Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (8 page)

BOOK: Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany
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On Friday 27th, Mussolini had been captured by Italian partisans. He had tried to disguise himself in the helmet and greatcoat of a German soldier and pretended to be asleep in the back of an army truck. He and Clara were taken to a partisan safe house in the hills. At four o’clock the following afternoon a man named Walter Audisio arrived, claiming to have come to rescue them. He was in fact a member of the Italian resistance. He drove them to a villa near the village of Giulino di Mezzagra above Lake Como. There Audisio read out a death sentence in the name of the Italian people and shot them both. One report claimed that Mussolini cowered in terror, another that he pulled open his coat and shouted, ‘Aim for the heart!’

One hundred and fifty miles away, Allied trucks and jeeps of the 2nd New Zealand Division, part of the British Eighth Army, are driving through the dark streets of the northern Italian city of Padua. Men and women are running alongside shouting, ‘
Viva! Viva!
’ Some are clapping, some are crying. The troops stop their vehicles in a small square in front of a church. Thirty-five-year-old Major Geoffrey Cox, a former
Daily Express
journalist turned intelligence officer, watches as groups of soldiers head into the nearby streets to deal with
snipers. Desperately tired, Cox gets his bed roll out from his jeep and lies down in the back of a truck. The sound of rifle fire echoes around the square.

The New Zealanders are leading a charge to get to the large port of Trieste before Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav Fourth Army. In their way is the German army and Fascists loyal to Mussolini. The Yugoslavs want Trieste as part of a new, larger Yugoslavia of which Tito is provisional prime minister. His country was invaded by the Axis powers in 1941, and since then the Allies have supported the Yugoslav resistance. But Trieste is important as a gateway to get supplies to Allied troops heading across the Alps and into Austria – plus, whoever controls the city, controls the northern Adriatic. Churchill is deeply concerned with the shape of Europe after the war. Two days earlier he sent a telegram to President Truman: ‘The great thing is to be there before Tito’s guerillas are in occupation. Therefore it does not seem to me there is a minute to wait. The actual status of Trieste can be determined at leisure. Possession is nine points of the law.’

Churchill also told Truman there will be ‘great shock’ when the US army withdraws from some of their zones of occupation in Germany and hands the territory over to the Russians, as agreed at the Yalta Conference. So if at the same time the northern Adriatic was occupied by Yugoslavs, ‘who are the Russians’ tools and beneficiaries’, in Churchill’s words, ‘this shock will be emphasised in a most intense degree’
.

The events of the last days of April 1945 had been shaped by the final conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, held in early February at Yalta in the Crimea, with Stalin as host. Stalin arrived in the Crimea by train (he had a fear of flying), Roosevelt in the first presidential plane, nicknamed ‘Sacred Cow’, and Churchill also by plane, with plenty of whisky to fend off the typhus and lice he believed thrived in Yalta
.

The Crimea had been occupied by the Germans, and the last Tzar’s summer palace, where the conference took place, had been thoroughly looted, so furniture, linen and paintings had all been brought in by train from Moscow’s best hotels – along with most of their staff. ‘We could not have found a worse place for a meeting if we had spent ten years on research,’ Churchill complained
.

At the end of the first day things were not going well. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote that night, ‘Stalin’s attitude to small countries struck me as grim, not to say sinister.’ He was right. Stalin’s aim was to regain all the territory that had ever been under Russian rule, and as neighbours he wanted regimes that that could be controlled from Moscow. Stalin was convinced that Germany would rise again within 25 years and he wanted Poland as a buffer state under his influence. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to ensure that any Polish government included Polish politicians who were in exile in London. Churchill especially needed a free Poland – after all, this was the reason that Britain had gone to war in the first place – ‘the cause for which Britain drew the sword’. It was decided at Yalta that a Polish provisional government would be set up – the form of which would be decided by a commission. As for Germany, an agreement stated that the Allies ‘shall possess supreme authority with respect to Germany. In the exercise of such authority they will take such steps, including the complete dismemberment of Germany as they deem requisite for future peace and security’
.

