The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (477 page)

On April 22, both Dönitz and Himmler telephoned the bunker and
urged Hitler to leave, but by then the Führer had decided to stay, to die at a time and place of his choosing. That night, he sent Keitel and Jodl south, toward Bavaria, to prepare for a last stand under the command of Göring in the phantom mountain redoubt (Hitler, like Eisenhower, had come to believe Goebbels’ propaganda). Jodl protested that Hitler, cut off in Berlin, could not control the battle, and added that the Wehrmacht would not fight under Göring. Hitler shot back: “What do you mean, fight? There’s precious little more fighting to be done!” The moment was a small island of clarity in a sea of delusion. Albert Speer called the surreal world in the bunker “the Isle of the Departed.”
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On April 23, Himmler and Göring made their respective bids to supplant Hitler. Göring, by then in Berchtesgaden, wrote a letter to Hitler that cited a 1941 decree that should Hitler lose control of the government, the
Reichsmarschall
was to take command. Himmler that night met with Count Bernadotte in the Swedish consulate at Lübeck, on the Baltic. Himmler proposed, in writing, an astoundingly naive yet not unsound concept: he would arrange for the surrender of German armies in the west while continuing the fight against the Red Army until such time as Eisenhower and the Allies appeared on the scene to take over the battle against the Bolsheviks. By that night, only Hitler’s SS guards, Ribbentrop, and Bormann remained with Hitler. Bormann, like Himmler and Göring, was plotting his own escape and ascendancy to supreme power. Hitler, learning of Himmler’s and Göring’s gambits, flew into a rage. He declared the fat
Reichsmarschall
a traitor, and ordered that he be found and shot, an order Bormann was only too happy to send out over the airwaves. Albert Speer that day had made the dangerous journey by air from Mecklenburg to Berlin, where he landed his cub aircraft in front of the Brandenburg Gate. He had come to ask Hitler to grant him his leave, and he fully expected to be hauled outside and shot for failing to obey Hitler’s scorched-earth directive. Instead, after Speer confessed his disobedience, the two chatted amiably, if clumsily. For a moment, Hitler’s “eyes filled with tears.” Then he waved off Speer with a curt
auf Wiedersehen.
They parted without a handshake, and for the last time Speer left the Chancellery, now in ruins, which he had designed and built seven years earlier.
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By April 25, Berlin was surrounded, although a narrow corridor to the northwest was still open, along which thousands fled in hopes of reaching the refuge of the Anglo-American lines. That day, recalled one of Hitler’s bodyguards, SS staff sergeant Rochus Misch, Hitler stunned those within earshot when he declared the war lost. Yet Hitler, like Himmler, still clung to a final delusion. After a junction between the Germans and the Americans, both armies would then turn to fight the Soviets. “Hitler didn’t think a people like the Englanders would bind themselves with the communists
to crush Germany, and he still believed… something could happen. He liked the Englanders,” recalled Misch, “except for Churchill.”
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That day, Russian and American advance patrols met at Torgau on the Elbe, just seventy-five miles south of Berlin. Germany was cut in half. Churchill and Truman had their first telephone conversation that day, the topic Himmler’s offer to surrender German armies in the west. They pondered the proposal for less than a minute and agreed that Himmler was not a man to deal with and that all German armies must surrender simultaneously to the three powers, on all fronts. Churchill cabled Stalin with the decision. Churchill would remain loyal to Stalin to the end, but in fact he was now one with Himmler on the need to keep the Bolsheviks from reaching the western borders of Germany. “My mind,” Churchill later wrote, “was oppressed with the new and even greater peril which was swiftly unfolding itself to my gaze.” As he contemplated the consequences to Europe if the Russians kept up their westward march (they had reached Paris in 1814 and could do so again now), he pondered a response, a military response.
