Krukenberg and a few officers entered the Chancellery garden and were admitted to the Führerbunker; descending a long concrete staircase they entered a strange, malodorous realm that Goebbels compared to a ‘maze of trenches’. Krukenberg requested a meeting with Army Chief of Staff, General Hans Krebs, the last senior military figure left in Hitler’s bunker community. The recycled air was warm and foetid: a stinging cocktail of oil, urine and sweat. A diesel engine spluttered and hummed. Hitler’s SS ‘Leibstandarte’ guards sat drinking morosely in a dingy little room not far from his study. As the Russian guns ceaselessly pounded Berlin’s shattered buildings, the lights inside the bunker flickered. Hitler had been ruined by this subterranean life. His face had turned pale, puffy and sallow; he was barely able to make his way from his private quarters to the military conference room unaided. He had become slovenly, his clothes splattered with food stains. Hitler still relished wolfing down his favourite Viennese cream cakes.
Krebs, as Krukenberg discovered, had not given up hope. Both he and Hitler had become convinced that German units were being mustered somewhere to the south by General Walther Wenck, referred to reverentially as ‘Wenck’s Army’, that would soon march north, brushing aside allegedly weak Soviet spearheads, and ‘rescue Berlin’. Before Krukenberg left that night to return to his men, he requested a meeting with Fegelein, who was, in theory, his commanding officer. A search was ordered – but Fegelein was nowhere to be found. A puzzled Krukenberg drove back towards the Olympic Stadium, which they reached just before dawn.
A few hours later, Krukenberg met with General Helmuth Weidling at his headquarters in Hohenzollerndamm in Wilmersdorf. Now, he told Krukenberg, he faced 2.5 million Soviet troops with just 2,700 Hitler Youth, 42,500 geriatric Volkssturm units, armed with a few Czech and Polish rifles – and dilapidated foreign Waffen-SS units.39
Berlin was now completely encircled. For the desperate inhabitants of Hitler’s subterranean fortress, the single link to the outside was the East-West Axis airstrip. As Russian shells descended on the centre of Berlin; as American and Russian soldiers exchanged cigarettes at Torgau on the Elbe; and as RAF bombers pounded the abandoned Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, Hitler and Goebbels talked long into the night about how they might still win ‘this decisive battle’ and not leave the stage of history in disgrace. Goebbels conjured up a rosy posterity: if Europe was ‘Bolshevised’, then National Socialism would swiftly attain ein Mythos (a mythic status). History would look kindly on their hard-fought crusade against Bolshevism.
Shortly after dawn on 28 April, Soviet T34 tanks clattered across pontoon bridges thrown across the Landwehr canal close to Hallesches Tor, the gateway to the broad avenues that led straight to the citadel government quarter and the Reich Chancellery. The canal was the last line of defence – the moat around Hitler’s citadel. The French SS Sturmbataillon, reduced to just sixty men but reinforced by Hungarian and Romanian SS troops, threw up a fragile defensive line across the broad avenues of the old Friedrichstadt. Ammunition was in desperately short supply and the Russian tanks just kept on rolling across the pontoon bridges. No word came from the longed for ‘relief army’ of General Wenck.
On 29 April, Hitler convened his final military conference. He ordered that all defenders of the ‘capital city of the Reich’ must break out of the Soviet encirclement, join up with other units still fighting and take to the forests. Not a whisper had been heard from Wenck. As it turned out, Wenck had never got any further than Potsdam and was withdrawing to the Elbe. The ‘relief of Berlin’ had been a chimera. In his ‘Testament’, dictated to his faithful secretary Traudl Junge, Hitler blamed the downfall of Germany on ‘international Jewry’. He insisted that ‘I do not wish to fall into the hands of enemies who … will need a spectacle arranged by Jews’. At about 3.30 a.m. on 30 April 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun, who he had married the same day, committed suicide. Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge hauled the corpses up to the Chancellery garden. The loyal paladins of Hitler’s court, led by Goebbels and Bormann, watched solemnly as Linge emptied jerry cans of fuel over the remains of the Führer and his wife. As acrid black smoke rose into the air, Soviet shells began falling into the garden.40
As this macabre rite unfolded in the Chancellery garden, some twenty-five survivors of the French SS Sturmbataillon had taken refuge in the basement of a library on Friedrichstrasse. One of more fanatical French SS officers, Hauptsturmführer Henri Josef Fenet, lamented that its beautiful collections would soon be ripped to shreds by a drunken ‘Mongols’.41 It was a rather beautiful spring day. In the Tiergarten, sunlight dappled the shredded trees. Twisted ruins stood out against the blue, cloud-flecked sky. Smoke drifted across rubble filled streets. On Tuesday 1 May, SS-Brigadeführer Mohnke appeared at Krukenberg’s headquarters at Stadtmitte U-bahn station. A party of German officers led by Colonel General Krebs had crossed the front lines to begin surrender negotiations with the Soviet commanders. He admitted that ‘Army Wenck’, the promised relief force, had been beaten back. But he chose not to reveal that Hitler was dead. It was a gross deception. Mohnke now ordered Krukenberg to take his men to Potsdamerplatz station and halt the Soviet advance. This was the last line of defence. The obedient Krukenberg fought his back way as far as Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry – a massive granite edifice within sight of the Chancellery. Terrified Luftwaffe men cowered in the bombproof basement. Before Krukenberg could get any further along Leipzigerstrasse, he was called back to the Air Ministry building. Krebs had rescinded his orders. The battle for Berlin was over.
