commander Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, based now at Flens-
burg in Schleswig-Holstein, he wrote:
Urgent! On Führer’s orders: Reich government is not
to fly to Bavaria. Prevent any flight from Holstein,
move like lightning. Block all airfields.And to the SS barracks on the Obersalzberg itself:
() Führer awaits news mission accomplished fastest.
() Have you taken Lammers and other ministers into
custody? Arrest Bouhler too.Glimpsing Speer, his face bright with intrigue even at this des-
perate moment he had been flown in by a sergeant pilot in a
light aircraft that had landed him near the Brandenburg gate
Bormann added another radio message to the Obersalzberg:
Speer has meantime arrived here.These were the pages that would be found ten weeks later, still
on Bormann’s darkened desk in the bunker ruins. Among them
was a copy of a letter dated April , which Bormann had sent to
“my dear Heinrich” Himmler describing Göring’s “treach-
ery”:
In the Führer’s opinion he must have been plotting to
do this for some time. On the afternoon of April
the day he drove down south G[öring] told Am-
bassador [Walther] Hewel [Ribbentrop’s liaison offi-
cer to Hitler], “Something’s got to be done and now.
We’ve got to negotiate and I am the only one who
can do it. I, Göring, am not blackened by the sins of
the Nazi party, by its persecution of the churches, by
its concentration camps.. .”