Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (30 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
With the help of three SS guards, Linge carries Hitler’s body up the steps to the Reich Chancellery garden. The Führer’s head is covered by the blanket but his legs are sticking out. Martin Bormann lifts the wrapped body of Eva Hitler and carries her out into the corridor. Erich Kempka, who has just come up from the underground garages to deliver the petrol, takes the body. He doesn’t like to see her being held ‘like a sack of potatoes’ by a man she so despised, he tells interviewers after the war. Kempka carries her to the stairs where Günsche, who is much bigger and stronger, takes over. He carries her out into the garden and lays her body beside Hitler’s in a spot about three metres from the bunker door.
Soviet shells are falling all around as Günsche and Linge pour the petrol over the bodies. Goebbels has brought matches, which Linge uses to light some paper, creating a torch. He hurls the burning paper towards the bodies and then races back to the bunker entrance. A fireball engulfs the bodies as he pulls
the door behind him. The funeral party raise their arms and shout ‘
Heil Hitler
’ from the safety of the staircase.
Venice absorbed the Eighth Army as it had absorbed so many other conquerors, with a quietness which indicated that all this fighting was a pretty vulgar business anyway
.
Geoffrey Cox
Two Allied tanks are speeding along the causeway that links Venice with the mainland. They pull up in front of the Santa Lucia railway station at the end of the causeway, and thousands of Venetians arrive to greet them.
Sitting by a deserted Bavarian Autobahn, Claus Sellier is writing in his pocket diary.
‘30th April 1945. We completed our mission!’
Earlier at the army provisions store in Traunstein, he and his companion Fritz loaded up two knapsacks each with supplies, including pots and pans to exchange for food. Claus yells as loud as he can towards the Alps, ‘I am free at last! This is a great day!’
The young men pick up their knapsacks and head for home.
Four days later on 4th May, Claus and Fritz see an American roadblock in the distance. They keep their uniforms on, but bury their pistols in a gas mask box, and mark the spot by placing their belts in the shape of cross in case they need to retrieve them
.
At the roadblock the GIs take great interest in Claus’s medals, especially a swastika made of gold. Claus doesn’t understand exactly what’s being said, but he knows an auction when he sees
one. A young GI gives the soldier on duty a wad of notes for the gold swastika. Claus notices that all of the Americans have watches from their wrists to their elbows. They try and take Fritz’s gold watch, but he fights too hard, shouting in broken English that he demands to see the officer in charge
.
Then the GIs motion to Claus and Fritz to roll up their sleeves. All SS soldiers have their blood type tattooed under their armpit. Satisfied that they are ordinary soldiers, the Americans take them to a nearby cemetery where they join other German soldiers sitting on cold, wet gravestones
.
Claus and Fritz watch as a civilian is stopped. He protests in good English that as he isn’t a soldier he shouldn’t be searched. But in his belongings the American soldiers find a photograph of him dressed in an SS uniform – he shouts indignantly that it’s a picture of his twin brother. They rip off his white shirt and find a blood group tattoo – further evidence that he’s in the military. At gunpoint the man joins Claus and Fritz in the cemetery. It starts to snow
.
Two weeks later, the men make it home to their families, looking tired and scruffy
.
Around the same time, a farmer outside Munich discovers that two of his scarecrows are wearing the uniforms of the German Mountain Artillery Regiment
.
High in the Italian Alps, a mystery has been solved. The 120
Prominente
, former prisoners of the SS, including Lëon Blum, former Prime Minister of France, Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former Chancellor of Austria, and the British secret agent Sigismund Payne-Best, are recovering from their ordeal in the Lago di Braies Hotel’s luxurious rooms. Payne-Best suspects that his fellow guests are hoarding more than just food. Throughout the day, those with rooms on the third floor have been coming one by one to tell Payne-Best that their eiderdowns and pillows have gone missing (he’s felt like a combination of
host and hotel porter since they arrived). Payne-Best asks one of the ex-prisoners, Commander Franz Liedig (who’s come to be seen as a sort of hotel manager), to look into the disappearances. Liedig searches all the floors and finds all the missing eiderdowns and pillows piled up in one room. He never revealed whose room it was.
