The fighting was fiercest at the Landwehr Canal, several hundred yards from the bunker. The canal wasn’t wide, but the little humpbacked bridge over it was heavily exposed to German fire. While some Russians rushed the bridge, others were planning to swim across the canal or make rafts out of anything that came to hand. Among them, by some accounts, was Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, a decorated veteran from Siberia.
While his comrades moved up to the canal, Masarov apparently heard a child crying in the ruins on the other side. The Russians gave him covering fire as he zigzagged across. Ten minutes later, he returned with a three-year-old girl in his arms. Her mother had just been killed in the fighting.
It was a good story, perhaps even with an element of truth. Marshal Chuikov was certainly pleased when he heard it. Suitably embellished, the story would make excellent propaganda in due course, a useful counterweight to all the tales of rape and mayhem that the Soviet army was leaving in its wake. But that was for another day, after the fighting was over. First, the Russians had to get to the Chancellery and finish the business in hand.
* * *
A FEW HUNDRED YARDS AWAY, lunch in the bunker was a muted affair as Hitler ate a last meal before his suicide. His wife apparently had no appetite and stayed alone in her room. Hitler ate with his two secretaries and his personal cook instead. Gerda Christian, the senior of the two secretaries, wasn’t hungry either as they joined him:
I suppose it was about 12:30 p.m. when my relief, Traudl Junge, arrived. This was the usual time—we were still working in shifts—and it was also, again as usual, the familiar signal for lunch. Hitler “for old times’ sake,” now invited both of us secretaries, along with Fräulein Manziarly [Hitler’s cook], to join him for lunch at 1 p.m. He came out into the corridor to announce this, and soon Fräulein Manziarly, a mousy but pleasant little Innsbruckerin arrived with the food.12
They ate at a little table in Hitler’s study, the so-called Map Room. If Gerda Christian’s memory was correct, the only other man present was Corporal Schwiedel, an SS orderly. It was an unhappy meal of spaghetti and tossed salad. Nobody felt like saying much as they contemplated a grim future. “We had often eaten alone with Hitler before, of course, but this was the very last lunch, and everybody knew it. It was a peculiar honour, qualified by the depressing knowledge that, with Hitler soon to be gone, the breakout would be our only hope. This was a harrowing thought for all three of us women. The lurid Berlin rape stories had given us the shudders, so the topic was avoided.”13
Traudl Junge recalled a bizarre discussion about dog breeding and another about French lipstick being made from grease recovered from the Paris sewers. Other than that, as Gerda Christian said, the conversation was desultory, the same conversation they had been having every day for weeks. Hitler seemed perfectly relaxed throughout, but Junge still remembered the meal as “a banquet of death under the mask of cheerful calm and composure.”
Hitler pushed his chair back when he had finished, announcing that it was all over and the time had come. He went to say goodbye to Göbbels, who tried one last time to dissuade him, urging him to flee Berlin instead. There was a tank in the Chancellery garage, aircraft on standby with a range of seven thousand miles. They could fly him to South America at a moment’s notice, or Japan, or one of the Arab countries. There was still a chance to escape.
But Hitler wasn’t going anywhere. He had made up his mind. “You know my decision, Herr Doktor,” he told Göbbels. “There’s nothing more to be said.” He advised Göbbels to flee instead.
Junge was having a quiet cigarette in the servants’ room when Otto Günsche summoned her to say goodbye. Stubbing her cigarette out, she joined a line of Hitler’s closest aides waiting to shake hands, but was so overcome that she could barely register who else was there:
All I really see is the figure of the Führer. He comes very slowly out of his room, stooping more than ever, stands in the open doorway and shakes hands with everyone. I feel his right hand warm in mine, he looks at me but he isn’t seeing me. He seems to be far away. He says something to me, but I don’t hear it. I didn’t take in his last words. The moment we’ve been waiting for has come now, and I am frozen and scarcely notice what’s going on around me. Only when Eva Braun comes over to me is the spell broken a little. She smiles and embraces me. “Please do try to get out. You might still make your way through. And give Bavaria my love.”14
Hitler was wearing his uniform jacket with the Iron Cross awarded to him in the Great War. Eva was wearing the dress he liked best: dark blue, with roses at the neckline. She had washed her hair and done it up beautifully for the occasion. Junge was so upset that she could scarcely bear to look.
