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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.

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April 1945

Reich chancellery

Vorbunker

Berlin

EVERYONE IN THE BUNKERS beneath the chancellery knew their days were numbered.

The Führerbunker had been built in 1944 below the original bunker, now known as the upper bunker or Vorbunker, which was built in 1936 as a temporary air shelter beneath the Reich chancellery.

The self-sufficient Vorbunker contained bedrooms and dormitories, a dining room and kitchen, bathrooms and storage areas. Joseph Goebbels and his family stayed there often. Martin Bormann had a bedroom, as well. Nearly twenty others, support staff for the Führer, lived in the upper level, too. The Führerbunker beneath it was smaller, designed just for Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun.

The general mood of the bunker’s inhabitants was mixed. On the one hand, there was obvious apprehension. But interwoven with the fear, particularly among the staff and low-level soldiers, was a decided air of resignation. There was almost no hope of escape, they reasoned, and hopefully as staff or soldiers and not policymakers, they would be treated more humanely when captured.

Many drowned their sorrows with liquor, drunken soldiers and staffers choosing to ignore the looming approach of the Russians. There was nothing else to do—no war they were capable of winning, no means of escape—so let us drink! But now liquor, like food, was at a premium. Shopkeepers could not keep food on their shelves; either by purchase or pillage, people were desperately stocking up.

These shortages were not limited to civilians. Those in the bunkers beneath the chancellery grounds had difficulty receiving food, as well. The staff in the Vorbunker began a system of rationing food, just as was done for the infantry.

Which was why Henrik Becker and Alfred Otto, two corporals from the Administration Office of the Army High Command, or OKH, were so popular when they arrived at the bunker one evening in early April with supplies of meat, vegetables, milk, and liquor.