On the last day of the conference, 11th February, the Big Three made the final changes to a statement of intent (Churchill objected to the word ‘joint’ as it reminded him of ‘the Sunday family roast of mutton’.) Published the next day, the communiqué stated that the Declaration on Liberated Europe meant the establishment of order to enable ‘the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice’
.

But Yalta had merely papered over the cracks. It was clear to most at the conference that the Soviets and the Western powers had very different plans for the future of Europe. ‘The only bond of the victors is their common hate,’ wrote Churchill
.

About 3.15am/4.15am UK time

Flying from Rechlin airfield to Lübeck on the Baltic in a little two-seater, Hanna Reitsch and Luftwaffe chief Robert Ritter von Greim are under attack from Russian fighter planes which have control of the skies. Reitsch, who is one of the most skilled pilots of her generation, manages to dodge all attacks.

In the Hotel Bachmann in the Italian Alps, the news that British MI6 agent Captain Sigismund Payne-Best has been waiting for has arrived. General Vietinghof of the nearby German army garrison is sending a company of infantry to ensure the safety of the
Prominentes
from the SS. Vietinghof has promised to let the advancing Americans know that there are important prisoners in the Hotel Bachmann and in homes in Villabassa.

Relieved at the news, Payne-Best finally goes to bed.

You are free. We are the English army. Be calm. Food and medical help is on the way
.

Loudspeaker announcement to the inmates of Bergen-Belsen, 15th April 1945

Twenty-one-year-old medical student Michael Hargrave is being woken up by an army cook in a transit camp outside Cirencester. It’s bitterly cold and Michael has spent the night dressed in socks, trousers and sweater. He heads quickly to the washhouse, as he leaves for Germany in an hour.

A month ago, Michael saw a notice pinned to a board in Westminster Hospital asking for students to volunteer to help starving Dutch civilians. Yesterday afternoon Michael and 94 other volunteers were photographed by the press and then informed there had been a change of plan – they were not going to Holland at all, but to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in north-western Germany.

The washhouse turns out to be a corrugated iron shed with no door and no glass in the windows. Michael has a very quick wash.

In Bergen-Belsen on the morning of the 15th April, Clara Greenbaum, her eight-year-old daughter Hannah and her three-year-old son Adam heard a strange rumbling sound. Leaving their hut they saw that the watchtowers were empty – in fact there were no guards anywhere. Thousands of emaciated prisoners stood facing the direction of the noise; many others lay on the ground dying. After a while, tanks with Union Flags flying from their turrets appeared, circled the camp twice and then stopped in front of the gates. Then about 500 soldiers arrived, gazed into the camp, and one by one were sick. Prisoners turned away in embarrassment. Clara and Hannah began to cry for the first time in three years. Then soldiers threw food over the fence and a tank smashed through the gates
.

There to greet the British was the Commandant, Josef Kramer, a former unemployed electrician who had joined the SS in 1932. He stayed in the camp because he had been ordered to do so by his superiors
.

Bergen-Belsen was built originally as a camp for well-connected, so-called ‘exchange Jews’, who could be swapped for German POWs. As the Russians advanced west, camps in Poland were evacuated by the Germans and the inmates forced to march on foot or sent in cattle trucks to camps in Germany. By early April,
Bergen-Belsen was hopelessly overcrowded. At the end of 1944 there were 15,257 inmates, by April there were 44,000
.

In February there was a massive outbreak of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. It’s believed that between 20,000 and 30,000 died. Two of the victims were 15-year-old Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who had hidden with their parents in a secret annexe in Amsterdam until they’d been discovered the previous August. The sisters were buried in a mass grave with 10,000 others just a few days before the British arrived
.

One of the first correspondents to visit Belsen was the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby. His colleague Wynford Vaughan-Thomas met him driving away from the camp. He looked like a changed man
.

