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 (9 page)
Adolf and Eva Hitler retire to their bedrooms. In the past, she had complained that he only loved her when they were in bed together. He would prepare for sex with injections of bovine testosterone and she would take medication to stop her periods when she stayed with him. But those days are over. He gets himself ready for bed. He doesn’t like help; he doesn’t like to be touched. He washes carefully; he has always been fastidious about cleanliness. He changes into a white cotton nightshirt, and hangs his clothes carefully on a clothes horse. Liesl is waiting for Eva in her bedroom and helps her into an Italian blue silk nightgown. In the quiet of their beds they can hear the rumble of the Russian guns. The enemy are now only a few hundred yards from the bunker. The guns have been firing all night, but as dawn approaches the bombardment intensifies.
Traudl Junge has finished typing Joseph Goebbels’ testament. He almost tears the last sheet from her typewriter, checks and signs it and then retires to his room. Junge finds a spare camp bed and falls into an exhausted sleep as dawn is breaking over Berlin. Many buildings in the centre of the city are ablaze. The nearby Gestapo headquarters are under heavy artillery and howitzer attack. Following a massacre of the prisoners by the Gestapo guards on 23rd April, there are only seven inmates left inside.
Martin Bormann is in his room in the Reich Chancellery cellar. He needs very little sleep and keeps the same hours as the Führer, habitually staying up until the early hours. Tonight, before he settles down to sleep, he writes a diary entry:
‘Sunday 29th April. The second day which has started with a hurricane of fire. During the night of 28th–29th April, the foreign press wrote about Himmler’s offer of capitulation. The wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. Führer dictates his political and private wills. Traitors Jodl, Himmler and the generals abandon us to the Bolsheviks. Hurricane fire again. According to the information of enemy, the Americans have broken into Munich.’
American intelligence scouts are indeed entering Munich as Bormann writes his diary.
In Padua, New Zealander Major Geoffrey Cox wakes up in the back of his intelligence truck after only three hours’ sleep. On a wall above him is a large map of Italy, with little flags
showing the enemy divisions. The truck also contains captured German maps and scores of aerial photographs showing the German positions.
The sky is grey and Cox can still hear the sound of gunfire in the streets. He washes quickly, keen to find out what is going on as there is no time to be wasted if the Allies are to beat the Yugoslavs to Trieste. Cox’s boss General Freyberg urged his officers, ‘Press on at full speed, press on. Give them no rest!’
The Allies are being helped by Italian partisans in the north of Italy who are attempting to stop the retreating Germans destroying vital factories, railway lines and bridges. The partisans are a mixture of former Italian army units and bands of militia formed after the Germans occupied Italy following the armistice of 1943, when Italy left the Axis powers
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Propaganda broadcasts from Rome have given the partisans instructions on how they can help the Allied advancing armies, including guidance on pronouncing the word ‘mine’ to let their soldiers know where the Germans had laid minefields
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After a night of travelling under fire, Reitsch and von Greim arrive at Plön Castle which has, for the last week, functioned as the headquarters of all German military forces in the north of Germany, under the command of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz.
Robert Ritter von Greim is exhausted from the overnight journey but Hanna Reitsch is still exhilarated by the excitement of all their near misses and she gives Admiral Dönitz a passionate account of their mission and ferociously denounces Himmler. She passes on Hitler’s order for Himmler’s arrest. Dönitz explains that Himmler has the protection of a substantial SS escort battalion and can’t easily be arrested.
Reitsch and von Greim will stay in Plön for a couple of days and Reitsch manages to have a brief interview with Himmler. She later claimed that she took the opportunity to convey her disgust at what she considered to be his treachery of the Führer but, given the presence of his SS guard, she was in no position to carry out the heroic arrest she dreamed of
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The BBC Home Service is broadcasting a 15-minute programme called
The Daily Dozen – Exercises for Men and Women
based on a fitness programme for young recruits in the First World War.
About 6.30am
A young officer, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, wakes his colleague Gerhard Boldt. The two men share a room in the upper bunker, where they sleep and work. Their job is to compile twice-daily reports on the military situation for the Führer’s military conferences. Their room contains bunk beds, two desks and two telephones as well as a large map. Part of the room is divided off with a curtain, behind which their boss, General Krebs, sleeps. Von Loringhoven is bursting with news but he doesn’t want Krebs to catch him gossiping, so as Boldt sits down to work, von Loringhoven looks up casually and whispers, ‘Our Führer got married last night.’
