NAZI MINISTER TO QUASH HITLER’S “NERO ORDER”
Berlin, Germany • March 29, 1945
By 1945 everything was falling apart for the Nazi regime. Most of the conquered areas in the Soviet Union and Western Europe had been recaptured from the Germans. The Wehrmacht’s last gambit in the west, the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of the Bulge (mid-December 1944 to mid-January 1945), had failed with the loss of hundreds of precious German aircraft and tanks and upwards of 100,000 killed, missing/captured, or wounded. As the Soviet Army approached the Nazi capital and epicenter of the tottering regime from the east and American units from the west neared the Elbe River, 60 miles south of Berlin, Adolf Hitler issued his “Nero Order” (“Nerobefehl,” or scorched earth decree) to all military commanders on March 19, 1945. The order was officially titled “Demolitions on Reich Territory” (“Befehl betreffend Zerstoerungsmassnahmen im Reichsgebiet”). Hitler issued Nero-like orders, named after the Roman emperor and tyrant Nero, to Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, German commander of the Paris garrison, on August 23, 1944, two days before Allied armies entered the city, and to Reichskommissar in charge of German-occupied Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, in late 1944.
The first time Albert Speer (pronounced “spare”), Nazi Minister for Armaments and War Production, had heard the words “scorched earth” in reference to Hitler was nearly eleven months before. Hitler had been impressed with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s use of “scorched earth” in successfully halting the German drive on Moscow in 1941. Hitler’s secret instructions of March 19 ordered the destruction of all military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments, harbor facilities, canal bridges, mines, supply depots, and food warehouses that had not yet been destroyed by the Allies, as well as the destruction of anything else of value within Reich territory that could in any way be used by the enemy now or in the foreseeable future. The Fuehrer of the Thousand Year Reich was resolved that, were he taken down, Germany would be destroyed too, leaving “a desert, void of civilization.” The war, he decreed, was to “be fought fanatically. No consideration can be given to the civilian population at this time.” Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels told a press conference that March: “If we go down, then the German people will go down with us, and they will do it so gloriously that even after a thousand years the heroic defeat of the Germans will be at the forefront of world history.”
On this date, March 29, 1945, ten days after the scorched earth decree was issued, Speer convinced Hitler to appoint him (Speer) to implement the draconian measure. Unknown to Hitler until his final days, Speer—at considerable personal risk—worked at cross-purposes to persuade senior generals and Nazi Party administrators to evade the Nero Order. (It helped that Nazi Germany, its destructive powers finally spent, lacked the resources to realize Hitler’s order. Besides, the scale of devastation already inflicted on Germany by Allied aircraft and artillery was mind-boggling enough.) Forty-two days after its issuance, the Nero Order was moot: Hitler was dead by his own hand, one among 200,000 Berliners who were casualties of his war of perdition. Speer himself was arrested on May 23, 1945, convicted by the postwar International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg for his role in the Nazi regime, principally for using forced labor (mainly from Nazi-occupied countries) in the German armament industry, and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.
Albert Speer: Hitler Protégé, Reich Architect, and Minister of Armaments and War Production
Above: Standing before a kneeling news cameraman, “Architect of the Reich” Albert Speer (left), Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Germany’s “official state sculptor” (since 1937) Arno Breker take in the tourist sites of conquered Paris, June 28, 1940. Hitler, in a Mercedes convertible, and his fellow tourists visited the Opéra to marvel at its lavish architecture, Napoleon’s tomb at the Hôtel National des Invalides to pay their respects, and of course the Eiffel Tower before returning to the Fuehrer’s temporary field quarters in a Northern French village. Vacated by nearly four million Parisians, the capital’s streets, cultural landmarks, and public buildings were eerily empty.
Left: In a May 1, 1943, ceremony, Hitler presented Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production Speer the Fritz Todt Ring for German Engineering in gratitude for the “extraordinary increase in weapons, armored vehicles, and munitions production during the previous year.” With no background in economics or production planning, Speer made himself czar of Germany’s wartime economy. Propaganda Minister Goebbels called Speer “a genius with organization.” Despite the Allies’ round-the-clock bombing campaign of German industrial centers, war production increased until the latter half of 1944, the fifth year of the war, when armaments production exceeded nearly twice the capability of the increasingly pressed German armed forces to consume manufactured output. By then Speer considered the war lost.
Right: Behind protective shielding Speer (arms folded with swastika armband) and Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch (hand on support) observe a demonstration of a newly developed weapon (eines neuentwickelten Kampfmittels). The demonstration took place in October 1943 at an “airport in the East” during a symposium of leading German armament experts called together by Speer.