Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (35 page)

After instructing Hitler on how to use the cyanide phial, Werner Haase was one of the small group who remained in the bunker until the Russians came on 2nd May 1945. He was sent to Moscow’s Butyrka prison. He was probably tortured, like the others from the bunker who were imprisoned by the Russians, in order to extract information about Hitler’s death. He died of the tuberculosis in 1950.

Fey was reunited with her husband Detalmo in May 1945. Together they searched for their missing sons but it was Fey’s mother who, in August 1945, tracked them down to a former Nazi children’s home in Innsbruck, where they had been given new names and identities. She was just in time, as all the homes were due to be closed down in a few days and all children given up for adoption to local peasants. Fey and her husband were reunited with their sons at the end of October 1945, a year after they had been taken from them. They returned to Italy, and had a daughter in 1948.

In 1975 Detalmo and Fey returned to the Lago di Braies Hotel, but as it was filled with tourists, and surrounded by cars, it had none of the atmosphere of the days before her liberation.

As the war ended, the former head of the SS was at a loss. He played no part in the surrender and was isolated from his fellow Nazis. For several days he did nothing, then on 11th May 1945 he decided to flee from Lübeck with a small number of SS guards, but without planning where they would go. He was captured at a Russian checkpoint on 22nd May and handed over to the British. He was undergoing a medical examination the following day when he slipped a cyanide phial into his mouth and, to the surprise of the doctor examining him, suddenly dropped dead.

For months after his release from Rangoon jail, whenever Bill Hudson heard a noise in the night, he would leap out of bed and stand to attention, expecting a Japanese guard to appear. He dedicated his memoirs to his wife Audrey, who helped him get over the trauma. Exactly 40 years on, Bill Hudson flew to Tokyo to meet Haruo Ito, the commander of Rangoon jail, who had written the letters left on the jail’s main gate. In the foyer of the New Otani Hotel they shook hands and Ito gave Hudson his card – he now worked for a successful Japanese food company. They talked about the night of 29th April 1945. Ito explained that he left the camp with 60 of his men, but only 17 survived the journey through the jungle. Hudson then took Ito to meet his wife, and in his hotel room the former POW and his jailer had a beer.

On 7th May 1945 Alfred Jodl signed the Act of Military Surrender to the Allies on behalf of Admiral Dönitz at the
supreme headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, in Rheims. He was then arrested and tried at Nuremberg. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; waging a war of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. He was hanged on 16th October 1946. A German court later overturned the guilty verdict on the grounds that it had not been unanimous. His property was restored to his widow. This reprieve was later overturned by a Bavarian court, but his widow was allowed to retain the property.

The three couriers who had left the bunker on 29th April 1945 with Hitler’s testaments spent the night of 30th April on Pfaueninsel, the island on the River Havel where Dönitz had promised to send a seaplane to rescue them.

On the night of 1st May the island was bombarded by Russian fire and they seized a canoe and paddled out to a yacht at anchor in the Havel. They hid in the stationary yacht; a munitions ship was ablaze close by and the river was brightly lit by its flames, so the men knew that any move would be easily spotted by the Russians. Unfortunately for them, it was at this moment that the seaplane arrived. The three couriers attempted to row towards it but the plane came under direct fire and the pilot flew off without them. For the next two days the men remained in hiding, moving between the island and the yacht. On 3rd May, wearing civilian clothes which they had found on the island, they set off on their journeys home, abandoning the attempt to take the documents to their destinations.

Johannmeier
returned to his family home in Westphalia and
buried the documents in the back garden, inside a bottle. He was quickly found by Allied investigators, living under his own name. He refused to admit to his American interrogators that he had any papers until after his two companions had both been forced to give their copies up.

Zander
succeeded in reaching Bavaria. He hid the documents in a trunk in the house of a woman he knew in the village of Tegernsee. He adopted a new identity, taking the name Friedrich Wilhelm Paustin, and created a new life working in Tegernsee as a gardener. The documents were found on Boxing Day 1945, following detective work by Hugh Trevor-Roper and American counter-intelligence agents. Zander himself was tracked down and arrested, after a short gun battle, near the Czech border early in 1946. The documents were shipped to Washington. Zander died in Munich in 1974.

Lorenz
, Hitler’s press secretary, was captured by the Americans in June 1945. Information he gave under interrogation led to the arrests of his fellow couriers. He was released in 1947 and returned to work as a journalist, which had been his profession before the war. He died in 1985.

Having fled Hamburg at the end of April 1945, by mid-May the Joyces were lodging in a house in a small Danish hamlet called Kupfermühle under the name of Hansen. On 28th May two British soldiers who were part of T-Force, Lieutenant Geoffrey Perry and Captain Adrian Lickorish, were walking in the woods nearby collecting firewood, when they met a man with a limp called ‘Herr Hansen’. They started talking, and Hansen gave them a lecture on the difference between coniferous and
deciduous forests. After a while, Perry said, ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be William Joyce, would you?’ Joyce reached into his trouser pocket for his false ‘Hansen’ papers, but Perry thought he was reaching for a gun and shot him though the hip, knocking him to the ground. As he was driven off in the jeep, Perry recalled that Joyce ‘couldn’t stop talking’.

In an appropriate twist of fate, Geoffrey Perry was a German-born Jew named Horst Pinschewer, whose family had fled Nazi persecution in 1936.

Joyce was hanged at dawn at Wandsworth Prison on 3rd January 1946, having been found guilty of giving ‘aid and comfort to the King’s enemies’. The jury took 19 minutes to reach their verdict. One eyewitness in the courtroom said they looked as if they’d been out for a cup of tea.

