Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (32 page)

Corporal Bert Ruffle is hiding in a latrine in Stalag IV-C, a POW camp in the Sudetenland. He fled before the guards came to his hut to get the night shift out for construction work at the oil refinery. Keeping true to his vow that he would never do hard labour again, Ruffle slipped out and headed to the latrine.

It’s been a day of rumours in the camp: that the Russians are near Berlin, that Montgomery has crossed the Rhine, and that Hitler has finally gone mad.

Geoffrey Cox is staring at the diners in the restaurant of the Royal Danieli Hotel in Venice. Men in linen suits are eating with well-dressed women wearing expensive jewellery. The last of the day’s sun bounces off the water of the lagoon into the room. To Cox it is an unpleasantly decadent scene – he can only think about the ambulances carrying wounded New Zealanders, and the Germans he saw lying dead in a ditch the day before. He hurries away.

In the early dusk of the smoke filled skies, the three officers who have escaped the bunker, von Loringhoven, Boldt and Weiss, are setting off in a rowing boat they have found in a sailing club on the Pichelsdorf peninsula. Like the three men carrying Hitler’s testaments, they are also heading for the Wannsee bridgehead. It is another dark and moonless night. The three men hold their oars and let the boat glide silently downstream. They can hear the conversations of the Russian soldiers occupying the villas along the river banks. These are the very same houses that have, until only recently, been used as weekend getaways by the top Nazis, and before that belonged to Jewish families who were brutally forced out.

As the bunker telephones are no longer working, a technician called Hermann Gretz brings a drum of cable to Misch’s switchboard. He heads out, taking the other end to the Russian command in nearby Zimmerstrasse. Now the Führer is dead, those remaining in the bunker want to establish contact with the enemy forces.

In Plön Castle Admiral Dönitz is on the telephone to Heinrich Himmler. After hearing of his appointment as Hitler’s successor, one of Dönitz’s first actions was to ask his adjutant
to call Himmler. He feels it is very important that he gets his support. At their meeting that afternoon, Himmler had given him the impression that he saw himself as a natural successor to the Führer. The SS chief initially refused to come to Plön, but now reluctantly agrees when Dönitz calls him back and speaks to him in person.

Gretz returns from the Russian command and plugs in the cable. Misch tests it, but says the line is dead. Gretz double-checks. It is dead. He goes back to the Russians in Zimmerstrasse.

In the upper bunker Magda Goebbels is putting her children to bed. The littlest, Heide, has a sore throat. Her mother finds her a red scarf.

This is their last night’s sleep. This time tomorrow they will each be given an injection of morphine. Their mother will tell them that this is a vaccination that all the soldiers are getting to protect them against disease.

Once they are dozing, Ludwig Stumpfegger, one of the Reich Chancellery doctors, the only one whom Magda has been able to persuade to carry out this task, will crush a cyanide capsule between each child’s teeth.

The three testament couriers are reunited at the Wannsee bridgehead. While waiting for his colleagues, Johanmeier has found a small German army unit and used their radio to make contact with Admiral Dönitz. Dönitz has instructed them to go to Pfaueninsel, a small wooded island further south along
the River Havel, and wait for a seaplane which he is sending to rescue them.

Gretz the technician reappears in the Führerbunker switchboard office. ‘The cable wasn’t earthed. Try it again.’ Misch plugs it in and hears a Russian voice. ‘
Moment, moment
,’ he says and passes the connection to General Krebs, who has been secretly brushing up the Russian he learned when he was the military attaché in Moscow before the war. Krebs arranges to meet the Russian General Zhukov later that evening.

Constanze Manziarly is mashing potato and frying eggs, creating a dinner that she knows the Führer won’t eat. Those in Hitler’s immediate circle are keeping his death secret from the staff in the Reich Chancellery, and the kitchen orderlies who assist her have no idea that this meal is a charade.

Back in the map room, Goebbels and Bormann are drafting a letter for Krebs to take to General Zhukov. Goebbels is adamant that they will not offer an unconditional surrender.

In the Reichstag fierce fighting continues. Two Russian soldiers, bearing a red flag and heading for the roof, are mown down as they reach the second floor.

