Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (4 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
Braun’s room is the most comfortable in the bunker complex. She has furnished it entirely with pieces designed for her by the architect of the bunker, Albert Speer. As well as the dressing table and chair, there’s a straight-backed sofa, upholstered in a floral fabric, a wardrobe and a single bed. Everything is marked with her four-leaf clover monogram, also designed by Speer, the two sides of the clover created out of a curved E facing a curved B. Her monogram is stamped on the furniture, embroidered on her clothes and engraved on her silver combs and brushes, on her jewellery and on the broach clip which Liesl is pinning into her hair.
Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, designed the massive new Reich Chancellery, which has been used from 1939, beside the old Reich Chancellery, a rococo palace on Berlin’s Williamstrasse which had served as an official Chancellery building since 1875, as well as the bunker complex beneath both buildings. Both Chancellery buildings have suffered bomb damage and are largely abandoned, but in the cellars there is an emergency hospital and a field kitchen plus garages and a network of rooms for secretaries, officers, officials. The cellars are connected to the Führerbunker by a long passageway which has been shelled in the past few days, but is still passable
.
Twenty-eight feet above Eva Braun’s head, the body of her brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, is being placed in a shallow grave in the Reich Chancellery garden. The gravediggers are working by the light of the firestorms illuminating the Berlin night sky. There is heavy Russian artillery bombardment as Soviet forces have just succeeded in establishing a crossing over the River Spree and the guns are giving cover to the stream of tanks entering the centre of Berlin. Braun’s brother-in-law has been executed during the evening on the orders of the man she
is about to marry. She pleaded for his life for the sake of her younger sister Gretl who is expecting Fegelein’s child any day, but Hitler had dismissed her furiously, forcing her to concede, ‘You are the Führer.’
Hermann Fegelein, an obsequious cavalry officer, has been working in the bunker as Himmler’s liaison officer. He had attempted to cement his position in Hitler’s inner circle by marrying Gretl Braun the previous summer. However, he had no wish to die at the Führer’s side and had disappeared from the bunker during the previous week. He had been caught with a woman, not his wife, in his Berlin apartment. Apparently preparing to flee the capital, he was found stuffing German marks and jewellery into a suitcase. He had been held by the Gestapo ever since and when news of Himmler’s attempts to negotiate with the Allies reached the bunker Hitler had no hesitation in ordering the execution of the SS chief’s representative
.
At the Kanoya Naval Air Base in the south of Japan, 23-year-old Yasuo Ichijima is in his room updating his daily diary. He’s due to fly in a few hours, and he knows he is not coming back. For the past year, most of the flights from Kanoya have been kamikaze missions. A few days ago Ichijima was told that his suicide mission was imminent, and has spent his time swimming, going for walks and saying goodbye to friends. Last Tuesday night he was kept awake by rowdy and drunk kamikaze pilots next door. Ichijima wrote in his diary, ‘They probably have the right idea. Personally I prefer to wait for death quietly. I am anxious to behave well up to the last moment… I am very honoured and proud to have the opportunity of offering to my country, which I love more than I can say, a pure life.’
Ichijima’s mission is to fly a plane loaded with explosives and fuel towards the US fleet which is part of the invasion force slowly overrunning the Japanese island of Okinawa, 500 miles
to the south. The Americans have advanced steadily through the Pacific and if they take Okinawa, the invasion of Japan will soon follow. He must fly at low altitude and, avoiding anti-aircraft guns, crash into a warship – preferably close to, or into, one of its funnels. Ichijima knows that he must not close his eyes at the last moment, however much he wants to, as it will make him less accurate. He’s a devout Christian, and is writing what will be the final entry in his diary – words from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”’
So far in April there have been over 1,000 kamikaze missions against the US and Royal navies, with about 20 ships sunk with the loss of hundreds of Allied lives. The kamikaze pilots only have minimal training as they make only one flight. They are escorted by experienced pilots who return to base to pick up the next wave of young volunteers
.