Boldt looks so astonished that von Loringhoven can’t suppress
his amusement and the two of them collapse with laughter, stopped only by the voice of their boss, through the curtain: ‘Have you taken leave of your senses, gentlemen, laughing so disrespectfully at the sovereign leader of your country?’
The two men fall silent and von Loringhoven waits until he hears Krebs get up and leave before telling Boldt all he has heard about the events of the night.
At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg outside Munich, British officer Major Elliott Viney is shaving. In the distance he can hear the sound of gunfire.
Viney has been a prisoner since May 1940 when he was captured after the attempt by the Bucks Battalion under his command to defend the town of Hazebrouck during the retreat to Dunkirk. (Later in 1945 Major Viney will be awarded the DSO for his leadership and bravery at Hazebrouck.)
Viney has only been in Moosburg for a fortnight. On 14th April he and other Allied officers were moved south from the POW camp at Eichstätt, just two days before it was liberated by the Americans. On the march, a squadron of USAAF Thunderbolts mistook the British khaki uniforms for Hungarian military uniforms (Hungary being a member of the Axis powers) and attacked. A number of Viney’s friends were killed, and he only just escaped. Later that night when he unpacked his rucksack he found a large bullet from a Thunderbolt lodged in a shoe
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Viney has been up since before five as events in the camp are moving so fast. Last night the SS camp guards surrendered control to the prisoners, and some left. Now the prisoners are patrolling their own camp and manning the perimeter fence. Viney heads off to find some breakfast.
Let us not fail to grasp this supreme chance to establish a worldwide rule of reason – to create an enduring peace under the guidance of God
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President Truman, 25th April 1945
On the banks of the River Elbe, Russian and American troops are recovering after days of drinking and dancing.
On the morning of 25th April in Leckwitz, a hamlet in eastern Germany, an American officer named Albert Kotzebue saw a lone horseman he couldn’t identify ride into a courtyard; he and his men followed in their jeeps. The man turned out to be a Soviet cavalryman, Aitkalia Alibekov, on a scouting mission. It was 11.30am. The two mighty armies had met for the first time. Germany was cut in two
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Alibekov led Kotzebue and his men to the River Elbe, where they waded knee-deep through bodies of dead Germans to get to the other side. There they met other Russians, and formal salutes were soon replaced by pats on the back and toasts from the Russians to ‘our great leaders – Stalin and Roosevelt’ (they didn’t realise that Roosevelt had died a fortnight before and been replaced by Vice President Harry Truman). Over the next few days the men swapped cigarettes, danced and got drunk. There were celebrations in Times Square, and in Moscow 324 guns fired 24 salvos in salute
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A few hours later an historic conference opened in San Francisco to determine the shape a new international peace organisation called the United Nations should take
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One thousand delegates from all over the world were there. A US delegate wrote to his wife that San Francisco was ‘dazzling… there are rich hotels teeming with the diplomatic corps of the world
– food beyond description – wines, liquors, cars for one’s beck and call – free movies…’ It was a world away from the squalor of the battlefields of Europe and the Far East. On flags and on the badges worn by the delegates was a new emblem designed by the graphic artists of the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA) showing a world map set against a blue backdrop, with the US as host nation at its heart. Later the map will be tilted to have the international dateline at its centre
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In San Francisco and on the Elbe, all is not as harmonious as it seems. Russian soldiers in Germany mixing with their Allies have been told to ‘take no initiative in organising friendly meetings… give no information about operational plans or unit objectives’. In San Francisco Bay the Russians have an ‘entertainment’ ship called the
Smolny,
purportedly full of caviar and vodka, but in reality it was fitted out with spying equipment and a secure phone line to send messages back to Moscow
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On 28th April, RAF pilot Eric Lapham, who’d recently left a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany after the guards had fled (the last guard meekly handed over the keys to the gate after a POW bravely walked up to him and stuck his hand out for them), came across some Russian soldiers who spoke English. They talked about the Russian–American meeting at the Elbe and then Lapham asked them where they thought their advance would end. ‘We were rather shattered when they said “the English Channel”’, he recalled
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Our main enemy is America. But the basic thrust must not be delivered against America itself
.
Joseph Stalin
Stalin is paranoid that he will be betrayed – and with good reason. On 22nd June 1941 German forces invaded Russia,
breaking their non-aggression pact. Stalin was so shocked he said that someone should ‘urgently contact Berlin’ as Hitler surely didn’t know about the attack.
