After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (19 page)

In the afternoon the Ivans [the Russians] sent three negotiators to our lines, in an attempt to persuade the fortress commander to surrender. However, General Niehoff has decided to continue the struggle and rejected the Soviet offer, after a three hour ceasefire.

This was the invocation Dönitz and Schörner made in Hitler’s memory. German soldier Heinz Liedtke wrote to his brother:

We sit in Breslau like rats in a trap, we are just waiting for the end. I’ve already lost hope I’ll ever get out of this shit-hole. We fight, drink out of despair (if we manage to organize something to drink) and lead a debauched life with whores of various nationalities – there’s no shortage of them here. Yesterday I received a pass for a couple of hours and went to find Aunt Trude. All that’s left of her house in Königsplatz is a burnt wall. No-one knows what happened to our aunt and the rest of the tenants but it seems to me we will never see her again. I’ll probably meet the same fate in this damned place.

Liedtke concluded: ‘If you can, pray for me – the heroic defender of the infamous fortress Breslau.’

Russian forces were bewildered that Breslau continued to fight. They dropped leaflets over the city, appealing to its inhabitants to surrender. They could not understand – with Berlin captured – why it was still resisting. A dark joke began to circulate among the besieging Soviet 6th Army. Victorious Red Army troops are on their way from Berlin to Moscow for the Victory Parade. Suddenly, they hear explosions and machine-gun fire. ‘Is that our welcoming salute?’ asks one soldier. ‘No,’ his comrade replies, ‘it’s just the 6th Army – it’s still busy conquering Breslau.’

Beneath the mask of Nazi ideology lay unbelievable cruelty. On the afternoon of 3 May Captain John MacAuslan, an intelligence officer with the British 5th Reconnaissance Regiment, was advancing along the Bay of Lübeck when he saw a stricken German vessel – some 2 miles out to sea – being bombed by a squadron of RAF Torpedoes. The ship was the
Cap Arcona.
As MacAuslan took in the terrible scene, an escaped slave labourer appeared, waving down the British column. ‘That ship is full of prisoners from a concentration camp,’ he told the horrified troops. ‘They are locked away in the hold – and there are no lifeboats.’

The
Cap Arcona
was originally a large German luxury liner. In 1940 she had been taken over by the German navy and used in the Baltic Sea. Briefly – in 1942 – her military service was interrupted, as she was used to portray the doomed
Titanic
in a propaganda film commissioned by Joseph Goebbels. In early 1945 she was employed by the Kriegsmarine to evacuate German soldiers and civilians from East Prussia. By April her turbines were completely worn out and could only be partially repaired. No longer seaworthy, she was decommissioned – only to be acquired by Himmler’s SS at the end of the month and turned into a prison ship.

On 3 May the
Cap Arcona
was loaded with thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp. It was later claimed that the ship was taking these prisoners to Sweden. But SS officers from Himmler’s headquarters, which had transferred to Flensburg with its master, testified that the real purpose of the voyage was to scuttle the
Cap Arcona
, with all the prisoners still on board. There were no Red Cross markings – and all these unfortunates were locked away in the hold. The RAF pilots thought they were attacking an SS ship trying to make an escape to Scandinavia.

RAF intelligence had received reports that the Germans were assembling ships in the Bay of Lübeck to make a retreat across the Baltic to Norway: ‘The ships are gathering in the area around Lübeck and Kiel,’ it was stated. ‘At SHAEF it is believed that important Nazis who have escaped from Berlin to Flensburg are on board and are fleeing to Norway or neutral countries.’

Among the Western Allies there remained the fear that the Flensburg government could be a front, and that the important Nazis – Himmler and Bormann (whose death in Berlin had not yet been confirmed) – might still evade their clutches.

‘The Navy are unable to reach the area because of the minefields in the Kattegat,’ the intelligence report continued, ‘so an all-out air effort is being planned to block this last escape hole.’ The 2nd Tactical Air Force called out four of its squadrons. On 3 May Warrant Officer Derek Lovell of 197 Squadron recalled: ‘We were told to go up to the Baltic and attack shipping. On our way up we passed some of our planes coming back. They’d set the
Cap Arcona
on fire. It was red hot from head to stern.’