Payne-Best’s belief that former prisoners have a tendency to steal food and bedding without thinking will be confirmed when he comes to pack his things to return home a few days later. He discovers that he has butter, tobacco, tins of spam and milk in his room, and no memory of taking them
.
The guests of the Lago di Braies Hotel will be liberated by the Americans early on 4th May. The GIs disarm and arrest the German troops who had been guarding them, in case the SS return. Before they are taken away, Payne-Best addresses the German soldiers, telling them how he respects their bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, and that although difficult times lay ahead for them, there is a brighter future too. He asks the American commanding officer if the German troops could be treated with consideration. The Americans then join Payne-Best and the others for breakfast at the hotel
.
As he recalls later, ‘they seemed to have expected to find us in extremis, and were certainly surprised when, within an hour of their arrival, they found themselves sitting down to a magnificent breakfast, and being waited upon by a number of pretty and very charming girls.’
President Truman is meeting with Joseph E. Davies, the former Ambassador to Moscow. He wants Davies to go to London and meet Churchill and have one-to-one talks with him, to assess whether the death of Roosevelt has brought about any change in attitude to the United States. Truman has already asked Harry
Hopkins, who was one of Roosevelt’s closest advisors, to fly to Russia to meet Stalin on a similar mission. Truman feels there is only so much he can learn from telegrams. Roosevelt’s widow Eleanor advised Truman that Churchill ‘was a gentleman to whom the personal touch means a great deal… If you talk to him about books and let him quote to you from his marvellous memory everything on earth from Barbara Frietchie to the Nonsense Rhymes and Greek tragedy, you will find him easier to deal with on political subjects’.
Truman can see that Davies doesn’t look well and he suggests that maybe a trip to England is not such a good idea. Davies dismisses the suggestion.
In 1941 Joseph E. Davies had published a book called
Mission to Moscow
about his time as Ambassador in the 1930s. Two years later it was turned into a film starring Walter Huston as Davies. It was the first pro-Soviet film made by Hollywood, and by the end of the war it was ridiculed for its bias towards Stalin and its naivety about his show trials. America had fallen swiftly out of love with Stalin
.
By the spring of 1945, the American people are prospering – they are enjoying 40% higher disposable income than at the start of the conflict. As a reminder that the war isn’t over, the government is encouraging its citizens to take holidays on the West Coast where they are likely to see the burned-out and damaged merchant and navy ships that are taking such a hammering in the Pacific from the Japanese
.
George L. Harrison, advisor to the US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, is completing a paper to be put to the Chief of Staff General George Marshall in the morning. It recommends ‘the setting up of a committee of particular qualifications’ with responsibility for advising the government on the use of the atomic bomb ‘when secrecy is no longer fully required’. Harrison
warns, ‘If misused it may lead to the complete destruction of civilisation.’
President Truman knew nothing about the development of the atomic bomb until two weeks into his presidency. On the day of his swearing in, Secretary of War Stimson had whispered a few cryptic words in his ear about ‘the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power’ – but that was it. In 1944 Truman, then a senator, had made Stimson’s life a misery while chairing a committee investigating wasteful military spending. The committee wanted to investigate rumours of costly scientific experiments. On 25th April Stimson found himself in the Oval Office explaining the details and power of the so-called Manhattan Project to someone he had once described as ‘a nuisance and a pretty untrustworthy man’
.
Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche goes up the stairs to the upper bunker and drops onto the bench beside Traudl Junge. He takes the bottle of schnapps from her and lifts it to his lips. His large hands are shaking. He is as white as a ghost and stinking of petrol. ‘I have carried out the Führer’s last order,’ he says softly. ‘His body has been burned.’ Traudl Junge doesn’t reply.
Downstairs, Heinz Linge is sorting out Hitler’s study: disposing of the bloodstained carpet, medicines, documents and clothes. Günsche leaves Traudl Junge to give orders to two SS officers, Ewald Lindloff and Hans Reisser, to bury the bodies.