As night fell, the French SS men took refuge in the ruined vaults of Reinhard Heydrich’s former bastion – number 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Himmler’s SS headquarters lay in ruins next door. Its cellars, once used to torture the enemies of the Reich, now provided sturdy shelters. At 7 p.m. Krukenberg furtively crossed Leipziger Strasse and descended the long concrete stairway into the Führerbunker for the last time. Inside he met Krebs who confessed that Hitler was dead, and by his own hand. Goebbels too had killed himself, his wife and his children.
In his memoir Krukenberg wrote: ‘All the sacrifices of the troops had been in vain. The idealism of the volunteers had been abused in the worst way.’42
The last survivors of Himmler’s ‘Germanic army’ now fled Berlin. A day later, Pierre arrived, alone, in the village of Gadebusch, halfway between Rostock and Lübeck. In the middle of the road, blocking his way, stood a solitary British parachutist ‘who invited me, very politely, to enter a wonderful meadow which served as Assembly Camp where the number of one hundred German prisoners of war grew to several thousand within two or three days!’
A few badly shaken French SS men took refuge inside Potsdamerplatz station, sheltering with elderly German veterans of the kaiser’s war behind a pile of wicker baskets. Russian soldiers found them there the next day. A Soviet soldier brandished a gun in the face of Unterscharführer Roger Albert-Brunet shouting ‘SS! SS!’ then shot him through the head. He was the last foreign legionary to die in Berlin.
I had a question for Pierre. Does he regret pledging allegiance to Hitler – and did he feel, like Krukenberg, that he had been abused in the ‘worst possible way’? When he replied after a few moments thought, Pierre had a defiant look. ‘I don’t regret anything. Were we wrong about Bolshevism?’43
15
The Failure of Retribution
Certainly we had been beaten. We had been dispersed and pursued to the four corners of the world.
Léon Degrelle, Campaign in Russia
At the end of April 1945, Léon Degrelle reached Schwerin in northern Germany. Here, beneath the grand castle of the Dukes of Mecklenburg, a vast human torrent flowed away from the advancing Soviet juggernaut towards the Baltic ports; broken carts and abandoned clothes blocked the roads. Degrelle was in search of Heinrich Himmler. He knew nothing of Himmler’s sudden downfall and would not learn that Hitler was dead for another two days. On 1 May, Degrelle and his small entourage, led by faithful bearer of lugga
ge Robert du Welz (‘promoted’ to SS-Hauptsturmführer), moved on to Kalkhorst. His quarry was indeed very close, hiding inside the Schloss Ziethen some 35 miles to the north. Officially, he was still Reichsführer-SS, Chief of Police and Chief of the German Reserve Army. He was accompanied by a tiny company of faithful attendants that included Dr Rudolf Brandt, his doctor, Prof. Dr Karl Gebhardt, Werner Grothmann (Chief Adjutant of the Waffen-SS) and Otto Ohlendorf, who had once commanded Special Task Force D.1
On 2 May, Degrelle was at last able to corner his prey. He noticed a line of official Mercedes emerging from a side road and set off in hot pursuit. It was getting dark when he caught up. Pale skinned and wearing an odd leather cap, Himmler, Degrelle recalled, took both his hands and proclaimed: ‘You have been among the faithful, you and your Walloons … Gain yourself six months. You must live.’ Degrelle desperately affirmed his ‘absolute loyalty unto death’; how should he continue the struggle? Himmler asked how many men he had with him: just three, Degrelle admitted. A smile hovered on Himmler’s thin lips. Then he embraced Degrelle for the last time and drove away. As night fell, Degrelle doggedly pursued Himmler’s party, but his sputtering VW, burdened with bulging suitcases, could not keep up with the powerful Mercedes as it vanished into the darkness. In a last conversation with Dr Kersten, Himmler had speculated: ‘what will history say of me? Petty minds, bent on revenge, will hand down a false and perverted account of the great and good things I have accomplished for Germany.’2 On 22 May 1945 the former Reichsführer-SS bit down on a potassium cyanide capsule concealed in a back tooth and was dead moments later.
