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

by Nicholas Best

  Later, another SS officer arrived from Mauterndorf. Standartenführer Krause shared the general reluctance to kill Göring, but wouldn’t set him free without proper authority. He wanted the Luftwaffe to take the decision out of his hands.

  “Why don’t you liberate Göring by force?” he asked Koller. “You have more troops than I have.”

  “I don’t want to risk liberating a corpse.”3

  Krause conceded the point. It couldn’t be denied that some of the SS under his command might prefer to shoot Göring rather than let him go. “I can’t guarantee every one of my men, if we’re attacked,” he admitted, after some thought. “But if you decide not to act, Herr General, I promise that nothing will happen to Göring. But please make sure that his arrest is lifted soon.”

  * * *

  BACK AT PLÖN, Albert Speer had decided to stay the night at Dönitz’s headquarters, rather than return to his trailer at Lake Eutin. With a bag packed by his secretary, he had been given a small room to himself in the naval barracks. He was mentally and physically exhausted as he went to bed after a day of drafting signals for Dönitz and bottling his emotions about the death of Hitler. Closing the door of his room after one of the worst days of his life, Speer was glad to be on his own at last.

  When I unpacked my overnight bag, I saw that Annemarie Kempf had put in the red leather case with Hitler’s portrait, which he had signed for me on my fortieth birthday six weeks before. I was quite all right until—I don’t know why—I opened the case and stood the photograph up on the night table next to the bed. And then suddenly, standing there, I began to cry. I couldn’t stop. It just went on and on until I fell asleep, still fully dressed, on the bed.4

  18

  MAY DAY IN RUSSIA

  THERE WERE NO TEARS FOR HITLER in Moscow. It was May Day, the greatest day of the year in the Soviet calendar. Stalin was up again, after a few hours’ sleep, and everyone was gathering in Red Square for the parade. Troops of the Moscow garrison were taking their places, smart in their best uniforms as they formed up in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. Diplomats and other invited guests were finding their seats in the stands beneath the Kremlin walls. Ordinary people were not allowed into the square without a pass, but they were thronging the surrounding streets in hundreds of thousands, waiting to cheer on the troops as they passed. Wartime regulations had been relaxed for the day to allow people from outside Moscow to come in and enjoy the fun. They had responded willingly, lining the streets in happy, excited crowds as they came to celebrate not only May Day but also the imminent end of the Great Patriotic War.

  Stalin took the salute after the speeches. From the balcony of Lenin’s mausoleum, he presented a benign figure as he beamed down on the troops, bayonets flashing as they goosestepped past. The troops were followed by Jeeps and trucks, speeding tanks and heavy artillery—all the military might of a country at war. Fighter aircraft roared overhead. Stalin watched happily, knowing that the forces were his to command, knowing that the enemy was beaten and that a truly terrible conflict had been won against what had once seemed impossible odds. He said as much in his order of the day to the Russian armed forces:

  Comrades. This year, the peoples of our Motherland are celebrating May Day at the same time as the victorious termination of the Great Patriotic War.

  The Red Army has captured East Prussia, home of German imperialism, Pomerania, the greater part of Brandenburg and the main districts of Germany’s capital Berlin, having hoisted the banner of victory over Berlin …

  The world war unleashed by the German imperialists is drawing to a close. The collapse of Hitlerite Germany is imminent. The Hitlerite ringleaders, who imagined themselves rulers of the world, have found themselves ruined. The mortally wounded Fascist beast is breathing its last. One thing still remains—to deal the death blow to the Fascist beast.

  Fighting men of the Red Army and Navy! The last storming of the Hitlerite lair is on. Set new examples of military skill and gallantry in the concluding battles. Smite the enemy harder, skilfully break up his defence, pursue and surround the German invaders, give them no respite until they cease resistance! 1

  There could have been more. Stalin could have had it announced over the loudspeakers that Hitler was dead and the Germans were suing for peace. Moscow would have erupted if he had. But Stalin held his tongue. He still didn’t know for sure that Hitler was dead. All he had for certain was the unsubstantiated word of a German general, claiming that Hitler had been cremated and no corpse was available for inspection. Hitler could be on his way to South America for all Stalin knew. Much as he would have loved to announce it, he had decided to wait on events before going public with the news that all of Russia was longing to hear.

