Hitler's Last Day: Minute By Minute Part 3

As soon as Himmler heard that news of his attempts to start peace negotiations with the Allies had become public, he summoned Sch.e.l.lenberg, who had been involved in setting up the meetings with the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte.

As Sch.e.l.lenberg wrote later, 'I realised that my position with Himmler would now be so difficult that I should have to face the fact that I might be liquidated.'

In order to protect himself, Sch.e.l.lenberg decided to take Walther Wulff with him to meet Himmler. He knew that the deposed SS chief could never resist having his horoscope read and he hoped that Wulff would be able to keep Himmler calm.

Himmler is chewing on a fat cigar. He smells strongly of brandy and is sweating and shaking and close to tears. He is terrified that he could be arrested or simply shot on Hitler's orders at any moment. Sch.e.l.lenberg and Wulff are equally tense. Wulff has spent time imprisoned by the Gestapo. He has agreed to help Sch.e.l.lenberg but he is anxious not to aggravate the SS chief with his predictions. As agreed with Sch.e.l.lenberg in advance, Wulff tells Himmler that the stars suggest the best course of action is to send Sch.e.l.lenberg back to Count Bernadotte in Sweden. Sch.e.l.lenberg is committed to trying to rescue the talks about talks. Studying the charts, Himmler finally agrees that Sch.e.l.lenberg can discuss the ending of the German occupation of Scandinavia with Bernadotte.

Himmler's biggest concern is what the charts have to say about his personal future and that of his mistress, Hedwig Potthas, and his children. He has no idea what to do and keeps asking Wulff whether he should kill himself, or whether he could have a future. He asks Wulff to explain how safe various countries are, in astrological terms. Should he flee, for example, to Czechoslovakia? Wulff advises that the charts aren't looking good for Czechoslovakia. It is the position of the stars, rather than the position of the Russian army approaching the Czech capital that concerns Himmler. He eventually decides that he will remain in Lubeck but that Sch.e.l.lenberg should travel to Denmark rather than Sweden. With enormous relief, Sch.e.l.lenberg rushes off to pack.

Sch.e.l.lenberg's nervousness that he might be 'liquidated' is based on the fact that Himmler holds it a virtue to overcome any feelings of compa.s.sion which might prevent one from carrying out an execution. Addressing SS officials at a secret meeting in 1943, he explained, 'Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person with exceptions due to human weaknesses has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.'

2.30am.

In Villaba.s.sa in the Italian Alps, British MI6 agent Sigismund Payne-Best is sitting in his bedroom in the Hotel Bachmann waiting for news. Telephone contact has been made with German army units still fighting in the hills around Villaba.s.sa. Payne-Best had sent a message to the German area commander saying that he must come to their a.s.sistance if the Prominente are executed by the SS, the Commander would be held responsible by the Allies when the war is won, for allowing such a blatant war crime to take place.

Waiting with Payne-Best is fellow prisoner General Alexander von Falkenhausen. Payne-Best hasn't told von Falkenhausen about the drunken warning from the SS guard, as the threat of execution will spread panic, and if people try to escape it will lead to reprisals. Payne-Best believes they should stay put and negotiate their way out of the crisis, hoping the German army Commander will arrive and take over. The Englishman knows full well that few of the SS guards have any enthusiasm for the ma.s.s execution due to take place later in the day.

General Alexander von Falkenhausen was the German army Commander-in-Chief in Belgium until his implication in the 20th July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The would-be a.s.sa.s.sin was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic army officer disillusioned by n.a.z.i ideology and by his experiences on the Eastern Front, who planted a bomb in a briefcase in Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. When it detonated, Hitler was blocked from its full blast by the heavy oak conference table. Four of the 24 people with him died of their injuries but Hitler, who had been leaning over the table at the moment of the explosion, suffered only splinters and small cuts and burns, singed hair and burst ear drums. He was well enough to meet Mussolini later that afternoon, and to show him the scene of his 'miraculous escape'.