On 4 May, Degrelle and Hauptsturmführer du Welz reached Copenhagen. Both Denmark and Norway remained officially under German control. The following day, Degrelle met Dr Werner Best, the German Plenipotentiary, and demanded access to an aircraft. Best sent him on to Oslo where he had meetings with Reichskommissar Terboven and Vidkun Quisling. Neither showed any interest in Degrelle’s offer to prolong the struggle against Bolshevism. Instead Terboven offered Degrelle the use of a Heinkel aircraft ‘belonging to Minister Speer’ that had been abandoned at Oslo Airport, complete with pilot. That evening Degrelle and his loyal adjutant, still wearing their SS uniforms, drove to the airport. The aircraft took off at midnight and ascended over the North Sea before turning south-west. After a hair-raising flight, the Heinkel crash landed in the Bay of Concha not far from San Sebastian in northern Spain. A journalist from Le Soir Illustré photographed the wreckage. As the former Chef de Rex lay in a hospital bed recovering from his injuries, the government of liberated Belgium applied for his extradition. At the last moment, Degrelle vanished again, spirited into hiding by Spanish Falangist admirers. Mme. Degrelle had chosen not to join her disgraced husband and obtained a divorce. Later he remarried; his new spouse was a niece of the French Milice chief, Joseph Darnard. As ‘José León Ramírez Reina’, Degrelle embarked on a new career as a construction magnate and, thanks to some lucrative deals with Franco’s government, made a fortune. By the end of the 1950s, Degrelle emerged from hiding and was busy forging bonds with the new European far right who revered him as the last link to Hitler and the Reich. He allied himself with the Spanish neo-Nazi faction, the Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa (CEDADE). The Madrid office published his rambling biography of Hitler, as well as his solipsistic recollections of the Eastern Front. Emboldened by new circle of admirers, Degrelle made a public appeal to Pope John Paul II to snub the ‘fraud of Auschwitz’ and entertained Jihadist anti-Semites at his opulent villa in the hills above Malaga. After Franco’s death, the Belgian government renewed its application to have the corpulent and fast-fading Degrelle brought back to Brussels to stand trial for treason. But Léon Degrelle, the former Chef de Rex, the ‘hero of Cherkassy’ and one of the most contemptible and self-deceiving foreign servants of Hitler’s Reich was lucky to the very end. He died in Malaga, unrepentant, in 1994.
Degrelle fascinated and inspired resurgent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. But he had little real impact on post-war European history. He was a relic, a ghost. Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, left behind a more menacing and malign legacy. German-produced Arabic radio broadcasts had saturated the Muslim world with hysterical warnings about Jews and global conspiracies, and at the end of the war, the Mufti’s renown in Palestine and Egypt was undimmed. He would have a profound and malicious impact on the development of Islamic radicalism following the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.
By the winter of 1944, Berlin was no longer a safe haven for men like the Grand Mufti. He had never been a brave man and was often found cowering under tables as the great armadas of Allied bombers pounded the capital of the Reich. His allies in the Foreign Office, like Erwin Ettel, did what they could to protect their esteemed Muslim guest and tried to coax him to escape Germany to whatever safe haven he chose by U-boat. The Mufti was simply too timid to contemplate such a journey and held on in Berlin to the very end. At the beginning of May 1945, the Grand Mufti and his entourage at last packed up and fled. He knew that once the British reached Berlin they would waste little time tracking him down. After many tribulations, they managed to reach Constance in the French zone of occupation. Recalling how well he had been treated after his flight from Palestine, when he escaped to French Beirut from British Palestine, the Grand Mufti surrendered to the French authorities. He was soon relaxing in an opulent villa near Paris.