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On Saturday, April 28, the Russians moved into Potsdamer Platz, a mere block from Hitler’s bunker. The seismic footfalls grew closer. By early the next morning, Hitler had heard enough. He put Dönitz in charge of the government, such as it was, and then dictated his last will and testament, in which he blamed “the ruling clique in England” and “International Jewry” for the war and its forty million dead. Sometime before dawn on the twenty-ninth, Hitler and his somewhat dim-witted mistress of twelve years, Eva Braun, were married in a civil ceremony witnessed by Bormann and Goebbels. The bride wore a dark-blue silk dress; a small private reception followed. The guests listened as the Führer rambled on about the old days, the good days. Later that afternoon, Hitler received one of the last reports to reach him from the world outside. Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been murdered the previous day by Italian partisans. By the time Hitler learned of the deaths, their bodies had been brought to Milan and strung up by the heels from lampposts. Garbled communications spared Hitler from learning of the other momentous event that took place that day in Italy: General Heinrich von Vietinghoff agreed to surrender his Italian forces on May 2. Above the Chancellery, the Red Army swept down the avenues of Berlin.
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A
s Hitler toasted his bride, Churchill dispatched a long telegram to Stalin in a final attempt to salvage the agreements on Poland made at Yalta. In
effect, it was a final attempt to salvage the peace. The plan for Poland agreed upon at Yalta, Churchill wrote, called for “universal suffrage” and truly democratic elections. “None of this has been allowed to move forward.” Britain had gone to war for Poland, Churchill reminded Stalin. “The British people can never feel that this war has ended rightly until Poland has a fair deal in the full sense of sovereignty, independence, and freedom on the basis of friendship with Russia.” Rumors were now coming out of Poland that indicated Polish patriots were disappearing (indeed, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, was orchestrating mass liquidations of Polish officers and men). In late March, sixteen Polish republicans had been granted safe passage from Warsaw to Lublin in order to meet with Soviet generals. They had disappeared. Molotov, attending the San Francisco conference of the United Nations, at first refused to divulge to Eden any information on the goings-on in Poland. The Allies had agreed at Yalta that representatives from each government were to have free access to areas controlled by the others. Yet, Churchill declared to Stalin, “neither I nor the Americans are allowed to send anyone into Poland to find out for themselves the true state of affairs.” A horrific crisis was in the making, Churchill warned: “There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate… are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their associates… are on the other. It is quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces.” Colville thought the telegram a “masterly… final appeal to resolve the Polish crisis.”
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Stalin, that week, imparted his philosophy of war to Milovan Djilas, a guest at the Kremlin: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise…. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, it is because Russia has no army which can reach to Paris in 1945.”
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Austria’s turn to go under the Soviet boot came later, on April 29, when Moscow radio announced the formation of a provisional government in Vienna. American troops occupied the western two-thirds of the country, but in spite of that and in spite of the agreement made at Yalta, the Soviet government refused to allow American or British missions to enter Vienna. In reality, there was not that much left to enter; the Germans had burned St. Stephen’s Cathedral and much of the old city on their way out of town.

In Berlin early the next day, Monday, April 30, Hitler was told the city’s defenders would run out of ammunition by nightfall. Late that afternoon, after testing the effect of a cyanide capsule on his Alsatian bitch, Blondi, Hitler proffered one to his new wife. Frau Hitler dutifully took the capsule, and bit down. Adolf Hitler had murdered his last German. A moment
later, the widower put the barrel of a German pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The Americans occupied Munich that morning, and in Italy they entered Turin, where Italian partisans had been fighting Germans for three days. The war in Italy was effectively over, although Albert Kesselring, now commanding all German forces in the west and south, sacked von Vietinghoff, who had proposed to surrender. Two days later, Kesselring saw the futility of his situation, and surrendered the Italian armies to Alexander.

