Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (24 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
Buckner and about 50 US soldiers watch as the army chaplain reads a civil service that is then translated for the couple. The ceremony is soon over; an accordion plays and the groom makes a speech which is duly translated. Then the sergeant on duty shouts, ‘Take ’um home!’
The following day at a two-hour press conference, Buckner will face critical questions about what the reporters call the ‘Hollywood wedding’. At the end of the conference, Buckner, who has no love of the press even though his father was a newspaper editor, will reckon he’s persuaded some of the reporters that the wedding was a useful exercise, but that other reporters will ‘want to raise controversial bad feeling for sensational purposes’
.
On the day of the press conference, Buckner travels to two frontline observation posts – he is fond of seeing for himself how the battle is progressing. These are not popular visits as it often provokes Japanese fire when the enemy spots a general. On 18th June, Buckner visits the 1st Marine Division wearing his three silver stars prominently on his helmet. The marines ask him to remove the helmet and change it for one less conspicuous. Buckner replies that he isn’t afraid of the Japanese and refuses to take it off. Moments later a US battalion command post radios that they can clearly see the general’s stars. Buckner agrees to take off his helmet, places it on a rock nearby and puts on a regular one instead. But he’s been spotted. A Japanese shell explodes on the rock next to him. General Buckner dies at a battalion aid station shortly after, as a young marine private repeats, ‘You are going home, General; you are homeward bound...’
White frost covers the bodies of the dead in and around the railway wagons outside Dachau concentration camp. To medical officer Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith of the US army, the frost looks like nature’s shroud. Smith has only just arrived, and was summoned yesterday to do what he can for the survivors. Smith notices mutilated bodies of SS guards on the ground.
Nearby there is an ornate signpost that says
SS KonzentrationsLager
(Concentration Camp). The road to the administrative area is shown by three figures – a bugler leading two soldiers. On the sign indicating the road to the prison there are two figures dressed as peasants – one holding an umbrella and the other an accordion. A third figure, a soldier, is playing a cello.
The 30th April found us in the position of some passengers in an old-time sailing ship crossing the ocean – we had mutinied and removed officers and crew, but did not yet know how our further course was to be set nor who would navigate
.
Captain Sigismund Payne-Best
Adolf Hitler follows his wife’s example and heads up the steps to the Reich Chancellery garden. He climbs slowly, and as he reaches the top the sounds of shelling intensifies. He doesn’t open the door, but turns around and makes his way back down.
Lieutenant Claus Sellier and his friend Fritz are packing their few belongings. They’ve decided that, although it is tempting to help Barbara and the girls on the farm, they should finish their mission and go to Traunstein to deliver the final package. Once that’s done, Claus is determined to go home.
In a hotel in the Italian Alps five miles away from the village of Niederdorf, 26-year-old Fey von Hassell is getting used to being free. She is one of the 120 prisoners who, thanks to British secret agent Sigismund Payne-Best, has been led by partisans to safety. Yesterday, their SS guards fled, leaving their weapons behind.
The Lago di Braies is a huge hotel with over 200 rooms. Fey has one to herself, with a view over an emerald lake that’s so beautiful she keeps staring out at it.
In his room, Payne-Best is also captivated by the view. Despite the cold, he’s been out on the balcony many times to take it all in. He recalled later, ‘For five and a half years I had been starved of the beauties of the world...’
Over the past weeks Payne-Best has reassured his fellow prisoners with his calm authority and the way be dealt with their SS captors. Yesterday afternoon they had been impressed further with how he had helped transform a cold hotel closed for the winter, without food or drink, into a haven. Local people had willingly provided food, wine and tobacco. The local German army commander had even sent 60 bottles of Italian brandy – but as yet no soldiers to protect the former prisoners as he’d promised. It seemed there was more than
enough food for everyone, but they were soon running out, so the hotel kitchen had to produce more. Payne-Best reckons that old prison habits die hard, and that food is being smuggled up to bedrooms just in case things take a turn for the worse.
