Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (15 page)
Read Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany Online
Authors: Emma Craigie,Jonathan Mayo
Intelligence officer Major Geoffrey Cox is getting ready to move out of Padua. Around him, other members of the 2nd New Zealand Division are loading up their trucks. News has arrived that the route to Venice, 30 miles away, is almost secure. The plan to capture the city is codenamed Operation Merlin.
For the past few days the New Zealanders have driven through villages where girls have thrown flowers and blossom as they passed. It is a small reward for the tough slog through Italy in the past few months. They feel that they are the forgotten army – their battles rarely knock news of the advances in northern Europe from the front pages. Some of the jeeps of the 2nd New Zealand Division have ‘D-Day Dodgers’ scrawled on the side in chalk – the unfair nickname that some have given them back home
.
Most of the troops in the Italian campaign feel unfairly maligned. On 3rd May 1945 Major Neil Margerison will write to his fiancée from Italy, ‘People in England don’t understand the conditions which have prevailed in Italy. They think that we have been disgustingly slow about the job, and that any propaganda regarding the difficult terrain and terrible weather are an official excuse for our procrastinations…. Chaps serving in Italy are “good time boys” or “D.D.D.s” (D-Day Dodgers). Chaps who
have returned from overseas service in the Med. (4½ years) take a back place to the chaps who are serving in France and receiving leave every six months...’
On the BBC Home Service, Lieutenant J. Trenaman is presenting one of a series of 15-minute programmes called
Teaching Soldiers to Read
.
The BBC has a policy both on the Home Service and on the Forces Programme to educate and inform servicemen, as well as to provide entertainment. One such innovation is a round-table discussion called
The Brains Trust
(its name taken from Roosevelt’s nickname for his circle of advisors) that tackles such varied questions as ‘What is democracy?’ and ‘What is a sneeze?’ It began in 1940 on the Forces Programme but proved so popular it’s repeated on the Home Service. By 1945 it has an audience of 12 million. One factory worker wrote in his diary: ‘The favourite topic on Mondays seems to be the previous day’s
Brains Trust.
Hardly anyone ever confesses that he didn’t hear it, or if they do, take care to give adequate reason for so doing.’
12.30pm/8.30pm Okinawa time
‘
Mein Führer
,’ General Krebs begins, ‘there are three young officers who are keen to try and break out of Berlin and make contact with General Wenck so that they can update him on the situation here and support the speedy attack of the 12th Army on the capital.’
There is a silence of several seconds before Hitler replies. He
seems weary. It has been a difficult situation conference. All the reports are extremely discouraging.
‘Who are these officers?’
Krebs gives him their names.
‘Who are Boldt, Weiss and von Loringhoven? Send them in.’
Standing at the back of the conference room, the Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below listens carefully to what follows. Like these young officers he is desperate to find a way to survive. With the telephone lines down he has no means of contacting his pregnant wife and children on the Baltic coast.
The three officers file in and von Loringhoven sets out the plan. He is surprised how calm the Führer seems. He points out their possible route options on the large map laid out on the table. The second option involves travelling down the River Havel. Hitler immediately prefers it.
Von Loringhoven elaborates, ‘Once we reach Pichelsdorf Bridge we will take a rowing boat and row up the River Havel, between the Russian lines as far as Wannsee Lake.’
Hitler interrupts, ‘Bormann, supply these officers with a motor boat, otherwise they will never get through.’
Boldt feels a rush of panic. If the mission depends on Bormann obtaining a motor boat in the current circumstances it will never take place. But no one is supposed to contradict the Führer. Boldt has to risk it: ‘
Mein Führer
, we will get hold of a motor boat ourselves and deaden the noise. I’m convinced that we will get through.’
Hitler slowly stands up again. He shakes the three officers by the hand. ‘Give my regards to Wenck. Tell him to hurry or it will be too late.’
On the island of Okinawa, the commander of the Japanese forces General Mitsuru Ushijima has called his staff together in a spacious cave 100 feet beneath ancient Shuri Castle, the
headquarters of his 32nd Army. On 1st April, Easter Sunday, US forces launched a massive amphibious assault on the south of the island – 1,200 vessels landed over 170,000 soldiers. General Ushijima has 77,000 Japanese and 24,000 Okinawan auxiliaries to fight them, and so far, in slow, bloody battles reminiscent of the First World War, they have succeeded in holding the Americans back.