Joseph McNamara, a sailor with the USS
Anthony
off the coast of Okinawa, kept a diary about what it was like to be under continued kamikaze attack. On 27th May 1945 he wrote:
‘A day of horror – unbelievable… one Jap hit the water so close to us his body was thrown up on the forward torpedo tubes. The men found him, covered with rag dolls, charms etc. He was immediately pitched into the water – sharks in schools tore him to pieces. They hang around us.’
Yasuo Ichijima is part of a small Christian community in Japan. Catholic missionaries first arrived in the middle of the 16th century and were initially persecuted for their faith. In 1873 a ban on Christianity was lifted, but it is still only practised by a minority – Yasuo Ichijima is seen by his fellow pilots as unusual to hold such beliefs
.
In the Führerbunker switchboard office the telephonist Rochus Misch is watching Hans Hofbeck of the Reich Security Service describing Hermann Fegelein’s killing. Hofbeck witnessed the shooting in the Reich Chancellery cellar corridor about half an hour ago. He acts out what he witnessed: he raises his arms, holding an imaginary machine gun, and aims at shoulder height, shouting the sound effects ‘Ratatatata!’
00.10am
Adolf Hitler is standing in the conference room of the Führerbunker leaning both his hands on the broad side of the empty map table. Traudl Junge, one of the two secretaries remaining in the bunker, sits on the other side of the table taking down his words in shorthand. The Führer has nearly finished dictating his ‘Political Testament’. Junge had been very excited when he started. She thought that she was going to be the first person to learn why the war had become so catastrophic. As she later told the makers of the documentary
The World at War
, ‘I was heart thumping (sic) when I wrote down what Hitler said.’ But as Hitler drones on in a flat monotone she feels increasingly disappointed. There are no revelations, neither expressions of guilt nor justifications, just the recycled accusations she has heard many times before: ‘It is untrue that I, or anybody else in Germany, wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked exclusively by those international politicians who either came of Jewish stock, or worked for Jewish interests…’
He boasts how he has forced the Jews to pay for all the
suffering they have caused: ‘I … left no one in doubt that, this time, millions of children of Europe’s Aryan peoples would not die of hunger; millions of grown men would not suffer death; and hundreds and thousands of women and children not be burned and bombed to death in the towns, without the real culprit having to atone for his guilt, even if by my more humane means.’
Hitler goes on to explain his planned suicide: ‘I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who wants to create a new spectacle, organised by the Jews, to entertain the hysterical masses. I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin, and there to choose death voluntarily at the moment when I believe that the residence of the Führer and the Chancellor can no longer be held…’
Traudl Junge wrote down her memories of the bunker in 1947–8, but in the following years she was ashamed of the manuscript and her failure to distance herself critically from the events. For many years she tried not to think of this period of her life. She told herself that she was too young – 25 in 1945 – to be held responsible for her involvement in the murderous regime. However, one day, when she was in her forties, she walked past a plaque in memory of Sophie Scholl in Munich. Sophie Scholl had been a member of the White Rose group which distributed anti-Nazi leaflets. Junge noticed that Scholl had been born in 1920, as she had herself, but in 1942, the year when Junge started working for Hitler, Scholl had been executed for her anti-Nazi activities. She later said, ‘At that moment I really realised that it was no excuse that I had been so young.’ She went on to rewrite and publish her memoirs in 2002
.
Hitler barely looks up as he dictates. He nominates a successor government with Grand Admiral Dönitz, the head of the navy, as its leader. Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe,
and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, are formally expelled from the party and from their posts for negotiating with the enemy ‘without my knowledge and against my wishes’. The list of new appointments is long. As she jots down the names in shorthand, Junge can’t understand the point of all these appointments if, as he insists, all is lost.
The Führer pauses briefly and then launches into the dictation of his personal will.
