Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (2 page)

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Adolf Hitler greets members of the Hitler Youth behind the Reich Chancellery building on his 56th birthday, 20th April 1945
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In April 1941, Al Bowlly, one of Britain’s best-loved singers, recorded a new Irving Berlin song at Abbey Road Studios in London. ‘When That Man Is Dead and Gone’ was to become one of the most popular songs of the war. In it he looked forward to the day when the ‘news’ll flash / Satan with the moustache’ is buried ‘beneath the lawn’. The song, although written by an American, summed up the mood of the British people in 1941, who regarded Hitler as a ridiculous yet dangerous figure, whose death they would happily celebrate. But it had not always been the case.

Even as late as the ‘Phoney War’ or what some called the ‘Bore War’ of the winter of 1939–40, there was considerable support for reaching an agreement with the German dictator. Within a year that changed. Attitudes hardened because of the humiliation of the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, and the Battle of Britain of the summer and autumn that followed, but most especially because of the Blitz, which brought terror to cities such as Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Liverpool and London.

The singer Al Bowlly himself was a casualty. A week after
recording ‘When That Man Is Dead and Gone’, a bomb exploded outside his flat near Piccadilly. Lying on his bed reading a cowboy book, Bowlly was killed outright.

The British public first heard about Adolf Hitler in November 1923 when he attempted to seize control of the Bavarian government as a first step towards overturning the Weimar Republic. But his political awakening began in the First World War.

On 1st August 1914 Hitler was photographed in a crowd which had gathered to celebrate the outbreak of the First World War in the Odeonsplatz, Munich. He later wrote in
Mein Kampf
that he ‘thanked heaven from the fullness of [his] heart for the favour of having been permitted to live at such a time.’ The war was ‘a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth’.

That distress began in early childhood. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in the town of Braunau am Inn in Austria. His father Alois was a bad-tempered, authoritarian and unpredictable man, frequently drunk. According to Adolf’s younger sister Paula, her brother received daily thrashings. Their mother Klara was much younger than their father, and closely related to him. She addressed him as “Uncle”. Hitler later told people that she would sit outside the room, waiting for the beatings to finish so that she could comfort her son. She was, in Paula’s words, ‘a very soft and tender person’ and Adolf adored her. His father died when Adolf was 14 and his
mother when he was 18. Her doctor, who had attended many deaths, later recalled, ‘I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’

Hitler had already faced disappointment when he failed to get a place to study architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts shortly before his mother’s death. After her funeral in 1907 he returned to the Austrian capital. He lived in cheap lodgings and then, after a period of sleeping on park benches, moved into a men’s hostel. He fraudulently claimed financial support – pretending to be a student – and supplemented this by selling small paintings and sketches, but lived an indolent life. He rose at noon and stayed up late at night working on grandiose architectural projects, designing castles, theatres and concert halls. He wrote operas and plays. Each project began with manic euphoria, but none were finished. His ambitious dreams alternated with periods of depression.

Hitler frequently got into furious arguments at the night kitchens where he went for bread and soup. According to one of his early flatmates in Vienna, Jewish-Czech August Kubizek, the 19-year-old Hitler quarrelled with everyone and had frenzies of hatred. The anti-Semitism of Vienna, crudely expressed in endless cheap pamphlets, gave Hitler the relief of a focus for his feelings of fury and resentment. Writing
Mein Kampf
15
years later, he claimed that this was the period when his view of life took shape: ‘since then I have extended that foundation very little, and I have changed nothing in it.’

This festering aggression found a new outlet in the First World War. Hitler was accepted into the German army as a regimental staff runner and suddenly his aimless life had a structure and purpose. In the next four years he was twice wounded and twice decorated but he never rose above corporal. According to one of his fellow soldiers he sat in a corner ‘with his helmet on his head, lost in thought, and none of us could coax him out of his apathy’. He was seen as a loner, a dreamer. His only friend was a dog, a white terrier he called Foxl which had wandered over from the English trenches. According to his military chief, Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler was brave but odd, and couldn’t be promoted further because it was clear that he couldn’t command respect.

