Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (22 page)

Getty Images, © Fred Ramage

German civilians flee over a demolished bridge across the River Elbe, 1st May 1945
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Nicolaus von Below, the Luftwaffe adjutant who is making his way home to his wife and children on the Baltic coast, steps out of the Chancellery garages on to Hermann-Göringstrasse. The street is an inferno. There are fires on all sides and the night air is thick with smoke. The surface of the street has been devastated. He has to make his way in the darkness over a confusion of cables, torn-down tram wires, building rubble and bomb craters. As he picks his way towards the Brandenburg Gate and the River Havel, on the same route travelled by the two groups of officers yesterday, von Below feels an enormous flood of relief. As he writes many years later, ‘With every step it became clearer to me that I had left nothing left to do. It was all the same to me whatever happened now. I was free at last of all the responsibility and depressing burden of the Hitler years.’

Further along the route, the three testament couriers are rowing as silently as they can down the River.

Wing Commander ‘Bill’ Hudson is in the Commandant’s office at Rangoon jail. The Commandant and the Japanese
guards have gone, leaving letters of explanation on the main gate. Hudson is the highest-ranking officer among the 668 Allied prisoners and so has taken charge. He knows he’s free, but doesn’t feel much emotion. He is writing his diary by the light of five candles that are slowly spreading wax across the table. A Japanese doll sits in the middle of the table; next to her is half a bottle of sake. Birds are singing noisily outside as Hudson writes.

‘This day is a frightening one. Anything may be in store for us.’ As a precaution he has padlocked the prison gate from the inside. The POWs may be at risk from the Burmese population, many of whom had welcomed the Japanese as liberators. Before he shut the gate, Hudson peeped out for a quick look at freedom. Rangoon means ‘end of strife’ but he can’t believe that’s quite true yet.

In the camp in Rothenstein on the outskirts of Königsberg, Dr Hans von Lehndorff is eating a meal that consists only of sugar. Holter, the camp’s translator, found it – von Lehndorff didn’t ask where he got it from, but guessed he stole it from the Red Army kitchens. Von Lehndorff is sitting on a bed by the door of their makeshift ward with three other medics. They don’t trust the water supply, so there is nothing to wash the sugar down with, but they all enjoy the sensation as it hits their stomachs.

In a neighbouring room are the doctors’ assistants, including 20-year-old Erika Frölich. She came to see von Lehndorff a few weeks ago after she injured a finger. Having been treated, Erika started clearing up the chaos in the medical centre, without being asked. She has only had some basic medical training but von Lehndorff is hugely impressed by how good she is at diagnosing illnesses and instantly winning the trust of
the patients. Erika even has a good rapport with the Russian soldiers – which has probably saved her life. She’s looking after a woman who earlier today gave birth to a stillborn child.

At a railway siding in the Sudetenland, POW Bert Ruffle and his gang of three have finished emptying their truck of mud, bricks and boulders. It’s taken them three hours and they are exhausted. Their German guard tells them that, as they know the way back to Stalag IV-C, they can walk there by themselves. The POWs stagger through the dark, covered in mud. Ruffle vows that he will never do hard labour again.

In the switchboard room of the bunker Rochus Misch is woken from his doze by a message from Hitler. The Führer wants to know whether there has been any reply to the questions radioed to General Jodl a few hours ago. Is there any news of the progress of the German combined attack forces which are supposed to be relieving Berlin? There isn’t.

A group of about 25 guards and servants are summoned from the Reich Chancellery building to the Führerbunker. Hitler tells them of Himmler’s treachery and his intention to take his own life rather than be captured by the Russians.

‘I do not want to be put on show like an exhibition in a museum.’ He shuffles along the line of people and shakes hands with each of them, thanking them for their service. He tells them they are released from their oath of loyalty. They must try to make their way to an area controlled by the British or Americans rather than fall into Russian hands.

On the second floor of the camp outside Königsberg, Dr von Lehndorff is wide awake. It’s quiet and the only sound is the creaking of floorboards as people make their way to the corridor to use the buckets placed out there to act as a latrine. Von Lehndorff heads for the corridor too. He’s glad it’s dark so he can’t see the others and they can’t see him. He finds it a humiliating experience.

In London and the south-east of England snow is settling on the blossom of the trees. After a mild month, the cold weather this weekend has come as a surprise, as there have been no weather forecasts available to the public since the outbreak of war. Weather predictions are something only the military have access to, as they can determine the success – or otherwise – of their ground operations or bombing raids.

In the Führerbunker, SS doctor Professor Ernst Schenck is looking Hitler in the eye, and although the Führer appears to be staring back at him, his eyes say nothing. There is no expression. They are ‘like wet pale blue porcelain, glazed actually more grey than blue… filmy like the skin of a soft ripe grape’. The whites of his eyes are bloodshot and there are dark black bags beneath. Schenck is not clear why he has been woken from a deep sleep and summoned to meet the Führer, but he is one of four medics who have been called to this meeting. He is exhausted. He has been working in the emergency hospital in the Reich Chancellery all week, carrying
out operations on the endless stream of wounded who are brought in. Schenck is by training a research doctor, not a surgeon. His more experienced colleague, Dr Werner Haase, guides him through the more complex operations. Haase is suffering from tuberculosis and has difficulty breathing. He lies on a hospital bed beside the operating table and talks Schenck through the necessary incisions.