He sets out a number of legacies and then explains that he has decided to ‘take as my wife the young woman who after long years of friendship voluntarily came to this practically besieged city in order to share her destiny with mine’. The news shocks Junge. Hitler has always insisted he will never marry because women have a destructive influence on great men. Hitler regarded it as a crucial part of his public persona that he was a single man, devoted to his country and without a wife standing in the way of the fantasies of the women of Germany.
He continues, ‘I and my wife choose death in order to escape the shame of deposal and surrender. It is our will that our bodies be burned immediately in the place where I performed the greatest part of my daily work in my 12-year-long service to my people.’
Suicide has always been an option in Hitler’s mind. Just before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, he told his supporters, ‘If it succeeds, very well; if it fails, we’ll hang ourselves!’ He has always seen the choice being between absolute success and absolute defeat. There is no middle ground.
Hitler pauses for a moment, then moves away from the table. ‘Type that out for me in triplicate and then bring it in to me.’ He has never before ordered triplicate copies without first checking a proof copy.
Earlier in the evening, while Hitler was ordering the execution of Fegelein, Traudl Junge had dozed off on a camp bed in the Führerbunker conference room. Since the bombing of the passageway which links the bunker with the cellars of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler insisted that the two remaining secretaries, Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, come and sleep in the Führerbunker. They have been snatching odd hours of rest, sleeping in their clothes
.
Traudl Junge thinks the Führer must have asked for her and left her undisturbed because when she went to his room at about 11.30pm to drink tea, as the secretaries do every evening, he asked her, ‘Have you had a nice little rest, child?’ He then asked her if she would take some dictation. Hitler often calls her ‘child’, and she thinks of him as ‘a kindly paternal figure’, who gives her ‘a feeling of security, solicitude for me, safety’. She grew up without a father and his protective attitude is something she has always longed for
.
Traudl Junge takes off the typewriter cover. It seems such an undignified end, ‘the same phrases, in the same quiet tone, and then… those terrible words about the Jews. After all the despair, all the suffering, not one word of sorrow, of compassion’. She thinks, ‘He has left us with nothing. A nothing.’
In the kitchen of the Hotel Bachmann in the centre of Villabassa, a small town in the Italian Alps, two SS guards are getting drunk with a British secret agent. One of the guards has already passed out. The other, called Fritz, pulls out a piece of paper from his pocket and shows it to the Englishman.
‘Here is the order for your execution; you won’t be alive after tomorrow.’
The extravagantly named Captain Sigismund Payne-Best of the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6) takes the news calmly. ‘What nonsense... Surely no one is going to be such a fool as to shoot any of us at this stage of the war. Why, the whole lot of you will be prisoners yourselves in a day or two.’
Payne-Best knows the SS well. For five and a half years, the 59-year-old agent has been held in chains by the SS, mostly in solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In November 1939 he was captured at the Dutch–German border while in the middle of what he’d thought were peace negotiations between the German government and the British government of Neville Chamberlain. Britain and Germany had been at war for two months, and Chamberlain was still eager to find a peaceful solution. Churchill, then First Sea Lord, was sceptical about the talks and was vindicated when the Germans broke off the negotiations and arrested Payne-Best and his colleague Major Richard Stevens, in order to find out about British secret intelligence networks in Europe. It was a highly successful kidnapping from the German point of view. Stevens was carrying an uncoded list of British agents in Europe
.
Payne-Best is a remarkable man, and in the words of a fellow prisoner, ‘the caricature of the Englishman. Very tall, very gaunt, and even stooping a little through emaciation, with hollow leathery cheeks, prominent teeth, monocle, flannel trousers, a check jacket and a cigarette.’ His teeth are in fact dentures, his original teeth having been replaced by a Sachsenhausen dentist, due to decay caused by the appalling camp diet. Payne-Best didn’t mind the process, despite the lack of anaesthetic, because it got him out of his cell. He speaks fluent German, having been an intelligence
officer in the First World War, and he used every opportunity in Sachsenhausen to get to know his SS guards. He speaks with such confidence and authority that his drinking partners assume that he has connections inside the SS and so they seek his friendship
.
