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

by Nicholas Best

  Kesselring wasn’t convinced, but could see Wolff’s point. Ringing off at 4:00 a.m., he promised to think it over and get back to him. Half an hour later another officer rang to say that Kesselring had reluctantly agreed to the surrender and was withdrawing the directive for various officers to be arrested.

  Headquarters at Bolzano wasted no more time. The order to surrender went immediately to all the remaining units that hadn’t already received it. The radio messages were sent en clair, since the Germans no longer had any need to disguise their intentions from the Allies. At two o’clock that afternoon, as agreed, German forces in Italy ceased all hostilities against the Allies. In the Italian theater at least, the war was over.

  * * *

  WOLFF WAS QUITE RIGHT about Trieste. The Allies were already on their way, aiming to take control of the port from the German garrison before Tito’s Communists could seize it for Yugoslavia.

  The charge was led by the New Zealanders. They left Monfalcone at eight thirty that morning, intending to complete the remaining seventeen miles to Trieste without delay. But the cease-fire did not come into effect until two that afternoon and, anyway, did not apply east of the Isonzo River, where the Germans retained the right to defend themselves against partisans. There were still isolated pockets of resistance along the road as individual German units continued to put up a fight.

  It wasn’t until two thirty in the afternoon that the Kiwis reached Miramare, a peninsula with a white castle, across the bay from Trieste. The Germans, defending it with 88mm guns and machine-gun nests in pillboxes, were quickly brushed aside. The New Zealanders’ Sherman tanks pressed on to Trieste and were in the middle of the city by 3:00 p.m., exchanging greetings with Tito’s men, who had arrived earlier from the other direction.

  But the fighting was far from over. Various strongpoints in the city were still in German hands, fiercely defended by troops determined to hang on until the New Zealanders appeared, so that they could surrender to them rather than the Yugoslavs. The ancient castle was under siege as the New Zealanders arrived, the German garrison taking pot shots at the partisans and regular Yugoslav troops surrounding them. The Germans fired at the New Zealanders, too, until they realized who they were. Then, to the irritation of the Yugoslavs, they opened the gate and allowed a company of Kiwis in to take their surrender.

  The Yugoslavs were quick to retaliate. They continued to snipe from the rooftops, shooting at the New Zealanders in the castle as well as the Germans. The German commander offered to help with the defense if his men could have their weapons back, but was rebuffed. As night fell, the New Zealand defenders and their German prisoners pooled their rations and sat down to a meal together, sharing their food inside the castle while sentries kept a careful watch on the Yugoslavs outside.

  At the Law Courts, the SS commander flatly refused to surrender to anyone. A New Zealand officer went forward under a white flag, but the SS man appeared too drunk for a rational discussion. The New Zealanders therefore joined forces with the Yugoslavs, using their tanks to blast holes in the walls of the building while Yugoslav infantry poured through. The fighting continued long into the night. It wasn’t until next morning that the garrison finally agreed to lay down their weapons.

  Elsewhere, only the Villa Opicina and a stretch of land along the northern edge of Trieste remained under German control by nightfall on May 2. The rest of the city was occupied by a variety of different forces: New Zealanders, Tito Communists, Chetnik royalists, Slovenian home guards, Serb collaborators, and the Italian nationals—some Fascist, some not—who formed the majority of the city’s population. Many were armed to the teeth and ready to defend themselves if necessary. The New Zealanders had been cheered by the Italians as they raced toward Trieste, but there were cheers for Tito, too, signs along the road claiming the land for Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs themselves were bitterly divided between royalists and Communists, united only in their desire to inflict atrocities on the Germans. The New Zealanders established their headquarters that night in Trieste’s grandest hotel, but it was still anybody’s city as sporadic shooting continued and Tito’s Yugoslavs began the sinister business of rounding up and disarming anyone who didn’t share their particular view of Trieste’s future.

