Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (32 page)

Miller and Scherman arrived to discover that the whole place had been taken over by the 45th Division. The 179th Regiment had put a sentry on the door and was using the building as a command post. There was plenty of room to spare, so the two of them were invited to stay the night.

They needed no urging. Where better in Munich? Scarcely believing their luck, they dumped their kit in Hitler’s apartment and wandered from room to room, looking through his possessions, examining everything they found, searching for a glimpse of the real man behind the public mask. The library was full of leather-bound books, presentation volumes given to Hitler by admirers, but there were few books of his own, few signs of his personality at all, beyond some mediocre paintings on the wall and a large globe of the world that had doubtless played its part in his deliberations.

Hitler’s bedroom was scarcely more informative. It was hung with department store chintz and had a large, cream-colored safe in the corner. The maid, valet, and guard could all be summoned by pressing a button on the bedside table. The adjoining bathroom connected to a small room with a single bed, where Eva Braun had slept when she stayed overnight.

At the other end of the apartment, there was a separate flat with a state-of-the-art switchboard on the wall. Hitler had been able to dial straight through to Berlin, Berchtesgarden, and similar places. Since Berchtesgaden had yet to fall to the Allies, Lieutenant-Colonel William Grace of the 179th had tried to telephone the Berghof when he arrived, on the off chance that Hitler might pick up the phone. An obliging German operator put him through, but no one had answered. Berchtesgaden had still not recovered from the RAF bombing of a few days earlier.

Going downstairs again after they had looked around, Miller and Scherman found a German woman living in an apartment on the ground floor. Married to an Englishman named Gardner, she had British nationality and spoke excellent English. She told them about Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, and showed them a jug shaped like King George VI’s head, which played the British national anthem when lifted. A gift to Hitler from Neville Chamberlain when he visited Prinzregentenplatz, it had been passed on to her for safekeeping.

Outside, Miller and Scherman went to see the Hofbräuhaus, Munich’s famous old beer hall where Hitler had outlined the Nazis’ twenty-five-point manifesto at the beginning of his career. The roof had been blown in, but there was still beer in the cellar. The Hofbräuhaus was where Munich’s university students celebrated May Day in happier times, but there were no celebrations that day, although a few drab civilians were drinking in the ground-floor hall, which hadn’t been destroyed. Miller had a beer, too, just to say that she had drunk there.

Later, she and Scherman visited Eva Braun’s house on Wasserburgerstrasse. It had already been looted when they arrived, given a thorough going-over by refugees searching for something to eat. Curious to learn that Hitler had kept a mistress, Miller looked through Eva’s scattered possessions with more than usual interest. The house was dull and nondescript, but she found some photographs of Hitler, affectionately inscribed to Eva and her sister Gretl. Most of Eva’s clothes had gone, but the remaining accessories and scent bottles suggested a woman of considerable femininity. Among other things, there was a douche bag, lipstick from Milan, and a supply of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics. From the array of products in the medicine cupboard, it was evident that the woman in Hitler’s life had been a martyr to menstrual pain.

Back in Hitler’s apartment, Miller had a bath that night, the first proper bath she had had in weeks. Stripping off her clothes, she propped up a photograph of Hitler on the edge of the tub and soaped herself in the Führer’s own bath while Scherman took photographs. He also photographed her at Hitler’s desk and took a picture of Sergeant Arthur Peters lounging on Hitler’s bed reading a copy of
Mein Kampf
. Colonel Grace was photographed, too, standing by the switchboard and holding the telephone to Berchtesgaden to his ear. If the Führer was in, he still wasn’t answering.

*   *   *

SOUTH OF MUNICH,
the Thirty-sixth Texas Division had reached Bad Tölz, a spa town on the river Isar. Learning from a prisoner that Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was waiting for them at a local sanatorium, Second Lieutenant Joe Burke of the 141st Infantry took a ten-man patrol from Company A and went to arrest him.