  * * *

  AS PART of the celebrations, Stalin had decreed that a gun salute was to be fired in all the important cities across the Soviet Union: Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Minsk, the capitals of the satellite republics and many others. The guns in Moscow duly sounded, twenty artillery salvoes reverberating around the city with a resonant boom. The noise penetrated everywhere, even as far as the walls of the Lubianka prison, where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, himself an artillery captain until his arrest, was being held in a cell with five others as he awaited sentencing for anti-Soviet activities.

  In contrast to the rest of Moscow, it was a very quiet day at the Lubianka. The prison was normally very busy, full of noise and activity as prisoners were summoned from their cells and led away for interrogation. Sometimes they were beaten senseless, sometimes merely sent to the punishment block on reduced rations for being found asleep outside the permitted hours or some other trivial offense. But the prison was unnaturally silent that day. One prisoner was beaten up by warders, but nobody was summoned for interrogation, presumably because the interrogators had taken time off and gone to join the May Day celebrations. The Lubianka remained like the grave all day, so quiet by nightfall that the prisoners wondered at the silence and found it more than a little unnerving.

  The blackout shade had just been removed from the window in Solzhenitsyn’s cell. It was still impossible to see out, because the bulk of the window was permanently blocked from the outside by a sheet of metal known as a muzzle, but at least there was some daylight now that the blackout had gone. And maybe the war was over, too, or soon would be, if the prison was no longer being kept in darkness.

  Solzhenitsyn was in cell number 53. Among his cellmates were an engineer, a stool pigeon who relayed everything he heard to the interrogators, and a mentally ill mechanic who had once been chauffeur to Nikita Khrushchev, the rising star of the Communist Party. None of them was a boon companion, but it was a privilege for Solzhenitsyn to share a cell with other people, after so long in solitary confinement. He much preferred it to being on his own, cooped up in one of the punishment boxes with only himself for company.

  Solzhenitsyn had been arrested early in February for criticizing Stalin’s conduct of the war. He had been in East Prussia, serving as a battery commander, when letters to a schoolfriend had been found in which he had been less than respectful about “the whiskered one’s” military strategy. Solzhenitsyn had been careful not to mention Stalin by name and had been no more critical of the leadership than thousands of German and Allied officers in similar complaints to their friends. But the letters were enough to see him relieved of his command and placed under arrest before being taken to Lubianka.

  Unfortunately, it was not only the letters. Solzhenitsyn’s sergeant had gone through his possessions when he was arrested, hurriedly removing a looted German book containing a picture of Hitler before the investigators could find it. But they had found other pictures in his map case: stamp-size portraits of German and Russian leaders taken from a book about the First World War. The portraits had included Tsar Nicholas II and Leon Trotsky, clear evidence of subversive tendencies in Solzhenitsyn. There had been diaries, too, four small notebooks containing the material for a novel about the war. Solzhenitsyn had noted down everything
he had seen for himself in the war or heard from other soldiers, whether it was about the fighting at the front or the misery and famine that the Soviet collectivization of the 1930s had visited on ordinary people. He had kept a note of the soldiers’ names and the dates on which he had spoken to them. The material might not be enough to condemn him, particularly as his interrogators had not gotten around to reading it yet, but it was more than enough to prevent Solzhenitsyn from pleading his innocence. Bowing to the inevitable, he had decided to acknowledge his guilt in due course and accept his punishment, whatever it might be.

  He had a good idea of what the punishment would be. A conviction under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code meant penal servitude, many years of forced labor in a gulag somewhere, hard physical graft for the crime of saying what he thought in a letter to a friend. After serving his sentence, he would not be allowed home. He would be sent into internal exile instead, banished thousands of miles away to spend the rest of his life in some godforsaken spot far from everything he held dear. It was how political prisoners had been treated in the bad old days under the tsar. In his cell at Lubianka, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was slowly beginning to realize that it was how they were treated under communism, too.

  * * *

  THE GUNS BOOMED across Moscow. They boomed also in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, where Lieutenant-General Nikita Khrushchev was commissar. Twenty salvoes were fired, in accordance with Stalin’s decree. The sound echoed noisily across the river Dnieper while Communist officials and local military commanders took the salute at the traditional May Day parade.

  Khrushchev had had a good war. As a political officer at Stalingrad, he had been a pivotal link between Stalin and the front-line generals in the increasingly bitter struggle to defend the city. He had led from the front, spending most of his time with the troops fighting the Germans, rather than safely back at headquarters. He had taken a keen interest in their welfare, seeing to it that the fighting men’s interests were paramount and they received all the food, weapons, and training they needed. He had been promoted to his present rank as a result and had never looked back.

