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 (20 page)
Twenty-five-year-old Private Manny Fisher has been helping transfer the sick. He’s written in his diary: ‘I simply could not look at these human wrecks for more than a few seconds. I found my eyes filling with tears, and had to turn away from my soldier-comrades. Some are beyond human aid and will soon die. But they are happy and look forward to living again even though they might know it is only for a short while.’
The wards are often in a state of chaos. The patients sometimes fight for what little food there is, and basic equipment is lacking. Bedpans sometimes double up as feeding tins. Five hundred new patients arrive every day, and the British doctors and nurses and the 48 Red Cross volunteers who arrived a few days ago are struggling to cope. Lieutenant Colonel James Johnston, the senior medical officer at Bergen-Belsen, requested medical personnel from England, and was shocked when a few days ago 60 German doctors freed from POW camps arrived.
A Red Cross nurse wrote home, ‘They strut about the place in a most alarming fashion terrifying all the inhabitants. However the British Tommy is marvellous in taking them down a peg or two.’
On their second day, the German doctors ignored an order to parade at 7am, so Lieutenant Colonel Johnston threatened to hang their senior officer. After that they were more obedient.
German nurses drafted in from nearby towns and cities have added to the tension in the camp. When a group from Hamburg arrived on a ward for the first time, they were set upon by patients (some of whom were dying) armed with knives and forks. Troops were called to rescue the nurses who were by then covered in blood, their uniforms torn to shreds. This is the atmosphere that Michael Hargrave and the other volunteers face in the coming weeks.
Michael will finally arrive in Bergen-Belsen on 3rd May, and be put in charge of Hut 210. Over the next few weeks he treats patients suffering from typhus, diarrhoea and severe malnutrition, and makes careful notes and drawings in his diary about the various conditions he encounters. One day in the camp he comes across a huge pile of boots about 20 yards long and 12 feet high that had belonged to those who’d perished before the British arrived
.
‘…the shoes at the bottom were squashed as flat as paper so you can imagine how many thousands of pairs of shoes were there, and each pair had once had an owner, and though the Germans may have destroyed all records of the camp, this pile of shoes and boots bore mute and absolutely damning evidence of the number of people who had died…’
In May and June a strange sort of normality will appear in the makeshift hospital in the Panzer training school. Dances are
organised, attended by British soldiers and patients, with music provided by an RAF band
.
One doctor wrote later of the survivors: ‘Some could hardly walk, others looked as if they’d break in two.’
A library will be established; Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten come to give performances, and in June, Laurence Olivier’s 65-strong Old Vic Company perform Bernard Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
for the soldiers and medical staff
.
Just before Michael Hargrave leaves England, a consignment of lipstick will arrive at Bergen-Belsen (no one knows who’d ordered it) and it has a remarkable effect on the female survivors. Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Gonin wrote, ‘At last someone had done something to make them individuals again; they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.’
Only yesterday, on 28th April, the British finally buried in mass graves the last of the corpses that they’d discovered when they first entered Bergen-Belsen. Most of the soldiers and medical staff smoke all the time as a way of hiding the atrocious smell
.
Cameramen from British Movietone News and from the British Army Film Unit are filming footage in and around the huts. For stills photographer George Rodger, on an assignment for
Life
magazine, the scenes at the camp are all too much. After realising he is trying to find the most photographically pleasing composition of bodies, Rodger is so ashamed he stops taking pictures. For the rest of his life he avoids war zones and concentrates instead on the people and wildlife of Africa.
The Ministry of Information is keen to collect images to prove to the German people that reported atrocities are real. The famous film director Alfred Hitchcock has been recruited to help compile the footage into a documentary for cinema release.
When he is shown the harrowing footage from Belsen, Hitchcock is so shocked he stays away from Pinewood Studios for a week. One of Hitchcock’s aims will be to show how close the camps are to German towns, and that local people must therefore have known about them. But by the time the film is finished, British politicians are keener to reconstruct Germany than humble its people. The film won’t be shown until 1984
.