The ship was already burning extensively and soon began to capsize. MacAuslan’s men – realising that thousands of prisoners were trapped inside it – tried desperately to establish radio contact with their HQ, to pass the information on. It was too late. A massive explosion ripped open the
Cap Arcona
’s hull. She turned on her port side and sank. More than 4,250 of the prisoners perished.

The slave labourer warned the 5th Reconnaissance Regiment there was something else that they had to see – a short drive away, on the beach at Neustadt. It was from this beach – earlier in the morning – that the prisoners had been put in barges and taken out to the
Cap Arcona
. But there had not been room in the ship for all of them and this news had been relayed back to the SS and German marines supervising the loading.

Captain MacAuslan’s regiment pushed on into Neustadt, 23 miles north-west of Lübeck. There they found concentration camp prisoners who had not received any food for eight days. ‘They were totally dehydrated,’ MacAuslan said, ‘and when they walked, those that could walk, they were like marionettes in those dreadful costumes they had to wear, pyjamas with a bluish thick stripe and white in between … None of the Germans would help at all. The hospital refused point blank to take in any of the prisoners until we made them do it at gun point.’ And then the British soldiers reached the beach.

MacAuslan related:

The beach at Neustadt was the most horrifying place I have ever seen. The Germans had barges into which they had packed prisoners. But some were not able to set sail. So the guards took away the ladders and machine-gunned everyone inside, there and then. These barges were still packed with women and children who had been shot. And on the beach itself were several hundred little children – little children with their heads caved in. They had been tied back to back with cords through their mouths and beaten to death. Their bodies lay right in front of us.

Later that afternoon the 5th Reconnaissance Regiment left Neustadt and stopped briefly at a small manor house several miles away. The German owner tried to be friendly. ‘Come and look at my books,’ he said. MacAuslan found it difficult to engage with him. ‘I wouldn’t understand them,’ he replied. The German persisted: ‘I’ll translate them for you – I’ve got Goethe and Dickens.’ MacAuslan struggled to comprehend a world where Goethe and Dickens coexisted alongside what he had just witnessed. ‘No,’ he said eventually.

Three days had passed since Hitler had committed suicide in the bunker in Berlin. Britain’s Mass Observation Archive (where observers noted contemporary reactions to events) recorded one of the comments made after his death: ‘I’m sorry in a way – it means that he will never be brought to trial. I would have liked to have heard his defence, because he must have had a defence, in his own mind, a certain aim, a feeling that he was right – some philosophy that made sense of it all. And now we shall never know.’

On 3 May Soviet intelligence officer Elena Rzhevskaya moved into a makeshift office in Berlin’s Reich Chancellery. On the desk in front of her were documents retrieved from the Führer Bunker. Much material had been destroyed, but as Rzhevskaya sifted through the fragments that remained – a pocket diary of Martin Bormann’s that had been stuffed down the back of a chair, Goebbels’ family manuscripts hastily crammed into a suitcase, then left forgotten and discarded – a picture began to emerge.

There was a fleeting hope of flight to the Berchtesgaden. The hope was dashed. Military reports were compiled on the state of fighting in the Reich’s capital. Rzhevskaya sensed a growing isolation – as communication with other parts of the front was lost. There were the Reuters news agency reports, typed up and prepared for Hitler – the last source of information for those trapped in the bunker. On one news report, on the death of Mussolini, Rzhevskaya noticed that Hitler had underscored in pencil the words ‘hung upside down’. And then, the records showed a desperate, all-consuming search for gasoline. After his death, the Führer wanted his body burnt with such intensity that no trace might be found of it.

The NKVD had identified the charred bodies of Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, and General Hans Krebs. All had committed suicide on the early evening of 1 May. They had interrogated surviving witnesses of the last days of the bunker. All the statements confirmed that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the early afternoon of 30 April. They had uncovered badly burnt remains deep in a shell crater – the fragments contained parts of a jaw, and this was now being matched against Hitler’s dental records. A positive identification seemed likely. The clearest piece of evidence left by the departed was the most chilling: the bodies of the Goebbels’ six children, murdered in the bunker on the orders of their mother.