‘You must go and see it, but you’ll never wash the smell of it off your hands, never get the filth of it out of your mind. I’ve just made a decision… I must tell the exact truth, every detail of it, even if people don’t believe me. This is an outrage… an outrage.’

A few hours later, Dimbleby recorded a 14-minute report describing the horrors of the camp
.

Since July 1944 the BBC had been broadcasting details of what had been happening to Jews in camps such as Auschwitz thanks to reports smuggled out by the Polish resistance. Dimbleby’s report was the first radio eyewitness account of the barbarism of the camps
.

‘I found a girl, she was a living skeleton… stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was: “English, English, medicine, medicine” and she was trying to cry but didn’t have enough strength.’

One of Richard Dimbleby’s last broadcasts from Germany will be from Hitler’s study – sitting in his chair. Dimbleby came away with knives, forks and spoons with the initials A.H., which he would provide at dinner parties for people he didn’t like
.

4.00am

In the Führerbunker Traudl Junge finally finishes typing Hitler’s testaments. The copies are taken through to the conference room for the witnesses to sign. Goebbels, Bormann and the generals Burgdorf and Krebs sign the three copies of the political testament as witnesses and Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below signs the will. Junge thinks how the bunker light makes everyone look grey and exhausted as she returns to the desk in the common room to put the papers in order.

Von Below has been with Hitler throughout the war, representing the Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Göring. He is honoured to be asked to sign Hitler’s will. The last few days have been particularly tense as he has had to manoeuvre carefully to distance himself from his disgraced boss. Von Below is longing to find a way to leave the bunker. Only three weeks ago he travelled to the Baltic coast to say goodbye to his pregnant wife and three children. He had travelled back to Berlin in beautiful sunshine with great reluctance. He believes it unlikely that he will leave the capital alive.

‘On behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would unreservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital…’
About 4.15am

Joseph Goebbels bursts in on Traudl Junge as she makes final corrections. He is weeping and shaking. He chokes out his
words: ‘The Führer wants me to leave Berlin, Frau Junge! He has ordered me to take a leading post in the new government. But I can’t. I can’t leave Berlin. I can’t leave the Führer’s side! I am
Gauleiter
of Berlin. My place is here. I can’t see the point of carrying on living if the Führer is dead…’

Traudl Junge has never seen him so upset.

‘He said to me, “Goebbels, I didn’t expect YOU to disobey my last order as well!” I can’t understand. The Führer has made so many decisions too late – why must he make this last decision too soon?’

Goebbels then asks her to take down his testament. She puts aside the documents she’s been working on and picks up her shorthand pad and pencil. He starts dictating:

‘For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Führer. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Otherwise – quite apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and loyalty forbid us to abandon the Führer in his hour of greatest need – I should appear for the rest of my life as a dishonourable traitor and common scoundrel, and should lose my self-respect together with the respect of my fellow citizens.

‘For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would unreservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it falls, but rather, at the side of the Führer, to end a life which will have no further value to me if I cannot spend it in the service of the Führer, and by his side.’

Joseph Goebbels asks for three copies to be sent as addenda with Hitler’s political and private testaments.

Traudl Junge starts typing and concentrates on typing as fast as she can without making errors. She is longing to go to bed. She has spent most of the last week looking after the Goebbels
children, reading them fairy tales, playing forfeits. The thought of them brings a lump to her throat but she feels like an automaton. She keeps typing, trying to get these last three documents word perfect.

4.30am

Hanna Reitsch has commandeered a car at Lübeck airfield and is driving von Greim towards Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters in Plön Castle near the Baltic. Robert Ritter von Greim is feeling very unwell. His leg wound is becoming increasingly painful as infection sets in. Every jolt of the car on the rutted road makes it worse. Their vehicle is under constant bombardment from Russian planes.

BOOK: Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany
11.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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