  * * *

  AT CASERTA, the staff at Allied headquarters spent the first part of the day wondering if the surrender was actually going to happen or not. Field Marshal Alexander had set a deadline the previous night for a response from Wehrmacht HQ, allowing both sides time to give the necessary orders for a cease-fire. But with the Germans bickering among themselves and Field Marshal Kesselring impossible to locate, the night had come and gone without any answer from Bolzano. It wasn’t until later that morning, when the Allies learned that General von Vietinghoff had been restored to his command, that surrender began to seem possible. It was confirmed at noon when Wolff sent Alexander a message from Kesselring promising that the surrender would go ahead at two that afternoon, as agreed.

  Nevertheless, Alexander waited until late afternoon before going public with the news. The Germans had asked for it to remain secret for another twenty-four hours, but the orders for a ceasefire had already gone out en clair. Alexander was adamant that the timetable agreed at Caserta must be adhered to. He was under pressure from Harold Macmillan, his political adviser, to confirm the surrender in time for Winston Churchill to announce it in Parliament that day. He didn’t want to do so unless he was quite sure the surrender was actually happening.

  It wasn’t until 5:00 p.m., therefore, with good reports from the front and the surrender going ahead as planned, that he and Macmillan felt able to make the announcement. They released the news at six thirty. An hour later Churchill stood up to give the details to a cheering House of Commons. The war in Italy really was over.

  * * *

  FOR SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT DOLE of the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, it had been over for some time. Dole was in hospital at Pistoia, near Florence, when the surrender was announced. He heard the cheers from the GIs in the wards as the word came through, but was too badly injured to take much notice. He was so far gone that his doctors were expecting him to die within the next few days.

  Dole’s war had come to an abrupt end on April 14, just over two weeks earlier. As a replacement platoon commander, he had only been with the Eighty-fifth Regiment since February. They had been fighting in the Apennine Mountains, southwest of Bologna, when the order had come to capture Hill 913 as part of a drive toward the Po Valley. Dole’s company had experienced heavy mortar fire as they advanced. One officer had been killed by a mine, another by a sniper. Dole himself had been hit by shell splinters, his shoulder ripped apart and his spinal column badly damaged. He had lain where he fell for six hours until the battle had moved on and the medics were able to come to his rescue.

  It had been a further three hours before Dole reached the evacuation hospital. He had lost so much blood by then that the doctors had had to wait until next day before operating. Cutting him open from neck to shoulder, they had cleaned up his wounds, removing numerous bone fragments and what they could to stem the internal bleeding. Then they had stitched him up and sent him back to the base hospital at Pistoia, paralyzed from the neck down.

  The damage to Dole’s spine was severe. The surgeons at Pistoia had opened him up again to see if anything was pressing against the spinal column, but had found nothing amiss. Dole was just paralyzed, no feeling in his arms and legs, unable to do anything for himself, prey to all sorts of infections if his body couldn’t function properly. From a medical point of view, he was almost certainly a goner.

  But he was also young and strong, with a burning desire to live. Bob Dole wasn’t finished yet. Once the sedatives wore off, he had begun to feel pain again after several days, acute pain throbbing intensely throughout his body. He had welcomed every agonizing moment of it, because if he could feel pain, he couldn’t be paralyzed. While the rest of the hospital cheered for the end of the war, he
had noticed some feeling returning to his legs, and had already managed to wiggle his toes a little. The doctors still thought he was a goner, but where there was life, there was hope. Bob Dole wasn’t a goner. He was going to live to prove them all wrong.

  * * *

  JUST OUTSIDE CASERTA, Lance-Bombardier Spike Milligan of the Royal Artillery was at Maddaloni when the surrender was announced. Like Bob Dole, he had been wounded by a mortar bomb during the Allied advance and had been taken out of the line to recover. Medically downgraded to B2, he had been working as a wine waiter in the mess at Portici before transferring to Maddaloni, an outpost of the Caserta GHQ, as a clerk/driver to the officers.

  Milligan’s war had begun in 1940, when he had sat in a Martello tower on the Sussex coast listening to the sounds of Dunkirk across the Channel and wondering how he and the only other occupant of the tower were supposed to stop the Germans with a single rifle between the two of them. Sent to Algiers in 1943 to support the U.S. landings there, he had fought through the western desert before landing at Salerno in September. The fighting in Italy had been intense, taking an increasing toll on his mental health as the war progressed. By Milligan’s reckoning, the longer he survived without a scratch, the greater the price to pay when his number came up, as it surely would, sooner or later.

