Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (27 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
Hitler shuffles along the corridor to the telephone switchboard. He pauses in the doorway. Misch stands up, awaiting orders, but there are none. Without saying anything, the Führer turns away and shuffles back to his room.
Seyss-Inquart is arriving at St Josef’s School. The Reich Commissioner can’t believe his eyes. Prince Bernhard is taking photographs leaning against his own precious, stolen
RK1
car.
Hitler summons the military staff for the daily situation conference. General Weidling, Commandant of Berlin, leads the briefing. He is very pessimistic.
‘Munition is running out. Air supplies have become impossible. Morale is very low. Fighting only continues in the city centre. The battle of Berlin will be over by evening.’
A week ago Hitler sent out an order for Weidling, then commanding a Panzer division, to be captured and executed by firing squad for retreating in the face of the enemy. Weidling learned of this when he telephoned the bunker to report, after two days without telephone communication. General Krebs, sitting in the report office, informed him ‘with conspicuous coldness’ that he had been condemned to death for treason and cowardice. Weidling’s reaction was to make his way straight to the Führerbunker to protest his innocence to Hitler in person. Hitler was so impressed by Weidling’s bravery in coming to see him that he not only cancelled the execution order, but also made Weidling Commandant of Berlin
.
Hitler is silent for a long time. Then he turns to General Mohnke, who, at six that morning, had suggested there might be 24 hours left. In a weary voice Hitler asks Mohnke his view. Mohnke nods heavily. He agrees with Weidling. Hitler pushes himself slowly out of his chair.
Weidling asks permission to ask a final question. If they run out of ammunition, will the Führer give permission for the remaining soldiers to attempt a breakout from the city? Hitler turns to General Krebs. Krebs agrees that permission to break out should be given. Hitler then orders it to be confirmed in writing, that small numbers can attempt to break out so long as it is clear that Berlin will never surrender.
In Prague rumours that the Allies are approaching the city take hold and the people start crowding in the streets to welcome them. Karl Hermann Frank, Nazi head of police, gives orders for the streets to be cleared. Anyone who refuses to leave the streets is to be shot.
It is the beginning of a week of tension before the Prague Uprising in which 1,694 civilians and almost 1,000 German soldiers will die
in three days. The Germans will regain the city on 8th May, only to surrender to the Soviet Army a day later
.
Yelena Rzhevskaya of the SMERSH Russian intelligence unit is waiting in the centre of Berlin for the Reich Chancellery to be captured. She talks to a young woman with a thin little boy. The woman’s husband was sent to the front two years ago. She hasn’t seen him since. She can’t stop talking about him and Rzhevskaya can see how this upsets the boy, who is making ‘painful grimaces’. The woman is at a loss. For a long time she coped with her husband’s absence by making a list of jobs for him to do when he got home – replacing a door handle, a window catch in their apartment. Now her entire apartment block has been destroyed by shelling.
It was fun being in Germany proper. After five negative years we were at last bringing the war into the country of the people who had started it. If you shelled a house because there was a machine-gunner in it, it was a German house and no longer did some wretched French or Dutch family go homeless
.
John Stirling, 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards
Many of the British troops fighting in Holland and Germany are veterans of several bloody campaigns. Twenty-six-year-old gunnery officer Jack Swaab of the 51st Highland Division has seen action in Tunisia, Sicily and Normandy. He’s in a tent on the outskirts of Bremen, which surrendered to the British four days ago, updating a diary he’s kept since 1942. He can’t be too overt about it as diaries are a breach of regulations. Over the last few months Swaab has recorded his impressions of the German population (‘there seem to be so many children… it
makes me nervous to see them – seeing in them the seeds of another war…’); the morale boost of seeing a British newspaper (‘you don’t realise how well you’re doing until the
Daily Mail
tells you!’); and the hidden dangers (‘the budding of the trees holds a menace here… the forests are still sheltering deserters, saboteurs…’)
Swaab is feeling low – he’s ill and therefore ‘LOB’ (left out of battle), and yesterday Jerry Sheil, one of the division’s finest commanding officers, was killed. Brigadier Sheil was returning from a military conference in a village near Bremen and had swapped places with his driver, who was feeling tired. Their jeep went over a mine – the driver survived, but Sheil was killed.