This has made him deeply suspicious of his Allies. He is convinced that the US and Britain would like to secure a separate peace with Germany, and then all three countries would turn on Russia. Until Stalin received a telegram from Churchill on 5th June 1944 (‘tonight we go…’), he had been unconvinced that the Second Front – the invasion of northern Europe led by General Eisenhower – would actually take place. Russia has suffered greatly during its four-year battle with Germany. It’s estimated that ten million Russian soldiers died in action in the Second World War, representing 65% of all Allied military deaths – the proportion of British and US military deaths was 2% each; a further three million Russians died after they became prisoners of war, and seven million Russian civilians were killed.
Stalin is after revenge, and he wants to get to Berlin first, capture Hitler and put him on trial.
At the end of March 1945, General Eisenhower sent a personal message to Stalin, reassuring him that his armies would not march on Berlin. Churchill was furious that Eisenhower could have made such a unilateral decision – he was convinced that Berlin should not fall into Russian hands (even though it was well within the agreed Russian zone of occupation)
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General Patton confronted Eisenhower: ‘We had better take Berlin and quick.’
‘George, why would anyone want it?’
‘I think history will answer that for you.’
In a square on the outskirts of Padua, New Zealand soldiers are shaving, their mirrors placed on the side of their tanks. Geoffrey Cox and the other intelligence officers are having a civilised breakfast round a table covered in a white cloth. Women on their way to early Sunday mass stop and stare at the scene.
An Italian man runs up to the officers claiming that a British soldier has looted his flat and taken his radio.
‘We fight for you, and then you do this. It is not right!’
‘You fight for us?’ Cox replies, ‘Who the hell do you think we are fighting for here in Italy?’
There has been a great deal of looting throughout the war. In the early years of their conquests in Europe the Germans practised it on a massive scale, stripping factories of their machinery, and museums and art galleries of their treasures and shipping them back home. Now the looting is more opportunistic. British tank crews are reversing their tanks through German warehouse doors and stealing the contents; Russian soldiers are grabbing anything of value they find, from watches to cloth, and sending it back home. They are allowed to send a parcel a month. Many exceed their quota
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Red Army officer Akim Popovichenko wrote to his wife a few days ago, ‘Today at last I have succeeded in sending you parcels of valuable items… so many silk and wool fabrics, I can’t remember how many metres… there are silk stockings for you, I think about eight pairs, all new of course, then two silk ladies’ blouses… you would be the richest woman in Smela. I mean that seriously.’
Daily Express
journalist Alan Moorehead, travelling with British troops in Germany, watched a wine warehouse in the village of Steyerberg being looted. Villagers and refugees helped themselves to bottles of the finest wine he had ever seen – a child carried a case of Château Yquem; his parents used a wheelbarrow to carry their
haul. Others struggled to hold onto large magnums, jeroboams and rehoboams of Rothschild Château Lafite 1891. Many were dropped and smashed
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Last weekend the BBC’s Wynford Vaughan-Thomas told his radio listeners about the former slave labourers he’d seen take tractors, bicycles, lorries, even eggs and chickens from the farms where they’d been forced to work. Vaughan-Thomas concluded, ‘Yes, the Germans are in for a grim winter. But then, they might have thought of that before they based their agriculture on slave labour.’
In nine days’ time, on VE Day, the world will discover the full extent of the art treasures the Nazis have stolen. In a salt mine at Altaussee in the Austrian Alps, American soldiers will come across a vast network of caves transformed into an underground art gallery, and will be closely followed by a team of experts known as the Monuments Men who will catalogue what has been found. The items hidden away from the threat of Allied bombers include 6,577 paintings, 2,300 drawings and watercolours, 954 prints, 137 pieces of sculpture and 181 cases of books
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Also on VE day, in another salt mine, this time in Weimar in Germany, another team of Monuments Men led by sculptor Walter Hancock, will make an even more bizarre discovery. In a hidden chamber in the mine there are four large caskets. On each is a piece of Scotch tape on which has been scribbled in red crayon the name of the body inside: ‘Feldmarschall von Hindenberg’, ‘Frau von Hindenberg’, ‘Friedrich Wilhelm, der Soldaten König’, and finally the king whose portrait Hitler has hanging up in the bunker, ‘Friedrich der Grosse’ – Frederick the Great. Slave labourers who’ve worked in the caves will tell Hancock that in early April the German army brought the caskets to the mine, ‘to preserve the most potent symbols of the German military tradition around which future generations might rally’
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