Von Rundstedt was no longer a serving soldier. Recalled to active service in 1939, he had led German armies into Poland, France, and Russia, but had frequently clashed with Hitler about the conduct of the war. He had recognized the inevitable after D-day, urging his superiors in Berlin to negotiate with the Allies rather than go on fighting a losing battle. “Make peace, you idiots!” he had yelled at one point. His advice had been ignored, and von Rundstedt had been quietly relieved of his command in March 1945.

Plagued with heart trouble and an arthritic leg, he had gone to Bad Tölz to take a cure. He was sitting by the fire with his wife and son when Burke arrived. Von Rundstedt was shocked, because he hadn’t expected the Americans until next morning. Surrendering at once, he couldn’t conceal his bitterness at the ignominious way in which his career had ended. “It is a most disgraceful situation for a soldier to give himself up without resistance,” he told Burke, as he was led into captivity.
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But he had been right about the Germans’ conduct of the war. They should have made peace long ago.

*   *   *

FIFTY MILES
to the west, Major Wernher von Braun of the SS was still waiting for the Americans to arrive, longing to be arrested as soon as they showed up. As Germany’s leading rocket scientist, the man behind the attacks on London and Antwerp, von Braun had no qualms about surrendering to the Americans. Rather than fall into the wrong hands, he wanted to give himself up to the Yanks and make his expertise available to them before anyone else could take him prisoner and hold him to ransom.

The last few weeks had been very difficult for von Braun and his team. They had been at Peenemünde, the rocket base on the north German coast, until forced to retreat by the Russians. Fleeing south, von Braun had been involved in a car crash that had left him with a broken shoulder and an arm still in a cast. Along with several hundred other rocket scientists and technicians, he had ended up in a Wehrmacht camp near Oberammergau, in the foothills of the Alps. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and the scientists were prisoners, being held by their own people as bargaining chips for the peace negotiations with the Allies.

The man holding them hostage was Hans Kammler, an engineer turned SS general who had constructed Auschwitz and several other camps with the ruthless use of slave labor. Fearing that the Allies would hang him for war crimes, Kammler intended to trade the scientists for his own life. Failing that, he planned to kill them all to prevent their expertise from being acquired by the enemy.

As if that weren’t enough, the camp was also under constant threat from Allied aircraft, bombing and strafing at will. Worried that his entire team could be wiped out in a single air raid, von Braun had persuaded a junior SS officer to limit the danger by dispersing the more important scientists among the surrounding villages. The young major had been very reluctant, but von Braun had managed to convince him that he would be held responsible if all the scientists were killed in a single attack.

Von Braun himself had been taken under escort to a skiing hotel at Oberjoch, a few miles west of Oberammergau. He was waiting there now with his brother and a few colleagues, hoping that the Americans would appear before the SS changed their minds and massacred the lot of them. There was a unit of the French army not far away, but von Braun didn’t want to surrender to the French if it meant being separated from the rest of his team. And he certainly didn’t want to surrender to the British. They would never accept his protestations that his rockets had been designed for space travel, rather than the destruction of London—particularly if they learned that his team had celebrated the first successful attack on London with champagne.

Von Braun was a scientist before he was anything else. He wanted to deliver his entire team to the United States to ensure that their expertise was safely preserved for the benefit of all mankind. Nobody knew more about rockets than von Braun and his men. They could go to the moon with their rockets, once the technical challenges had been overcome. But they could only do it with American help.

Conferring with his brother Magnus, von Braun decided that if the Americans weren’t coming to them, they must go to the Americans. Magnus spoke the best English of the party. If the Americans hadn’t arrived by the next day, it was agreed that he should go and fetch them on his bicycle. If he went down the mountain, he could surely find some American troops somewhere and bring them back to the hotel. The Americans would be delighted to arrest von Braun and his team, once they realized that all the research and rocket data from Peenemünde was hidden in a mine shaft in the Harz Mountains, and only von Braun knew where.

*   *   *

FARTHER EAST,
the trickle of soldiers deserting from the Wehrmacht was threatening to turn into a flood as the remaining forces in Bavaria joined the retreat toward the mountains. With Munich gone and the war obviously lost, there seemed little point in continuing the fight any longer. Soldiers were voting with their feet instead, abandoning their units and slipping quietly away, shedding their uniforms and heading for home to be reunited with their families.

