteen-hour trip to Berlin, where he would spend the rest of his life living underground in the Führerbunker (Führerhauptquartier, or FHQ) in Berlin. The bunker was a fortress of engineering prowess, built beneath the New Reich Chancellery. Its roof, buried under several tons of earth, was sixteen feet thick. Its walls were six feet wide. Living inside the Führerbunker, with its low ceilings and cryptlike corridors, was “like being stranded in a cement submarine,” said one of Hitler’s SS honor guards, Captain Beermann. Beermann described a “bat-like routine of part-time prisoners kept in a cave. Miserable rats in a musty cement tomb in Berlin.” Not everyone shared the sentiment. Months later, when Mittelwerk general manager Georg Rickhey was angling to get a job from the Americans, he would boast to army officers that he’d overseen construction of the grand Führerbunker in Berlin.
Now, in mid-January 1945, with Hitler moving back to Berlin, it was decided that Speer should head east, to Silesia, in Poland. There, he was to survey what was going on. Important chemical weapons factories had been built in Poland, armaments ventures jointly pursued with IG Farben, a chemical industry conglomerate. The location of these facilities was significant; Poland was, for the most part, out of reach of Allied bombing campaigns. But a new threat was bearing down. The Soviets had just launched their great offensive in Poland, a final military campaign that would take the Red Army all the way to Berlin. Germany was being invaded from both sides—east and west—squeezed as in a vise.
The same day that Hitler left the Eagle’s Nest, Speer was driven to Poland. There, he witnessed firsthand what little was left of the Reich’s war machine. On January 21, he went to the village of Oppeln to check in with Field Marshal Ferdinand Sch?rner, newly appointed commander of the army group, and learned that very little of the Wehrmacht’s fighting forces remained intact. Nearly every soldier and every war machine had been captured or destroyed. Burnt-out tank hulls littered the snow-covered roads. Thousands of dead German soldiers lay in ditches along the roadsides, but many more dead soldiers swung eerily from trees. Those who dared desert the German army had been killed by Field Marshal Sch?rner, a ferocious and fanatical Nazi Party loyalist who had earned his moniker, Sch?rner the Bloody. The dead German soldiers had placards hanging around their necks. “I am a deserter,” they read. “I have declined to defend German women and children and therefore I have been hanged.”
During Speer’s meeting with Sch?rner, he was told that no one had any idea exactly how far the Red Army was from overtaking the very spot where they were standing, only that the onslaught was inevitable. Speer checked into an otherwise empty hotel and tried to sleep.
For decades, this night remained vivid in Albert Speer’s mind. “In my room hung an etching by K?the Kollwitz: La Carmagnole,” remembered Speer as an old man. “It showed a yowling mob dancing with hate-contorted faces around a guillotine. Off to one side a weeping woman cowered on the ground.… The weird figures of the etching haunted my fitful sleep,” wrote Speer. There, in his Oppeln hotel room, Albert Speer was overcome by a thought that had to have been preoccupying many Nazis’ minds. After Germany, what will become of me? The guillotine? Will I be torn apart by a yowling mob?
Jedem das Seine. Could it be true? Does everyone get what he deserves?
The following week, on January 30, 1945, Speer wrote a memorandum to Hitler outlining the huge losses in Silesia. “The war is lost,” is how Speer’s report began.
Widespread destruction of evidence would now begin.
CHAPTER TWO
Destruction
Ninety miles southeast of Speer’s Oppeln hotel room, chaos was unfolding at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Speer’s chairman of the ultra-secret Committee-C for chemical weapons, a chemist named Dr. Otto Ambros, had documents to destroy. It was January 17, 1945, and every German in a position of power at Auschwitz, from the army officers to the IG Farben officials, was trying to flee. Not Ambros. He would not leave the labor-extermination camp for another six days.