Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (28 page)

Across Berlin people are destroying evidence of any link to the Nazis. Posters or photographs of the Führer are smashed and thrown in with the rubble on the streets. Women are
throwing out their photographs of the men they love because they are wearing German army uniform.

Intelligence officer Geoffrey Cox has decided to head into Venice. The engineers of the 2nd New Zealand Division are in the process of building a bridge over the River Piave, and until it’s completed they can’t continue their advance to Trieste. A trip to Venice would be useful, as Cox knows that the partisans there have telephone contact with groups behind German lines. He is also desperate to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

America is waking up to sensational headlines, such as ‘MUSSOLINI AND PARAMOUR EXECUTED BY ITALIAN PATRIOTS’. ‘REDS STABBING BERLIN’S VITALS’. But there are small domestic war stories too – many papers cover the tale of a Baltimore woman who lost her wallet a week ago and has had it returned, minus $5 but with an IOU saying, ‘I borrowed the $5 I found. My husband is being shipped out so we had gone to Baltimore to see the sights and naturally money comes in handy. Please don’t be angry.’

Hitler sits down for lunch with Constanze Manziarly and the two secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge. Eva Hitler has no appetite and has stayed in her room with her maid Liesl Ostertag.

Everyone around the table maintains an artificial composure, as they twirl the plain spaghetti around their forks and prod the cabbage and raisin salad. Hitler gives a monologue on the future of Germany and the difficulties that lie ahead.

‘The immediate post-war world will not have a good word to say about me – but later histories will treat me justly. You will all experience things that you cannot even imagine.’

As he drones on the secretaries feel a mounting tension. They are desperate to get away. After the meal, as soon as they politely can, they slip off to find somewhere ‘to smoke a cigarette in peace’.

Eva Hitler has chosen a black dress with white roses around the neck, one of her husband’s favourites. Liesl has pressed it and is now coiffing Eva’s hair.

Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand is explaining to the Reich Commissioner in the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the details of the Allied plan to feed the Dutch, and the medical arrangements in place for those suffering from malnutrition.

In Königsplatz, in central Berlin, the Russian 150th Rifle Division are diving for cover. They have not yet succeeded in crossing the moat in front of the Reichstag. They have come under heavy fire from the rear as the anti-aircraft guns from the Zoo tower, two kilometres away, have been turned upon them. Hundreds of Russian soldiers have been killed. The survivors are forced to wait until nightfall.

However, beyond Königsplatz, the German defence fighters have been utterly unable to stop the flow of tanks and heavy artillery over Moltke Bridge into the city centre. Supported by these big guns, the Russians are systematically emptying the buildings around the square to isolate the German fighters in the Kroll Opera House and the Reichstag itself.

Antonina Romanova is an 18-year-old Russian forced labourer planting potatoes on a farm near Greifswald in north-east Germany. She and her fellow labourers work in all weathers,
but today at least it is warm and sunny. Antonina notices that the three-storey farmhouse has white sheets hanging out of the windows. She is bemused as the beds were aired only two days ago. What can this mean?

Suddenly she sees some horsemen riding across the field. As they get close they shout in Russian, ‘Where are the Germans?’ Overjoyed, Antonina and the others kiss the soldiers’ boots and pull them from their horses and hug them. ‘We were drunk with joy,’ Antonina wrote later.

In Nassau, in the Bahamas, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are having breakfast (the Duke is the former King Edward VIII who abdicated in December 1936). Today is the day that his resignation as Governor takes effect. They have already started packing and will leave the island in three days’ time for New York, and eventually France. Edward and Wallace have not been happy in what he calls ‘a third-class British colony’. He has asked Churchill to intercede and persuade his brother, the King, to invite him to tea on his return to Europe. It is a courtesy normally extended to former governors, but George VI absolutely refuses. Churchill assures the Duke, ‘I have not concealed my regret that this should be so.’ Following a visit to Obersalzberg in 1937 when the Duke of Windsor publicly gave Hitler a Nazi salute, he has been widely criticised in Britain for having apparent Nazi sympathies. After the war he will insist, ‘The Führer struck me as a rather ridiculous figure with his theatrical posturings and bombastic pretensions.’

Twenty-seven-year-old American GI Lieutenant Wolfgang F. Robinow is steering his way through the wrecked streets of Munich in a jeep. There is a machine gun mounted at the back of the vehicle, and sandbags on the floor as protection from mines. With Robinow is his reconnaissance unit of 21 men, whose mission is, as usual, ‘To go forward until you meet resistance.’

There are few civilians to be seen in the city, and most of the SS battalions who have defended Munich so fiercely in the past few days have left. (The SS have also faced a three-day insurgence from some citizens of Munich hoping to be spared further destruction.)

