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 (12 page)
On 10th July 1943, Sparks landed with the 157th Infantry as part of the Allied invasion of Sicily. It is now day 511 of their long, hard campaign. They fought through Italy to Rome; then sailed to the South of France, fighting across the Alps and into Germany. Six days ago they were in Nuremberg, where in a battle by the opera house, Sparks was forced to abandon his jeep, which had in it letters from his wife Mary and photographs of his year-old son Kirk. Now the only pictures he has of them are stuck on the butt of his Colt .45 revolver
.
9.30am
The bodies of Mussolini and his girlfriend Clara Petacci are hanging upside down from meat hooks outside a petrol station on a corner of the Milan square where they had been dumped
earlier. As the square filled up, it was hard to prevent the crowd from trampling the bodies, so in an attempt to calm the onlookers, the bodies were strung up. Their names are on placards pinned to their feet.
Milton Bracker, a reporter for the
New York Times
, is pushed towards the bodies by the ecstatic Milanese, into what he would call later ‘the circle of death’. The crowd think Bracker’s driver, Private Kenneth Koplin, is an American colonel on an official mission to see the bodies, and push him from his jeep to take a close look. Koplin feels sick and can’t wait to get away.
In the crowd, taking one of his last photographs of the 600-day Allied war in Italy is a young second lieutenant working for the British Army Film and Photo Unit. Twenty-four-year-old Alan Whicker has seen plenty of fighting – including the Allied amphibious landings at Anzio in January 1944 and the liberation of Rome the following June (where he attended a press conference with Pope Pius XII where US photographers were shouting ‘Hold it, Pope!’).
On 25th April he and his team of cameramen arrived in Milan, ahead of the advancing Americans, Whicker having swapped his jeep for a large Fiat limousine. They were told by Italian partisans that the SS holding out in the city would only surrender to an Allied soldier. Whicker wrote later, ‘I was looking for pictures, not prisoners, but allowed myself to be led towards the enemy stronghold.’ There, an SS general, clearly disappointed at Whicker’s low rank, nevertheless clicked his heels and handed over his revolver.
Now, four days later, Whicker is in front of the Milan petrol station taking pictures as the mob spit and scream at the bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci. He too is appalled at the scene. ‘It was not, at that moment, a very splendid victory,’ he wrote later.
Alan Whicker’s day is not yet over. He has a traitor to catch.
The Italy section of the British Army Film and Photo Unit took over 200,000 still pictures during the Italian campaign, and over half a million feet of film. It came at a high price. Eight of the 40 officer and sergeant cameramen were killed and 13 seriously wounded
.
A Hitler Youth runner appears in von Loringhoven and Boldt’s office in the upper bunker to report that the Russian tanks are now about 500 metres from the Reich Chancellery.
In Padua, New Zealand senior intelligence officer Geoffrey Cox is watching a Sherman tank roar up to his command post. On the front is John Shirley, one of the finest radio experts in the division.
John Shirley has proved to be invaluable to Geoffrey Cox’s intelligence team. It’s clear from the interrogations of German prisoners that they have considerable knowledge of Allied troop movements, and Shirley has helped establish that they’ve been using First World War techniques to eavesdrop. The Germans have been laying their own telephone lines alongside the Allies’, and so have picked up, thanks to the physics of induction, what was being said
.
In Padua, through interrogations and examining captured files, it was also discovered that during the famous battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, the Germans had employed another ingenious method to get information. At one point Allied telephone cables had been laid along a railway embankment that ran towards German positions. The rails worked as reliable conductors, so all the Germans had to do was attach listening equipment to them to discover vital intelligence
.
Further back on the Sherman tank, holding white flags in one hand and holding on with the other, are four German officers. Cox orders the men to be put in a disused office building with other German POWs. Prisoners are becoming a real problem; that morning the Italian partisans captured 5,000, and the Allies can’t spare men to guard them.
Cox arrives to speak to the four officers and arrange for their transfer south. They give him the Nazi salute. One of them, a general, asks if he can take with him a basket filled with bottles of cognac. But Cox is in no mood to be helpful, having heard the general’s aide de camp and other officers making comments about their Maori guard, calling him a ‘
Neger
’.