Among them was Josef Ratzinger. As an eighteen-year-old conscript, small and distinctly unmilitary, Private Ratzinger had been against the war from the very beginning. He came from a family of devout Catholics who had been forced to move house before the war because of his policeman father’s anti-Nazi outbursts. The Ratzingers had never wanted anything to do with German militarism.

Ratzinger himself had been in a seminary, training for the priesthood, when he was called up. He had served initially in an antiaircraft battery, defending the BMW works north of Munich and then the Dornier factory west of the city. The battery itself had been attacked once, with a man killed and others wounded. With no stomach for the war, Ratzinger had been delighted to hear of the Allied invasion of Normandy, if it meant a quick end to the fighting. He lived only for getting back to the seminary and catching up on his Latin and Greek.

He had been released from the flak battery late in 1944, when he became old enough to join the real army. The SS held a recruiting session soon afterward, hauling the young men out of bed one night and calling on them to volunteer in front of their peers. Quite a few had obliged, too sleepy and malleable to say no. Ratzinger had refused, pointing out that he was going to be a Catholic priest after the war. The SS had sneered at that, sending him out of the room to a chorus of abuse. Ratzinger hadn’t minded. He had seen slave laborers from Dachau and had watched Hungarian Jews being transported to their deaths. He didn’t want to be in the SS.

Sent home instead to Traunstein, near Berchtesgaden, Ratzinger had done his basic training at the local barracks, marching through the streets with his platoon, singing military songs to reassure the local population. But his heart had never been in it. He was just waiting for the war to stop so that he could go back to the seminary and become a priest.

And now his wish was coming true. The war was almost over. Ratzinger’s family lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Traunstein. He could be there in an hour, if he was prepared to slip away from his barracks.

It was still dangerous, of course. Deserters were still being hanged if they were caught, or shot against the nearest wall. But the risk seemed worth it to Ratzinger as the Wehrmacht began to disintegrate. He decided to try his luck:

I knew that the town was surrounded by soldiers who had orders to shoot deserters on the spot. For this reason I used a little-known back road out of the town, hoping to get through unmolested. But, as I walked out of a railway underpass, two soldiers were standing at their posts, and for a moment the situation was extremely critical for me. Thank God that they, too, had had enough of war and did not want to become murderers. Nevertheless, they still needed an excuse to let me go. Because of an injury I had my arm in a sling, and so they said: “Comrade, you are wounded. Move on!”
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Ratzinger needed no urging. Putting the war behind him, he set off for home without a backward glance.

*   *   *

ON THE OTHER SIDE
of the Alps, Leni Riefenstahl was on her way to Mayrhofen. After completing the dubbing of her latest film,
Tiefland
, she had abandoned her studio at Kitzbühel and was heading for the mountains to stay with an old lover until the war was over. As a public figure indelibly linked to Hitler, she did not want to be in Kitzbühel when the Allies arrived. She would feel a lot safer with Hans Schneeberger, keeping a low profile at his cousin’s boarding house in the mountains.

Riefenstahl had moved to Kitzbühel in 1943 to escape the bombing. She had set up a makeshift studio in the town, storing her film archive in an old castle at first to protect it from air raids. Changing her mind as the fighting came closer, she had sent the originals of some of her most important films to German HQ in Italy for safekeeping. Three metal boxes containing the negatives of
Triumph of the Will
and other Nazi films had been taken by car to Bolzano in April, but Riefenstahl had heard nothing of them since. With all the chaos on the roads, she didn’t even know if the car had reached its destination.

She was leaving Kitzbühel with reluctance. Her mother was still there, and her film crew. Riefenstahl wanted to stay with them, sticking together as the enemy arrived, but they were all adamant that she should go. They didn’t want to be associated with her when the Allies came, particularly if the Russians got there first. The Riefenstahl name would jeopardize them all if she stayed. Even her mother had begged her to go.