Summary of Volker Ullrich's Eight Days in May

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 On April 30, Hitler took his own life. Krebs and the Soviet commander, General Vasily Chuikov, arrived at Schulenburgring 2 in the Tempelhof district to inform him of the news. Chuikov seemed unimpressed.
#2 Goebbels hoped that the conflicts of interest between the western Allies and their Soviet partner would come to a head and that the Soviet leadership might be inclined to desert the anti-Hitler front. It took a while to establish a telephone connection to Chuikov's command and then to agree on a time and place for the peace envoys to meet the Soviet side.
#3 The German message was delivered by Krebs, and it was clear that the two sides were irreconcilable. The only possibility was a total unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union as well as the United States and Britain.
#4 The German negotiators returned to the chancellery to give Goebbels a preliminary report. They were accompanied by a Soviet major, who was shot when they came under SS fire en route. It took hours for Dufving to arrive at the chancellery and relay the news that the Soviets were insisting on unconditional surrender.

Sujets

• Europe
• Germany

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669354598
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Volker Ullrich's Eight Days in May
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

On April 30, Hitler took his own life. Krebs and the Soviet commander, General Vasily Chuikov, arrived at Schulenburgring 2 in the Tempelhof district to inform him of the news. Chuikov seemed unimpressed.

#2

Goebbels hoped that the conflicts of interest between the western Allies and their Soviet partner would come to a head and that the Soviet leadership might be inclined to desert the anti-Hitler front. It took a while to establish a telephone connection to Chuikov's command and then to agree on a time and place for the peace envoys to meet the Soviet side.

#3

The German message was delivered by Krebs, and it was clear that the two sides were irreconcilable. The only possibility was a total unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union as well as the United States and Britain.

#4

The German negotiators returned to the chancellery to give Goebbels a preliminary report. They were accompanied by a Soviet major, who was shot when they came under SS fire en route. It took hours for Dufving to arrive at the chancellery and relay the news that the Soviets were insisting on unconditional surrender.

#5

On the morning of May 1, as Krebs was making his way to Chuikov’s command post, Dönitz sent a radiogram message to the chancellery. It was another effusive confirmation of Dönitz’s unbroken subordination: My Führer, my loyalty to you will always be unconditional. I will thus undertake all attempts to relieve you in Berlin.

#6

Hitler had named his successor, Dönitz, on April 30. Speer was unaware that Hitler's testament had dismissed him as armaments minister in favor of his rival Karl-Otto Saur. That was payback for the refusal of Speer in the final months of the war to carry out to the letter the Führer's orders to leave nothing behind in Germany.

#7

Hitler’s testament was in effect, but there was no explicit acknowledgment that Hitler was dead. Bormann was keeping Dönitz in the dark about when and how Hitler had died. He was determined to save his skin and continue playing a leading role in the German government.

#8

After the idea of a separate arrangement with the Soviets was discarded, Hitler’s suicide was announced to the public. Hitler left the form and timing of an announcement to the troops and the public up to Dönitz.

#9

On April 30, Dönitz was already considering who he could appoint as foreign minister. He initially chose Konstantin von Neurath, who had served as foreign minister in the final two presidentially appointed governments of the Weimar Republic and in the Nazi regime until 1938.

#10

Dönitz attempted to contact Neurath, but he was unsuccessful. He then asked Ribbentrop, who had replaced him as foreign minister, if he knew where Neurath was. Ribbentrop insisted on a personal meeting with Dönitz.

#11

The office of foreign minister was given to Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the longtime finance minister. He had survived all changes in government since 1932, and had been confirmed in his post by Hitler's testament. He knew there were no laurels to be reaped from the position, but he needed a man who could advise him politically during the decisions to come.

#12

On May 1, Dönitz announced that Hitler was dead. Between 9 p. m. and 10:25 p. , the state radio station in Hamburg and its subsidiaries in Flensburg and Bremen broadcast selections from Wagner’s operas Tannhäuser, Das Rheingold, and Die Götterdämmerung.

#13

The German public was given false information about Hitler’s death. Covering up Hitler’s suicide concealed the fact that he had evaded responsibility for the regime’s crimes.

#14

Dönitz’s speech was a clear attempt to shift blame for the continuation of the war in the west to the British and Americans. He promised that as far as he was able to do so, he would create tolerable conditions for the German people.

#15

Dönitz was appointed Germany’s new president and commander in chief on May 1. He pledged to continue the battle against the Bolsheviks as long as it took for the fighting troops and hundreds of thousands of families from the eastern German realms to be saved from enslavement and destruction.