Rochus Misch remains at the switchboard; he has been joined by one of the mechanics from the underground garages who helped bring the petrol to the Führerbunker. They sit in silence.
Misch is hyper-alert. He keeps thinking he can hear ‘the tread of the death squad’s boots sent below by Gestapo Müller to shoot us’. He takes the safety catch off his pistol.
No one can look like a liberator in a gondola
.
Geoffrey Cox
New Zealand intelligence officer Geoffrey Cox is having a surreal experience. He and other officers are being rowed in a gondola up Venice’s Grand Canal. Occasionally people wave from a house or from a bridge as they pass by, but Cox feels like a tourist and is rather embarrassed by the whole experience. Their little flotilla arrives at St Mark’s Square and Cox is relieved to get ashore.
In the square, the Italian and Venetian flags hang in front of the cathedral, and below Kiwi troops are being sold food to feed the pigeons. By the lift that takes people up the bell tower, the price list in German is being replaced by one in English. Cox watches as a terrified-looking fascist is led by partisans over a bridge to prison; a noisy crowd follows on behind.
Cox heads to the Royal Danieli Hotel – the best in Venice – where the British and New Zealanders have set up their headquarters (they have done this at speed to prevent the Americans from getting it first).
Cox climbs the stairs to the first floor, where, in a large suite overlooking the Grand Canal, a unit of Italian partisans have made their base. Cox is impressed – they are a group of well-organised and well-dressed students and lawyers who have planned for this day in secret for many months – with the assistance of the US intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services. Their leader, a pre-war racing driver, had been
dropped in by parachute the year before, wearing a business suit and carrying a rolled umbrella. For the next few hours, Cox, his team and the partisans telephone villages on the route to Trieste to find out which bridges are still standing.
As dusk begins to fall, Berlin darkens quickly under the pall of smoke and the Russian assault on the Reichstag restarts. General Shatilov has learned that his overly optimistic claims of having taken the Reichstag have reached Stalin. He is now desperate to get the red flag flying on the roof of the building on the far side of the square.
Captain Neustroev, who is leading the assault unit, is exasperated by the focus on the flag. All his platoon sergeants are vying to be the ones to plant it on the roof.
Half a mile away in the Führerbunker, Goebbels, Bormann and generals Krebs, Mohnke and Burgdorf are sitting in the conference room trying to agree the best course of action. They quickly decide against joint suicide. Bormann suggests a mass breakout, but Mohnke argues that it would be impossible. They decide to try and set up negotiations with the Russians. Meanwhile the Führer’s death must be kept secret. Only two people need to know: General Weidling, who is leading the defence of Berlin, and Joseph Stalin. Weidling is summoned from his command post in the Tiergarten.
Churchill’s car is arriving back at Downing Street after his long weekend at Chequers. His staff are shocked by the mess of paperwork in his red box. Churchill is determined that, even though the war is almost over, he keeps abreast of events as much as he can. Today he received a letter from Sir
Stewart Menzies (known as ‘C’), the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, suggesting that he reduce the paperwork being sent his way.
‘Prime Minister, in order to save time in reading I am preparing, until such time as you direct me to the contrary, Boniface Reports as headlines, in the same form as Naval headlines as submitted to you daily.’ (Boniface Reports are the information gleaned by spies). Churchill had written in large red letters, ‘No’ and then ‘Certainly not’ underlined.
The Prime Minister now puts through a cable to Truman, urging the liberation of Prague and ‘as much as possible of the territory of western Czechoslovakia’. He argues that there can be little doubt that this ‘might make the whole difference to the post-war situation in Czechoslovakia and might well influence that in nearby countries’. For this reason he wants Truman’s Chief of Staff, General Marshall, ‘to agree to the dispatch of a message to Eisenhower in order that he should take advantage of any suitable opportunity that may arise to advance into Czechoslovakia’. He adds, ‘I hope this will have your approval.’
