Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (31 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
Truman then consults General Marshall, who sets out his view in a communiqué to Eisenhower: ‘Personally… I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.’
Radio is the most modern and the most important instrument of mass influence that exists anywhere
.
Josef Goebbels
Twenty-nine-year-old William Joyce, known to millions of Britons as Lord Haw-Haw, is recording his final broadcast from the Hamburg radio studio of the
Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft
(Reich Broadcasting Company). Outside in the
street, members of staff are standing around a bonfire made up of files, scripts, paperwork and tapes. Joyce is drunk.
‘This evening, I am talking to you about… Germany. That is a concept that many of you may have failed to understand. Let me tell you that in Germany there still remains the spirit of unity and the spirit and strength...’
Joyce was born in America and grew up in the west of Ireland. He attended Birkbeck College in London where he got a First. In 1933 he joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and became their Director of Propaganda. He eventually left, believing that Mosley wasn’t anti-Semitic enough. In August 1939, Joyce headed to Germany with his wife Margaret to start a new life. It was an ill-thought plan and when they realised that if war broke out they would be interned, they tried to return to London. That proved impossible. Looking for employment, Joyce had a radio audition and made his first broadcast on 6th September, three days before the war began
.
The radio critic of the
Daily Express,
Jonah Barrington, began to make fun of German propaganda and German radio announcers, giving them comic names like ‘Winnie the Whopper’ and ‘Uncle Smarmy’. Having listened to William Joyce, Barrington wrote of his fake aristocratic drawl, ‘He speaks English of the haw-haw damn-it-get-out-of-my-way variety...’ William Joyce soon became known as Lord Haw-Haw
.
Tonight his speech is slurred and his Irish accent occasionally comes through.
‘…I had always hoped and believed that in the last resort there would be an alliance, a compact, an understanding between Germany and Britain. Well, at the moment, that seems impossible. Good. If it cannot be, then I can only say the whole of my work has been – in vain...’
At the peak of Joyce’s popularity in January 1940, it’s estimated that seven million people listened to him on Radio Hamburg, having retuned after the BBC’s nine o’clock bulletin finished
. The Times
even started listing his broadcasts in their radio column, and the BBC became so concerned at Joyce’s popularity that they moved their most successful show, Arthur Askey’s
Band Waggon,
to be at the same time at his broadcasts
.
But as Lord Haw-Haw became an increasing irritation, he also became a figure of fun as his claims to know what was going on in Britain were easily discredited. He once broadcast that Eastbourne harbour had been completely destroyed – when the town has no harbour. Such nonsense was not unique on German radio – at one point it was announced that the Luftwaffe had attacked the town of Random, after a British communiqué stated that ‘bombs were dropped at random.’
In September 1944 Joyce and his wife were awarded Merit medals by Hitler, but not in person: ‘The Old Man was too busy,’ Margaret wrote in her diary
.
‘…I can only say that I have day in and day out called the attention of the British people to the menace [long pause] from the east which confronted them. And if they will not hear, if they are determined NOT to hear...’ [he slams the desk] ‘...then I can only say that the fate that overcomes them in the end will be [long pause] the fate they have merited…’
Joyce has a large scar across his right cheek that he got stewarding a political meeting in south London that turned violent. He calls it his ‘Lambeth Honour’. Goebbels has insisted that Joyce keep broadcasting until the very end of the war, and so in March he had him and his wife evacuated from Berlin to Hamburg. Joyce has come increasingly to rely on alcohol, and is in pain from an ankle injury resulting from a fall into a tank trap while drunk. The night before they left Berlin Joyce wrote
in his diary, ‘I believe a bomb fell quite near but I was indifferent to it. Was really drunk...’
Before his final broadcast this evening, he and other members of the
Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft
had raided the cellars of the Hamburg station. His colleagues naively believe that they will be able to carry on working in broadcasting after the war. Joyce knows that’s impossible, and that they will all be arrested by the Allies. ‘If I cannot dodge the bill I must pay it,’ he wrote in his diary four days ago.
Joyce has reached the end of his typed script: ‘...I say to you these last words – you may not hear again for a few months, I say –
Es lebe Deutschland
!’ He drops his voice. ‘
Heil Hitler
… and farewell.’