  Milligan had been hit in January 1944. The wound had been minimal—a two-inch gash to his right leg—so slight that he hadn’t even noticed it at first. But the damage to his mind had been far worse. Diagnosed with battle fatigue, he had been examined by a psychiatrist who clearly thought him a malingerer and sent him back to his unit without delay. The first thing he had seen upon his return were the graves of some comrades killed in a direct hit on their battery. The next time he heard gunfire, Milligan ran straight to his dugout and hid there, stammering with fear.

  Reduced to the ranks, still stammering, he had been sent back to hospital with manic depression. At one point he had slashed his face with a razor to gain attention. After a long period of rehabilitation, he had been promoted to lance-bombardier again and had found his way eventually to Maddaloni, where he played trumpet in the dance band in his spare time.

  Milligan had also begun to regain his sense of humor as time healed his mental wounds. Learning that the German army in Italy was on its last legs, he had just written a sketch for the camp review in which Göbbels tried to explain to Hitler that the Wehrmacht was running out of legs. But humor was only a mask for the pain. In between recurring bouts of depression, Milligan had been horrified to learn of Mussolini’s treatment after his death: “Someone is worse off than me. Mussolini has been murdered; he and his mistress are hanging upside down in a garage in Milan. It was a barbaric act that puts the clock back. However, the natives seem happy. Nothing like an assassination to cheer the masses.”2

  And now the war was over, in Italy at least. Milligan had been saving a bottle of Dom Perignon 1935 for the occasion, stolen from the officers’ mess in Portici. The church bells were ringing in Maddaloni and Italians in the square were singing “Finito, Benito, finito” as they celebrated Il Duce’s departure. Spike Milligan joined them for a while, but somehow couldn’t share their enthusiasm as he contemplated an uncertain future now that the fighting was finished:

  I walked back through the milling streets, lay on my bed and lit up a Capstan. I could hear the din outside and running footsteps, but I was strangely quiet. Suddenly a complete change of direction. How do you handle the end of a campaign? I wanted to cry. Was it really over? Thirty one thousand Allied troops had died—a city of the dead. Is a war ever really over? 3

  * * *

  IN MILAN, there was jubilation in the streets as the surrender was announced, but mayhem, too, as old scores continued to be settled. The Americans were tightening their grip, but Mussolini’s followers were still being hunted down across the city. German troops were being hunted, too. A few were still in hiding or refusing to surrender. Most were already in American hands, desperately hoping that their captors would continue to protect them from the mob.

  For Herbert von Karajan, there was bitter irony in the situation as he remained indoors, too scared to show his face until the hunt for Fascists had subsided. A longtime member of the Austrian Nazi Party, he had fled to Italy at the beginning of the year to get away from the chaos in Berlin. The bombing of the capital’s concert halls had been bad enough, but Karajan had also fallen foul of the Nazi leadership after marrying Anna Gütermann in 1942. Her Jewish grandfather had not commended her to the Nazis, although Josef Göbbels was said to have taken a fancy to her. Karajan’s brilliance as a conductor had seen him through the war years, but he and his wife had decided to flee as the Russians approached. They had persuaded a friend to invite them to Milan for a series of radio concerts, using the invitation as a pretext to obtain exit visas from Germany, more valuable than gold.

  They had lived in a Milan hotel for the first few weeks, before joining friends in Como. Back in Milan on business, Karajan and his wife had found themselves trapped as the war ended, unable to go anywhere for fear of being attacked as Germans. According to Karajan, the lawyer they had been to see was keeping them hidden in his own home until it was safe to go out again. He had warned them that they risked being shot on sight if they ventured out before it was safe.

  The present was bad enough, but the future looked even worse to Karajan. Other conductors had been careful to keep their distance from the Nazis during the war, but he had been closely associated with the party from the first. It was even said that he had joined the SS Security Service to avoid being drafted—a claim he always denied. Like everyone else, Karajan insisted that he was only a Nazi for professional reasons, but he feared retribution when prominent party members were hauled before the courts after the war. He would probably be blacklisted from conducting, perhaps banned from ever working again.