Allied bombardment from the air and from field artillery has damaged many of Munich’s finest buildings, including the 12th-century Peterskirche and the Wittelsbacher Palais, used until recently as a Gestapo jail and satellite camp for Dachau. The capture of Munich for the Allies will be a symbolic prize – the Nazis call it ‘the Capital of the Movement’; General Eisenhower called it ‘the cradle of the Nazi beast’.

Hitler had first come to Munich in 1913 with a plan (never achieved) of enrolling at the Art Academy. ‘Almost from the first moment… I came to love that city more than any other place. “A German city!” I said to myself...’ Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
. Now, in Odeonsplatz, Munich’s central square, where Hitler joined the crowds celebrating Germany’s declaration of war on Russia and Serbia in August 1914, large white letters are painted across a monument: ‘I am ashamed to be German.’

Making his way through the centre of Munich is nerve-wracking work. He recalled later, ‘We never knew what was hiding around the next corner. We didn’t have any dogs or tanks or anything like that. Just the jeeps. My soldiers had rifles. I had a pistol. That was it.’

Russian soldiers are rampaging through 77-year-old Elisabeth Ditzen’s house in the town of Carwitz in north-east Germany. They arrived with swords, rifles and horsewhips. Elisabeth offered them two clocks, but they wanted more. They are now in every room in the house going through every drawer, every suitcase. A soldier heads out of the door, and Elisabeth can see that he is holding her late husband’s watch. He stares at her, then shakes her hand and leaves.

In the Führerbunker, the switchboard operator Rochus Misch is sick with panic. In order to stretch his legs he has just been over to the new Reich Chancellery where he saw three men in the corridor. Two he recognised as high-ranking SS officers,
but it was the sight of the man they were flanking that terrified Misch. The thin, pale man with close-set eyes is Heinrich Müller, aka Gestapo Müller, chief of the Gestapo. Misch can only think of two possible reasons for his arrival – either he has come to shoot the eyewitnesses to Hitler’s death or he has come to blow up the bunker with a time bomb.

At Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue, President Truman is saying goodbye to Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, the White House Special Counsel. They have just had a brief meeting to discuss the question of what to do with Nazi war criminals. Stalin is in favour of the execution, without a trial, of high-ranking Nazis – indeed, he half-joked at the Tehran Conference about the need for between 50,000 and 100,000 staff officers to be killed. But Truman wants public trials, and has just asked Rosenman if he would act as his official representative in talks with the Allies.

The letter of instruction that Judge Rosenman has with him concludes, ‘Those guilty of the atrocities that have shocked the world since 1933 down to date must be brought to speedy justice and swift punishment – but their guilt must be found judicially…’

Lieutenant Wolfgang F. Robinow’s reconnaissance unit is making its way onto Munich’s historic 12th-century square the Marienplatz. They are soon surrounded by a group of old people waving and cheering. Robinow can only feel anger at their pleasure. This was the city that supported Hitler and his National Socialists from the start, and where the
Volkischer Beobachter
, the Nazi propaganda newspaper, still has its headquarters.

‘And now these people are happy to be “liberated”?’ Robinow thinks in disgust.

The young lieutenant spots a police station, and heads across the square with his men.

In Dachau, medical officer Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith is being shown the full horror of the camp by the former inmates. He is at the rear of the four furnaces of the crematorium. On a wall is a sign showing a man riding a monstrous pig. The caption reads, ‘Wash your hands. It is your duty to remain clean.’

In the main police station in central Munich, Lieutenant Robinow is looking at row upon row of pistols – all boxed and
with two tags attached, one showing the number of the pistol and the other the number of the officer who had been issued the pistol. Robinow can only smile at the German efficiency he knows so well. He had expected trouble at the police station and had marched boldly in with his men, but was greeted only by salutes from unarmed officers.

A policeman with Robinow says that, if the Americans are taking the weapons away, he wants a receipt for them. Robinow writes, ‘Received this day the 30th of April, 1945, 102 pistols. Signed John Doe. First Lieutenant Infantry US Army.’

Admiral Dönitz has arrived at another police station 500 miles to the north, where Heinrich Himmler has set up his headquarters. Hanna Reitsch has made it clear that Hitler wants Himmler arrested, but Dönitz does not have the forces to overpower Himmler’s SS guard. Himmler has kept Dönitz waiting, and finally appears with what Dönitz reckons must be every available SS officer. The room in Lübeck police station is packed. Himmler assures the Admiral that he has had no contact with Bernadotte, and has made no overtures to the Allies. He emphasises that in these difficult times it is vital to avoid internal disputes. It suits Dönitz to take these assurances at face value.