The map is on the table and the map is the country. The marks on it are armies and the armies are the marks. Yesterday I gave the order for Steiner to attack from the north and close the gap above the city, and this conference is convened to report the attack made, and the attack has not been made. Steiner has not moved. The formation I ordered to the line is a name on the map and a strength on a return filed weeks ago, and the men the return counts are not where the count puts them, and a good many of them are not anywhere. I move the marker to the position the order requires, and the position the order requires is empty ground. The officers stand round the table and give me the ground, and the ground they give me and the ground on the map have come apart.
The man whose work is to know the front reports it and does not soften it, and I do not thank him for not softening it. He gives me the streets the Soviet armies hold, streets I have driven through, and he gives me the bridges still in our hands and the strength holding them. Weidling has the defence of the city and the defence of the city is old men of the Volkssturm with one rifle between several and boys of the Hitler Youth at the Pichelsdorf bridges, fourteen and fifteen years of age, who will hold the bridges because I have ordered the bridges held, and who will be killed there because the bridges cannot be held against what is coming for them. The order is mine. I gave it this week and I have not withdrawn it.
There is a relief that is coming. Wenck is bringing the Twelfth Army from the west and Busse the Ninth from the south-east, and between them they will reach the city and lift the siege. I move them across the map toward the city and they do not come, and their not coming I enter in the account of the men who have failed me rather than in the account of the war I began. Göring has sent word from the south asking to take up the leadership, and I have struck him from the party and the state. Himmler, they tell me, has reached for a line to the enemy. The loyalty I built the apparatus upon is going out of the apparatus, and I read the going as the cause of the defeat and not as its sign, because the other reading would not let me keep working at the map, and I keep working at the map.
The orders leave this room and they do not stop killing because the room is underground. The directive I signed in March stands: what cannot be held is to be destroyed, the works and the bridges and the stores the people on the surface will need if they are to live through what is coming. Speer came down to this room and said to my face that the war was lost and that he had not carried the directive out, and I let him say the first thing and the directive stands on the paper regardless of the second. In the streets above, the courts are hanging men from the lamp posts with boards round their necks for leaving their posts: a soldier of the line at a corner in Wilmersdorf this morning, and beside him an older man who had put a white cloth out of a window. They hang under the authority that runs down from this table. None of this is happening to me. I am doing it.
And the orders that have run the longest are the ones I have never called back. The camp the enemy entered this month, where the typhus goes through the huts and the dead are not lifted from where they lie, is a camp the apparatus I command filled and kept. The column on the road, the people marched out of the camps in front of the advancing line, the ones who cannot keep the pace and are shot and left at the verge of the road, are on that road because the order to clear the camps came down from the state I lead and I have not countermanded it. A woman in that column who will not reach the next town, and a child in the typhus hut who will not be carried out of it alive, are not the weather and are not a fate that has fallen on them. They are the standing instruction of the state, and the state is mine, and the instruction is mine.
I began this war; no one began it for me. The murder of the Jews of Europe was my policy and my order. What ends in these rooms is not a destiny that turned against me but the end of the thing I made.
I ordered the army into Poland. I ordered the camps. I ordered the city held to the last bridge and the last boy. The generals did not make this and the people did not make this and the enemy did not make this. I made it, and it is being lost, and the losing is the working out of the thing I made and not a thing done to me. I turn back to the table. Steiner has still not attacked. I give the order again.