At 4am, Joyce and his wife will be driven away from Hamburg by two SS officers, with the city about to surrender to the British. Joyce has no recollection of what he’s said in that last broadcast. He wrote in his diary, ‘I fear I made an improper speech but what it was I don’t know. I was under the influence. Was given a good bottle of wine as I left. Splendid.’ The recording was never broadcast, and is found by British soldiers on 2nd May in the studios of the Hamburg Rundfunk
.
At a meeting of the War Cabinet, Churchill is explaining that the war is ending with ‘no friendly spirit’ between the Allies, and there is a ‘tendency to quarrel’.
Sir Andrew Cunningham, the First Sea Lord, agrees with the Prime Minister saying, ‘Quite true – the French are very difficult and the Russians very suspicious and so difficult.’
The Chair of the British Military Chiefs of Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, listens with frustration. Brooke has just had a week’s fishing in Inverness and feels ‘a great disinclination to start work again’. He returned yesterday to such
a backlog of mail that it took two dispatch riders to transport the sacks from his office to his home. This afternoon he’s chaired a long meeting of the chiefs of staff and now finds Churchill ‘in a bad mood’, making the Cabinet meeting unpleasant. Brooke is fed up with Churchill’s misunderstanding of events, refusal to listen and tendency to drink until he’s ‘tight’. Now he’s exasperated by Churchill abusing Field Marshal Alexander. Only a day after Alexander has received the German surrender in Italy, Churchill is complaining that he hasn’t yet taken Trieste and made a greater advance towards Vienna.
The Reichstag is full to the rafters with blind-drunk Russians. Where ten have been shot, twenty new ones arrive! It’s terrible. Hand grenades and pistol shots rain down from above, the underground passageways and vaults echo with anti-tank grenades and rifle fire
.
First Lieutenant Fritz Radloff
In Berlin the Russian soldiers of the 150th Rifle Division are charging the front of the Reichstag. They have finally been able to cross Königsplatz under the cover of the dark fug of smoke and with tank support close behind them. They rush at the building expecting to burst through doors and windows, but the German defence force has managed to brick up and block the entrances. The Russians have to blast their way in.
A few hundred yards away SS officer Ewald Lindloff climbs the steps from the Führerbunker to the Reich Chancellery garden, armed with a spade. He has been ordered by Otto Günsche to bury the bodies of Adolf and Eva Hitler. Shells have hit the
garden in the last few hours and Lindloff finds the bodies are not only burned, but have been ‘torn open’ by shelling. He buries the remains in a fresh shell crater.
Admiral Dönitz arrives back at Plön Castle, following his meeting with Himmler in Lübeck police station. He is astonished to be greeted with a telegram from Martin Bormann informing him that he has been appointed as Hitler’s successor.
In Mauthausen concentration camp, prisoner Henry Wermuth is getting ready for what he called later ‘the performance of my life’. Three days ago the 22-year-old arrived at the camp – his eighth – and has decided that if he is to survive he must steal some extra food. The rumble of guns in the distance gives him hope that the Allies are not far away – if he can only survive until they get here.
For the first time Wermuth is alone; his father died on the way to Mauthausen. Together they had survived Auschwitz, where, convinced that they were destined for the gas chambers, his father had said calmly, ‘Should we be gassed, breathe deeply, my son, breathe deeply, to get it over with quickly.’ They were never sent to the gas chambers, but their forearms were tattooed. Wermuth is B3407, his father B3406.
Wermuth’s barracks at Mauthausen contain two rows of three-tier bunk beds for about 6,000 prisoners. Last Friday night, his first night, he was allocated a middle bunk made for one person to sleep in. He had to share it with four others, one of whom is suffering from diarrhoea. It was so unbearable that Wermuth got out and slept under a blanket on a nearby table. He often dreams he has a machine gun and is shooting crowds of Germans. He only stops when he sees a small child in his gunsight.
In Auschwitz a small loaf of bread was shared between four
people; here it is one loaf between eight. Wermuth can feel his strength diminishing. But he has a plan.
At six o’clock as usual, the sealed metal container carrying watery soup arrives in the hut, and is placed on the floor just a few feet from Wermuth. He knows that it will be five minutes before it’ll be dished out by a
kapo
(a prisoner given authority over the inmates) so he hasn’t long.