Up in her room, Fey von Hassell is in torment. Her father Ulrich von Hassell was the former German Ambassador to Italy who had been dismissed by Hitler in 1938 because of his criticism of Nazi policies. After the failed bomb plot of 20th July 1944, Ulrich von Hassell was arrested and under interrogation admitted to involvement in plots against Hitler. He was hanged soon after.
Even though Fey had no involvement, in September she was also arrested along with her two young sons Corrado and Roberto (her husband Detalmo was safely in Rome). The boys were taken away, and for eight months Fey was a prisoner in a succession of concentration camps. She has no idea where Corrado and Roberto are.
Although Fey is enjoying the comfort of the hotel, now that she has time to think she feels the separation all the more. As she went to sleep last night, she could hear Corrado’s desperate cries, exactly as she’d heard them as she was led away by the Gestapo.
Fey contemplates leaving Lago di Braies to start looking for them, but feels too weak to make the journey.
American soldiers come to the camp to look at us. A group of them were led to a block. In a washroom lay 50 corpses that had died – starved, exhausted. One of the officers started crying when he saw that. Strange to think of a man coming from battle, who sees corpses all the time... crying at the sight of our dead. But I
know what our dead look like, so shocking that even the tears of a warrior are understandable
.
Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Dachau inmate
In Dachau US medical officer Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith has walked through the main gate under the metal sign
Arbeit Macht Frei
. The few inmates who have braved the cold crowd around him and his small team of orderlies. There is the sound of gunfire in the distance.
‘Is it safe?’ one of the inmates asks Smith.
‘Yes. The Nazis are all gone; they will never come back; we have driven them away; soon the war will be over.’
The men try to smile. Smith wishes he had been here yesterday when they were liberated to have seen their faces then.
The inmates volunteer to be guides. The Americans walk to the first barrack block, but they have to wait as the inmates can’t walk as fast as them. There are bodies all around the barracks. Smith goes in.
In Berlin, in the upper bunker corridor, one of the kitchen orderlies is clearing the table of the debris – glasses, bottles of schnapps and cigarette ends left by the overnight drinkers – so that the Goebbels children can have breakfast there.
In the small room which the six children are sharing, Helga and Hilde, the two oldest girls are helping the younger ones get dressed. They have now been in the bunker for a week and their clothes are getting rather grubby. They brought pyjamas but no spare clothes, as their parents didn’t expect them to be staying very long.
To the Editor of the
Daily Telegraph
May I suggest that, after his death, Hitler should be
buried in an unmarked grave at Buchenwald, amongst his victims? By this means his name would be indissolubly linked, for all time, with the horrors he loosed upon the world, and even Germans would find it difficult to make a national hero out of him.
Yours faithfully
F.W. Perfect, London NW11
.
In her house in a village on the outskirts of Coventry, Clara Milburn is reading the letters page of the
Daily Telegraph
. Clara’s son Alan has been a POW in Germany since Dunkirk in 1940, and she always scans the papers for news of his prison camp Stalag VII-B. There is news of the men liberated from Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, but not of Alan’s camp.
Clara is fascinated by the idea suggested in a letter that when Hitler dies his body should be buried at the Buchenwald concentration camp with his victims, to prevent him becoming a hero and his grave a place of pilgrimage.
Later today Clara will write in her diary about today’s events as she has done for the last five years. (‘Things go well in Burma… but we seem so preoccupied with events in Europe that our minds cannot take in all the happenings there too.’) Clara ends her diary for the 30th April by writing: ‘May tomorrow – the month of Alan!’
Clara’s hunch is right. On 9th May, she receives a telegram from him saying he’ll be home soon. The next day, Alan is back at their kitchen table eating boiled eggs and bread and butter, and then later walking with his mother to the grocer’s for double rations, shaking hands with the people they meet along the way. That night she writes her final ever entry, ‘Here the “Burleigh in wartime” diary ends with victory bells... Alan John is home!’