Magda Göbbels appeared, begging for a last meeting with the Führer. Visibly annoyed, he agreed to a private word. They had a minute together behind closed doors, while Göbbels waited outside. Magda implored Hitler to think again, telling him that it still wasn’t too late, urging him to leave Berlin and live to fight another day. But Hitler wasn’t listening anymore. He turned her down abruptly and she left in tears.
It was midafternoon now. The Führer’s time had come, and everyone in the bunker knew it. His wife came to him, following meekly to his room. The others watched silently, not meeting one another’s eyes, keeping their thoughts to themselves as the heavy steel door swung shut. They had no idea what would happen next, but they could guess. Once the Führer was gone, they could all start thinking about their own futures, how to get out of the bunker alive and in one piece. But they couldn’t do that until the Führer was gone. Until then, all they could do was sit in the corridor and wait.
12
CURTAIN CALL FOR LORD HAW HAW
WHILE HITLER WAS MAKING HIS FAREWELLS, Admiral Dönitz was on his way to Lübeck for a meeting with Himmler. He was going to find out once and for all if Himmler was secretly negotiating a peace deal with the Western Allies, as reported on foreign radio.
Himmler had been drunk and tearful when Wulff told him his fortune the previous day, but he had pulled himself together by the time Dönitz arrived. Having had no response from Hitler, he had evidently decided to bluff it out and continue to deny any knowledge of surrender negotiations with Count Bernadotte. Indeed, he was still expecting to succeed Hitler as Führer, as Dönitz quickly discovered:
I found that every available senior SS leader had apparently been summoned to the meeting. Himmler kept me waiting. He seemed already to regard himself as head of state. I asked him whether the report was true that he had sought contact with the Allies through the medium of Count Bernadotte. He assured me that it was not true, and that in his opinion it was essential, in these last days of the war, that discord among ourselves should not be allowed to create further chaos in the country.1
Dönitz took Himmler at his word. Whatever his private suspicions, he saw no reason not to. They parted on good terms, and Dönitz drove back to his own headquarters at Plön, glad of an excuse not to pursue the matter any further. He arrived back at six that evening to find Albert Speer waiting to see him. Dönitz immediately invited him in to supper.
They had hardly sat down when Walter Lüdde-Neurath, Dönitz’s aide, burst in with a signal from Berlin. It contained astonishing news:
Grand Admiral Dönitz.
The Führer has appointed you, Herr Grand Admiral, as his successor in place of Reichsmarshal Göring. Confirmation in writing follows. You are hereby authorised to take any action which the situation demands.
Bormann.2
Dönitz was dumbfounded. So were the others. Dönitz knew the situation was bad, but never in his life had he imagined himself as a successor to the Führer. He was a sailor, not a politician. He had hardly spoken to Hitler in the past year, and never alone. Hitler had never given the slightest hint that he was thinking of appointing him as his successor.
He was still gaping at the message when Speer recovered from his own shock and offered his congratulations. But Dönitz’s first thought, once he, too, had r
ecovered, was to wonder what Himmler would make of it. When they met that afternoon, it had been obvious that Himmler was expecting to succeed Hitler as Führer. He wasn’t going to like it that Dönitz had been chosen instead.
Dönitz told Lüdde-Neurath to telephone Himmler and ask him to come to Plön at once. But Himmler refused. It was a long drive in the dark, and he had already seen Dönitz that day. He was persuaded only after Dönitz came to the phone in person and insisted that his presence was essential.
