Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (36 page)

Among them was Sybil Falkenberg, an Englishwoman recently divorced from her German husband. While everyone else viewed the British arrival with gloom, she was longing for her countrymen to appear, counting the hours until Hamburg fell. After the last five years of hell, the British couldn’t come too soon for her.

As Sybil Bannister, she had married a German gynecologist before the war, taking his nationality and bearing him a German son. They had been in Danzig when the war came, wondering if the bombs falling on them were German or Polish. Her husband had been drafted, and Sybil had found herself alone, trying to look after a child with no friends or family to call on in a very unfriendly environment. Most Germans had been polite, but a fair number had been thoroughly unpleasant, spying on the
Engländerin
behind her back and reporting her every move to the police.

Her marriage had collapsed under the strain. Sybil had retained custody of her son, only to see him taken away by order of the Gestapo. She had been bombed out of her flat as the air raids intensified, suffering third-degree burns from phosphorus dropped by her own side. Making her way to Hamburg, she had found a room to let and was living like a troglodyte as the British halted outside the city. With nothing to barter for food, she had been reduced to setting snares for the rabbits that wandered freely among the ruins. She was so malnourished that she had stopped menstruating.

Sybil had been delighted when Kaufmann announced that Hamburg would not be defended. “Oh, thank God! We shall live to see the end of the fighting after all. No more suspense! No more air raids! Every night will be undisturbed! The Russians will not come. Occupation by the English won’t be so bad. This awful war will soon be over!”
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The news that morning of Hitler’s death only added to her delight, coming so soon after Kaufmann’s announcement.

But her excitement was premature. The Wehrmacht wasn’t happy with Kaufmann’s decision. Neither was Dönitz, when he learned of it that lunchtime. The decision to surrender Germany’s largest port and second-largest city was his to make. Dönitz was furious that Kaufmann had acted without authority and taken matters into his own hands.

Albert Speer knew Kaufmann. At Dönitz’s request, he drove to Hamburg that afternoon to talk to the Gauleiter personally. He found him at his headquarters, surrounded by a bodyguard of students. Kaufmann was just as angry as Dönitz, pointing out that he had had an ultimatum from the British, who threatened to bomb Hamburg into oblivion if he didn’t surrender without a fight. “Am I supposed to follow the example of Bremen’s Gauleiter?” he demanded bitterly. “He issued a proclamation calling on everyone to defend themselves to the last man, then escaped himself while Bremen was blown to bits in a terrible raid.”
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Speer took the point. He rang Dönitz, explaining the situation. He told him that Hamburg’s Gauleiter was prepared to mobilize the city’s population against the defending troops, if necessary, rather than fight on and see the city destroyed. There would be mutiny in Hamburg if the troops were ordered to fight on.

Dönitz asked for time to think it over. An hour later, he rang back giving permission for Hamburg to be surrendered without further ado. He did so because the situation had changed dramatically since lunchtime. The British had just broken through on their way to the Baltic and were unstoppable as they advanced on Lübeck. The Canadians were equally unstoppable as they advanced on Wismar, a few hours ahead of the Russians. With the escape route for the Germans in the east cut off, there was no reason for the Germans in the west to fight on anymore.

Instead, Dönitz gave orders for Hamburg’s commandant to contact the British under flag of truce the next morning, agreeing to give the city up without a fight. He was also to warn the British that a delegation would shortly be on its way from Dönitz to begin the negotiations for a general surrender.

22

THE NAZIS CONSIDER THEIR POSITIONS

KAUFMANN BEGAN THE PREPARATIONS AT ONCE.
Surrendering to the British was the only sensible option. Taking Speer aside, he proposed that Speer surrender as well, the two of them giving themselves up together.

But Speer wasn’t ready to surrender yet. Nor was he ready to escape, as his pilot friend Werner Baumbach had suggested. Baumbach had a seaplane standing by, a four-engine machine used for flying supplies from Norway to the German weather station in Greenland. It had already been loaded with books, medicine, writing materials, extra fuel tanks, and enough paper for Speer to begin work on his memoirs. With rifles, skis, tents, a folding boat, and hand grenades for fishing, they could live quietly in one of Greenland’s many bays for a few months, until the fuss had died down and it was safe to fly to England to give themselves up.

