Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (41 page)

The next shell could hit our truck, so I jump off the wing and go over to the right, where a trench runs under the fence into the field. Suddenly something hits me, knocking me down. I look at it with horror. It is a bloody something without either head, hands or feet, just a bloody, smashed torso.
12

Drenched in blood, almost crippled by a shell splinter in his right foot, Altner stumbled on for hours, hobbling across country until he reached Döberitz. There was no sign of Wenck’s army when he arrived, no sign, either, of the huts the lieutenant had promised. No one in Döberitz had even heard of Wenck. Potsdam had been Russian for days. All the talk of a relief army for Berlin, all the talk of hanging on by their fingertips until help arrived to deliver them from the Red Menace, all of that had been a lie from the very beginning.

25

NOW THAT THE FÜHRER HAS GONE

WHILE MARTIN BORMANN LAY DEAD IN BERLIN,
his eldest son was in a village near Salzburg, wondering if he, too, should kill himself now that Hitler was dead. Martin Bormann, Jr., was only fifteen, innocent of any crime, but he could see no future for himself with the Führer gone and his father probably dead as well. The people around him were taking their own lives. He was trying to pluck up the courage to do the same.

Bormann Jr. had been a pupil at Feldafing, the school near Munich for the sons of the Nazi elite, until its closure on April 23. The other boys had been given a hundred Reichsmarks each and told to make their own way home, but Bormann had been issued false papers in the name of Martin Bergmann and driven to Salzburg. His father’s staff from Berchtesgaden had regrouped there after the bombing of Hitler’s mountain retreat.

They were in the
Gaststube
(lounge) at the village inn when they learned of Hitler’s death. It was two o’clock in the morning, as Bormann recalled. The room was small and they were packed tightly together on the benches when the announcement came over the radio. Like everyone else, Bormann sat stunned, unwilling to believe that his godfather was dead:

I can’t describe the stillness of that instant, which seemed to last for hours. Nobody said anything, but very soon afterward people began to go outside, first one—then there was a shot. Then another, and yet another. Not a word inside, no other sound except those shots from outside, but one felt that that was all there was, that all of us would have to die.
1

Bormann didn’t want to die. At fifteen, his whole life lay in front of him. But his family had been very close to Hitler. They had had a special edition of
Mein Kampf
printed on human skin, until his mother got rid of it. If his father’s staff were killing themselves, he saw little option but to do the same.

A gun was put into his hands. Reluctantly, desperately wishing that there was an alternative, Bormann accepted the inevitable. Getting to his feet after a long period of introspection, he took the weapon and went outside to shoot himself.

My world was shattered. I couldn’t see any future at all. But then, out there, in the back of that inn, where bodies were already lying all over the small garden, there was another boy, older than I—he was eighteen. He was sitting on a log and told me to come and sit with him. The air smelled good, the birds sang, and we talked ourselves out of it. If we hadn’t had each other at that moment, both of us would have gone—I know it.
2

*   *   *

IN MARIENBAD,
far to the north, Private Günter Grass of the Waffen-SS accepted Hitler’s passing with far more equanimity. Lying wounded in a hospital bed, he wasn’t in the least surprised to be told that Hitler had fallen in Berlin. Something of the sort had long been inevitable, nothing to get upset about. At the very least, they could all joke about him now, and that had to be good for something.

Grass was seventeen, old enough to be a tank gunner in the SS but not old enough to have participated in the atrocities on the Eastern Front. There had been no mention of atrocities during his training. Drafted into the SS at sixteen, he had been happy to join an elite unit in the fight against Bolshevism. It was only later, after being advised to ditch his SS markings for his own safety, that he had had to admit to himself what kind of unit he was in.

On his way to the front he had passed through the ruins of Dresden, seeing what might have been dead bodies lying in charred bundles beside the track. The first bodies he had seen for sure had been Wehrmacht soldiers, old men and young boys hanging from trees with placards of cowardice around their necks. He had wet himself when he first came under fire, urinating uncontrollably as Russian shells whistled overhead. Picking himself up afterward, he had turned to see the tangled intestines of the young man he had just been talking to.

