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

by Nicholas Best

  While Altner disappeared into the gloom, actress Hildegard Knef and her lover were a couple of miles south, on their way to fight the Russians at Schmargendorf. Film producer Ewald von Demandowsky had been called up into the Volkssturm, the German equivalent of Britain’s Home Guard, and sent straight to the front line. Knef had insisted on accompanying him, rather than staying behind on her own. Just nineteen, ravishingly pretty, she had no illusions about what would happen if the Russians got hold of her. She preferred to remain with her boyfriend and take her chances in the fighting.

  She had tried to disguise herself as a man for the purpose, but, despite her deep voice, had been rapidly unmasked when they reported for duty. Nevertheless, she had been given a helmet, a machine gun, and a handful of grenades and shown how to use them. She had acquired a jackknife as well and tucked it into her boot, reminding herself to cut upward if she ever had to use it, upward from the wrist rather than across.

  Now she was on her way to Schmargendorf’s freight yard with Demandowsky and a few others. There were ten of them in all, a ragbag assortment of Russia veterans, Hitler Youth, SS, and old men spaced at twenty-yard intervals as they made their way across the rubble. They were crawling some of the way, running and jumping the rest, to avoid becoming targets. They managed to reach the freight yard unharmed, but were spotted by Russian snipers when they tried to cross it. Hopping over the rails like a kangaroo, Knef sprinted for an abandoned train and dived underneath a freight car as the snipers opened fire. She made it in time, but one of the Hitler Youth with her wasn’t so lucky. Knef could still hear the sound of him calling for his mother as he died.

  The German front line lay across the yard, a row of foxholes hastily dug beside the tennis courts. Knef and Demandowsky found shelter in a garden shed, next to a lieutenant who was surveying the tennis courts through his field glasses. He had camouflaged his helmet and shoulders with foliage, looking to Knef as if he were about to go onstage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  There was a dead SS man outside. Knef and Demandowsky were trying to move his body when the Russians launched an attack:

  Orrraaaay! It’s coming from behind us, behind the tennis courts. The lieutenant looks up. They screech like monkeys, he says, when they attack they always screech like monkeys. He raises his fist and slams it down in the mud, twenty machine guns start rattling and chattering, we pull ours up and stick an ammunition belt into it. It starts heaving and bucking, wants to go it alone, resents our meddling, starts throwing itself from side to side, gets hot, jams, dies. E von D picks it up, crawls out and runs for the shed. The houses behind us are on fire.5

  The Russians were beaten off and did not attack again before dark. Knef was grateful for the respite, if only because it gave her the chance to have a pee at last. She volunteered for the first turn on guard duty that night, occupying a foxhole all to herself while Demandowsky got some rest in the shed. Early evening was the best time to be on guard, because the Russians rarely attacked in the early evening. That was their time for getting drunk and raping women, as Knef soon discovered:

  I stand there in my hole, in the water, keep a firm hold on the machine gun and the pistol, peer through the glasses over the yard, see shadows, chew the rest of the cheese, hear something crack and rustle, hear screams, dreadful heartrending screams, high thin shrill. I call out softly to the next hole: “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that screaming?”

  “Russians are in that house over there started on the women shitshitohshitohshit.”6

  Knef was terrified, acutely aware of what the Russian army did to women. She had heard it firsthand from East Prussian refugees at Dahlem. The Russians had raped the women of East Prussia repeatedly before beating their brains out. One woman had told Knef that her sister’s breasts had been cut off and her husband crucified against a door. Crouching miserably in her foxhole as the screaming continued, with a gun in one hand and her knife in the other, Hildegard Knef was determined that nothing of the sort would ever happen to her if she could avoid it.

  3

  HIMMLER SUES FOR PEACE

  WHILE THE FIGHTING RAGED IN BERLIN, Heinrich Himmler was on his way to Lübeck, returning to his Baltic headquarters after a Wehrmacht conference at Neuroofen. With so many refugees on the road, the journey was taking him most of the day, although normally it would only have been a couple of hours.