However, cinema newsreels in May 1945 will show footage from Belsen. Outside a cinema in Kilburn, north London, a sign is put up: ‘See Them – Lest You Forget.’
Bletchley Park pick up a message from Heinrich Himmler replying to Karl Hermann Frank in Prague:
‘Ref. yours of 1900 hours.
‘What do you mean by freedom of action in domestic and in particular in foreign policy?’
Having been accused of treason by Hitler, Himmler is not going to be seen to give any encouragement to any independent foreign policy initiatives.
Bletchley don’t pick up any reply from the Führerbunker, but they intercept a message to Frank from the Plön headquarters of Admiral Dönitz. Frank is curtly reminded that he has already had instructions for the removal of the German population from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
In London the white stone of BBC Broadcasting House has turned a dark-grey colour during the war years, and it has bomb damage on its west side. The BBC’s civil engineering department has decided that these battle scars should remain as a memento of the war years. In one of the building’s news studios, newsreader Stuart Hibberd is reading the nine o’clock bulletin, and it’s full of details of the death of Mussolini.
Later that evening Hibberd updates his diary: ‘He had been
shot like a dog, together with members of his Cabinet and others, and his body afterwards publicly displayed in Milan, hung up like a turkey in a Christmas market.’
This was one of the last broadcasts in which he would say, ‘Here is the news – and this is Stuart Hibberd reading it.’ In a few days the BBC will request that their newsreaders return to pre-war anonymity. There had been so many fake radio stations broadcasting propaganda out of Germany that in 1939 the BBC decided their newsreaders should be identified by name. They became some of the most well-loved personalities of the war years, both in Britain and in occupied Europe
.
On 3rd May, a Norwegian named H. Bloemraad wrote to Hibberd and the other BBC newsreaders from his home in Larwik. He’d been in hiding since December when the Germans conscripted all men between 17 and 40
.
‘It was a welcome quarter of an hour at nine o’clock in the evening, when your well-known voices told us of the day. In spite of the Germans and their prohibitions and the betrayers they made use of, we have been able to listen to your news regularly. And our relationship, although we are unknown to each other, became ever closer
.
‘And now, at the bottom of our misery and hunger, we are hearing your voices telling us of rumours about peace… As soon as our Germans are in their cages I’ll bring this letter to the post office.’
In his diary the politician Harold Nicolson notes the response of Mrs Grove, his London housekeeper, to the news of the deaths of Mussolini and Clara Petacci. Mrs Groves thinks the Italian dictator thoroughly deserved what he got, ‘a married man like that driving about in a car with his mistress...’
The Royal Marines attached to Dalzel-Job’s 30 Assault Unit are finding it hard to fight the German troops in the woods surrounding the naval arsenal. They’ve sent out patrols, but the Germans are either small in number or unwilling to take them on. They keep disappearing into the trees. Fortunately, the aim of the German mortars is erratic, so there are no British casualties so far – but a German self-propelled gun is being more precise.
30 Assault Unit will be forced to defend the arsenal for another two days. On 1st May the Irish Guards send a platoon to help them deal with the remaining German resistance. Remarkably Dalzel-Job never has a man killed or wounded under his command. ‘From the first I held a firm and quite irrational faith that unlike my father [who died on the Somme when Dalzel-Job was three years old] I should survive and that no man of mine should be killed.’
The [Allied] soldiers were mentally packing their bags for home while they were still shooting their last shots
.
Photographer Robert Capa
Nina Markovna’s 17th birthday is ending with a dance. They are making good use of the old theatre that is her family’s temporary home. Nina has looked forward to dancing with the soldiers and pilots who visit the camp. In ballet school before the war she had learned to tango and waltz, and she wants to impress the young Americans with the ‘Western Salon’ dances she knows.
But the Americans don’t want a formal dance; instead they are showing Nina their newest craze, which they call ‘the
Jitterbug’. To Nina they do resemble large jittering bugs as they move furiously across the dance floor. She tries to copy them, but just feels stiff and ridiculous, while they dance as if they were born to do it.