On 10th November 1918, the day before Armistice Day, Hitler was in hospital in north-east Germany convalescing after his second injury. As he recalled in
Mein Kampf
, a pastor came in to address the patients. With regret he told them that Germany had become a republic; the monarchy had fallen; the war was lost. To Hitler the news was unbearable:

‘I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.

‘Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept… But now I could not help it…

‘And so it had all been in vain… Did all this happen only that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the Fatherland?... I, for my part, decided to go into politics.’

After leaving hospital Hitler went to live in Munich and started attending political meetings. He made his first public speech on 16th October 1919 in a beer cellar in a Munich suburb to an audience of 111 people. He spoke till he was sweating and exhausted, unblocking a dam of hatred towards the political establishment, frustration at the humiliation of the defeat of the 1914–18 war and determination to overturn the traitors who, in June, had signed the Versailles Treaty. Hitler was thrilled to discover ‘what I had always felt deep down in my heart... proved to be true. I could make a good speech’. The audience was electrified by his raw intensity. He was voicing the pain of people who felt powerless and offering hope of a glorious future to people who felt battered by defeat. Within weeks he was attracting audiences of 400; the following February he addressed 2,000 people crammed into a huge beer hall in the centre of the city. People stood on the tables and roared as he shrieked abuse at the Jews. There was tumultuous applause as he declared, ‘Our motto is only struggle! We go forward unshakably to our goal!’

By July 1921, Hitler had assumed leadership of the
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, later known as the Nazis. By the autumn of 1923 he had gathered more than 55,000 followers, a thousandfold increase from when he joined as the 55th member. Intoxicated by this success, and inspired by Mussolini’s successful ‘March on Rome’ the previous October, Hitler decided to attempt a coup – later known as the Beer Hall Putsch – and assert his position as the leader of all the anti-Republican protest groups in Munich. The putsch was planned one day and executed the next.

On the evening of 8th November, Hitler burst into a Munich beer cellar where 3,000 people were listening to speeches by Bavarian politicians. He was accompanied by one of his most glamorous supporters – the war hero and ace fighter pilot Hermann Göring – and a team of helmeted storm troopers pushing a heavy machine gun. Hitler leapt onto a chair, waving a dog whip and brandishing a pistol. In order to make himself heard he fired a shot at the ceiling and then shouted across the vast room, ‘The national revolution has broken out in Munich! The whole city is at this moment occupied by our troops! The hall is surrounded by 600 men. Nobody is allowed to leave!’

The city was not occupied by Nazi troops and the putsch fizzled out after a 30-second exchange of gunfire in which four policemen and 14 Nazis were killed. One of the activists was a young chicken farmer with a soft pudgy face and
glasses. He held his head high and carried a standard bearing a swastika. His name was Heinrich Himmler.

Hermann Göring was shot in the leg. Adolf Hitler tripped and dislocated his shoulder. Both men fled the scene. Göring managed to escape to Austria where he was treated for his injuries and given morphine for the pain. It was the beginning of a lifelong addiction. Hitler only managed to get as far as a friend’s house outside Munich and was arrested two days later. Together with several other organisers of the march he was tried for treason. Hitler was given the minimum sentence of five years and in April 1924 was sent to Landsberg Prison.

In Landsberg, Hitler had a large room with windows looking out over beautiful countryside. Many of the prison guards were Nazi Party members and secretly showed their respect with greetings of
Heil Hitler
. He was allowed to receive flowers and gifts and had so many visitors that once numbers topped 500 he decided to restrict them. He spent most of his time writing, or rather dictating,
Mein Kampf
, setting out a political ideology which he never revised. He argued that the future success of the German nation required triumph over the evil conspiracies of the Jews and communists and territorial expansion in the east.