Speer was tempted, but said no. As a minister in the new government, his duty lay with Dönitz. Leaving Hamburg, he headed back to Plön. He arrived late that night to find that the admiral had moved headquarters in his absence to escape the British advance. He had gone north to the naval cadet school at Mürwik, near Flensburg, on the Danish border. Keitel and Jodl were preparing to join him. They just had time for a quick word with Speer before they, too, headed north. After a brief visit to his trailer at Lake Eutin, Albert Speer went that way as well.

*   *   *

HIMMLER WAS GOING,
too. Wherever Dönitz’s government went, he was sure to follow. Wearing a crash helmet, he was driving his own Mercedes at the head of a motorized column carrying his personal retinue, which still amounted to a hundred and fifty people. They were approaching Kiel in the last hours of daylight when the RAF found them.

“Discipline, gentlemen, discipline!” Himmler yelled, as panic set in.
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The column came to an abrupt halt as staff of both sexes dived for cover from the British attack. The mud was so thick that it sucked the women’s shoes off their feet. Picking themselves up after the aircraft had gone, Himmler’s people regrouped in some disarray and withdrew to find a less dangerous route to Flensburg.

The roads were so disrupted that it was early next morning before they arrived. Himmler immediately arranged for the women on his staff to be taken across the border to Denmark, where they could wash in safety and have something to eat before returning to his headquarters. As for himself, he had no idea what to do next. Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the new foreign minister, thought Himmler should shave off his moustache, disguise himself in a wig and dark glasses, and vanish before the Allies caught up with him. Either that, or shoot himself. Himmler didn’t want to do either.

*   *   *

RUDOLF HÖSS,
too, was on his way to Flensburg, trying to avoid the RAF as he headed north for a final meeting with Himmler. As the former commandant of Auschwitz, he was one of several camp commanders who had been summoned to Flensburg for a conference the next morning to receive their last orders from the Reichsführer SS.

It was not an easy journey. Höss had his wife and children with him as he went. They had been sheltering in a farmhouse along the road when they learned of Hitler’s death. Höss’s immediate reaction had been the same as his wife’s: to kill himself immediately, now that his world had collapsed. “Was there any point in going on living? We would be pursued and persecuted wherever we went. We wanted to take poison. I had obtained some for my wife, lest she and the children fell alive into the hands of the Russians.”
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Höss had good reason to be nervous. As commandant of Auschwitz for three and a half years, he had presided over the establishment of the gas chambers and the slaughter of innocent people on an industrial scale. He had left Auschwitz in December 1943, only to return the following May when the Jews from Hungary began to arrive. It had been all hands to the pump with so many new bodies to process. They had got the murder rate up to almost ten thousand a day at one point, a figure viewed by Höss with considerable satisfaction. A Jewish mother had berated him for driving her children to the slaughter but she had evidently failed to realize that the children had to be killed, too, in case they came looking for revenge when they grew up.

Höss had few qualms about what he had done, but he knew the Allies would see it differently if they found him. He had been at Ravensbruck with his family as the Russians approached. They had escaped with several other families, leaving by night in a convoy of unlit vehicles, bumper to bumper along a road crowded with refugees. Under regular attack from the air, they had traveled for days from one clump of trees to the next, desperate to keep together as Spitfires and Typhoons roared overhead. They had glimpsed Field Marshal Keitel at Wismar, arresting deserters from a front that Keitel himself had never visited. From there, they had turned west toward Lübeck and then Flensburg to the north.

The Höss children’s old governess from Auschwitz lived at St. Michaelisdonn, near the mouth of the Elbe. With nowhere else to go, Höss left his wife and four of his children there while he continued toward Flensburg with only his eldest son for company. The boy wanted to stay with his father, both of them hoping that there might yet be a part for them to play in the final hours of the Reich. Höss still had his poison with him, but with the children to think about, he was very reluctant to use it. He preferred to believe that Himmler would know what to do next, when he reported to Flensburg. Himmler surely wouldn’t have summoned the commandants to Flensburg if he didn’t know what they should all do next.

