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Outside, it was snowing again, harder than ever. I returned to the station. A mass of inmates was waiting in an empty lot, sitting in the snow and the mud under the gusts of wind. I tried to have them come into the station, but the waiting rooms were occupied by soldiers from the Wehrmacht. I slept with Piontek in the car, overcome with fatigue. The next morning, the lot was deserted, aside from a few dozen snow-covered corpses. I tried to find the Obersturmführer from the day before, to see if he was following my instructions, but the immense futility of it all oppressed me and paralyzed my movements. At noon, I had made my decision. I ordered Piontek to find some gas, then, through the SP, I contacted Elias and Darius. By early afternoon I was on my way to Berlin.
The fighting forced us to make a considerable detour, via Ostrau and then through Prague and Dresden. Piontek and I took turns driving; it took us two days. Dozens of kilometers before Berlin, we had to clear a way for ourselves through floods of refugees from the East, whom Goebbels was forcing to skirt round the city. In the center, all that was left of the a
I devoted two days to writing a very critical report on the evacuation. I also spoke about it in person to Pohl, who swept aside my arguments: “Anyway,” he declared, “we have no more room to put them, all the camps are full.” In Berlin, I had run into Thomas; Schellenberg had left, he had stopped throwing parties and seemed in a glum mood. According to him, the Reichsführer’s performance as commander of an Army Group was turning out rather pathetic; he wasn’t far from thinking that Himmler’s appointment was a maneuver of Borma
Around noon, a speech of the Führer’s was broadcast on the occasion of the twelfth (and, as it turned out, last) a
At the begi