Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

  6

  HIMMLER LOOKS TO THE STARS

  BACK IN GERMANY, Heinrich Himmler was about to have his fortune told in the dimly lit police barracks at Lübeck. He had arrived just after midnight to keep his appointment with SS Brigadeführer Schellenberg and the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff.

  The two men shot to their feet as Himmler burst through the door. It was obvious at once that he had been drinking. The smell of alcohol followed him across the room as he ordered the men to resume their seats and took his own place at the head of the table.

  If Himmler was surprised to see that Schellenberg had brought an astrologer with him, he gave little sign of it. The meeting began with Schellenberg’s report on Count Bernadotte’s failure to negotiate a surrender to the Western Allies. Schellenberg had been terrified earlier in the evening, fearful of imminent execution, but it seemed to Wulff that he recovered his confidence as he began to speak, explaining in detail the reasoning behind the Allies’ refusal to negotiate. Himmler listened carefully to every word, chewing on a cigar that he kept picking up and putting down again with a hand that trembled almost uncontrollably.

  Himmler was sweating, too, his body quivering with barely suppressed emotion as he fought back tears. He had been badly shaken by the Reuters report of his treachery in approaching the Allies. He knew that it could have disastrous consequences for him if Hitler were still alive and got to hear of it. Himmler was convinced that he was about to be arrested at the very least, if not shot out of hand. As soon as Schellenberg finished speaking, Himmler turned to Wulff and asked him what the stars had to say about his future.

  Wulff had brought his astrological charts with him and a stellar chronometer. Spreading the charts out on the table, he divined from them that Himmler might still just survive if he sent Schellenberg to Sweden at once to conduct a fresh round of talks with Count Bernadotte and the Swedish foreign minister. Wulff happened to know that Schellenberg was most eager to visit Sweden in the near future, with no intention of coming back. Once safely on neutral territory, he could arrange for Himmler to follow, slipping across the Baltic to Stockholm before anyone in Germany realized he was gone. It was a better idea than Himmler’s disguising himself as a farm worker and hiding on an estate in Oldenburg, as one of his subordinates had suggested.

  But the SS leader was not impressed. “Is that all?” he demanded, when Wulff had completed his forecast. He had been hoping for some encouragement from the stars, not just an admission that all was lost and it was time to run.

  Yet there was nothing for him in the heavens. Himmler was doomed, if the sky were to be believed. He seemed to lose all control as he yelled at Wulff: “What’s going to happen? It’s all over, nothing can be saved now. I’ll have to kill myself! Take my own life! Or what else do you think I can do?”

  Wulff did not reply. After a spell in a Nazi jail, at the mercy of the Gestapo, he had little sympathy for Himmler now that the tables had been turned.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Himmler begged. “Tell me. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Flee the country,” Wulff advised him, with a shrug. “I presume you have the necessary documents?”

  Himmler did. But they were little comfort to him, as Wulff quickly realized: “‘Tell me what to do, please tell me what to do!’ Himmler repeated, as he stood in front of me like a frightened schoolboy about to be caned, alternately chewing his fingernails and raising his cigar to his lips with trembling hands. ‘What am I to do, what am I to do?’ he went on. And then, in answer to his own question: ‘I’ll have to kill myself; there’s nothing else for it!’”1

  Looking at this dreadful little man, Wulff saw that the leader of the SS really did have no idea what to do. With ample time to prepare for his own escape, he had remained paralyzed instead, doing nothing to save himself when anybody with any sense would already have fled.

  “Himmler had actually made no plans. He had simply come to grief. And in this desperate situation from which there was no way out, an astrologer who had been persecuted by the Nazis and forced to live in their prisons and dark cells as a detainee was expected to advise his torturer.”2

  The discussion continued for another hour, Himmler poring over the charts as Wulff explained the configurations of Jupiter and Saturn to him. Himmler was desperate to know what the stars had in store for his children and his mistress, Liesel Potthas. He seemed a pathetic figure to Wulff, a minor bureaucrat risen far above his station, only too happy to persecute Jews and political opponents when the going was good, but terrified for his own skin as soon as events took a turn for the worse.

  It was decided at length that Schellenberg should go to Denmark, rather than the Stockholm of his choice, to negotiate the effective surrender of the German forces in Norway and Denmark. He went back to his hotel at once to begin packing. Himmler himself still hadn’t decided what to do next. He thought of flying to Czechoslovakia, where the German army was still in control, but Wulff poured cold water on the idea, telling him that the stars for Czechoslovakia did not look good. Himmler had no idea what to do instead.

  Everything depended on Hitler. Once the Führer was dead, beyond any shadow of a doubt, Himmler could step into the breach and replace him as Germany’s new leader, the man the Allies would have to deal with if they wanted peace. He would be in a much stronger negotiating position once he knew for sure that Hitler was dead. But the Führer wasn’t dead, so far as anyone in Lübeck knew. He was still alive, still in charge, and the time for negotiation was fast running out.

  * * *

  THE FÜHRER was indeed still alive. Not only that, but he had just gotten married. In the small hours of the morning, with the Russian front line no more than a few hundred yards away, he had finally married Eva Braun in the conference room at the bunker.