The meeting was fraught on both sides. Fearing arrest for talking to the Allies, Himmler arrived at about midnight with a large bodyguard, some of the hardest men in the SS, specially chosen for the task. They drove up in a fleet of open Volkswagens and armored personnel carriers, maintaining a watchful presence around their boss as he approached Dönitz’s headquarters in the blackout.
Dönitz, too, was wary. He had been warned that Himmler might try to seize control by force. Dönitz had few armed guards of his own, but a detachment of U-boat men concealed themselves nearby as the SS arrived, ready to defend him, if necessary. Heinz Macher, the SS commander, spotted them at once and was not impressed. “Poor bastards!” he thought. “We’ll blow them away with the greatest of ease.”
But there was no bloodshed. Himmler was received by Lüdde-Neurath and escorted to Dönitz’s room. The meeting went off without a hitch, although Dönitz was distinctly nervous at first:
I offered Himmler a chair and myself sat down behind my writing desk, upon which lay, hidden by some papers, a pistol with the safety catch off. I had never done anything like this in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be.
I handed Himmler the telegram containing my appointment. “Please read this,” I said. I watched him closely. As he read, an expression of astonishment, indeed of consternation spread over his face. All hope seemed to collapse within him. He went very pale. Finally he stood up and bowed. “Allow me,” he said, “to become the second man in your state.” I replied that that was out of the question and that there was no way in which I could make any use of his services.3
They talked for a while, and then Himmler left, taking his entourage with him. Dönitz turned to other matters. His first task as Hitler’s heir apparent was to assess the military situation for himself and find out how grave it actually was. There was clearly no stopping the Russians. They had just captured Neubrandenburg, on the main road north of Berlin, and were about to take Ravensbrück as well. The British were coming, too, advancing on Hamburg from the other direction. Dönitz’s main concern, therefore, as he sat contemplating his new responsibilities, was to get as many Germans as possible to safety in the west and then bring the war to an end as soon as he decently could.
* * *
WHILE DÖNITZ returned from Lübeck, the staff at Hamburg’s radio station were having a party. They had made a bonfire in the courtyard and destroyed all the station’s records before abandoning the building to the British. Scripts, files, and tapes had all gone up in smoke as the paperwork was hurled onto the flames. Now the staff were having a party, eating, and drinking everything they could find so that there would be nothing left for the British when they arrived. Alcohol had been rationed for years in Hamburg, but there was no point rationing it anymore if the enemy was at the gates. In common with much of the city, the staff at the radio station were drinking themselves into a stupor instead.
Few were drinking more than William Joyce. An Englishman of sorts, known to his listeners as Lord Haw Haw because of his absurd accent, he had spent the war years broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the British, trying to persuade them that resisting the Germans was futile and they should surrender instead. He had succeeded only in making himself hated by millions, a traitor of the worst kind. With the British army only a day or two from Hamburg, Joyce was acutely aware that he could expect no mercy from his countrymen if they found him in the city at the war’s end.
The irony for Joyce was that he was deeply patriotic. Born in America, Irish in origin, German by adoption, he nevertheless saw himself as wholly British, a man who loved his country and only wished that his compatriots could see the world as he did, could understand that their future lay with the Germans and National Socialism, working in alliance with the Nazis rather than against them. But the British hadn’t understood that, and now they never would.
Joyce had spent most of the war in Berlin, working for German radio’s foreign service in Charlottenburg. When the bombing disrupted broadcasting in the capital, he and his wife had been among the radio personnel evacuated to the country. They had gone to Oldenburg first, where they had been bounced by a Spitfire, and then to Hamburg, where the city’s radio station was one of the few buildings to have survived the air raids unscathed. It was from Hamburg, as he lurched drunkenly into the studio after the party, that Joyce recorded his final message to the British people.