In Rome, 41-year-old Military Policeman Benedict Alper is writing one of his regular letters to his wife Ethel at home in the US. Since he was posted overseas in September 1943, he has written to her almost every day. (He missed two days after they had a spat when Ethel accused him of having fallen in love with a young army nurse.)
Alper tried to enlist only hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but was turned down because he was over the draft age and he didn’t have 20/20 vision. Still keen to do his bit, he went on to try and join Marine Intelligence, the Coast Guard, the Harbor Antisubmarine Patrol – even the Red Cross. After a year of trying, he was accepted by the Military Police.
Alper writes to Ethel, ‘Here all we think of is when do we go home, now it’s in its final hours… we have lost time together, my sweet, chances to make love, but not love itself, that is, if anything stronger than it was. Surely we will never take each other for granted again, and I promise not to be inconsiderate ever again, or angry, or any of the silly things I have kicked myself for so many times since.’
9.30pm
General Sir Bernard Montgomery is retiring for the night, as he always does at this time. His TAC HQ (Tactical Headquarters)
is based in an isolated group of farm buildings outside Soltau, south of Hamburg. It is his 26th TAC location since the D-Day landings the previous June. Monty is not staying in the farm itself; he has his own caravan, which was captured in the North African desert two years ago from an Italian officer. In it Monty keeps photographs of enemy generals to help him decide what sort of men they are, and how they might react to any moves he may make against them.
Monty is a skilled military commander, much loved by the British people. He is a complex man. Major Peter Earle sat next to him at an evening meal on 12th April and summed up Monty in his diary that night as ‘a bounder: a complete egoist, a very kind man, very thoughtful to his subordinates, a lucid tactician, a great commander’
.
Monty frustrates General Eisenhower with both his caution in battle and his tendency to mislead him with his ‘successes’. Monty always tries to keep ‘Winston’s podgy finger’ out of his campaigns, much to the Prime Minister’s frustration (Churchill came close to sacking Monty on a visit to TAC HQ in July 1944)
.
Monty knows that the end of the war is in sight and his staff can see that he is more relaxed. He has more time to write to his 15-year-old son David, a pupil at Winchester College. On 10th April, using paper captured from the commander of the German VI Army Corps, he wrote to David about his school report: ‘I do not think that this report is very good; except for the Chemistry. I should say that you have been playing the fool a good deal… You must give up trying to dodge the rules, and fooling the masters. Anyone can do that, but it takes a proper chap to run straight down the course.’
Last week there was better news for David. His father sent two parcels – one contained captured pictures of the German field marshals Rommel and Kesselring, the other containing a cake, a box of chocolates and a tin of sweets
.
On 3rd May, a German peace delegation led by Admiral von Friedeburg will arrive unexpectedly at Monty’s headquarters, offering the surrender of all the forces in the north of Europe. Monty emerges from his caravan looking deliberately casual in old corduroy trousers and a grey turtle-necked sweater and trademark black beret
.
Monty greets von Friedeburg by bellowing, ‘Who are you and what do you want? I’ve never heard of you!’
One of Montgomery’s staff whispers to a colleague, ‘The chief is putting on a pretty good act.’
To which the colleague replies, ‘Shut up, you son of a bitch, he has been rehearsing this for six years!’
Monty will then lecture von Friedeburg about the bombing of Coventry and the mass murder of Jews at Belsen. Later he sends a message to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke in London, ‘I was persuaded to drink some champagne at dinner tonight.’
In the Sudetenland, Corporal Bert Ruffle is standing up to his knees in a mud-filled railway truck with three other POWs. They had been promised some light night work by the Stalag IV-C guards – all they had to do was empty the trucks of rubble, then claim extra rations when they finished the job. But Ruffle can see that the Germans were lying – the truck is filled with mud, bricks and large boulders. The men open the side gate of the truck and the mud pours out in a torrent. They start shifting the bricks and boulders.