  Himmler was not a happy man as he drove. With Berlin about to fall and the German army in full retreat, he was uncomfortably aware that a day of reckoning was fast approaching for the Nazi leadership, a calling to account for all the atrocities committed over the past five years. As head of the SS, he knew the Allies would show no mercy when they caught up with him. His only real chance of survival was to have something to offer them in return for his own life, a bargaining chip to get him off the hook.

  Himmler had been careful not to mention it at the conference, but he had made a clandestine approach to the Americans on April 23, requesting peace negotiations through the good offices of Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte. At Bernadotte’s suggestion, he had written a letter offering to surrender all German forces in the west to the Anglo-Americans, but without saying anything about the troops still fighting the Russians in the east. Bernadotte had undertaken to deliver the letter in secret to the Western Allies, with the caveat that, in his view, they would be very unlikely to consider any German surrender that did not include the Russians as well.

  The Allies’ reply was waiting for Himmler when he got back to Lübeck. It was not what he had been hoping for. As Bernadotte had anticipated, the British and Americans were not prepared to contemplate a separate peace without the Soviet Union:

  A German offer of surrender will only be accepted on condition that it is complete on all fronts as regards Great Britain, the Soviet Union as well as USA. When these conditions have been fulfilled, the German forces must immediately on all fronts lay down their arms to the local Allied commanders. Should resistance continue anywhere, the Allied attacks will be ruthlessly carried on until complete victory has been gained.1

  That was not all. Himmler was appalled to hear that the Allies had released the details of his approach to the press. He had made the approach in strictest confidence, without Hitler’s knowledge, intending to negotiate a surrender package behind the Führer’s back that would ensure his own survival unpunished, perhaps even as head of a postwar German government. But the Allies had betrayed him. They had deliberately leaked the story to the newspapers that morning and it had been picked up by foreign radio. Himmler’s treachery would be all over Germany by next day.

  As if on cue, there was a phone call for him soon after he got back to Lübeck. It was from Grand Admiral Dönitz, who had heard the news from Wehrmacht headquarters and wanted to know if it was true. Himmler hastily assured him it wasn’t. He assured the Wehrmacht as well, ringing army headquarters of his own accord to deny the radio reports and insist that he had had no contact with the Allies. Then he sent for SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, his go-between in the negotiations with Count Bernadotte in Denmark. He wanted to hear from Schellenberg why the negotiations had failed, and why his name was all over the news when Schellenberg had been under strict instructions to conduct the whole business in secret.

  Schellenberg went to meet Himmler with deep reluctance. He was under no illusions about the summons. Himmler had a bad habit of blaming others for his own miscalculations and leaving them to face the consequences. As Schellenberg drove to Lübeck late that afternoon, it seemed distinctly possible to him that he might be taken out and shot as soon as he had made his report to Himmler.

  Schellenberg had been hoping that Count Bernadotte would accompany him to the meeting for moral support, but Lübeck was now too close to the front line for that. Instead, rather than face Himmler alone, Schellenberg had telephoned ahead and arranged for someone else to go with him in lieu. “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. I therefore arranged for an astrologer from Hamburg to accompany me. Himmler knew this man personally and thought very highly of him. He could never resist having his horoscope read, and I felt this would soften his reaction to the disappointment.”2

  The astrologer was Wilhelm Wulff, a self-appointed seer who by his own account had been one of hundreds of German astrologers arrested after Rudolph Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941, and interrogated by the Gestapo as they sought an explanation for Hess’s behavior. Wulff had been released after a while but remained under observation, threatened with severe punishment if his horoscopes proved to be inaccurate. He was almost as nervous as Schellenberg as an SS car collected him from Hamburg and drove him to Lübeck, where he was to meet Schellenberg before reporting to Himmler later that evening.

  “Make sure that Himmler sends me to Stockholm” were Schellenberg’s first words when they met.3 Wulff asked to be left alone for an hour while he consulted his charts and prepared some horoscopes. Then the two of them set off for the police barracks in the suburbs that housed Himmler’s headquarters.