Hundreds of German army officers like von Falkenhausen were arrested, suspected of being in on the conspiracy, and over 5,000 people were executed not just army officers but also civilian opponents of the regime. Under an ancient German law known as Sippenhaft, members of the suspect's family could be arrested too. In the hotel with Payne-Best and von Falkenhausen are many relatives of those executed after the bomb plot.

At Rechlin airfield, Hanna Reitsch takes the controls of a tiny open-top aircraft and von Greim, again, squashes in beside her as they set off for Lubeck. They are now focused on the second part of the mission: to capture Heinrich Himmler. They have decided to head to Admiral Donitz's headquarters in the hope that he will have information on Himmler's whereabouts.

In the Fuhrerbunker the wedding celebrations continue. Adolf Hitler sits quietly while Eva knocks back the champagne. Generals Krebs and Burgdorf are on cognac.

General Krebs is the Army Chief of Staff, recently appointed on the grounds of his readiness to comply with the Fuhrer's will. His predecessor, General Guderian, was sacked for disagreeing with what he regarded as. .h.i.tler's suicidal military decisions. Krebs is a much decorated, monocle-wearing infantry general, who joined the military in 1914 and never left. He is a fluent Russian speaker, the only Russian speaker in the bunker, having served as the military attache in Moscow from 1936 to 1939.

General Burgdorf is more junior, a large and florid character, who is serving as. .h.i.tler's chief army adjutant. Following the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Hitler in July 1944, it was General Burgdorf who undertook the murder of Field Marshal Rommel. Rommel was believed to have had a peripheral involvement but Hitler knew that he could not put the country's favourite general on trial for treason. Burgdorf was sent to Rommel's family home on 14th October 1944 with instructions to give Rommel a choice: he would either be tried and executed for treason, or he would commit suicide and his family would be guaranteed immunity from prosecution. Burgdorf told Rommel that he had the poison on him. It would only take three seconds. The man known as the Desert Fox said goodbye to his wife Lucie and their 15-year-old son Manfred ('I shall be dead in half an hour...') and left the house with Burgdorf. They drove to a quiet country road, where Rommel took the poison. Hitler sent a message of condolence to Lucie.

Poor Neville Chamberlain believed that he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong with Stalin.

Winston Churchill.

About 3.00am.

In Milan, two bodies are being dumped from a removal van onto the cobbles of the Piazzale Loreto. They are the mud-spattered remains of Italy's deposed dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. He's wearing a grey-brown jacket, grey trousers with red and black stripes down the sides and black boots. A crowd swiftly gathers and people start pelting them with vegetables, spitting, kicking and urinating on the bodies; shots are fired into Mussolini's head. His eyes are still open. A woman fires five bullets into Mussolini's body shouting, 'Five shots for my five a.s.sa.s.sinated sons!' Piazzale Loreto has been chosen as the site to dump the bodies, as it was here that 15 executed partisans had been publicly displayed in August 1944.

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!'

One hundred and fifty miles away, Allied trucks and jeeps of the 2nd New Zealand Division, part of the British Eighth Army, are driving through the dark streets of the northern Italian city of Padua. Men and women are running alongside shouting, 'Viva! Viva!' Some are clapping, some are crying. The troops stop their vehicles in a small square in front of a church. Thirty-five-year-old Major Geoffrey c.o.x, a former Daily Express journalist turned intelligence officer, watches as groups of soldiers head into the nearby streets to deal with snipers. Desperately tired, c.o.x gets his bed roll out from his jeep and lies down in the back of a truck. The sound of rifle fire echoes around the square.

The New Zealanders are leading a charge to get to the large port of Trieste before Marshal t.i.to'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 t.i.to 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 t.i.to'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'.

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.

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.

At the end of the first day things were not going well. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote that night, 'Stalin's att.i.tude 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'.