General Ushijima’s Chief of Staff General Cho is holding forth: ‘We must mount a massive counter-attack while we still have the strength! In a few weeks attrition will have eaten away at our forces, and we will be too weak to take the offensive. We must strike now and destroy the Americans, even at the risk of losing our whole army!’
General Cho is famous for his hard drinking and his extreme views. In the 1930s he advocated holding the Emperor at knife-point until he introduced military rule in Japan. Facing Cho at the meeting is the man responsible for the strategy for the defence of Okinawa, Colonel Yahara. He guessed exactly where the Americans would land and had prepared an impressive line of defensive fortifications, with Shuri Castle at its centre. He has no time for Cho’s fiery rhetoric.
‘The Americans have suffered great losses… but it would be folly to attack, because to break through the American lines on the high ground would demand much greater forces than we possess. Therefore, the army must continue its current operations, calmy recognising its final destiny, for annihilation is inevitable, no matter what is done.’
Cho is unimpressed and starts to outline an audacious plan.
The Sherman tanks of the US 14th Armoured Division are crashing through the ten-foot-high wire fence of Stalag VII-A
at Moosburg outside Munich. The tanks are immediately swamped by emotional POWs. An American Air Corps lieutenant kisses a Sherman, saying, ‘God damn, do I love the ground forces!’ A bearded paratrooper climbs onto a tank and kisses its crew commander, tears running down his cheeks. ‘You damned bloody Yanks, I love you!’ a tall Australian shouts, throwing his arms around a shocked jeep driver. One member of a tank crew recognises his brother among the POWs. British Major Elliott Viney – a prisoner for nearly five years – writes in his diary, ‘AMERICANS HERE.’
Another British officer wrote optimistically in his diary later that day, ‘God bless the bastards… after five years, free at last. May be home next Sunday.’
A few hours later General George Patton will arrive and point to the swastika flying from the camp’s flagpole, and yell: ‘I want that son-of-bitch cut down, and the man that cuts it down, I want him to wipe his ass with it!’
In the last few weeks conditions in the camp, built for only 10,000, have become extremely harsh. There are now 80,000 prisoners in Moosburg. A long trench had been dug as a latrine and hundreds were suffering from dysentery. Most of the guards have fled
.
In the five years since the British POWs like Elliott Viney and Bert Ruffle were captured, there have been many changes to the Allied armies. One group of RAF prisoners failed to recognise the uniform of their British liberators, and had hidden in a tree for hours until they heard their accents. Elsewhere, reporter Alan Moorehead overheard a POW say in awe, ‘So that’s what a jeep looks like!’
Bert Ruffle and Frank Talbot have finished the job in Brüx. Instead of the usual work building the oil refinery, they were sent with a camp guard to pick up some materials for one of the refinery foremen. Next to them in the truck, under a tarpaulin, is a crate of beer they discovered in Brüx – they are taking some surreptitious swigs. The guard spots them, but says nothing. The men offer him a bottle.
I Company is marching through the town of Dachau. The soldiers are impressed – it is well kept with neat flower beds, cobbled streets, numerous small shops and a pretty river. Above the houses is an old castle. There had been a short firefight on the outskirts of the town but little else in terms of opposition. White sheets are hanging out of windows – the town has surrendered.
Some soldiers are following a railway line that leads out of the town.
About 1.00pm/6.30pm Burmese time
Royal Australian Air Force Wing Commander Lionel ‘Bill’ Hudson is lying in the cell he shares with 20 others in Rangoon jail in Burma, listening to a commotion by the main gate. He’s half asleep and can’t be bothered to investigate what’s going
on. This morning there had been the regular
tenko
(roll call) at 6.45, followed by a Sunday service, and then Hudson had headed back to his cell to have a nap – it’s been a hot week in Rangoon.