#16

The address delivered by Dönitz was an act of desperation, as he wanted to beat back the Bolshevik tide while merely shadowboxing with the western Allies. The oath was becoming a solitary one.

#17

The reaction among the German military commanders held as POWs in the Trent Park estate in London was similar. They thought Dönitz was a stupid ass and a charlatan.

#18

Goebbels was the last official act of informing Hitler of his death was to prepare himself for his own end. He repeatedly invoked the example of Frederick the Great, who had held out against an overpowering coalition in the Seven Years War.

#19

Goebbels had stressed more than once that he would stay by Hitler’s side in Berlin and follow him with his own family into death if necessary. In his Supplement to the Führer’s Political Testament, dictated on the night of April 29 to Traudl Junge, he explained why for the first time in his life he would potentially have to disobey a command from Hitler.

#20

Goebbels’s wife, Magda, had prepared their children for their deaths. They had moved into the bunker with their parents on April 22, and Magda rejected all attempts by those remaining in the subterranean catacombs to persuade her to spare her children.

#21

In his first interrogation, Kunz said that Magda Goebbels gave the children morphine injections, and when they were asleep, she placed a crushed cyanide capsule in each of their mouths. But in his second interview, he said that Magda had asked him to administer the poison, but he had not been able to gather the necessary psychological strength.

#22

After the war, Magda and Kunz returned to the deeper recesses of the bunker, where Goebbels was anxiously awaiting them. Goebbels made his adjutant Günther Schwägermann promise to have his and his wife’s bodies burned.

#23

Harald Quandt, the son of Magda Goebbels, learned about the deaths of his mother and half- siblings from the BBC. He did not react, but he did not stop hiring people with National Socialist pasts.

#24

The commander of the citadel, Wilhelm Mohnke, drew up the escape plan. The groups would leave the basement of the New Chancellery building at intervals of a few minutes, sneak across Wilhelmplatz to the Kaiserhof subway station, and then through the tunnel under Russian lines to Friedrichstrasse station.

#25

The plan quickly proved unworkable. The groups of fleeing Hitler associates dwindled in number, until in the end every person was on his or her own.

#26

Only a handful of Hitler’s associates escaped Berlin, and they were all captured by the Russians. The majority of the others, including Baur, Linge, Günsche, Voss, Rattenhuber, and Misch, were killed or captured.

#27

The city of Demmin, in Germany, was the site of the largest number of suicides in early May 1945. It was occupied by the Red Army, and many people had heard stories about the crimes the Wehrmacht and the SS had committed in occupied areas of the Soviet Union.

#28

The Soviet Union advanced into East Prussia in 1944, and the first wave of violence they encountered was the village of Nemmersdorf, where German soldiers had found traces of a massacre that had claimed the lives of numerous citizens, predominantly elderly men and women.

#29

In late October 1944, the Wehrmacht succeeded in pushing the Red Army back beyond the Reich’s borders. The German military did not have enough men in reserve to resist the major offensive launched by the Soviets on January 12, 1945.

#30

Those who had been unable to flee to the west bore the brunt of Soviet retributions. Accounts of atrocities spread like wildfire, and the people who remained behind in Demmin knew only too well what was in store as they waited for the first Red Army soldiers to arrive.

#31

The town of Demmin was destroyed by the Red Army, and its residents were terrorized by marauding soldiers. They then committed mass suicide.

#32

The town of Demmin, located in northern Germany, was the location of a suicide epidemic in 1945. The town’s population was forced to flee as Soviet troops approached, and many committed suicide to avoid capture by the Soviets.

#33

Many Germans were able to surrender themselves to the mythology of the Führer and the norms of his regime. They could not imagine a life without Hitler and National Socialism.

#34

The end of the war saw the collapse of a social order that had given Germans a sense of structure and security. The suicide rate among refugees from eastern parts of Germany was notably high.

#35

The Ulbricht Group, a contingent of ten Communist functionaries from Moscow, was charged with assisting the Soviet occupiers. Berlin was familiar territory for the 51-year-old trained carpenter. He had left Germany in 1933 for Paris and Prague, heading to Moscow in 1938.

#36

After the Battle of Kursk, in July 1943, German Communists began planning for the end of the war. They created a working commission for political problems in February 1944, which produced an action program for battle-ready democracy.

#37

The KPD leadership in exile was required to balance their ideas with the interests of their Soviet bosses. The Soviet dictator Stalin did not push for the division of Germany and the establishment of a separate Communist satellite state. He wanted to secure his influence over Germany as a whole.

#38

The Ulbricht Group was led by a number of functionaries who would later occupy high offices i