Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (25 page)

Smith finds a blank page and starts a list, thinking, ‘What do these people need? Everything.’

The Russian army reaches Ravensbrück camp, 56 miles north of Berlin. They find about 3,500 sick and dying women and several hundred men. It is estimated that about 50,000 women died at the camp in the six years since 1939.

Thirty-four-year-old Leo Goldner is one of the prisoners at the Allach sub-camp at Dachau where prisoners are employed in the production of porcelain. He is close to the gate when
the first American soldier of the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division arrives.

The soldier shouts, ‘You are free!’

‘What’s your name? And where are you from?’ Goldner shouts back.

He never forgets the answer: his liberator is George Thomann from Akron, Ohio.

Another Allach prisoner, a Hungarian woman called Sarah Friedmann, is collapsing with hunger when the Americans enter the camp. She only arrived a couple of weeks earlier, having survived a death march from Birkenau. The soldiers start handing out cans of food and oil. Friedman eats a little but, as she later recalled, ‘Many of us perished that day as a result of overeating, because they were not used to such fat and nourishing food in their stomachs.’ Those who died are known as ‘canned-goods victims’ – people who survived concentration camps and death marches but who now die of overeating the rich food.

In the Bavarian Alps 15-year-old Barbara has taken the two young German lieutenants Claus and Fritz to an elderly neighbour so they can listen to her radio and get news of the war.

‘I don’t listen to it any more,’ the old lady says. ‘All day long they play military music, and there are bits of news in between, but it’s always the same: “We’re winning the war…” Yet in town they are saying there are American tanks on the Autobahn. I don’t know who to believe.’

They all sit and drink milk and listen to a station broadcasting from Rosenheim near Munich. The woman is right – the newsreader says emphatically that the Germans are winning and Hitler is in control.

A neighbour arrives – a tall, skinny farmer aged about 80. He has heard from the girls that the young officers need a lift into Traunstein. He’s happy to take them to the door of the army provision headquarters.

‘Maybe they’ll trade their stores for my apples,’ he jokes. ‘They won’t need what they’ve got for much longer.’

The farmer also knows that it will be far safer for him to travel if he has two army officers in his truck.

In Britain the BBC bulletins and newspapers are full of the news about the death of Mussolini and the battle for Berlin. As usual there is no news of the only part of the British Isles occupied by the Germans – the Channel Islands. The islands are an embarrassment to the government, and they have decided that any reference to the occupation in the press or by the BBC would be bad for the public’s morale. There was no mention of the islands in the King’s Speech last Christmas, and as recently as March Churchill refused a request from the Home Secretary to mention the suffering of the islanders in a speech. ‘I doubt if it will be possible for me to introduce the subject into my broadcasts. These have to be conceived as a whole, and not as a catalogue of favourable notices.’ The Channel Islands are a
reminder to him of the humiliating invasion of June 1940 and Britain’s inability to recapture territory only 12 hours away by boat.

The government knows a little of what has been happening on the islands thanks to escapees who have sailed over to liberated France. They’ve told how a group calling themselves the ‘Guernsey Underground Barbers’ has got together to punish women who have ‘misconducted themselves with Germans’. They’ve also reported that the German troops are reduced to eating horsemeat and their uniforms are falling apart, and that the islanders are starving too. The British government was initially reluctant to help, fearing that providing supplies for the island would only prolong the occupation. However, on 27th December 1944, after a long delay, a ship named the
Vega
docked at St Peter Port with 100,000 food parcels.

The painting of V-signs is a particular issue for the Germans. One man chalked a ‘V’ on a German soldier’s bike saddle so it would leave the mark on his trousers – for which he got 12 months in prison. ‘V’ badges made of British coins are pinned inside many lapels.

But there is by no means a united front against the German occupiers. For the past four years radios have been illegal – to be caught in possession of one means many months in prison, and at one point in 1943, the police were getting 40 anonymous letters a day denouncing neighbours for owning a radio (it’s believed they were paid £105 each for the information). The islanders have been constructing their own radios – every public telephone box on Jersey and Guernsey is out of action as the handsets have been stolen to make headphones.