  It was getting on for midnight by the time they arrived. They were taken down a dimly lit corridor and shown into a room containing beds, a table, and wooden benches around the walls. They sat down to wait, but Himmler did not appear. Midnight came and went, heralded by an air raid siren sounding the all-clear, but there was still no sign of the SS leader. Schellenberg and Wulff were evidently in for a long night. Settling down on one of the benches along the wall, they ran once more through the points they were going to raise with Himmler when he arrived, and then resigned themselves to a lengthy wait.

  * * *

  WHILE SCHELLENBERG went to meet Himmler, Count Bernadotte had remained in Denmark, horrified to learn from the radio that his discussions with the Allies had gone public. He was staying with a Danish official when he heard his own name on the news, followed by an announcement that he had been conducting negotiations with Himmler for a German surrender.

  Bernadotte’s first reaction was one of despair. As a cousin of the king of Sweden, his main object in agreeing to act as a go-between was to ensure a peaceful German withdrawal from Norway and Denmark, one that left his fellow Scandinavians unscathed as the Wehrmacht pulled out. He had negotiated mainly with Schellenberg, but he had seen Himmler, too, meeting him secretly at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck on April 23. They had had a long talk by candlelight in the aftermath of an air raid. Himmler had admitted that Germany was beaten and had told Bernadotte that if Hitler weren’t already dead, he soon would be. He had asked Bernadotte to approach the Anglo-Americans about a possible surrender, adding privately that if his overtures were rejected, he himself would go to the Russian front and seek an honorable death in battle.

  Himmler had spoken in strictest confidence, as had Bernadotte when he relayed Himmler’s message to the British and American ambassadors in Stockholm. It was frustrating, therefore, to hear their names on the radio and know that they had been exposed. But was it a disaster? Bernadotte certainly thought so at first. “My initial reaction was that this had spoilt everything, and that there was no further possibility of negotiations.”4 Thinking it over, however, he wasn’t so sure. It certainly meant that Himmler was out of the picture, but was that really so bad, when the Allies were refusing to deal with him anyway?

  It might actually be good, if Hitler were forced to appoint someone else to succeed him instead, as he would surely have to. Whoever Hitler appointed would not be as distasteful to the Allies. Either way, Bernadotte’s main concern was still to ensure a peaceful capitulation of the German forces in Norway and Denmark. He had told Schellenberg so that morning, before the SS man set off back to Lübeck to explain himself to Himmler.

  * * *

  HIMMLER, SCHELLENBERG, and Bernadotte all assumed that they had been deliberately let down by the Allies, who had leaked the news of their negotiations to the press. In fact, the Allies had done nothing of the kind—not officially, anyway. A lowly British official at the United Nations conference in San Francisco had leaked the story on his own initiative.

  Jack Winocour, a press officer for the British delegation, had first learned of Himmler’s approach on April 27, when Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, had mentioned it casually at a briefing. Winocour had assumed that the story was being released to the newspapers, but he had seen no mention of it anywhere. As the afternoon of the twenty-seventh wore on, and the wire services still hadn’t run the story, he wondered if it was being deliberately kept secret, and if so, why?:

  It was Himmler who still controlled the ghastly administrative apparatus of the Nazi state. It was he who would surely be Hitler’s heir, and who would attempt to perpetuate the legend. Surely Hitler now knew of Himmler’s treachery? Or if he did not know why had we not begun to tell the world with every means at our command that Hitler’s comrade-in-arms had betrayed him?

  There had been a long silence throughout the day. I had earlier been convinced that Eden was merely announcing to us what must soon be a matter of common knowledge in the nerve centres of war in Washington and London. The Foreign Secretary would not have taken thirty people into his confidence on a matter of this kind, if it was intended that secrecy should be maintained.5

  But the silence had continued into the evening. Winocour was preparing for bed when Paul Scott Rankine of Reuters news agency rang after midnight to ask if he had anything for the afternoon papers in Europe. Winocour hesitated for only a moment. Speaking strictly off the record, he gave Rankine the story. Half an hour later, every paper in Europe was remaking its front page and the BBC was broadcasting the news of Himmler’s treachery across the world.