Swaab is writing, ‘What utterly bloody luck on a man who’d come all the way from Alamein without a scratch. What good people we are losing in these final stages. Milan and Venice taken, the Russians and ourselves converging on Lübeck, Hitler reportedly dying of a stroke…’
Swaab has had some news – he should be home on leave by 8th May.
‘Leaving the battery on the 5th… sent C. no.68 last night telling her.’ (His letters to his girlfriend Clare are all numbered in case they are delivered out of sequence.)
Jack Swaab does indeed get home on 8th May – VE Day. After sailing in the morning from Calais, by the afternoon he is celebrating on the streets of London. Exactly three years to the day he would get married – but not to Clare
.
Independently working among the British troops already in Bremen are members of an elite team known as T-Force (T standing for Target; the unit disapproved of by 30 Assault Unit’s Patrick Dalzel-Job). Their mission is to capture the non-naval
technological secrets of Nazi Germany before the Russians do, and to ascertain what secret weapons may have been passed on to the Japanese.
The last five years of warfare have shown just how technologically advanced the Germans are – not just in producing V2 rockets and V1 flying bombs, but also jet fighters, infra-red gun sights and chemical weapons
.
Like 30 Assault Unit, T-Force is the brainchild of Ian Fleming of Naval Intelligence. He sits on the committees that decide T-Force’s targets and the order in which they should be captured, listing them in the so-called ‘Black Books’ issued to the unit’s officers. Fleming will later use elements of the exploits of T-Force in his Bond novels, particularly in
Moonraker,
published in 1955
.
In the past few weeks T-Force have uncovered a uranium research laboratory hidden within a silk factory, and the German army’s Anti-Gas Defence School close to Bergen-Belsen, where chemical shells were tested. They found hastily vacated laboratories with notebooks still open on desks, and photographs that showed that the chemists had been testing out their inventions on the inmates of Bergen-Belsen. One T-Force member wrote, ‘It certainly seemed that we were winning the war not a moment too soon.’
Since Bremen surrendered on the 26th, the men of T-Force have been scouring the ruins of the city. Over the past three days, T-Force have blown open 95 safes in their search for documents and caches of money. Often when the safes blow, billions of marks are sent fluttering into the air and down onto the soldiers, who are under strict instructions not to keep any. This order is not always obeyed
.
Eva Hitler is in her bathroom with Liesl, choosing her final outfit.
The Goebbels children are playing in their bedroom. Magda Goebbels is lying on her bed.
Hitler sends for Martin Bormann, his private secretary, to come to his study. Bormann, who has already started the day’s drinking, stands before the Führer in the crumpled suit he slept in.
Hitler begins, ‘The time has come. Fräulein Braun and I will end our lives this afternoon.’ He never called her Frau Hitler. ‘I am giving Günsche instructions to cremate our bodies.’
It is the conclusion Bormann has dreaded. He has made every effort to persuade the Führer to escape to Obersalzberg, but now he can only accept the inevitable end.
Claus Sellier and Fritz have at last arrived at their final destination. For six days the two young Mountain Artillery officers have been on a mission to deliver vital documents. ‘Guard them with your lives!’ the commanding officer of their training school had told them. The army provision headquarters in Traunstein is deserted. At the gate there is an elderly cigarette-smoking guard who tells them that the base closed last week, and that today is his last day on duty. There is no one to receive Claus’s documents.
Claus walks through the complex with its neat rows of tents, blankets, shoes and uniforms. In one room he disturbs a group of civilians helping themselves to equipment, who then flee through a hole in the fence.
The farmer who drove them to Traunstein can’t believe there is so much in the stores. ‘Is all this unprotected? There’s enough stuff for an army... I’m glad that I brought you!’
Claus tells him to load up his truck and to take supplies for Barbara and the girls. The farmer starts helping himself.