  The ceremony had been a civil one, with Göbbels and Bormann as witnesses. It had been conducted by Walter Wagner, a magistrate fighting with a Volkssturm unit nearby. He had been collected in the darkness and driven to the bunker in an armored vehicle. There, he had been introduced to the Führer and ordered to perform an abbreviated version of the ceremony without any formal publication of the banns.

  Like most Germans, Wagner had had no idea until then that the Führer even had a girlfriend. Thunderstruck, not believing that this was happening, he had asked Hitler and the woman by his side if they were both of Aryan descent and free of hereditary diseases. Assured that they were, he married them at once, citing the special circumstances permissible under wartime regulations.

  Eva Braun had been so flustered afterward that she had begun to sign her maiden name on the marriage certificate, before crossing out the B in favor of Eva Hitler, née Braun. Then she and her new husband held a small drinks party in their private quarters, reminiscing over old times with Generals Krebs, Burgdorf, and a few other chosen guests. Hitler himself hadn’t stayed long. He kept slipping away to the waiting room outside Göbbels’s office, where Traudl Junge, his young secretary, was busily transcribing his last political testament from shorthand.

  Hitler had dictated it to her earlier, a long, rambling diatribe about the Jews, Germany, his place in history, all the usual stuff that Junge had heard many times before. She had expected something different when she began to take it down: an explanation of what had gone wrong, perhaps, or a confession of guilt. Something, at any rate, to justify all the destruction he had brought down on Germany over the past six years. But Hitler had had nothing new to say. He had stood opposite her with his hands on the table, speaking almost mechanically above the din as the concrete walls reverberated endlessly to the sound of shells and bombs exploding overhead:

  It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests … After six years of war, which in spite of all setbacks will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a
nation, I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of this state.

  I wish to share my fate with that which millions of others have also taken upon themselves by remaining in this town. Furthermore, I do not intend to fall into the hands of the enemy, who require a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, as a diversion for their hysterical masses.

  I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin and there choose death voluntarily at the moment when I believe that the position of the Führer and the Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained. I die with a joyful heart in the knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in history of our youth which bears my name.3

  And so on. Traudl Junge had heard the bulk of it countless times before, as had millions of Germans on the radio. She felt curiously betrayed as she took it all down again in her immaculate shorthand: “Here we were. All of us doomed, I thought—the whole country doomed—and here, in what he was dictating to me there was not one word of compassion or regret, only awful, awful anger. I remember thinking ‘My God. He hasn’t learned anything. It’s all just the same.’”4

  The only surprise had come when Hitler named the members of the government that was to take over after his death. Junge had looked up in astonishment when he announced that Admiral Dönitz was to become Germany’s new leader, now that Himmler had been expelled from the party. Leader of what, she wondered, with the country in ruins and the enemy already in the streets of Berlin?

  But Hitler was past caring. After dictating his political testament he had continued with his private will, leaving his possessions to the Nazi Party, if it still existed, or else to the German state. Then he had gone to the conference room to get married, telling Junge to type up both documents in triplicate and bring them to him as soon as she had finished.

  She had begun at once, typing up her notes in the waiting room while Hitler celebrated his marriage in his private quarters. She typed furiously into the small hours, surprising herself with how few mistakes she was making as her fingers clattered across the keys. Hitler emerged from time to time to see how she was getting on, standing over her and staring unhappily at her shorthand before returning to his party. Göbbels came to see her, too. He was in a state of high emotion, as Junge never afterward forgot:

  Suddenly Göbbels bursts in. I look at his agitated face, which is white as chalk. Tears are running down his cheeks. He speaks to me because there’s no one else around to whom he can pour out his heart. His usually clear voice is stifled by tears and shaking. “The Führer wants me to leave Berlin, Frau Junge! I am to take up a leading post in the new government. But I can’t leave Berlin, I can’t leave the Führer’s side! I am Gauleiter of Berlin, and my place is here. If the Führer is dead my life is pointless.”5

  Göbbels, too, dictated a testament to Junge, as an appendix to the Führer’s:

  For the first time in my life I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Führer’s. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and personal loyalty forbid us to abandon the Führer in his hour of greatest need, I would otherwise appear for the rest of my life as a dishonorable traitor …

  Together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves and who, if they were older, would unreservedly agree with me, I express my unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital even if it falls, but rather, at the Führer’s side, to end a life that for me personally would have no further value if I couldn’t spend it in the Führer’s service.6

  Hitler, Göbbels, and Martin Bormann were all standing over Junge as she completed her work, adding to her nervousness as she struggled with the last page of Hitler’s testament. It was virtually torn from the typewriter when it was finished, and taken to the conference room to be signed and witnessed at once. The three copies were then handed to three different couriers, to be smuggled out of Berlin in different directions. One was to go to Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, one to the new Wehrmacht commander, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, and the third to Admiral Dönitz, the man who was to replace the Führer after he was gone.