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 communique stated that the Declaration on Liberated Europe meant the establishment of order to enable 'the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of n.a.z.ism and fascism and to create democratic inst.i.tutions of their own choice'.

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.

About 3.15am/4.15am UK time.

Flying from Rechlin airfield to Lubeck on the Baltic in a little two-seater, Hanna Reitsch and Luftwaffe chief Robert Ritter von Greim are under attack from Russian fighter planes which have control of the skies. Reitsch, who is one of the most skilled pilots of her generation, manages to dodge all attacks.

In the Hotel Bachmann in the Italian Alps, the news that British MI6 agent Captain Sigismund Payne-Best has been waiting for has arrived. General Vietinghof of the nearby German army garrison is sending a company of infantry to ensure the safety of the Prominentes from the SS. Vietinghof has promised to let the advancing Americans know that there are important prisoners in the Hotel Bachmann and in homes in Villaba.s.sa.

Relieved at the news, Payne-Best finally goes to bed.

You are free. We are the English army. Be calm. Food and medical help is on the way.

Loudspeaker announcement to the inmates of Bergen-Belsen, 15th April 1945 Twenty-one-year-old medical student Michael Hargrave is being woken up by an army cook in a transit camp outside Cirencester. It's bitterly cold and Michael has spent the night dressed in socks, trousers and sweater. He heads quickly to the washhouse, as he leaves for Germany in an hour.

A month ago, Michael saw a notice pinned to a board in Westminster Hospital asking for students to volunteer to help starving Dutch civilians. Yesterday afternoon Michael and 94 other volunteers were photographed by the press and then informed there had been a change of plan they were not going to Holland at all, but to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in north-western Germany.

The washhouse turns out to be a corrugated iron shed with no door and no gla.s.s in the windows. Michael has a very quick wash.

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 embarra.s.sment. 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.

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.

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.

In February there was a ma.s.sive 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 ma.s.s grave with 10,000 others just a few days before the British arrived.

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.

'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.

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.

'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.

4.00am.

In the Fuhrerbunker Traudl Junge finally finishes typing Hitler's testaments. The copies are taken through to the conference room for the witnesses to sign. Goebbels, Bormann and the generals Burgdorf and Krebs sign the three copies of the political testament as witnesses and Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below signs the will. Junge thinks how the bunker light makes everyone look grey and exhausted as she returns to the desk in the common room to put the papers in order.

Von Below has been with Hitler throughout the war, representing the Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Goring. He is honoured to be asked to sign Hitler's will. The last few days have been particularly tense as he has had to manoeuvre carefully to distance himself from his disgraced boss. Von Below is longing to find a way to leave the bunker. Only three weeks ago he travelled to the Baltic coast to say goodbye to his pregnant wife and three children. He had travelled back to Berlin in beautiful suns.h.i.+ne with great reluctance. He believes it unlikely that he will leave the capital alive.

'On behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would unreservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital...'

About 4.15am.

Joseph Goebbels bursts in on Traudl Junge as she makes final corrections. He is weeping and shaking. He chokes out his words: 'The Fuhrer wants me to leave Berlin, Frau Junge! He has ordered me to take a leading post in the new government. But I can't. I can't leave Berlin. I can't leave the Fuhrer's side! I am Gauleiter of Berlin. My place is here. I can't see the point of carrying on living if the Fuhrer is dead...'

Traudl Junge has never seen him so upset.

'He said to me, "Goebbels, I didn't expect YOU to disobey my last order as well!" I can't understand. The Fuhrer has made so many decisions too late why must he make this last decision too soon?'

Goebbels then asks her to take down his testament. She puts aside the doc.u.ments she's been working on and picks up her shorthand pad and pencil. He starts dictating: 'For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Fuhrer. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Otherwise quite apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and loyalty forbid us to abandon the Fuhrer in his hour of greatest need I should appear for the rest of my life as a dishonourable traitor and common scoundrel, and should lose my self-respect together with the respect of my fellow citizens.

