Read Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany Online
Authors: Emma Craigie,Jonathan Mayo
Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (11 page)
What has been dubbed Operation Manna is under way. Two RAF Lancasters are now lifting off from their base in Lincolnshire with eight specially built panniers in their bomb bays, containing tea, sugar, dried eggs, tinned meat and chocolate. The crews in the air and those getting ready to fly are apprehensive because the Germans have so far only given a verbal agreement to safe air zones. Flight Sergeant Bill Porter of 115 Squadron recalled, ‘As we crossed the Dutch coast on 29th April we could see the German gunners standing by their guns, but the barrels were horizontal.’
Lancaster pilot Robert Wannop kept a war journal and recalled his first flight, just 500 feet off the ground. ‘Children ran out of school waving excitedly – one old man stopped at a crossroads and shook his umbrella… Nobody spoke in the aircraft. It wasn’t the time for words. My vision grew a little misty. Perhaps it was the rain on the Perspex, perhaps it wasn’t. One building was painted with huge white letters “THANK YOU RAF”. Those brave people who had so often risked their lives to save an RAF aircrew and return him safely to England. Who had spied for us and done countless other deeds that may never be revealed. They were thanking us for a little food. I felt very humble.’
Two days after the Yalta Conference, on 13th February, Robert Wannop had been part of a massive RAF and USAAF bombing raid on the historic city of Dresden. The orders given to him and
other RAF pilots were to ‘hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front… and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do’. Wannop wrote a few days later, ‘Above it all we sat sombre and impassive, each man concentrating on the job in hand. The whole city was ablaze from end to end. It was like looking at a sea of liquid flames, inspiring in its intensity. It was so bright at bombing height that we could easily have read a newspaper.’ The firestorm killed at least 25,000 people. It melted the road surfaces and burned people to cinders
.
At RAF Witchford the Lancaster crews of 115 Squadron are being briefed about their mission. It is a relief for them to be dropping food rather than bombs.
Eighteen-year-old Dutch girl Arie de Jong wrote later, ‘There are no words to describe the emotions experienced on that Sunday afternoon. More than 300 four-engined Lancasters, flying exceptionally low, suddenly filled the horizon. I saw [one] aircraft tacking between church steeples...’
At the end of April and the beginning of May, hundreds of tonnes of food will be dropped over Holland. Some crews tie home made parachutes to the food parcels sent from their families at home and drop them to the starving people below. In among one consignment containing bags of flour and chocolate an airman left a note:
‘To the Dutch people
.
‘Don’t worry about the war with Germany. It is nearly over. These trips for us are a change from bombing. We will often be bringing new food supplies. Keep your chins up. All the best
.
‘An RAF man.’
A few Dutch civilians wear what the USAAF have nicknamed ‘happiness hats’ – brightly coloured headgear made from the
parachute silk from downed Allied airmen; they are so bright they can be seen by the low-flying aircraft. The parachutes had been hidden but now are being worn proudly as a sign that they had helped the Allied cause. The crew of one USAAF bomber were flashed by a woman wearing a ‘happiness skirt’ – and no underwear
.
Lieutenant Claus Sellier is standing in the lobby of the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau, which until yesterday was the temporary German army headquarters for the region. He is now dressed in the full uniform of a member of the 79th Mountain Artillery Regiment. On his chest are medals that he won fighting the Russians in Hungary. Claus looks over the receptionist’s desk and sees that the package he brought yesterday is still lying on the floor, unopened. Claus wonders if he should go round and open the package and check whether it contains what he assumes – a request for urgent supplies from his commanding officer. Instead he gives it a kick, then makes the sign of the cross over it. He’s done all he can to complete the first part of the mission – although Claus can see that no one here is interested. In his room is the second package that must be delivered soon.
In a large detached house named Burleigh, in a village outside Coventry, the telephone is ringing. Mrs Clara Milburn answers; it’s her friend Mrs Greenslade.
‘Aren’t you excited?’ she begins and explains that she’s seen a story in yesterday’s
Daily Telegraph
that POWs from Oflag VII-B have been liberated. Clara Milburn’s son Alan has been
a prisoner in Germany since Dunkirk. Mrs Greenslade means well, but Alan is in Stalag VII-B not Oflag VII-B.
