[The following shows the how the Nazi leadership envisioned the fall of Germany in the last phases of the war. I find it disturbing to say the least.]
And it was a vision which framed the chilling order given in March 1945 for the ‘preparations for the defence of the Reich capital’:
The Reich capital will be defended to the last man and the last bullet. […]
The enemy, who is to be granted not a minute’s peace, must be chewed up and bled to death in the closely-meshed net of nests of resistance, strongholds and resistance blocks. Any house or any stronghold that is lost is to be retaken immediately with a counterattack. […]
The precondition for a successful defence of Berlin, however, is that every block of flats, every house, every floor, every hedgerow, every shell-hole is defended to the utmost!
It does not matter that every defender of the Reich capital masters the technique of using weapons down to the last detail, but much more that every fighter is inspired and permeated by the fanatical will TO WANT TO FIGHT.
This was a call, in effect, not so much for the defence of the Reich capital as for its destruction.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “A World in Flames.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 17-18. Print.
Original Source Listed:
General Hellmuth Reymann, ‘Grundsätzlicher Befehl für die Vorbereitungen zu Verteidigung der Reichshauptstadt’, Berlin-Grünewald, 9 March 1945, printed in Reinhard Rürup (ed.), Berlin 1945. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1995), pp. 25-26.
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