Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (18 page)

Sparks hauls out his .45 and shouts, ‘You son of a bitch, if you touch another of my men, I’ll kill you right here!’’

Linden sits down in the jeep. Then out of the third vehicle, a battalion commander runs towards Sparks.

‘You can’t talk to my general like that! I’ll see you after the war!’

‘You son of a bitch – what’s the matter with right now?!’

The battalion commander hesitates, then returns to his jeep. As they pull away General Linden shouts at Sparks, ‘I’ll see you before a general court martial!’

Sparks recalled, ‘That was the last thing that was worrying me at that point...’

At Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, the centre for the British government’s Code and Cypher School, the team intercept a
message sent by Heinrich Himmler to Ernst Kaltenbrunner – an SS general and the Director of Reich Main Security. The message reads:

‘Situation in Berlin very strained. Situation on Eastern Front west of Prenzlau very difficult.

‘Reports on the enemy wireless are malicious perversions of a conversation that I had with Bernadotte.

‘It is clear that to fight is the only possibility, since the other side is at present absolutely at one against us.

‘Equally malicious and untrue is the other assertion that I with [Werner] Naumann, have prepared a detailed declaration concerning the Führer’s death. Naumann is in Berlin. I am outside. We have not spoken to each other for a fortnight.’

In Rangoon jail, there is still no sign of the Japanese guards. Bill Hudson is walking cautiously towards the main gate. It looks dark and sinister. There, to his astonishment, he finds two letters attached to it, neatly written in broken English.

The Japanese were told to defend Rangoon to the last man, but decided to flee the city, as they knew British forces were only days away. It is a bold act of disobedience as today is Emperor Hirohito’s birthday.

In the toilets opposite the switchboard, the Führer’s beloved Alsatian, Blondi, is trembling as her handler, Sergeant Fritz Tornow, holds her nose and forces her jaw open. One of the Reich Chancellery doctors, Werner Haase, crushes a cyanide capsule inside her mouth with a pair of pliers. Blondi falls sideways, ‘as if struck by lightening’.

Tornow can’t hide his distress from the Führer who comes, very briefly, to inspect the body. Hitler wants to see for himself that the cyanide which the treacherous Himmler has provided does actually work. The telephonist, Rochus Misch, is overwhelmed by the poison’s smell of bitter almonds and rushes
out of the switchboard room to the cellar of the new Reich Chancellery to get away from it.

Tornow carries Blondi’s body up to the Chancellery gardens, where he buries it. He comes back down for Wulf and the four other puppies. Following orders, he takes them to the garden and shoots them before burying them with their mother.

In one of the network of caves under Shuri Castle on the Japanese island of Okinawa, General Cho has been addressing his fellow commanding officers. He has outlined his plan to smash the American forces that invaded the island on 1st April. If the Americans secure Okinawa, then the invasion of Japan will be next. The generals have been drinking plenty of sake all evening. A vote is taken and Cho’s plan is unanimously adopted. They decide that the fightback will begin on 4th May.

At Stalag IV-C in the Sudetenland, British POWs Bert Ruffle and Frank Talbot are enjoying a German beer together with their mates Terence ‘Lofty’ Whitney (Royal Navy), Harry ‘Shoe’ Smith and Bunny Humphries (both Rifle Brigade). They are amazed that the guard let them hang onto the crate of beer that they found in Brüx, having been sent to pick up building materials. The POWs have noticed a change of attitude in the guards – they know that the war is almost over. Some of them have been spotted with civilian clothing on under their uniforms.

Later that day Ruffle writes in his diary: ‘There is not so much shouting and telling us to hurry up all the time, and if we worked or not made no difference to them. Yes, there was a wind of change!’

Lieutenant Claus Sellier is standing by the side of an Autobahn close to the Austrian border in the German Alps. He is shocked by what he sees – nothing but lines of filthy stranded trucks in both directions, and slumped in the fields around are groups of weary-looking soldiers. They have no petrol and nowhere to go. Claus turns to Fritz and says, ‘Let’s get away from here. Let’s find a farm and stay overnight and rest. None of this makes sense to me anymore.’

He recalled later, ‘The once formidable German military machine was a dying corpse, struggling, but barely alive.’