The Goebbels children are sitting around the upper bunker table, eating a breakfast of jam and butter and bread. One thing that they all appreciate is that here in the bunker they are allowed as much food as they like. Their parents have been very strict about keeping to the rations that ordinary Germans are allowed, and in the fridge at home each child has had their own tiny labelled ration of butter, milk and eggs to last them the week.
Magda Goebbels is lying on her bed. She can hear the chat and clatter of the children from her room, but she can’t face seeing them and has no appetite for breakfast.
In a hotel called Haus Ingeborg, in the centre of Oberjoch, close to the border with Austria, a 33-year-old scientist named Wernher von Braun is having breakfast. In 15 years’ time, von Braun will be receiving almost as much fan mail as Elvis Presley, be able to count Walt Disney as one of his friends and be known to millions of American children as ‘Dr Space’. Breakfast is a painful process as von Braun broke his left arm in a car accident a month ago, and it’s in a heavy cast. He is waiting for the US army to arrive in the town – he has information he knows they want.
For the past few years, Wernher von Braun has been the leading rocket scientist in the world, helping devise, develop and build the V2 (
Vergeltungswaffe-2
, Retaliation Weapon-2). With him in the hotel are other leading German rocket scientists, together with trunks, briefcases and boxes containing the crucial data they need to continue their work in the west.
At the end of 1943 von Braun had shown Hitler colour footage of the V2 and explained what it was capable of. The rocket is 46 feet long, can travel at 3,600mph and can carry a ton of explosives. Its range is 225 miles, so if launched from Holland, much of the south-east of England is within its reach. Hitler declared that it would be ‘the decisive weapon of the war’ and ordered its mass production. The burden of producing both the V2 rocket and the V1 flying bomb was given to slaves working under appalling conditions in secret factories in Germany. The first V2s didn’t roll off the production line until January 1944, because von Braun and his team had made over 63,000 modifications to its design
.
The first V2s fell on England that September, and soon began to inflict tremendous casualties. On 25th November a V2 landed on a Woolworth’s store in New Cross in London killing 160 people and injuring 108. By the end of April 1945, V2s had killed 2,754 people and injured 6,523
.
George Orwell wrote in December 1944, ‘People are complaining of the sudden wallop with which these things go off. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you got a bit of warning” is the usual formula. There is even a tendency to talk nostalgically of the days of the V1. The good old doodlebug did at least give you time to get under the table.’
In June 1945, when von Braun will be in Bavaria in the middle of negotiations with the Americans about coming to the US, he will give an interview to Gordon Young of the
Daily Express.
He speaks about a visit he’d made to London in 1934, ‘I did all the regular things you know – the British Museum and the Houses of Parliament, and lunched at the Savoy.’
‘But didn’t you feel a bit odd about trying to smash it up afterwards?’ Young asks
.
Von Braun laughs. ‘Well, you know how it is. You have to suppress your feelings a bit in wartime.’
Von Braun always maintained that his reason for developing the V2 was for space exploration
.
A few days later, von Braun would be on his way to the United States; several V2 rockets were shipped out soon after. His work for NASA in the 1950s and 1960s (in particular his development of the Saturn V booster rocket) would be decisive in putting man on the moon. In 1960 a Hollywood film was made about his life called
I Aim at the Stars.
Some suggested at the time the full title should be
I Aim at the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London.
In Dachau, medical officer Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith is staring at a German diary for 1940 that he’d picked up a few days before. He is reeling from the squalor he has just seen in the barracks. Smith looks for a blank page and comes across a list of important German dates.
‘May 1st. Public Holiday.’
‘I wonder if it will be celebrated here?’ he thinks.
‘May 22nd 1813 Richard Wagner’s birthday.’
‘May 29th 1921 Hitler becomes leader of the Nazi Party.’