The three officers who are supposed to be delivering Hitler’s testaments have reached Pfaueninsel in the middle of the River
Havel. The island’s white castle looms through the darkness. This will be the landmark to guide the seaplane which Admiral Dönitz is sending. The men clamber ashore. They manage to find some civilian clothes in the castle and they dispose of their army uniforms. They begin the long wait for the seaplane to arrive. At dawn they will be joined by the three officers who have broken out of the bunker – von Loringhoven, Boldt and Weiss.

General Eisenhower’s staff are sending a telegram to the Russian General Antonov, requesting that he advance no further into Austria than ‘the general area of the Linz’ and the River Enns.

A guard at Stalag IV-C has found Corporal Bert Ruffle hiding in the latrine and he’s marching him to the Commandant’s office.

Noël Coward is in a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London (his London home having been bombed in 1941). Pencil in hand, he is updating a diary which also doubles up as his appointments book. He has an impressive set of friends – lunch dates with Fred Astaire, Laurence Olivier or Greta Garbo are not uncommon. But today has been a quiet Monday, the papers full of speculation about the war.

He’s writing, ‘These supremely melodramatic days are somehow anticlimactic and confusing. The
Sunday Express
announced Germany’s unconditional surrender to all three Allies. This headline is mischievous and misleading as it is not true, although it probably will be in the next day or two. Rumours of the death of Hitler and Goering. Mussolini shot
yesterday and hung upside down and spat at. The Italians are a loveable race.’

Bert Ruffle is saluting the Commandant of Stalag IV-C, who then stands and returns the salute. The Commandant asks him why he was evading work.

‘Sir, I was ready for work when, a quarter of an hour before I was to go on parade, my stomach was filled with pain. I was very sick and I felt as though the world had come to an end. It took me all my time to come to this office, as you can see, sir.’ Ruffle holds out his grubby hands.

‘I am shaking like a leaf in the wind. I shall be OK for work tomorrow, Sir.’

The Commandant tells him that he should have reported sick earlier, and lets Ruffle go without punishment. Ruffle walks back to his hut feeling extremely lucky, given that his old friend ‘Lofty’ Whitney is serving seven days in the jail for leaving Stalag IV-C without permission.

In Braunau-am-Inn, where Hitler was born 56 years ago, BBC correspondent Robert Reid is spending the night with an Austrian farmer and his wife. When the correspondents are far from an army base, they often knock on the door of a German house asking for a bed for the night. Almost without fail they are invited in, and almost without fail, as they enjoy German hospitality, they will notice the space on the wall where a picture of Hitler once hung.

Reid is enjoying a large candlelit meal and plenty of beer. The farmer and his wife have brought out photographs of their relatives living in Seattle and Chicago and they are telling him about how they hated Hitler and the Nazis. But Reid is unconvinced by their claim – too many of the civilians he’s met in Germany have said the same. Two weeks ago he was reporting from Buchenwald concentration camp, an experience he will never forget. There, Reid interviewed a British officer named Captain C.A.G. Burney who’d been in the camp for 15 months.

Reid: How would you like to sum up your whole experience here?

Burney: Well, I couldn’t politely say it over the microphone.

Reid: But has it been shocking?

Burney: It’s been shocking, but on the other hand it’s so stunning it’s almost unreal, and I think probably when one has been back among civilised people for a while one just forgets it.

Reid: You really feel like you’ve been out of civilisation, do you?

Burney: Oh yes, absolutely out of the world.

Back in his hut in Stalag IV-C, Bert Ruffle is updating his diary. He has been a prisoner since he was captured at Dunkirk on 26th May 1940. He’s tired and he’s hungry.

‘Why?? Why?? am I writing this diary? Will anyone read it? What I have written is the true account of what I and my comrades have suffered in the past few months. When, oh when, is this bleeding bloody sodding WAR going to finish??’

General Krebs sets off from the Führerbunker for the Russian command post. He is accompanied by two officers and is bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann, which announces the death of the Führer and requests a ceasefire in order that peace negotiations may commence. They ask for safe passage for everyone in the Reich Chancellery complex.