The British urgently petitioned the French authorities to hand over the fugitive Muslim cleric who had slipped out of their hands so many times. But General de Gaulle was in no mood to oblige his ally and personally issued instructions that el-Husseini should be permitted to remain in France and resume, without interference, his political activities on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs. For the French, who blamed the British for the catastrophe of 1940, the Mufti offered a delicious opportunity to spite perfidious Albion. Since the French had reasserted their presence in North Africa, they had good reason not to wound Arab public opinion. The Mufti had little time to enjoy French hospitality. His protectors discovered that an ‘Irgun’ assassination squad had arrived in France. On 28 May 1945, el-Husseini bolted to Italy, then secretly boarded a British ship, the SS Devonshire, bound for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.3
The return of the Grand Mufti electrified the Arab world. At a rally at Heliopolis in Cairo exultant crowds swamped his convoy – and King Farouk offered him appropriately sumptuous accommodation at his ‘Inshas Palace’. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna breathlessly declared: ‘The hearts of the Arabs palpitated with joy at hearing that the Mufti had succeeded in reaching an Arab country … The lion is free at last and will roam the Arabian jungle to clear it of wolves. The great leader is back.’4
In 1936, Haj Amin el-Husseini had embarked on an epic journey that had led him from Iran and Iraq to the hub of Hitler’s Reich. Like the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, he was obsessed with the liberation of his disputed native land from a colonial power. But Bose was a radical socialist who rejected Nazi ideology and even dared criticise Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Mufti’s hatred of Jews provided a poisonous bond with Hitler and his fanatical elite, above all Heinrich Himmler. In Berlin, the Mufti’s loathing had been deepened. His German masters taught him to believe that only systematic mass slaughter could solve the ‘Jewish problem’.
Faced with chronic unrest in Palestine, the British decided to leave the Grand Mufti in peace. Arrest would only enhance his reputation and they had nothing to gain from his martyrdom. An American agent stationed in Cairo reported that ‘it was unlikely that any strong action will now be taken … against former Axis collaborators’.5 A British observer provided a vivid picture of a very relaxed Grand Mufti:
His Eminence was in excellent mood, charming, joking. ‘Put yourself in the Arabs’ place. Remember yourselves in 1940. Did you ever think of offering the Germans part of Britain on condition they let you alone in the rest. Of course not, and you never would. To sta
rt with, you would have preferred to die defending it. In the second you know that they would never have kept their word to remain in the one part.’6
Requests by the new Yugoslavian government for the repatriation of the Mufti to stand trial for his participation in the SS recruitment campaign in Bosnia also proved futile. As the battle for Palestine intensified, pan-Arab organisations like the Arab League had every reason to protect their own. The discovery of German crimes in Europe after the opening of the camps had no resonance in the Middle East. The enemy remained the old colonial powers, especially Great Britain. Most Arab nationalists like Ahmad Husayn, leader of the semi-fascist Young Egypt Party, and many others allied with King Farouk sharpened their propaganda war on Britain and her Jewish partners. In November 1945 the reinvigorated Akhwan el Muslemin, the Muslim Brotherhood, incited attacks on Jewish homes and property in Alexandria. In the post-war period, Arab fantasies about the ‘Jewish enemy’ would be reinforced as the West German government reappointed many of the Mufti’s Foreign Office supporters and stationed them at embassies in Baghdad and Cairo. Muslim radicals revered Haj Amin el-Husseini. The late Fatah leader known as Yasser Arafat eulogised him as his political mentor.7 El-Husseini brought back to the Muslim middle the vile poison of Reich anti-Semitism. The ‘Final Solution’ had been the Mufti’s passport to power and influence in Nazi Germany. Ensconced in an opulent Berlin villa, he relished his new status as the Reich’s pet Muslim eminence and became a zealous student of racial pseudoscience promoted by German universities and other Reich agencies. As Gottlob Berger’s SS recruiter in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the Mufti frequently referred to ‘killing Jews’ as the main task of Muslim divisions like the SS ‘Handschar’ – though this wicked plan meant little to his Bosniak recruits. It was the divisional Imams who ranted about murdering Jews; and they had been trained at the Mufti’s schools in Germany. Haj Amin el-Husseini brought this malevolent cargo back to Alexandria at the end of the war, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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