By the end of April, the occupying forces have more important matters to worry about. Food is so scarce that German troops have been eating limpets from the seashore, and stealing crops from fields. One farmer has been murdered protecting
his property. But the majority of German soldiers are showing discipline, even when the islanders deliberately eat their Red Cross parcels in front of them to provoke them.

It’s said that there are no pets left on the Channel Islands as they’ve all been eaten.

In the public library on Berlin’s Ravennee-Strasse, 53-year-old teacher Willi Damaschke is hiding among the bookshelves. He had to flee his house a few days ago, and since then has been moving from place to place – last night he broke in through the library’s front door.

Outside the battle is raging. Damaschke looks at the spines of the books – August Winning’s
The Book of Science
; Felix Timmerman’s
The Hernat Family
; books by Wilhelm Scholz and Regina Holderbusch. Damaschke reflects on how he used to spend time among these shelves in peacetime.

Damaschke gets out a pocket diary from his coat. In it he writes, ‘A wretched life! I’d like to get back to the house, but the courtyard’s under heavy fire...’

On the other side of the city, Russian tanks and self-propelled guns are rolling over Moltke Bridge to support the infantry assualting the Reichstag. The first company has suffered many casualties. The survivors are trapped. The sky above them is as black as night.

Martin Bormann rises from the corridor bench in the Führerbunker, nursing a hangover. He makes his way to the upper bunker to grab some sandwiches from the trolley in the corridor. He takes a couple to eat and stuffs some extras into his pockets.

In Prague, the Nazi leader of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the police Karl Hermann Frank makes the first of a series of broadcasts on Czech radio announcing that any uprising against German rule will be ‘drowned in a sea of blood’.

In the Danish border town of Padborg, a freight train made up of 56 carriages has arrived at the station. Inside are 4,000 women from Ravensbrück concentration camp 440 kilometres away in Germany. None of the women are Danish.

Hans Henrick Koch from the Danish Ministry of Social Welfare is watching the massive train pull in. Koch has spent the past two years trying to get aid to the Danes (mostly Jews and communists) who have been sent to concentration camps and prisons in Germany.

Koch watches as railway staff open the doors of the carriages, and women surge out – they refuse to be held back. The women then search for wood and kindling, and make fires all along the railway track. They’ve brought with them small pans in which they start to cook potatoes. Koch wrote later that it was a ‘strange and sad sight’.

At Euston Station in London, 17 German army generals are being escorted by Military Police to a train that will take them to POW camps in the north of England.

Traunstein has recently been wrecked by Allied bombs and is deserted. A farmer is driving Claus Sellier and Fritz through town. They tell him to pull up outside the headquarters of the town’s military commander. Suddenly they hear a female voice inside yell, ‘American tanks are in the town!’

Then there is a single shot. The two men run inside and find the military commander slumped dead on the floor, the muzzle of his rifle still in his mouth.

Forty kilometres away, in the village of Prutting, Annmarie Cramer is settling into a lakeside holiday hut with her six children. It is a place she knows from pre-war family holidays. She and the children left their home near Breslau in January. Her husband, an academic turned ordinary soldier, Ernst Cramer, managed to get them onto one of the last planes to leave Breslau before the Russians arrived. It took them to Berlin, where they caught a train, which took two weeks to reach Bavaria. She feels very lucky that she has managed to get here with all the children. The train was absolutely packed and one of her sons had to be heaved in through a window after it had started
moving. They had only just passed through Traunstein Station before it was destroyed by bombs. At least they didn’t leave on foot, like many others she knows, or on a ship like the
Wilhelm Gustloff
where so many thousands lost their lives.

Annmarie doesn’t yet know that her husband has just been killed in a gun battle with Americans near Leipzig. He was a very reluctant soldier. As a teenager he had fought in the First World War and been held in France as a prisoner of war.

In January, when he said goodbye to his family at the airport in Breslau, he asked his oldest daughter to help her mother with the little ones. He didn’t think he’d survive. He felt he’d used up all his luck in the last war.