'For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would unreservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it falls, but rather, at the side of the Fuhrer, to end a life which will have no further value to me if I cannot spend it in the service of the Fuhrer, and by his side.'

Joseph Goebbels asks for three copies to be sent as addenda with Hitler's political and private testaments.

Traudl Junge starts typing and concentrates on typing as fast as she can without making errors. She is longing to go to bed. She has spent most of the last week looking after the Goebbels children, reading them fairy tales, playing forfeits. The thought of them brings a lump to her throat but she feels like an automaton. She keeps typing, trying to get these last three doc.u.ments word perfect.

4.30am.

Hanna Reitsch has commandeered a car at Lubeck airfield and is driving von Greim towards Admiral Donitz's headquarters in Plon Castle near the Baltic. Robert Ritter von Greim is feeling very unwell. His leg wound is becoming increasingly painful as infection sets in. Every jolt of the car on the rutted road makes it worse. Their vehicle is under constant bombardment from Russian planes.

5.00am.

Adolf and Eva Hitler retire to their bedrooms. In the past, she had complained that he only loved her when they were in bed together. He would prepare for s.e.x with injections of bovine testosterone and she would take medication to stop her periods when she stayed with him. But those days are over. He gets himself ready for bed. He doesn't like help; he doesn't like to be touched. He washes carefully; he has always been fastidious about cleanliness. He changes into a white cotton nights.h.i.+rt, and hangs his clothes carefully on a clothes horse. Liesl is waiting for Eva in her bedroom and helps her into an Italian blue silk nightgown. In the quiet of their beds they can hear the rumble of the Russian guns. The enemy are now only a few hundred yards from the bunker. The guns have been firing all night, but as dawn approaches the bombardment intensifies.

5.30am.

Traudl Junge has finished typing Joseph Goebbels' testament. He almost tears the last sheet from her typewriter, checks and signs it and then retires to his room. Junge finds a spare camp bed and falls into an exhausted sleep as dawn is breaking over Berlin. Many buildings in the centre of the city are ablaze. The nearby Gestapo headquarters are under heavy artillery and howitzer attack. Following a ma.s.sacre of the prisoners by the Gestapo guards on 23rd April, there are only seven inmates left inside.

Martin Bormann is in his room in the Reich Chancellery cellar. He needs very little sleep and keeps the same hours as the Fuhrer, habitually staying up until the early hours. Tonight, before he settles down to sleep, he writes a diary entry: 'Sunday 29th April. The second day which has started with a hurricane of fire. During the night of 28th29th April, the foreign press wrote about Himmler's offer of capitulation. The wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. Fuhrer dictates his political and private wills. Traitors Jodl, Himmler and the generals abandon us to the Bolsheviks. Hurricane fire again. According to the information of enemy, the Americans have broken into Munich.'

American intelligence scouts are indeed entering Munich as Bormann writes his diary.

5.50am.

In Padua, New Zealander Major Geoffrey c.o.x wakes up in the back of his intelligence truck after only three hours' sleep. On a wall above him is a large map of Italy, with little flags showing the enemy divisions. The truck also contains captured German maps and scores of aerial photographs showing the German positions.

The sky is grey and c.o.x can still hear the sound of gunfire in the streets. He washes quickly, keen to find out what is going on as there is no time to be wasted if the Allies are to beat the Yugoslavs to Trieste. c.o.x's boss General Freyberg urged his officers, 'Press on at full speed, press on. Give them no rest!'

The Allies are being helped by Italian partisans in the north of Italy who are attempting to stop the retreating Germans destroying vital factories, railway lines and bridges. The partisans are a mixture of former Italian army units and bands of militia formed after the Germans occupied Italy following the armistice of 1943, when Italy left the Axis powers.

Propaganda broadcasts from Rome have given the partisans instructions on how they can help the Allied advancing armies, including guidance on p.r.o.nouncing the word 'mine' to let their soldiers know where the Germans had laid minefields.