Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (8 page)

On Friday 27th, Mussolini had been captured by Italian partisans. He had tried to disguise himself in the helmet and greatcoat of a German soldier and pretended to be asleep in the back of an army truck. He and Clara were taken to a partisan safe house in the hills. At four o’clock the following afternoon a man named Walter Audisio arrived, claiming to have come to rescue them. He was in fact a member of the Italian resistance. He drove them to a villa near the village of Giulino di Mezzagra above Lake Como. There Audisio read out a death sentence in the name of the Italian people and shot them both. One report claimed that Mussolini cowered in terror, another that he pulled open his coat and shouted, ‘Aim for the heart!’

The New Zealanders are leading a charge to get to the large port of Trieste before Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav Fourth Army. In their way is the German army and Fascists loyal to Mussolini. The Yugoslavs want Trieste as part of a new, larger Yugoslavia of which Tito is provisional prime minister. His country was invaded by the Axis powers in 1941, and since then the Allies have supported the Yugoslav resistance. But Trieste is important as a gateway to get supplies to Allied troops heading across the Alps and into Austria – plus, whoever controls the city, controls the northern Adriatic. Churchill is deeply concerned with the shape of Europe after the war. Two days earlier he sent a telegram to President Truman: ‘The great thing is to be there before Tito’s guerillas are in occupation. Therefore it does not seem to me there is a minute to wait. The actual status of Trieste can be determined at leisure. Possession is nine points of the law.’

Churchill also told Truman there will be ‘great shock’ when the US army withdraws from some of their zones of occupation in Germany and hands the territory over to the Russians, as agreed at the Yalta Conference. So if at the same time the northern Adriatic was occupied by Yugoslavs, ‘who are the Russians’ tools and beneficiaries’, in Churchill’s words, ‘this shock will be emphasised in a most intense degree’
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The events of the last days of April 1945 had been shaped by the final conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, held in early February at Yalta in the Crimea, with Stalin as host. Stalin arrived in the Crimea by train (he had a fear of flying), Roosevelt in the first presidential plane, nicknamed ‘Sacred Cow’, and Churchill also by plane, with plenty of whisky to fend off the typhus and lice he believed thrived in Yalta
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The Crimea had been occupied by the Germans, and the last Tzar’s summer palace, where the conference took place, had been thoroughly looted, so furniture, linen and paintings had all been brought in by train from Moscow’s best hotels – along with most of their staff. ‘We could not have found a worse place for a meeting if we had spent ten years on research,’ Churchill complained
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At the end of the first day things were not going well. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote that night, ‘Stalin’s attitude to small countries struck me as grim, not to say sinister.’ He was right. Stalin’s aim was to regain all the territory that had ever been under Russian rule, and as neighbours he wanted regimes that that could be controlled from Moscow. Stalin was convinced that Germany would rise again within 25 years and he wanted Poland as a buffer state under his influence. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to ensure that any Polish government included Polish politicians who were in exile in London. Churchill especially needed a free Poland – after all, this was the reason that Britain had gone to war in the first place – ‘the cause for which Britain drew the sword’. It was decided at Yalta that a Polish provisional government would be set up – the form of which would be decided by a commission. As for Germany, an agreement stated that the Allies ‘shall possess supreme authority with respect to Germany. In the exercise of such authority they will take such steps, including the complete dismemberment of Germany as they deem requisite for future peace and security’
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On the last day of the conference, 11th February, the Big Three made the final changes to a statement of intent (Churchill objected to the word ‘joint’ as it reminded him of ‘the Sunday family roast of mutton’.) Published the next day, the communiqué stated that the Declaration on Liberated Europe meant the establishment of order to enable ‘the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice’
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But Yalta had merely papered over the cracks. It was clear to most at the conference that the Soviets and the Western powers had very different plans for the future of Europe. ‘The only bond of the victors is their common hate,’ wrote Churchill
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You are free. We are the English army. Be calm. Food and medical help is on the way
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Loudspeaker announcement to the inmates of Bergen-Belsen, 15th April 1945

In Bergen-Belsen on the morning of the 15th April, Clara Greenbaum, her eight-year-old daughter Hannah and her three-year-old son Adam heard a strange rumbling sound. Leaving their hut they saw that the watchtowers were empty – in fact there were no guards anywhere. Thousands of emaciated prisoners stood facing the direction of the noise; many others lay on the ground dying. After a while, tanks with Union Flags flying from their turrets appeared, circled the camp twice and then stopped in front of the gates. Then about 500 soldiers arrived, gazed into the camp, and one by one were sick. Prisoners turned away in embarrassment. Clara and Hannah began to cry for the first time in three years. Then soldiers threw food over the fence and a tank smashed through the gates
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There to greet the British was the Commandant, Josef Kramer, a former unemployed electrician who had joined the SS in 1932. He stayed in the camp because he had been ordered to do so by his superiors
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Bergen-Belsen was built originally as a camp for well-connected, so-called ‘exchange Jews’, who could be swapped for German POWs. As the Russians advanced west, camps in Poland were evacuated by the Germans and the inmates forced to march on foot or sent in cattle trucks to camps in Germany. By early April,
Bergen-Belsen was hopelessly overcrowded. At the end of 1944 there were 15,257 inmates, by April there were 44,000
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In February there was a massive outbreak of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. It’s believed that between 20,000 and 30,000 died. Two of the victims were 15-year-old Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who had hidden with their parents in a secret annexe in Amsterdam until they’d been discovered the previous August. The sisters were buried in a mass grave with 10,000 others just a few days before the British arrived
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One of the first correspondents to visit Belsen was the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby. His colleague Wynford Vaughan-Thomas met him driving away from the camp. He looked like a changed man
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‘You must go and see it, but you’ll never wash the smell of it off your hands, never get the filth of it out of your mind. I’ve just made a decision… I must tell the exact truth, every detail of it, even if people don’t believe me. This is an outrage… an outrage.’

A few hours later, Dimbleby recorded a 14-minute report describing the horrors of the camp
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Since July 1944 the BBC had been broadcasting details of what had been happening to Jews in camps such as Auschwitz thanks to reports smuggled out by the Polish resistance. Dimbleby’s report was the first radio eyewitness account of the barbarism of the camps
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‘I found a girl, she was a living skeleton… stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was: “English, English, medicine, medicine” and she was trying to cry but didn’t have enough strength.’

One of Richard Dimbleby’s last broadcasts from Germany will be from Hitler’s study – sitting in his chair. Dimbleby came away with knives, forks and spoons with the initials A.H., which he would provide at dinner parties for people he didn’t like
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