Cox picks up the basket of cognac and hands it over instead to the guard.
Like many Allied soldiers, Geoffrey Cox’s attitude to the Germans has hardened since the publication a few days ago of photographs from Bergen-Belsen in the forces’ newspaper
Union Jack.
He has seen death both as a correspondent and as a soldier, but those pictures shocked him – and his men. Cox wrote later, ‘To the troops who saw them now, as they jolted forward in the back of their three-tonners… they were one more stimulus to an aggressiveness that was already a flood tide.’
Two days ago, Cox ripped out a picture of Belsen from
Union Jack
and gave it to his interrogator Mickey Heyden
.
‘Stick this up in your truck when you’re interrogating and see what they say about it…’
‘I will – but I know in advance what they will say – “
Gräuelpropaganda
” [atrocity propaganda].’
A short while later, Cox went to see several hundred captured German soldiers. Taken with them were four Russian women, who the Germans claimed were hospital workers, but Cox could see that was a lie. All the women were crying; one was staring at the
Germans with total hatred. A Kiwi guard offered them some chocolate cake, but they were too frightened to take it
.
As he watched them, a prisoner in his late thirties came up to Cox and said he was a lecturer in English from Hanover. Cox was too tired to fully interrogate the officer, so he decided to see where the man’s sympathies lay
.
‘I have always loved England,’ the German said. ‘I have made this war with a very heavy heart. Many Germans have made this war with a heavy heart.’
Cox showed him the pictures of Belsen, saying, ‘Enough Germans had light enough hearts to accomplish this.’
The man looked at the pictures but was clearly unconvinced. Cox pointed out the Russian women
.
‘Do you feel no shame about that sort of thing? Does it not seem evil to you to take girls like that and drag them from their homes to be used as slaves?’
‘It is ugly. But it is one of those things which come from war.’ Then the German officer said, ‘May I ask you one question? What will happen to us?’
The way the captured soldiers looked at the women had enraged Cox, and he thought of all the atrocities he’d seen in Italy, including just this past Sunday – the bodies of men who’d been dragged out of mass, put up against the church wall and shot
.
‘You will be handed over to the Russians to rebuild some of what you have destroyed,’ Cox lied. The man looked terrified, and as Cox walked away he heard the prisoners start whispering, ‘…
den Russen übergeben!
’ and he took some satisfaction that he’d scared them
.
Lieutenant Claus Sellier and his friend Fritz are walking out of the Austrian town of Lofer and heading for the German border and the army provision headquarters in Traunstein to deliver their final package – what Sellier suspects is a request
for urgent supplies for their beleaguered training camp. Claus feels free and strangely elated, since the generals have all disappeared. They come across three German soldiers – one has a bandaged foot and is being helped by the others.
‘Where are you going?’ Claus asks the wounded soldier.
‘Home to Berlin...’
‘But that’s 1,000 kilometres! And you’re limping – how will you get there?’
‘What else can we do? We were told to leave the hospital and so we’re going home. I don’t care how far it is. Anyway – do we have a choice?’
‘But there’s a big battle round Berlin… Aren’t you scared?’
The soldier shows Claus a letter from a doctor. It says, ‘Released from the hospital. Do the best you can! We need the beds for the next bunch of wounded soldiers that comes in.’
‘I’m going home. I have a bed there – I hope.’
The soldiers go their separate ways.
In his bedroom office in the upper bunker, the monocled General Krebs is on the telephone to army headquarters in Berlin. He is told that the German defence is collapsing on all fronts. Then the line suddenly goes dead. The air balloon which supports the radio-telephone communications has been shot down. All telephone communication between Berlin and the outside world has ended.
Almost immediately a Hitler Youth runner arrives with news of a report that General Wenck’s 12th Army is still holding out south-west of Berlin. Officers Boldt and von Loringhoven exchange glances. This could be the escape opportunity that they have been waiting for. They need to convince General Krebs that they can do most good by breaking out and fighting
with Wenck. They know that if there is any suspicion that they are trying to flee, they will be executed.