*   *   *

JOACHIM VON RIBBENTROP
was going the other way. He saw no point in following Dönitz to Flensburg, if he was no longer in the government. Annoyed to learn that Schwerin von Krosigk had been given his job, he had decided to go to Hamburg instead to make contact with the British. He still had a duty to Hitler to pass on his message urging the Western Allies to join forces with Germany against Bolshevism.

Ribbentrop knew Hamburg well. He had business connections there from before the war. There was a wine merchant from his champagne-selling days who would give him shelter for a while, enabling him to remain out of sight until tempers had cooled and it was safe to show his face again. While in hiding, he could compose a letter explaining Hitler’s reasons for wanting an alliance against the Bolsheviks and then present it to the British at a time and place of his own choosing. As the bearer of the Führer’s last message to the British, he would surely be treated with all the respect and consideration he deserved. Ribbentrop certainly hoped so, because Hitler’s last message to the British was the only card he had left to play.

*   *   *

IN THE FOREST
above Schliersee, south of Munich, Hans Frank and his adjutant were watching the Americans advance on the little village of Neuhaus. The village was not defended, but the Americans didn’t know that as they probed cautiously forward. None of them wanted to be killed this close to the end of the war. Their Sherman tanks were advancing with the hatches closed, ready for immediate action as they pushed aside a tank trap composed of tree trunks and approached Neuhaus from the south end of the lake. Frank watched with contempt from the mountain path above.

“Just look at those scared rabbits,” he told his adjutant. “They’re frightened they’ve finally got a whiff of our impregnable Alpine fortress.”
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Frank was ready for the Americans. As the governor-general of Poland, he was expecting to be arrested when they reached the village. He had destroyed all his files after fleeing Krakow in January and had since attempted to rewrite his later speeches and diaries to present his time there in a better light. But he knew the Americans would want to talk to him about his time in Poland. They would demand to know about Auschwitz, the starvation, the slave labor, the hangings in the streets, the summary executions of intellectuals, the humiliation and murder of Jews in synagogues, the wholesale looting of art and property, much of it to Frank’s own benefit. He had been a most efficient governor, by Nazi standards. The Americans would certainly want to talk to him about that when they took control of the village.

Frank had been lord of all he surveyed when he ruled the Poles from Krakow’s glorious castle. His empire since then had shrunk to a few secretaries and personal followers who stuck with him because they didn’t know what else to do. There had been a bad moment recently when his valet of many years had told him to “kiss my ass” before walking out, leaving Frank to press his own uniforms from then on. What remained of the governor’s Poland secretariat had all been accommodated in Neuhaus at the Café Bergfrieden, at 12 Josefstalerstrasse, with plenty of room to spare. Frank had been living at the Haus Bergfrieden since April 3, waiting for the Americans to put in an appearance.

He had assembled his staff there as soon as he learned of Hitler’s death. While the women of the village prepared white flags for surrender, Frank had privately ordered his staff to swear allegiance to Dönitz, their new Führer. They had all done so, like good Germans, but for what purpose, none could tell. There seemed little point in swearing allegiance to Dönitz when their only remaining option now was to sit in the Haus Bergfrieden and wait for the Americans to come. Hans Frank joined them there after he had finished watching the American tanks from the path above the village.

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ON THE OTHER SIDE
of the mountains, Adolf Eichmann was on his way to the Austrian lake resort of Altaussee. A number of top Nazis had moved to Altaussee in recent weeks because the approaches were easy to defend and the steep sides of the mountain valley made attack difficult from the air.

As head of the SS’s Jewish Office, Eichmann had been the operations manager for the Final Solution, responsible by his own estimate, for the efficient elimination of five million Jews, although the figures that came to him may have been exaggerated to meet their quotas. He had been particularly efficient in Hungary, rooting out the bulk of the Jewish population at breakneck speed after the Wehrmacht moved in, then sending them on to Auschwitz for further processing.