The rules for those who were hanged were followed to the letter; Joyce was buried at night, within the prison precincts with no mourners present, and his grave was unmarked. At the time of the execution, three men hiding in the prison nursery garden wearing sports jackets and flannels gave a quick Nazi salute.

Margaret Joyce was never tried. She died in London in 1972.

Hitler’s secretary was in the first group to break out of the bunker on the night of 1st May 1945. She was dressed as a male soldier and carrying a pistol. The sight of Berlin shocked her. In the moonlight she saw a dead horse on the pavement, its body hacked for meat. Her group stopped for some rest in a beer cellar. It soon became apparent that the beer cellar was surrounded by Russians and that their only option was surrender.

The leader of the group, General Mohnke, suddenly had an idea. He ordered Junge and Gerda Christian to take off their helmets and army jackets and even leave their pistols, and attempt to get through the Russian line under the guise of ordinary civilian women. He wrote a brief report, which he wanted them to take to Admiral Dönitz.

Junge later recalled that, to their amazement, they passed through the line of Russians ‘as if we were invisible’. However, Junge was later captured by the Russians. She caught diphtheria in custody and was handed over to the British. She was released in 1946.

In later life she remarried – her first husband had died during the war – and she worked on a magazine called
Quick
. After many years of silence she wrote her memoirs in late life: ‘my attempt to be reconciled… to myself’. She died in Munich in 2002 at the age of 81.

Wilhelm Keitel was arrested by the Americans in early May 1945. He was tried at Nuremberg and found guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, waging a war of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death and was hanged on 16th October 1946.

Krebs was ushered into the headquarters of the Russian General Chuikov at 4am on 1st May. According to Russian records, he began, in Russian, by informing Chuikov of Hitler’s death, adding, ‘You are the first foreigner to know.’ Chuikov bluffed and pretended that he already knew. Krebs then read Hitler’s political testament and a request from Goebbels for ‘a
satisfactory way out for the nations who have suffered most in the war’.

Chuikov telephoned Marshal Zhukov, who immediately sent his deputy to the headquarters. Zhukov then telephoned Stalin, who was asleep in his Dacha outside Moscow. Zhukov insisted he was woken.

Stalin was disappointed to learn that Hitler had not been captured alive. He ordered that Chuikov should agree to nothing less than unconditional surrender. Presented with the demand for unconditional surrender, Krebs insisted that he didn’t have the authority to offer it. Goebbels and Bormann had given him strict instructions not to surrender. He argued that the Russians needed to recognise a new German government with Admiral Dönitz as leader, then Dönitz would be able to surrender.

Chuikov consulted Zhukov on the phone again. Zhukov was clear: Krebs had to get Goebbels and Bormann to agree to an unconditional surrender by 10.15 that morning or the Russians would ‘blast Berlin into ruins’.

Krebs returned to the bunker. Goebbels, in particular, was implacable. The Russians waited until 10.40am and then they turned their big guns on what was left of the city centre.

Krebs committed suicide alongside General Burgdorf by shooting himself in the head on 2nd May 1945, leaving General Weidling to take on the negotiations with the Russians.

Hitler’s chauffeur escaped from the bunker on 1st May 1945 and managed to make his way to Berchtesgaden. He was arrested by American troops in June and held until 1947. He died in 1975. He gave many interviews and produced memoirs, becoming well known both for the inconsistencies in his
accounts and the colour of his language. For example he said of Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, ‘he had his brains in his scrotum.’

Dr Hans Graf von Lehndorff stayed in Königsberg until October 1945, when he fled to West Prussia on the run from the Russians, often giving medical aid in return for food and a bed for the night. In May 1947 he made his way to West Germany, where he worked for the rest of his life as a surgeon. In 1967 von Lehndorff published his harrowing diaries covering the years 1945–47. He died in 1987. In Bonn there is now a street named after him.

The SS officer who buried Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun broke out of the bunker on 1st May 1945 and was killed by Russian tank fire as he attempted to cross Weidendammer Bridge on 2nd May.

Hitler’s valet was one of the last to leave the bunker on 1st May 1945. He was captured by the Russians the next day and held in Moscow’s Lubjanka prison where he was frequently tortured. He was released in 1955. He travelled to London shortly afterwards and gave an interview to the BBC’s
In Town Tonight
programme. He settled in West Germany, wrote his memoirs and died in 1980.

See Johannmeier above.

See Boldt above.

Hitler’s cook was in the group lead by General Mohnke which broke out of the bunker on 1st May 1945, but she became separated from the others and was presumed dead. Her body has never been found.

Within days of the end of the war, the Americans left Triptis and the Russians moved in; the town was now part of their zone of occupation as agreed at Yalta. All Russians were forced to return to the Soviet Union, but Nina and her family managed to escape to the French zone, and for a while Nina found work dancing with a ballet troupe. In 1947, while working in a Red Cross club, she met a young GI, and they married. They crossed the Atlantic as soon as they could, as Nina wanted the child to be born in America.

Maurice served in the Luftwaffe for much of the war. He was captured by the Russians in 1948 and served four years in a labour camp. He died in 1972.

Misch was one of the last people to leave the bunker, making his escape early on 2nd May. He was soon captured by the Russians and held in labour camps until 1953. Like others who had been in the bunker, he was frequently tortured for information about Hitler. On release he returned to his wife in Berlin and became a painter and decorator. He died in 2013 at the age of 96. He insisted for the rest of his life, ‘He was a wonderful boss.’

Mohnke led the first party to break out of the bunker on 1st May, and surrendered to the Russians the following day. He was held by the Russians until 1955, spending the first six years of his incarceration in solitary confinement. On his release he returned to live in West Germany and became a dealer in trucks and trailers. He died at the age of 90 in 2001.