On the eve of the attack [the Soviet attack on Berlin], Hitler issued what was to be his last ‘Order of the Day’ to his soldiers on the eastern front:
Soldiers of the German Eastern Front!
For the last time the Jewish-Bolshevik arch-enemy has lined up his masses for attack. He is trying to smash Germany and to exterminate our people. You soldiers from the East yourselves know already to a great extent what fate threatens German women, girls and children above all. While the old men and children will be murdered, the women and girls will be reduced to becoming barracks whores. The rest will march to Siberia.
We have been planning for this threat, and since January of this year everything has been done in order to build up a strong front. A powerful artillery is greeting the enemy. The losses of our infantry have been replenished by countless new unites. Alarm units, reactivated units and the Volkssturm are reinforcing the front. This time the Bolshevist will experience the old fate of Asia i.e. he must and will bleed to death in front of the capital of the German Reich.
Whoever does not do his duty at this moment is acting as a traitor to our people. The regiment or division that abandons their position is behaving so disgracefully that they will have to be ashamed in front of the women and children who endure the bombing terror in our cities. […] Whoever gives you orders to retreat without your knowing him well is to be arrested immediately and, if necessary, to be bumped off [umzulegen] straight away – no matter what rank he holds. If every soldier on the eastern front does his duty in the coming days and weeks, the last onslaught of Asia will break apart, just as despite everything the breakthrough of our troops in the west also will fail in the end.
Berlin remains German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.
From a blood brotherhood not for the defence of the empty notion of a Fatherland but for the defense of your Heimat [homeland], your wives, your children and thereby of our future.
At this hour the entire German people look to you, my eastern fighters, and hope only that your steadfastness, your fanaticism, through your weapons and under your leadership, the Bolshevik onslaught suffocates in a bloodbath. At the moment in which fate has removed the greatest war criminal of all times [President Roosevelt, who died on 12 April] from this earth, the turning point of this war will be decided.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “The Last Days of the Reich.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 95-6. Print.
Original Source Listed:
‘Aufruf und die Soldaten der Ostfront (15 April [1945])’, in Percy E. Schramm (ed.) Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Wehrmachtführungsstab) [=KTB], Vol. 4: 1. Januar 1944-22. Mai 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1961), pp. 1589-1590.
Further Reading:
Battle of Berlin / Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation / Fall of Berlin
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