  Winocour woke later that morning to find the San Francisco correspondents in an uproar as they hurried to find out more. At the 10:00 a.m. briefing at the Palace Hotel, it was reported that Himmler had said that Hitler had suffered a brain hemorrhage and had only a few more hours to live. For mischief, Winocour added quite untruthfully that Himmler had offered to deliver Hitler’s body to the Allies as an earnest show of his good intentions. Winocour knew he wasn’t telling the truth, but he knew, too, that Hitler would be outraged if the story reached him. The power of black propaganda was not to be underestimated in wartime.

  By late afternoon of the twenty-eighth, the story had spun completely out of control. Assured that it was about to happen, the Associated Press took a gamble and put out a news flash announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender. There was no truth in the rumor, but the UN meeting in San Francisco’s opera house almost broke up in disarray as the delegates flooded outside to learn more, leaving Russia’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, vainly trying to restore order with his gavel. President Harry Truman was consulted in Washington, but could shed no light on the matter. He knew about Himmler’s approach to the Allies, because he had discussed it with Winston Churchill on the transatlantic telephone, but he had heard nothing of surrender. Truman got Admiral William Leahy to telephone General Eisenhower in Europe to ask if it was true. Eisenhower’s people in turn rang Churchill’s in the middle of the night, but no one had heard anything. If the Germans had surrendered, it was news to anyone in Europe.

  Accordingly, Truman decided to scotch the rumor. Just after nine thirty that evening, he summoned the White House correspondents to the Oval Office. Refusing point-blank to discuss Himmler’s approach, he confined himself instead to a short statement about the so-called surrender. “I just got in touch with Admiral Leahy and had him call our headquarters’ commander-in-chief in Europe,” he told the correspondents. “There is no foundation for the rumour. That is all I have to say.”6

  * * *

  IN BERLIN, Adolf Hitler learned of Himmler’s treachery at about nine o’clock that evening. The news was brought to the bunker by Heinz Lorenz, head of the German Information Office, who came hurrying over from the Propaganda Ministry with a radio transcript of the Reuters r
eport, apparently confirming an earlier report by Radio Stockholm. Telephone operator Rochus Misch saw him arrive:

  Hitler was sitting on the bench outside my switchboard room with a puppy in his lap when Lorenz, whom I had heard arrive at a run, handed him the paper on which he had jotted down the radio dispatch. Hitler’s face went completely white, almost ashen. “My God,” I thought, “he’s going to faint.” He slumped forward holding his head with his hands. The puppy plumped to the ground—silly how one remembers such trifles, but I can still hear that soft sound.7

  By other accounts, Hitler clutched the transcript to his chest and yelled that he had been betrayed again—and by der treue Heinrich this time, the only Nazi he could trust, the one leader whose loyalty had never been in question. Heinrich Himmler was the nearest Hitler had in the party to a friend. If Himmler had betrayed him, then nobody could be trusted anymore, nobody. Rudolph Hess was mad, and Hermann Göring had always been corrupt, but Himmler? Hitler couldn’t believe it.

  He calmed down after a while, turning deathly white in the process, so pale that he looked like a corpse. What remained of his mind was working overtime, swiftly assessing the implications of Himmler’s treachery. Was Himmler planning to assassinate him? Deliver him alive to the enemy? Was there anybody left in the bunker whom he could trust? Or were they all just waiting for a chance to offer him as a hostage in return for their own miserable lives? It was impossible to know.

  But at least there was a scapegoat at hand, someone on whom Hitler could take revenge for Himmler’s disloyalty. SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein was Himmler’s liaison officer in the bunker, a widely disliked opportunist whose wartime career had been devoted solely to his own advancement. Himmler might be beyond Hitler’s reach, but Himmler’s creature was still in the bunker. Fegelein was in close arrest after being caught trying to desert.