  The only consolation was that Karajan’s chief rival, Wilhelm Furtwängler, would probably be blacklisted, too. Furtwängler had been even closer to the Nazis: the funeral march from the Götterdämmerung, broadcast on the radio at Hitler’s death, had been conducted by him. But Furtwängler, too, had fallen foul of the regime. Suspected of complicity in the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, he had fled to Switzerland in February, urgently seeking asylum as a refugee from the Nazis. The Swiss had refused him sanctuary, but were allowing him temporary residence while he recovered from concussion after a fall. While Karajan lay low in Milan, Wilhelm Furtwängler was in a nursing home on Lake Geneva as the war ended. He was deeply unpopular with the local Swiss because of his Nazi past, yet terrified also that German agents were on their way to kill him as an enemy of the Reich.

  * * *

  RACHELE MUSSOLINI was on the road to Milan. Worn out with weeping for her dead husband, she was being taken back to the city where his bruised and battered body had been strung up for the amusement of the mob. She and her two children had been collected from Como at four thirty that afternoon and were being driven to Milan in an Alfa Romeo. They had no idea where they were going and were too frightened to ask what would happen to them when they arrived.

  They reached Milan at six and were escorted to a building near the Castello Sforzesco, where they were to spend the night. Romano and Anna Maria were still in deep shock after the horrors of the past few days, distraught at the murder of their father and the mutilation of his body. Rachele was desperately afraid that the same thing was about to happen to them, but she took some comfort from the friendliness of their American guards. The men were so kind, so respectful toward her, that they seemed almost apologetic, hardly likely to throw her children to the mob. Italians were being kind, too, perhaps appalled at the manner of her husband’s death.

  Mussolini himself was in the morgue, awaiting burial. He had always wanted to be buried in the family plot at Predappio, his hometown, but the authorities had decided otherwise. Along with the other Fascist leaders from the garage, he was to be buried the next day in Milan’s municipal cem
etery at Musocco. They were all going to be buried together, side by side in the same grave.

  The grave was to be left unmarked, so that the bodies couldn’t be dug up and desecrated. The bad news for Rachele, the news she really didn’t want to hear, was that Clara Petacci was going to be buried beside Mussolini, lying next to him in death as she had in life. Rachele may have been the mother of Mussolini’s children, the woman he claimed to have always loved, but it was the glamorous Clara, with her high heels and her makeup, who was going to be with him in death. Rachele’s only consolation was that she was still alive and still had the children. She kept them very close as they were taken to their accommodation in Milan and settled down under American guard to a miserable night’s sleep.

  24

  BERLIN FALLS

  IN BERLIN, IT WAS ALL OVER. The city had surrendered. There was still fighting in the suburbs, but the defenders in the center were laying down their weapons and emerging sullenly from the rubble. Germany’s capital had fallen, and the red flag flew undisputed all over the city.

  The process had begun just before six that morning, when three German civilians from the Ministry of Propaganda presented themselves at Marshal Chuikov’s headquarters and told him Göbbels was dead. They brought a letter from Hans Fritsche, the ministry’s deputy director. With a voice that sounded like Göbbels’s, Fritsche had originally made his name as a radio announcer, and still had a following across Germany. As “the last responsible representative of the government,”1 he presented his compliments to Chuikov in writing and formally requested him to take the city of Berlin under his protection. He also offered to make an announcement on the radio, urging Germans everywhere to stop fighting and surrender.

  The civilians were followed by General Weidling, commander of the Berlin garrison, who reached Russian headquarters just as they were leaving. The Germans were evidently speaking with different voices. Sensing chaos at the Chancellery, Chuikov asked Weidling why Krebs hadn’t come instead, and was told that he had probably committed suicide. Weidling himself was in a highly nervous state, breaking down uncontrollably at one point while the Russians pretended not to notice. He hadn’t heard of Dönitz’s broadcast on the radio and was surprised to learn that Hitler’s death was public knowledge. He couldn’t guarantee a general surrender, either, because he had lost contact with some of his forces and had no control over the SS.