Schenck has spent most of the war working in Dachau concentration camp, developing nutritious sausages for soldiers, experimenting on the prisoners. He has never been so close to the Führer. The diminished, hunched man with his shaking limbs is nothing like the inspiring leader he has admired from afar. Schenck is a man whose mind always turns to diagnosis. This, he thinks, is a clear case of Parkinson’s disease.

Noticing the food stains on the front of Hitler’s military jacket, Schenck suddenly becomes aware of the state of his own uniform. It is spattered with encrusted brown blood – not his own. He has worked and slept in it for as long as he can remember.

Hitler takes Schenck’s hand and gives it a jerky shake, a ‘cold fish, flapping gesture’. He moves along the line of medics, shaking their hands in turn with mumbling thanks for their work. The others summoned for this unexpected meeting are Dr Haase, who killed Hitler’s German Shepherd Blondi a few hours earlier, and two nurses.

One of the nurses, Erna Flegel, has been helping to look after the Goebbels children during the last week. Flegel is a stolid woman who does not flinch as she dresses the hideous injuries of the wounded who are brought into the emergency hospital – but now, when Hitler takes her hand, she breaks down, sobbing, ‘My Führer! Have faith in the final victory. Lead us and we will follow you!’

Hitler doesn’t respond. He starts speaking, but his words,
Schenck notices, seem ‘not aimed at anyone in particular’. He is ‘just summing things up; speaking, as it were, for the ages’. At last Hitler turns slowly away. Schenck and the two nurses leave, but Dr Haase is asked to stay.

The magnificent 270-foot long, three-masted barque
Gorch Fock
is slowly sinking into the Baltic Sea. She is a training ship for the German navy, moored just off the island of Dänholm. There is no one on board; her crew were deployed elsewhere as the Russians advanced. At midnight the harbour master Hans-Heinrich Beerbohm received an order that the
Gorch Fock
shouldn’t fall into Russian hands (they’ve already tried to sink her using tank shells), and so he dispatched two of his men to open the ship’s seacocks. The men are watching from their motor launch as the
Gorch Fock
slowly settles on the seabed, her masts protruding above the waves.

The testament couriers from the bunker have become separated on the River Havel. Only Johannmeier has managed to row as far as their agreed destination at the Wannsee bridgehead. In the darkness Lorenz and Zander have landed on the Schwanenwerder not far from the lakeside house where the Goebbels children were living until a week ago.

Dr Schenck is sitting drinking schnapps in the corridor in the upper bunker. As the doctors and nurses walked back to the Reich Chancellery after their meeting with Hitler, they came upon a big party of drinkers and were invited to join them. Two secretaries now appear with a third woman. Someone whispers to Schenck that this is Frau Hitler. She sits at one end of the table ‘like a Rhineland carnival queen’, knocking back the drink, dominating the conversation with chirpy stories. Schenck has never heard of her before, and certainly never met her. He can’t tell whether the tremor in her voice is caused by a lisp or by alcohol.

In the Führerbunker switchboard room, Rochus Misch is woken again as General Jodl’s replies to Hitler’s questions about a combined attack come through on the radio:

‘1.  Wenck’s spearhead is stuck south of Schwielow Lake.

 2.  Consequently, the 12th Army cannot continue its attack on Berlin.

 3.  The 9th Army is fully encircled.

 4.  Holste’s corps has been forced into a defensive position. Attacks on Berlin have not advanced anywhere.’

There is no good news.

In frustration, Hitler orders Martin Bormann to send a message to Admiral Dönitz: ‘Immediate ruthless action must be taken against all traitors.’ It is Heinrich Himmler he has in mind.

Twenty-year-old Pilot Officer Anthony Wedgwood Benn is cleaning five pairs of shoes. He is on leave, and together with other young RAF officers, is heading by train from their base near Cairo to Jerusalem. Wedgwood Benn has got up early to clean both his and his friends’ shoes as he feels that it’s good for him to do something he hates, plus he knows deep down he likes being thanked by others for small gestures such as this.

The papers say that the end of the war is in sight, and Wedgwood Benn hopes that the news will come when they are in Jerusalem. At this stage in his life he is a devout Christian, and for him the trip is a spiritual pilgrimage, and he has with him H.V. Morton’s book
In the Steps of the Master
. He is keen on politics too (his father William Wedgwood Benn, 1st Viscount Stansgate, had been an MP and Secretary of State for India) so he is also reading
Palestine – A Land of Promise
by a Dr Lowdermilk of the US Soil Conservation Commission.

Wedgwood Benn has only recently got his wings after finishing his pilot’s training. Like many RAF cadets, he was sent by ship to the relative safety of Rhodesia to be taught to fly in old Tiger Moths. A few days ago, in his diary – which he started in 1940 when still a pupil at Westminster School, and which he will continue for the rest of his life – Wedgwood Benn confessed to being afraid of ‘ditching, crashing, being taken prisoner, torture by Japs, these things are working on my imagination...’ Last June his brother Michael was killed in a flying accident, and his death has affected him deeply. Wedgwood Benn has sown his brother’s wings on his own battledress, and when he flies he always wears Michael’s gloves. The day after he heard the news, he flew his plane to
a height of 6,000 feet and decided to do a spin, inspired by Michael’s courage as a pilot.

He wrote in his diary that night, ‘My voice is rather like his when it is muffled and so I picked up my speaking tube and said ‘Hello James [as Anthony is called by his family], this is old Mikie speaking’ – but it made me cry so I stopped.’

Wedgwood Benn finishes cleaning the shoes, and the Palestine Railways locomotive carries on heading east through the desert for Lydda, where tomorrow the pilots will change trains for Jerusalem.