A convoy of three cars carrying a group of young aristocratic friends, and laden with rice, flour and tinned goods, is travelling through the Austrian Alps, heading for Moosham Castle, the family home of the Count and Countess Wilczek. The Count and Countess’s daughter, Sisi Wilczek, is one of
the passengers in the front car, sitting with her handbag and a shoebox on her lap. Until the beginning of April, Sisi had been living in the family palace in Vienna and working as a nurse. On 3rd April she managed to catch the last train to leave Vienna before the arrival of the Russian forces. She gathered all the family’s remaining cash – several million marks and several million Czech kronen – and stuffed them into the shoebox which she has clung to for the last three and a half weeks. She is now only hours from her destination. The young people in the convoy were on the edges of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler and have seen many of their friends executed for their involvement.

Shortly after passing through the town of Bad Aussee, Sisi and her companions realise that there is no sign of the third car. They pull over and decide to get out and stretch their legs while they wait for it to catch up. Eventually the third car arrives and the convoy continues slowly up the mountain road. After about four miles Sisi suddenly shrieks. She has left her handbag and the shoebox on the roadside where they stopped.

The front car turns back, while the others wait. They reach the spot and to Sisi’s huge relief, she immediately spots the shoebox on the side of the road, but there is no sign of her handbag. They decide to drive a bit further to see if they can find the person who has taken it and soon catch up with two women riding bicycles. Sisi’s handbag is dangling from one of the handlebars. There’s an unpleasant altercation as the women insist the handbag is theirs and threaten to call the police. But Sisi is not going to leave without it. When the car turns around and heads back to join the others, Sisi has her family fortune and her handbag safely on her lap.

Geoffrey Cox is driving through the streets of Mestre, a suburb of mainland Venice. There are thousands on the streets to
welcome the Allied troops – but it’s the girls that Cox notices most: they are sunburned and, as he wrote later, had ‘greeting and invitation in their eyes… The Italian men greeted us warmly enough, with relief and with thanks, but in the eyes of the girls there was something akin to ecstasy’.

President Truman is with his wife and daughter at the Foundry Methodist Church in Washington. Their pew is draped in black and surmounted with a black cross in memory of President Roosevelt. Truman is feeling uncomfortable about all the attention he is getting in the church. He feels as if he is distracting the congregation from their worship.

In Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, the poet W.H. Auden is in the throes of packing. He is about to leave America and travel on a US military passport to Germany. He has been recruited by the US Strategic Bombing Survey to a team tasked with surveying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale. Auden is originally from Birmingham, England, but controversially moved to the United States in January 1939, timing that many of his friends and readers saw as a betrayal of Britain. He is a fluent German speaker, having lived in Berlin from 1928 to 1929. Although he is gay he is in fact married to a German woman, Erika Mann, the daughter of the German writer
Thomas Mann. The couple married in 1935 to enable Erika to gain British citizenship and escape the Nazis. The person Auden really considers himself married to is the American poet Chester Kallman, who is currently watching him attempting to pack. Kallman tells friends that the scene looked ‘as though a mythical beast had gotten drunk and wandered through shitting books and soiled shirts’.

In Rangoon jail, the prisoners are celebrating by drinking tea, with sugar they’ve found in the Japanese stores. But the concern now is how to stop the Allies bombing the jail – they may not realise that there are POWs in Rangoon.

In the green room in the Reich Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels and his family are at a farewell party for some of the Hitler Youth who have worked for him. About 40 people have gathered, including some staff and patients from the emergency hospital. Everyone is served pea soup and the Goebbels children are passed from lap to lap. After the meal the Hitler Youth sing some of their songs. Goebbels asks for some of the old Nazi fighting songs. He listens with tears running down his cheeks. Then his children gather around the table and start singing to the accompaniment of a young soldier playing an accordion:

The children, who are very practised singers, go through their repertoire of German folk songs and lullabies. Staff Lieutenant Franz Kuhlmann, who had been brought along by another
officer, is very struck by the ghostly, unreal atmosphere. He later recalled that it felt as if everyone in the room knew that ‘this was a farewell for ever, the end of a world for which millions had fought and shed their blood, and that all the sacrifices had been in vain’.

In the hills above the chaos of the Bavarian Autobahn, the young German lieutenants Claus Sellier and his friend Fritz are standing outside a barn beside a picturesque farmhouse. They know there are people inside the barn as the door was shut as they approached.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Claus calls, ‘we’re passing through and we would like to sleep in your barn.’