Sixteen-year-old Armin Lehmann is one to the Hitler Youth runners. Once the telephone line goes down he finds himself making several trips a day across Berlin’s central street, Wilhelmstrasse, taking messages between army headquarters and the Führerbunker. He recalled these last days in a memoir published in 2003:
‘It was a nightmare
.
‘It was a game of Russian Roulette and those who stepped out from cover were taking their life in their hands. At best they would get a mouthful of the constant cloud of phosphorus smoke and poisonous petrol from the incendiaries; at worst they would be sliced down by a Russian rocket. By then Wilhelmstrasse stank with the smell of scorched bodies… It was a particularly nauseating, sickly sweet smell… If a katyusha strike hit anywhere near where one was, it often produced sudden blindness and a terrible disorientation. That was the most dangerous moment. One had to find one’s feet straightaway otherwise the next strike could be for you… The crossing had become an open air burial pit.’
In the last four or five days of the Battle of Berlin, 20 of Lehmann’s fellow Hitler Youth runners were killed in Wilhelmstrasse. Young boys who refused orders were strung up as an example to others. Only a couple of days ago Lehmann was briefly arrested for staring at the body of a young boy, ‘he cannot have been more than 13’, who had been hanged from a post with a length of clothes line. He was missing an ear and wearing a Home Guard uniform which was much too big for him. Lehmann had heard rumours that children were being hanged for cowardice, but this was the first evidence he had seen of it
.
John F. Kennedy is fast asleep in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The 26-year-old future President of the United States is working as a journalist for the
Chicago Herald-American
, reporting on the international conference to decide the shape of the United Nations that convened four days before. Kennedy’s newspaper byline says he gives ‘the point of view of the ordinary GI.’ Kennedy served as a commander of a motor torpedo boat that in August 1943 was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. His dramatic rescue of his crew has turned him into a war hero.
Last night, Kennedy filed the first of his dispatches for the
Chicago Herald-American
(for which he is paid $250). It began: ‘There is an impression that this is the conference to end wars and introduce peace on earth and good-will towards nations – excluding of course Germany and Japan. Well, it’s not going to do that.’
Kennedy is sceptical because he knows what is going on behind the scenes. He is incredibly well connected thanks to his father Joe, who was US Ambassador to London between 1938 and 1940. No ordinary journalist, JFK has dined with Averell Harriman the US Ambassador to Moscow, Chip Bohlen, a special assistant to the Secretary of State, and Anthony Eden, the leader of the British delegation and future Prime Minister. Already a womaniser, at one event JFK stole Eden’s attractive dance partner.
John F. Kennedy is not a well man – he is thin and drawn. He suffers from Addison’s disease and almost continual back pain. Betty Spalding, a friend staying in the same hotel, recalled that ‘he wasn’t his usual joyful self – he spent a lot of time in bed’. In JFK’s hotel room is a back brace that he uses to keep his spine straight.
He will use the brace for the rest of his life. It will be one of the reasons why he dies in Dallas in November 1963. Instead of falling after being hit by Lee Harvey Oswald’s second bullet, the brace keeps him upright and an easy target for the third
.
Kennedy is one of 600 accredited journalists at the UN Conference whose number bizarrely includes actors Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. San Francisco is the place to be.
Charles Ritchie is part of the Canadian delegation, and is finding the conference and San Francisco fascinating. Before he went to bed he wrote in his diary, ‘The sun shines perpetually, the streets are thronged, there are American sailors everywhere with their girls and this somehow adds to the musical comedy atmosphere. You expect them at any moment to break into song and dance… This seems a technicolor world glossy with self-assurance.’
Across town, in a restaurant called Fosters, journalists Alistair Cooke and Tony Wigan are eating a meal of two eggs over easy, sausages, pancakes and syrup. They arrived in San Francisco the same day as Kennedy; Wigan is a correspondent for the BBC, 37-year-old Cooke a reporter for the
Manchester Guardian
, although he also is one of three regular contributors to the BBC radio programme
American Commentary
. In his
American Commentary
on 25th April, Cooke summed up what was going on in the UN talks for his listeners in Britain: ‘What this conference is about is to see if we can become good citizens of one world, before we become its victims.’