On the thirtieth, Eisenhower guaranteed the Soviet deputy chief of staff that the right wing of Patton’s Third Army in Austria would not advance farther than “the general area of Linz,” the city where Hitler had spent most of his childhood and where he had intended to build his
Führermuseum,
to house his stolen art. His tomb, too, was to be in Linz, to which he presumed Nazi pilgrims would journey for centuries. A model of the museum had been brought down into the bunker; the Führer could not have helped seeing it as the Russians closed in. Two hundred miles north of Linz, the left flank of Patton’s Third Army was just sixty miles west of Prague, and under orders from Eisenhower to proceed no farther east. To Truman, Churchill pleaded the case for Patton to continue. The president backed Eisenhower, who had told him that he would not contemplate “any move which I deem militarily unwise.” Churchill’s concerns, as they had been since before Yalta, were not strictly military. He told Truman: “There is little doubt that the liberation of Prague… by your forces might make the whole difference to the post-war situation in Czechoslovakia and might well influence that in nearby countries.” Truman and Eisenhower held firm. Eisenhower, in fact, assured the Russians that when the surrender came, Allied troops would withdraw 140 miles from those areas within the Russian zone agreed upon at Yalta. The Russians took Prague on May 4. “The [American] failure to take Prague,” Eden later wrote, “meant the Red Army was able to put its creatures firmly in command.” The was not the sort of “mutual assistance” Eduard Beneš had in mind when he signed the twenty-year treaty of friendship with Stalin eighteen months earlier.
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Also on the thirtieth, Tito’s partisans entered Trieste, and by nightfall they were fighting Italians within the city limits. Churchill ordered New Zealand troops to occupy the city, advising that no violence should occur, except in self-defense. But Tito had won the race for Trieste, and Istrea. “It’s hard to see how he can ever be dislodged,” Colville told his diary. Yet Tito’s claim on northeast Italy, Colville wrote, “may split the Italian Communist party and thus at least save Italy from the Russian imperialist clutches.” It did, and Churchill’s show of force ended with the Yugoslavs returning home by mid-June. Truman took a strong stand in support of Churchill on the matter, leading Churchill to conclude that the new president
would likewise be stern with the Russians if the need arose, which appeared more likely with each passing day. Colville thought the prospect of the Soviets and their Yugoslav proxies dominating Europe “from the North Cape to Trieste” depressing, but for the fact that “the Americans occupy
de facto
great parts of Germany which belong
de jure
to the Russian zone of occupation.” He and Churchill were as yet unaware of Eisenhower’s pledge to move his armies out of the Russian zone.
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It was the night before May 1,
Walpurgisnacht
(a traditional festival in Europe in which witches are said to await the arrival of spring). For centuries on this night, from Romania to the Baltic, peasants lit bonfires intended to keep at bay demons who they believed roamed the landscape. They stoked the flames with hopes of surviving to the morrow, May Day, the ancient pagan day of rebirth. For a dozen years under Adolf Hitler, Walpurgisnacht was also a sacred Nazi holiday when good Germans celebrated the fertility of Nazi youth destined to breed glorious Nazi babies. Soon after the Führer had put an end to himself, a small contingent of SS men hauled his corpse and that of Eva Braun into the courtyard of the Chancellery, rolled them into a bomb crater, and with the help of twenty gallons of gasoline, added one more pyre to the inferno that was Berlin. It was twelve years and three months to the day since Hitler became chancellor of Germany. His thousand-year Reich would survive him by a week.
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Goebbels survived him by a day. Two years earlier the little doctor had drawn a bittersweet picture of family life in his diary: “In the evening I am able to devote a little time to the children, with whom I’m having much fun…. Once the war is over I shall be able to devote myself more than hitherto to their upbringing. I could not think and wish for any more beautiful task for the coming peace.” With the war now over, the peace Goebbels planned for his children would be everlasting. On the evening of May 1, Herr Doktor and Frau Goebbels poisoned their six children. The little bodies were taken aloft to the courtyard, where two SS officers, as ordered by Goebbels, dispatched the doctor and his wife with two shots to the back of the head. Then the Goebbels family was doused with gasoline and set aflame. Not enough gasoline was available to make a decent job of it, and the Red Army soldiers found the smoldering remains the next day.
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