Alan has written regularly over the years; the last letter Clara and her husband Jack received was on 23rd March – it had taken over two months to reach them. Alan wrote about his working party doing gardening in the local town and how cold the weather’s been – ‘the old ears and fingers get nipped first thing’. Seven other men from the 7th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment were captured with him; three have been moved to other camps
.
Last Wednesday a young man named Jack Mercer came to see the Milburns. He had been in Stalag VII-B with Alan up until 18 months ago, but then had been moved to another camp by the Germans. Jack’s camp was liberated by the Americans and he’d got home five days ago. Clara and her husband appreciated the young man’s visit, especially as he’d cycled 60 miles from Stoke to see them
.
Later today Clara will get out an old exercise book on the first page of which she has written ‘Burleigh in Wartime’, and she will write up the latest war news: ‘... Berlin is being hammered street by street and house by house. Thousands of Germans are killed each day and their sufferings must be ghastly, but how unnecessarily they have made others suffer – and are not sorry.’ Clara has kept this diary since the day Alan was called up in 1939
.
Clara is not alone in keeping a diary; hundreds of others around the country are doing the same thing, feeling that they want a record of these momentous days. Many, like Clara, are taking cuttings from newspapers to stick alongside their diary entries
.
At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, British Major Elliott Viney has finished his breakfast and is watching two USAAF P-51 Mustangs fly low over the camp. They perform a victory roll
and the men clap and cheer like mad. They can hear the sound of gunfire nearby. They know that liberation is close at hand.
Also watching and cheering the planes is a former P-51 pilot – 24-year-old Flight Lieutenant Alexander Jefferson is enjoying his first evening of freedom for eight months. In August 1944 Jefferson was shot down just outside Toulon while attacking a radar installation, and he was captured and taken first to a POW camp in Poland, and then, as the Russians advanced, moved with thousands of others to Moosburg.
Alexander Jefferson is one of the USAAF’s first black pilots. When the US entered the war in December 1941, black people were not allowed to fly planes. In 1943 Jefferson became part of the Tuskegee Institute Experiment, which was set up to determine if black people could, in fact, be pilots. Shortly after, he was assigned to the 332nd ‘Red Tail’ Fighter group; the Germans soon came to respect these ‘
Schwarze Vogelmenschen
’ or ‘Black Birdmen’ as skilled bomber escorts
.
Jefferson will eventually sail home on the liner
Queen Mary
two months after being liberated. Years later he recalled the welcome he received: ‘Having been treated in Nazi capture like every other Allied officer, I walked down the gangplank towards a white US army sergeant on the dock, who informed us “Whites to the right, niggers to the left.”’
Medical student Michael Hargrave is waiting on the runway at Down Ampney aerodrome by the Dakota transport plane that’s due to take him and other volunteers to Germany to help the sick at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Overnight snow has been brushed from the wings by the ground crew, the student’s
luggage is on board and Hargrave is drying his wet gloves on the tail of the plane.
In central Berlin there’s a sudden lull in the sound of artillery fire. Several Hitler Youth runners arrive in Boldt and von Loringhoven’s office in the upper bunker to report that the Russians are advancing with tanks and infantry towards the Reich Chancellery buildings. For days Boldt and von Loringhoven have been trying to work out how they can get themselves sent out on a combat mission. They have decided that this is their best hope of survival. It is clear that time is running out. Boldt feels sick with tension. The silence of the guns unnerves him.
On the outskirts of Berlin, Yelena Rzhevskaya is attempting to interrogate a ‘tongue’ – as the Russians call their informants – a 15-year-old Hitler Youth with ‘bloodshot eyes and cracked lips’. Rzhevskaya is with the Russian 3rd Shock Army’s SMERSH intelligence detachment. She’s a German speaker working as an intelligence interpreter. The detachment has just received instructions to make their way to the government district and head for the Reich Chancellery. Their orders are to take Hitler alive, but Rzhevskaya is confused and frustrated as information is ‘scarce and self-contradictory and unreliable’. They aren’t even sure that Hitler is in Berlin. The ‘tongue’ isn’t talking and Rzhevskaya concludes that he knows nothing: ‘He is sitting here looking around but not understanding anything. Just a boy.’