  Hitler went to bed soon after signing his testament. It was getting on for dawn by then, the harbinger of another disastrous day for the German defenders of Berlin. Watching him as he retired to his quarters, Junge thought that Hitler’s life was effectively over now. He would be ready to die as soon as he knew that at least one copy of his testament had reached its destination through Russian lines.

  Göbbels was ready to die, too, along with his wife and six small children. They would probably die by poison, since everybody in the bunker was being issued cyanide capsules. Junge had watched the poison being tested on Hitler’s dog Blondi. There had been a smell of bitter almonds as Hitler and a doctor bent over the animal, which had died at once. Hitler’s face had been like a death mask as he straightened up afterward and hurried wordlessly to his room.

  But it was Göbbels’s children who worried Junge the most. They were delightful kids, nice-looking and very well behaved, entirely innocent of the evil that was their father’s stock in trade. Playing happily in their room, they had no idea of what was about to happen to them. Their mother had told them that they might have to be inoculated, as a precaution against disease, but that was all they knew. Magda Göbbels hadn’t had the courage to tell them anything more. Nor had anyone else.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, AS DAWN CAME UP OVER the ruins of Berlin, the battle was beginning for the Reichstag, the great Parliament building that dominated the center of the city. The Reichstag’s shattered dome had long been the aiming point for the Russian advance, a highly visible marker for their troops as they pushed forward through the rubble. It had become a symbol for both sides in an increasingly desperate struggle for control of the city. Neither side was prepared to give an inch of ground in the fight. The German defenders understood as well as the Russians that once the red flag flew over the Reichstag, their capital would be lost forever and the war would all have been for nothing.

  The Reichstag stood on the banks of the river Spree. The Russians had crossed the river during the night, forcing their way over the Moltke Bridge, five hundred yards to the west. The fighting had been long and bloody, with heavy casualties on both sides, but the Russians had managed to establish a bridgehead on the German bank by early morning. As the sky began to lighten, they held one side of the street leading to the open ground in front of the Reichstag. The Germans held the other. The fighting remained relentless, with no quarter given and none expected as they grappled with one another from house to house and building to building across the street.

  The German defense was savage. Many of the defenders were SS, hard-faced young fanatics who had come up through the Hitler Youth and had never known anything except Nazism in their young lives. They thought nothing of storming into any building displaying a white flag and massacring the occupants. They hanged cowards from lampposts and shot deserters out of hand. They fought with the courage of young men who were not afraid to die, who had been taught no higher calling in the service of Führer and Fatherland. As the German defenders saw it, they were fighting to hold the Russians back until Wenck’s army arrived, and with him, the Americans, who were racing to Berlin to protect the capital and save German culture from the Red Menace. It was simply a question of hanging on until help arrived from the west.

  The Russian attack was equally determined. The Russian generals were in a barely concealed competition to be the first to reach the Reichstag. Whoever commanded the unit that captured the building and raised the red flag over the city would be a hero of the Soviet Union for the rest of his life. Habitually cavalier with the lives of their men, the Russian generals didn’t seem to care how many were killed as they drove them forward toward the gaunt, gray building that now stood in plain view of them, only a few hundred yards away along the street.

  But ordinary Russian soldiers we
re increasingly reluctant to die this close to the end of the war. So many had been killed in the past few days that their numbers had had to be made up with prisoners of war newly released from German camps. Instead of going home, the prisoners had been sent straight to the front line with guns in their hands, given a chance to atone in battle for the shame of having been taken prisoner. Some welcomed the opportunity for another crack at the Germans after all they had suffered in prison camp. Most wanted no further part in the fighting. Their ranks had been stiffened by hard-line Komsomol and Communist Party members, the Bolshevik equivalent of the SS, tough young men who brooked no resistance and insisted on carrying the war to the enemy. To the watching Germans, it sometimes seemed as if the Russians killed as many of their own men, with friendly fire, as they did the enemy.

  The battle for the Reichstag began at half past eight that morning, with a preliminary bombardment to soften the defenses for the ensuing attack. The bombardment was massive: all the field artillery, rocket launchers, tanks, and self-propelled guns that the Russians could bring to bear on the Parliament building. It lasted for an hour and a half, after which the Russians intended to begin their assault against the dazed defenders.

  As the fighting continued, however, it quickly became clear that the assault would have to be postponed, perhaps for the rest of the day, because the buildings along the way were still being held by the enemy. The Ministry of the Interior, a massive office complex beside the river, was defended in strength by Germans who stubbornly refused to surrender. The Russians were forced to take the building floor by floor and staircase by staircase, clearing each room of the enemy before advancing cautiously to the next. Progress was so slow that it would be evening, at the earliest, before they could turn their attention to the Reichstag, far too late to launch an assault that day.

  But the assault had to come next morning, the generals knew, because next morning was the last day of April. No matter how many people were killed in the process, the Russian commanders were determined to see the red flag flying over the Reichstag by nightfall on the last day of April. The timing was vital. Any later and Joseph Stalin wouldn’t be able to claim the credit for it when he took the salute from the Kremlin at the following morning’s May Day parade in Moscow.