Wearing his blanket like a robe over his right shoulder, Wermuth walks up and down, brushing over the soup container with his blanket as he does so. On the fourth pass he quickly bends down and opens the clasp that keeps the lid shut. Again he starts walking back and forth, then suddenly crouches, lifts up the lid, pulls out a bowl and dips it deep into the soup.
Then Wermuth walks slowly back to his bunk with the bowl and pulls out a spoon hidden under his thin mattress. He knows that he can’t drink the soup openly, so crawls under the bed, taking care not to spill any.
Suddenly the bed is surrounded by angry inmates, and he only has time for a couple of spoonfuls before the rest is stolen from him. They leave him alone to lick the bowl. Wermuth reckons that if stealing the soup doesn’t prolong his life by much, the thrill of carrying it out has revived his fighting spirit.
Mauthausen will be liberated by the Americans five days later. An inmate spots something unusual, and climbs onto the table that had been Wermuth’s bed on his first night for a better look
.
‘Ein amerikanische Soldat!
’ he shouts
.
Wermuth, lying in his bunk, too weak to move, pulls the blanket over his head and weeps for the loss of his family. He turns to share the moment of liberation with his last surviving bunkmate, but he has already died
.
The Commandant of Berlin, General Weidling, arrives in the bunker and is met by Goebbels, Bormann and the generals, who show him Hitler’s study where the double suicide took place. He is sworn to secrecy. He immediately summons Colonel von Dufving, his Chief of Staff, and a number of other staff members, to join him in the bunker, without giving a reason.
The stone columns of the great entrance hall of the Reichstag are covered in blood. The first Russian soldiers to force their way in are met with a storm of grenades and Panzerfaust fire from the balconies around the central staircase. As reinforcements flow into the building, climbing over the dead and injured, the Russians gradually make their way up the stairs, firing from sub-machine guns, lobbing grenades. Many of the German defenders – the Hitler Youth, the sailors, the SS – race down back staircases to hide in the cellars. Others are forced further and further upwards as the building catches fire.
‘They rape our daughters, they rape our wives,’ the men lament. There is no other talk in the city. No other thought either. Suicide is in the air
.
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, diary entry, April 1945
Plonzstrasse Cemetery, Berlin Records, 30th April 1945:
Gerhard N., b.1914
Rüdigerstrasse
Suicide by shooting
Ilse N., b.1914
Rüdigerstrasse
Suicide by shooting
Irma N., b.1944
Rüdigerstrasse
Suicide by shooting
It was not only Russians who were guilty of rape as they advanced through Germany. Saul K. Padover, an American officer, wrote in 1946, ‘The behaviour of some troops was nothing to brag about, particularly after they came across cases of cognac and barrels of wine. I am mentioning it only because there is a tendency among the naive or malicious to think that only Russians loot and rape.’ Many Allied soldiers discovered that sex was readily available to them. Major Bill Deedes of the 12th King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and future journalist, wrote later, ‘The Germans were very hungry. The girls would get at my riflemen for a tin of sardines.’
In the town of Berchtesgaden, near Hitler’s mountain home, Albine Paul gave her 11-year-old daughter, Irmgard, a small envelope containing a teaspoon of pepper. Pepper was very hard to obtain during the war and Albine had to overcome her reluctance to use the black market in order to get hold of some. She was terrified about the expected arrival of the Russians. The town had taken many refugees from the east who had brought hideous stories of the Soviet army raping and murdering women of all ages. Albine told Irmgard that if an enemy soldier threatened to harm her, she was to throw the pepper in his eyes. In the end, however, it was not the Russians but American, French and Moroccan troops that liberated Berchtesgaden. The local women feared the French and the Moroccan soldiers the most, but Irmgard was horrified to overhear a local official telling the story of a group of American soldiers gang-raping a 16-year-old girl in the former Nazi headquarters in
Stangass, Berchtesgaden. Although she understood that this was terrible it would be several years before Irmgard would understand what the word rape
, Vergewaltigung,
meant. She had not yet learned the facts of life. Nor did she fully understand the conversations between her mother and her aunt about the many abortions carried out in Berchtesgaden during the American occupation
.