Claus Sellier and his fellow Mountain Artillery lieutenant Fritz have met for breakfast at the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau, the onetime regional army headquarters. They are enjoying hot coffee and fresh rolls, but their mood is sombre. Claus is thinking of his three best friends at school – the group of them had been
nicknamed the Four Musketeers. Now the others are dead – two died in Russia, one was shot down over the Atlantic.
‘What do you think we should do now?’ he says to Fritz.
‘We’ll go to Traunstein and deliver the last package,’ Fritz replies, then adds bitterly, ‘Do you think Hitler knows that his generals have jumped ship? What are we going to tell Hitler if he calls here? “Yes, Sir,
Mein Führer Hitler
. No, sir,
Mein Führer!
Everybody at your headquarters has gone. It’s over, sir! You should go too!”’
The two men laugh, and then head to their rooms to pack.
9.15am
Corporal Bert Ruffle of the Rifle Brigade has been a POW since he was captured at Dunkirk on 26th May 1940. He’s a prisoner in Stalag IV-C, an all-British camp near Wistritz in the Sudetenland, and like hundreds of others, Ruffle is forced to work constructing the
Sudentenlandische-Treibstoff-Werke
– an oil refinery. The refinery has taken four years to build and is almost ready to start production. Ruffle never works very hard as he doesn’t see why he should aid the German war effort.
Normally they’re woken up by a guard bursting into their hut at 4am, but today Ruffle and his friend Frank Talbot of the Queen Victoria Rifles have a more pleasant job. They have been selected to go to the nearby town of Brüx to collect some building material for one of the foremen at the refinery. From the back of their lorry, they can see that the town has been bombed heavily by the Allies.
Ruffle is glad of any respite from the tough oil refinery work. Over the past few weeks their food ration has dropped – a loaf of bread a day now has to feed eight men rather than six. Last weekend was his 35th birthday and to mark the occasion he made himself a cake out of flour, burned barley ‘coffee’ grounds, potatoes and a small amount of sugar. ‘You never saw such a conglomeration in all your life but we ate it,’ Ruffle wrote in the diary he’s been keeping since January
.
Like many of the other POWs, Ruffle is starting to get dizzy spells and is seeing spots in front of his eyes. Their health suffered in the numerous marches they were forced to take as the Germans moved them away from the advancing Russians; one trek in the January snow and mud lasted over six weeks. On the march Ruffle witnessed many scenes of brutality – a British POW killed for trying to grab a potato from the side of the road; Russian prisoners shot one by one as they marched
.
Ruffle wrote that evening, ‘What would happen was a guard would snatch a prisoner’s hat and then throw it away. The prisoner was told to fetch it and, as he left the column to retrieve it, he was shot. It was nothing for a guard to give a prisoner a push and then shoot him as he staggered. All told, there must have been about hundred Russians who would not see Russia again.’
Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks is on an important mission. The infantry and tanks of his regiment – the US 157th Infantry of the 45th Infantry Division – have been given the task of taking part in the capture of Munich, the capital of Bavaria and the home of Nazism, and then to push on to destroy Hitler’s mountain residence – the Berghof, outside Berchtesgaden. They have been making good progress, covering on average 50 miles a day, and they’re now only 30 miles from Munich.
Sparks’ tanks are full of fuel, German opposition is light (little more than a few roadblocks), so Sparks is confident that the city will soon fall.
A message is radioed to his jeep from headquarters. ‘S-3 to all battalions. Upon capture of Dachau, post airtight guard and allow no one to enter or leave.’
Sparks hears it with fury. Capturing and taking over a concentration camp is going to slow him down – but he knows he has no choice. Yesterday he and other commanders were told that Dachau would be in their zone of action the next day, and that it was a ‘politically sensitive area’. This morning, Sparks divided his 56 tanks into two units and told them to go either side of the concentration camp and then to proceed to the town of Dachau, and reach Munich by nightfall.