Later, caught in another firefight behind Russian lines, Grass had played dead as the rest of his patrol scattered in the darkness. He had retreated with a Wehrmacht lance corporal, only for both to be arrested as deserters since they had no written orders to explain their absence from their units. Locked in a farmhouse to await summary court-martial, they had taken advantage of a Russian attack to make their escape, joining a column of refugees along the road to Spremberg.

The corporal had told Grass to change his SS jacket for a Wehrmacht one from a dead man. Bribing a sergeant to give them official marching orders, they had continued on their way, only to come under fire again, from Russian tanks. Grass had been hit in the right thigh and left shoulder. The corporal had been hit in both legs. On the way to the dressing station, he had asked Grass to check his balls for him to make sure they were still okay. It was all good material for the novel Grass was hoping to write one day.

The corporal’s legs had been amputated, while Grass had been evacuated to a rear hospital in Marienbad. Strafed en route by an American fighter-bomber, he had just managed to roll into a ditch before his truck went up in flames. He eventually reached Marienbad days later, unconscious, on the back of a military policeman’s motorbike.

Grass was glad to be in the hospital. The bed was freshly made, and the nurses were solicitous as they bandaged his thigh and probed the splinter in his shoulder. Their light touch meant much more to him than the announcement of Hitler’s death in faraway Berlin. It was May now, and the lilacs were in bloom. The war was almost over, and Grass was out of it for good. Like millions of German soldiers, he couldn’t get too upset about the death of Adolf Hitler if it meant an end to all the fighting.

*   *   *

IN ODETTE SANSOM’S CAMP,
the prisoners had tried to escape that morning, making a concerted rush for the gates in full view of the guards. The SS had opened up at once, raking the compound with machine-gun fire. Odette had watched in horror as the prisoners crumpled and fell, pathetic bundles of blue and white lying dead or dying while the SS looked on without concern.

As soon as it was over, Odette went to complain to the commandant. As Frau Churchill, she demanded to see Fritz Sühren. The radio was playing while they fetched him. Quietly eavesdropping, Odette learned that Berlin had fallen and the British were in Lübeck. The German army in Italy had surrendered. It was no surprise that Sühren was in tears when he appeared.

“Why don’t you open the gates of the camp?” Odette demanded. “The war’s over. It’s useless murder to keep people here.”

“They’d die on the roads.”

“Better to die on the roads than be killed here.”

But Sühren wasn’t interested in the prisoners. “Adolf Hitler is dead,” he told Odette despondently. “He died a hero in the forefront of battle.”

“Really?” Odette managed to suppress her grief. “Are you going to do the same, die a hero?”

“Go back to your hut. I haven’t finished with you yet.”

“Will you open the gates? I’ve never asked a favour of you in my life. I do now. For God’s sake!”

“No. The war isn’t over.”
3

Odette returned to her hut. There was no food. Toward evening, those prisoners who still had the strength formed a working party to make a pile of the bodies in the compound. After dark, they made bonfires of doors and bed boards from the huts and danced hysterically around them, half mad with fear and loathing as they waited to be set free. The gates were still shut, and the SS were still there with machine guns, but their release couldn’t be much longer now.

*   *   *

AT MAUTHAUSEN,
near Linz, the prisoners were only a day or two away from freedom as Patton’s army swept into Austria. They, too, were counting the hours, because they badly needed the Americans to come. Malnutrition had reduced the camp to cannibalism: when an Allied bomb killed some of them by mistake, the survivors had fed on the dead.

Mauthausen was a work camp attached to a stone quarry. The prisoners hewed rock all day for the rebuilding of German cities. By order of Himmler, every block they hewed had to weigh at least 110 pounds, which was heavier than most of them. They then had to carry it above their heads up 186 steps to the surface of the quarry. Prisoners lacking the strength were routinely thrown over the cliff for the amusement of the guards. They called it “parachute jumping” as they watched the prisoners tumble to their deaths.