‘I’ll come back tomorrow, and I’ll bring a few friends.’
In St Josef’s School, the meeting between the Germans and the Allies to settle the terms of the truce to allow planes to drop food supplies to the Dutch has yet to begin. Prince Bernhard, the Dutch representatives, Eisenhower’s chief of staff Major-General Walter Bedell Smith, Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand and the other Allied officers are enjoying an excellent lunch. Seyss-Inquart and his delegation are locked in a classroom.
Twenty-two-year-old Ernst Michel is working on a farm in Saxony, making sure that his jacket sleeve covers the tattooed number he was given at Auschwitz. Around his waist is a leather belt with many holes – he has lost so much weight in captivity that he has had to cut more and more notches.
A week ago Michel and his two friends, Felix and Honzo, were part of a group of prisoners being marched from the Berga concentration camp. They escaped as darkness fell by pretending they needed to go to the toilet, and fled into the woods.
After days wandering around the countryside they approached a deserted farm and knocked on the door, pretending to be forced labourers separated from their truck after an air attack. They said they would work for food and lodging. The farmer’s wife gave them food, but Honzo warned they had to eat it slowly as their stomachs weren’t used to it.
So the three men have spent the past few days working in the fields and slowly feeling their strength coming back. The farmer and his wife don’t ask the men any questions; they are just grateful for the help.
Michel survived Auschwitz because of his skill in calligraphy. In the summer of 1943, while in the camp hospital, an administrator came in asking for someone with very good handwriting. He needed someone to write the death certificates of those being shipped to Birkenau and the gas chamber. ‘No matter how they had died, I was to write “heart attack” or “weak of body” for the cause of death,’ Michel recalled. ‘You could not say “gas chamber”. I had to say only one of those two things.’
At the end of the war, Michel will work for the Displaced Persons Section of the US-controlled German zone, and then as a reporter for German newspapers at the Nuremberg trials, insisting that his by-line be ‘Special Correspondent Ernst Michel. Auschwitz number 104995.’
During the trials Michel will be feet away from Nazis such as Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop as they are tried by the Allied Military Tribunal
.
‘The scum who were responsible for the greatest crimes against humanity sat less than 25 feet away from me…’ Michel said later. ‘There were times when I wanted nothing more than to jump up and grab them all by the throat. I kept asking myself: How could you do this to me? What did my father, my mother… ever do to you?’
One day Göring’s lawyer says that his client wants to meet Michel – Göring has read his reports of the trial. Michel is taken to his cell. But when Göring puts his hand out in greeting, Michel looks at it, then his face – and freezes. ‘What the hell am I doing here? How can I possibly be in the same room with this monster and carry on a conversation? Should I blame him for my lost childhood? For the
death of my parents?’ Michel thinks. He bolts for the door, overwhelmed with emotion
.
Michel’s sister Lotte had gone missing during the war, but in 1946 she sees one of her brother’s reports in a newspaper, and they are reunited shortly after
.
Hitler summons his adjutant Otto Günsche. Like Rochus Misch, Günsche is seen by others in the bunker as a gentle giant. They find his physical presence reassuring. He is six foot six and broad-shouldered, a quiet, obedient man, with a long serious face.
Hitler tells him, ‘It is time to get the petrol. Tell Kempka we need it now, urgently. I don’t want to end up in some Moscow waxwork display.’
Hitler’s voice is calm but his driver, Erich Kempka, can hear the panic in Günsche’s voice when he calls the underground garages.
In the kitchen in the upper bunker, Constanze Manziarly is supervising the cooking of Hitler’s last meal. There’s a big pan of water coming to the boil for spaghetti and one of the orderlies is making a vinaigrette dressing for a salad. Like Hitler, Manziarly is an Austrian. She started working for Hitler in Obersalzberg in 1943. She quickly became his favourite cook as she has been trained in the Viennese/Bavarian cuisine that Hitler loves. She is a plump, kind, self-effacing woman who takes great trouble to prepare gentle vegetarian dishes which suit his delicate stomach and to bake the sweet, moist cakes he loves.