It was an embarrassing occasion. Joyce was so drunk that he kept slurring his words, lapsing into long, maudlin silences as he attempted to marshal his thoughts. The technicians recording the broadcast could only watch helplessly as he slumped in front of the microphone and made his valedictory address to his countrymen:
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 of strength. Let me tell you that here we have a united people who are modest in their wishes. They are not imperialists. They don’t want to take what doesn’t belong to them …4
How modest, how harmless does Germany’s request for the return of Danzig seem in contrast to the immense acquisitions of the Soviet Union and the further ambitions of the Kremlin. Stalin is not content with Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, Romania, Bulgaria, and eastern Slovakia. He wants the whole of central Europe, with Norway, Turkey, and Persia thrown in. And if these territories fall to him, his lust for aggrandisement will only be stimulated still further.
Such is the attitude of the Red dictator who menaces the security of the whole world, and whose power today constitutes the greatest threat to peace that has existed in modern times. Britain’s victories are barren. They leave her poor, and they leave her people hungry. They leave her bereft of the markets and the wealth that she possessed six years ago. But above all, they leave her with an immensely greater problem than she had then. We are nearing the end of one phase in Europe’s history, but the next will be no happier.5
Joyce rambled on for a total of ten minutes. Whether he was drunk or not, much of what he had to say was remarkably prescient. He couldn’t understand what the Allies thought they had to gain by backing the Soviet Union against the Germans. It made little sense to him. He wondered if the British and Americans really knew what they were doing in allowing the Communists to rampage unchecked across Europe.
Joyce signed off with a defiant “Heil Hitler” at the end. The talk was recorded on a disc and put aside to be broadcast later. Joyce left in tears soon afterward, clutching a bottle of wine and accompanied by two SS officers who had been detailed to accompany him and his wife to Flensburg, on the Danish border. The Germans had originally promised him a U-boat from Hamburg to southern Ireland, where he would have been safe from the wrath of the British, but there was no chance of that anymore.
Instead, he and his wife had been issued false papers in the name of Herr and Frau Hansen and given three months’ severance pay from the radio station. Their aim was to go to Denmark, still under German control, and from there to Sweden to seek asylum. But the road to Flensburg was in chaos, and Denmark was already full of refugees trying to get to Sweden. The prospects for Joyce and his wife were bleak as they left Hamburg in the middle of the night and set off for the border, desperate to cross into Denmark and make their escape before the British could catch up with them.
* * *
TO THE EAST, the Russians had just liberated the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Their tanks h
ad rolled into nearby Fürstenberg that afternoon, finding it all but deserted as the population vanished. From there, Captain Boris Makarov’s men had driven up to the camp gates, where they were met by Antonina Nikiforowa, a Russian army doctor who had been captured on the Estonian island of Saaremaa. She told them that without water or electricity, scores of the three thousand women still in the camp were dying of disease every day. Makarov promised to bring help just as soon as his troops had made the area secure.
As in so many camps, Ravensbrück was strewn with dead bodies dumped in piles because no one had had time to get rid of them. But it was not an extermination camp. It had been designed for slave labor originally—a distinction lost on the many thousands of women who had been shot, strangled, gassed, buried alive, or worked to death in the nearby Siemens plant, making parts for V2 rockets. Others had been tricked into sterilization or used for medical experiments, crippled for life in the interests of science.
Gypsy women had been sterilized. Polish girls, some as young as fourteen, had been used for experiments. Known as rabbits, they had been held down while their legs were cut open and infected with bacteria from shards of wood or glass, to test the efficacy of the latest sulfonamide drugs for the Wehrmacht. Others had had nerves cut or bones fractured to test their powers of recuperation. Some had died as a result; others had been killed later when their wounds failed to heal.
The rest had faced execution, too, as the Germans sought to destroy the evidence of their crimes. Ordered to report to camp headquarters a few weeks before the Russians’ arrival, the remaining rabbit girls had vanished instead, tearing off their identification numbers and losing themselves in the crowd. They had been shielded by the other prisoners, as the whole camp combined to ensure that some at least should live to bear witness after the war.
Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II Page 16