Rzhevskaya turned to Magda Goebbels’ papers. One item caused her wry amusement – an astrological prediction that had been drawn up for her. ‘In April 1945 Germany will achieve a dramatic turn-about of fortune on the Eastern front,’ it was forecast, ‘and fifteen months later will have finally conquered Russia … In the summer of 1946, all German U-Boats will be equipped with a terrible new weapon that will destroy the British and American navies.’

There was Bormann’s diary. It contained only brief jottings – on the increasing artillery fire as the Red Army drew nearer, the betrayal of the Führer by Göring and Himmler. It was all strangely insubstantial – fleeting glimpses, hard to grasp. On 30 April, against the names of Hitler and Eva Braun, was the runic inscription of death.

As Soviet intelligence officers searched the Führer Bunker and the Reich Chancellery grounds, American troops were approaching Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berchtesgaden. This was where the Führer had entertained heads of state, or relaxed with the closest members of his entourage. Its outlook was as lofty and spacious as the bunker had been cramped and claustrophobic. On 2 May Lieutenant Sherman Pratt and the 7th Regiment of the 3rd US Infantry Division had occupied Salzburg in western Austria. On the morning of the 4th they made a dash for the Berchtesgaden. Pratt felt a strange sense of apprehension. ‘The hills on either side of us became increasingly steep,’ he recalled, ‘and we were advancing along a narrow and restricted area.’ The troops were at risk of ambush – but their column proceeded safely. At 4.00 p.m. the Berchtesgaden came into view. ‘The houses were of Alpine architecture and design,’ Pratt said. ‘Some had gingerbread decorations. It looked like a village from a fairy tale.’

It was all strangely innocuous. Some of the soldiers began exploring the town. There were German soldiers there, but they surrendered without a fight. Lieutenant Pratt took one of his platoons and advanced farther up the mountains, to the SS barracks and Hitler’s house. ‘We were winding our way up a steep mountain road,’ Pratt continued. ‘The air was clear and crisp with almost unlimited visibility. We rounded a bend – and there before us, in a broad opening, lay the ruins of the Führer’s residence.’ The entire complex had been heavily bombed by the RAF a week earlier. ‘Everyone in my group was struck into silence,’ Pratt said, ‘all too aware of the significance of time and place. After all the years of struggle and destruction, the killing, pain and suffering – here, surely, was the end of it.’

5

Lüneburg Heath

4
May
1945

A
T THE BEGINNING
of May Field Marshal Montgomery’s TAC HQ had moved to its last site of the war, on windswept Lüneburg Heath in north-west Germany. There was nothing in modern warfare that quite resembled Montgomery’s nomadic HQ – a Boer lager in the Zulu Wars or the wagon circles of the pioneers in the nineteenth-century American West were perhaps its closest parallels. On D-Day the whole camp consisted of 27 officers and 150 men. In May 1945 it was regimental size. But it kept advancing with the front – using jeeps, mobile caravans and even light aircraft to quickly move forward. Montgomery insisted on seeing for himself the conditions where the fighting was the most intense.

At its centre was the radio caravan, an officers’ mess, a map room and Montgomery’s sleeping quarters, where lights went out at 9.30 p.m. sharp, whatever the military situation. The site was usually under the cover of trees and draped in a huge amount of camouflage netting. Despite it occupying a series of exposed positions, it was never once attacked during the entire war. The Lübeck campaign, where Montgomery had raced for the Baltic ports, had brought TAC HQ to its last outpost, to a bluff on the sandy, windswept heath of Lüneburg. The heather was brown, and cracked underfoot. The weather was freezing.

Montgomery had never forgotten his First World War fighting experience. During his four years of combat, he had seen his commander only on one occasion. In subsequent army training, Montgomery had developed the notion of a battlefield tactical headquarters – or TAC HQ – one completely separate from a main headquarters: a mobile communication centre, often tented, from which the commander could easily visit his subordinate officers and soldiers. It was entirely typical of Montgomery’s style of generalship – and was adopted by him in all his campaigns: North Africa, Italy and north-western Europe.

Montgomery would summarise it as follows: ‘My system of command was from a tactical headquarters, located well forward in the battle area. TAC HQ was the headquarters from which I exercised personal command and control of the battle. It was small, highly efficient and completely mobile on its own transport. It consisted chiefly of signals, cipher, liaison staff, defence troops and a very small operations staff for keeping in touch with the battle situation.’