It has been a strange few days. There have been explosions and fires to the east of Rangoon. The Japanese guards lit their own fire in the jail compound and started burning papers and what looked to the POWs to be medical records. Four days ago at 9.30 in the evening an Allied aircraft flew low over the jail. ‘That’s the closest I’ve been to a free man on our side for more than four months,’ Hudson confided to his diary later. Then the following day 200 of the fittest POWs were led away by some of the Japanese guards to an unspecified destination. Hudson asked why he was being left behind (he is the nominal leader of the Allied servicemen in the camp). ‘You – troublemaker,’ one guard replied. Hudson fears that the 200 men will be used as hostages in negotiations with the advancing British and Australian forces.
The guards who left have been replaced by raw recruits, with new shoes and uniforms, and they don’t mind if the POWs forget to bow to them.
Hudson, an Australian from New South Wales, was captured by the Japanese through what he knows was his own stupidity. On 19th December 1944, he flew his Mosquito from his base in Assam into Burma – he had no specific mission; Hudson just wanted to test out his guns on what’s known as a low-level ‘rhubarb’ – seeking targets of opportunity. Hudson and his navigator Jack Shortis were flying just above the treetops when the Mosquito hit a branch, which badly damaged the port engine. They dropped out of the sky ‘like a falling leaf’, Hudson wrote later, and were soon captured and taken to Rangoon jail. Rangoon, like the rest of Burma, had been overrun by the Japanese in early 1942; it took the invaders
only 127 days to push the British out of the country. The fall of Burma, following the loss of Hong Kong and Malaya, had been a humiliating defeat
.
The Japanese are brutal conquerors. When Hong Kong was taken, hospital patients were bayoneted in their beds, and nurses and nuns raped. Prisoners of war are treated with contempt for having surrendered. The Allied prisoners in Rangoon jail have witnessed many examples of sadistic cruelty. The badly burned crew of a USAAF Flying Fortress were left to die a slow death in solitary confinement; those who are too sick to work in the jail’s candle factory are given two bottles every morning, and expected to fill them with dead flies. When the able-bodied return in the evening, they help collect flies and put them in the bottles, so the sick can evade punishment
.
Operation Merlin is underway. Minutes ago, B Squadron of the 12th Lancers had radioed to say that they had successfully driven over the causeway into Venice. Now Geoffrey Cox and the rest of the 2nd New Zealand Division are heading east out of Padua, and people are on the streets and hanging out of windows cheering them. Italian flags are being thrown at the vehicles as they pass, and the Kiwis are obligingly wrapping them around their canvas canopies and gun barrels. As the Kiwis pass partisans on the road they shout ‘
Ciao!
’ in their best Italian.
Claus Sellier and Fritz are eating a large lunch in a hotel dining room in the German town of Reichenhall. They’ve walked across the border from Austria this morning. The hotel had been turned into a makeshift army hospital a few months ago, but now all the patients have gone. As they helped themselves
to food a doctor came in and told them, ‘Eat as much as you want! The kitchen doesn’t know how many patients we have in the hotel - nobody told them that there aren’t any.’
1.15pm
In a railway siding outside the town of Dachau, men from Felix Sparks’ 45th Infantry Division have found a long line of railway wagons. Lying in and around them waist-deep are hundreds of decomposing corpses – some naked, others in shredded blue and white uniforms. Some have crawled out of the wagons and have then been butchered by the tracks. Many of the dead in the wagons have their eyes open, as if staring at the Americans.
One GI feels it’s as if they are saying, ‘What took you so long?’
Sparks arrives on foot, looks at the scene and vomits on the ground. Around him, his men are angry; he can hear them shouting.
‘Let’s get those Nazi dogs!’
‘Take no prisoners!’
‘Don’t take any SS alive!’
They have counted 39 wagons – all of them full of bodies. Sparks orders one group of men to follow him into the camp, and another group to follow I Company Commander Lieutenant Bill Walsh. Walsh realises now that a concentration camp is nothing like a New York POW camp.
The railway wagons had come from Buchenwald concentration
camp as part of the Nazi policy to keep the prisoners away from the invading armies. At the start of the journey three weeks ago there were 4,800 prisoners; by the time the train arrived at Dachau, only 800 had survived. They were left to die in the wagons
.