Peter van Pels, the Jewish teenager arrested with Anne Frank, may have been in Mauthausen, if the records claiming that he had reached the camp from Auschwitz were correct. Simon Wiesenthal was certainly there, very close to death, by his own account. He was lying in Block VI as the news of Hitler’s death circulated. Block VI was the death block, where prisoners were left to expire when they were no longer able to work.

Son of an Austrian officer killed in the First World War, Wiesenthal had been an architect in Poland until the Red army invasion of 1939. He had escaped a Russian pogrom only to be arrested later by the Germans. An SS man had installed a Polish prostitute in Wiesenthal’s apartment when Wiesenthal had been sent to a labor camp to paint swastika-and-eagle shields on captured Russian locomotives.

He had been well treated by some of the German guards, closet anti-Nazis who bore Jews no ill will. Others had been less humane. According to Wiesenthal, he had narrowly escaped death in 1943 when a group of drunken SS had decided to shoot a few Jews to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Wiesenthal had been stark naked, waiting to be executed, when a friendly German had insisted that he was needed to finish painting the signs for the birthday celebrations.

Later, as the casualties at the front mounted, the SS had become much more solicitous toward their Jewish prisoners, keeping them all alive in the hope of avoiding active service by having someone to guard. It had been six SS guards to every prisoner at one point. Then normal service had resumed as Wiesenthal arrived at Mauthausen. Dropping out of the four-mile march from the station, he had been shot at by an SS man as he lay helpless in the snow. It was only next morning, when the prisoners were carrying his body to the crematorium, that someone had noticed that he was still alive.

Wiesenthal was a storyteller, prone to exaggerating his escapades. Yet his sufferings were real enough as he lay in Block VI waiting for the Americans to come. A friendly prisoner had supplied him with pencils and paper, and he was whiling away the time by making sketches of the Nazi leaders—using his skills as an architectural draftsman to produce grim caricatures of a monster Himmler and a death’s-head Hitler behind a mask.

He had also made a sketch of Franz Ziereis, Mauthausen’s commandant. Ziereis was a coldblooded murderer who once gave his son a birthday present of fifty Jews for target practice. Wiesenthal had captured his features perfectly on paper: a useful guide for the Allies, if Ziereis tried to disappear in the next few hours, rather than wait to be hanged for his crimes. The Allies would know exactly what he looked like as they hunted for him after the war—and thousands of other Nazis, too, if Simon Wiesenthal had anything to do with it.

*   *   *

IN UNTERBERNBACH,
it had been snowing as Victor Klemperer set off for Kühbach to see his first American soldiers. He was cold and ragged as he walked, but he had a full stomach for the first time in months, because the Germans in the village had just slaughtered all their pigs rather than let the Americans have them. Klemperer was feeling well fed and happy as he went forward to search for provisions and meet his liberators.

The shops were closed when he reached Kühbach, but the village was full of American troops. The first ones he saw were black, the crew of a vehicle recovery team, making friends with the village children in the square. Slipping down a side street, Klemperer approached a young blond woman and asked why the shops were shut. She replied that the Americans had looted everything when they arrived, but had otherwise been well behaved.

“The blacks, too?”

“They’re even friendlier than the others,” the woman beamed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Back in the square, Klemperer asked two old ladies the same question and received the same answer:

Exactly the same beam of delight because the negroes were the especially good-natured enemies. (I thought of all the black children’s nurses, policemen and chauffeurs in our life). And what had been said about the cruelty of these enemies—that had all been nothing but slogans, that was only rabble-rousing. How the populace is being enlightened!
4

There was a woman in the back streets, Klemperer learned, who could sell him a loaf of bread for ninety pfennigs. He went that way with a spring in his step.

*   *   *

AT BRÜNNLITZ,
in the Czech Sudetenland, the Jews of Oskar Schindler’s metalworking factory had learned of Hitler’s death from radios that their employer had illegally installed in the offices of key personnel. He had also arranged for one of his car radios to be permanently under repair, so that the repairman could plug his earpiece into the BBC and pass the news on to prisoners in another part of the camp.