  Stalingrad had taught Khrushchev two invaluable lessons for the future: that war was to be avoided at all costs, and that Stalin himself was not infallible. Like Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev had formed a poor opinion of Stalin’s military capabilities as the war progressed. He also understood the shortcomings of collectivized farming, particularly amid the cornfields of the Ukraine. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, though, Khrushchev was always careful to keep his opinions to himself. As a career politician, he knew better than to say what he thought in a letter to a friend.

  And now the war was all but over. With his services no longer needed at the front, Khrushchev had returned to Kiev earlier in the year to begin rebuilding the Ukraine while the rest of the army pushed on into Germany. He still kept in touch with the troops, particularly Marshal Zhukov. They had known each other before the war and continued to speak regularly on the phone. Zhukov had rung only the other day, full of enthusiasm now that his men were approaching Berlin. “That bugger Hitler,” he had told Khrushchev. “I’m going to put him in a cage soon and bring him to you. When I deliver him to Moscow, I’m going to come through Kiev first, so you can see him, too.”2 Khrushchev was rather looking forward to it. A politician to his fingertips, he recognized a photo opportunity when he saw one.

  * * *

  THE GUNS BOOMED in Odessa, the big Soviet port on the Black Sea. The May Day parade there was held in Kulikovo Square. It was normally a humdrum occasion, attended by local Communist leaders and party officials. That year, however, the apparatchiks were accompanied by a most distinguished guest from abroad: Clementine Churchill, wife of the British prime minister.

  Mrs. Churchill had been in the Soviet Union since April 2. She was touring the country at Stalin’s invitation to see the work being done with equipment provided by the British Red Cross. As patron of Britain’s Aid to Russia Fund, she had raised enough money from voluntary contributions to reequip two hospitals destroyed in the fighting and deliver ambulances, X-ray units, blankets, and warm clothing on a grand scale. She had come to see the results for herself and also report back privately to her husband on the mood of the Russian people as the war came to an end.

  It had been an exhausting few weeks. After flying in to Moscow with Mabel Johnson, secretary of the Aid to Russia Fund, she had gone by special train to Leningrad, still recovering from more than eight hundred days of German siege. From there, the two women and their staff had continued to Stalingrad, scene of the greatest single battle of the war. Clementine had had a distinct sense of déjà vu as they approached the ruins of the city:

  My first thought was, how like the centre of Coventry or the devastation around St Paul’s, except that here the havoc and obliteration seems to spread out endlessly. One building that caught my eye was a wreck that had been ingeniously patched and shored up. I learned that it was the building in whose cellar the Russians had captured von Paulus, the German commander. It was characteristic of them, I thought, to make every effort to preserve this ruin because of its symbolic value.3

  After Stalingrad, Clementine had gone to the Crimea, where she met the sister of the playwright Chekhov and stayed at the Vorontzov Palace, occupying the same room as her husband had during the Yalta conference. From there, she and Mabel Johnson had arrived eventually at Odessa, where they were spending two days before returning to Moscow and a flight home.

  It was a busy day. After watching the parade, Clementine was taken to a holding camp to meet British prisoners of war who had been liberated by the Russians. There were about 250 of them, captured earlier by the Germans and now awaiting repatriation. A ship had just arrived to take them home. The prisoners were delighted to meet Winston Churchill’s wife, knowing that the war was almost over and they were about to go home. She was pleased to see them, too:

  It heightened for us the happy sense of liberation that filled the air, as the war news poured in, and made the pulses beat faster to see our own men going home, freed from the miseries of captivity and knowing that soon they would be with their families again after the long and bitter separation.

  We also went to a camp of one thousand French civilians who had been deported into Germany to do forced labour. These poor fellows were in sorry straits after years of hardship, slave work and poor rations. Many of them had been tattooed for identification purposes.4

  Clementine was shocked to meet a Frenchwoman so brutalized by the Germans that she was no longer sure of her own name. “I think I know it now,” she told Clementine, after some thought, “but up to a week ago I used to think of myself by my number only.”5 She showed Clementine her arm, with her camp number tattooed on it. Plenty of other women were in the same state, reduced to mere ciphers after years of slave labor for the Germans. As a major embarkation port, Odessa was full of such people as the war came to an end: Dutch and Belgian prisoners newly liberated from the Nazis, disparate Czechs and Slovaks, captured Hungarian and Romanian troops, Germans in ragged uniforms, Jews from Auschwitz. The camps were overflowing with displaced persons from all over Europe. Most were in a splendid mood that day, happy and cheerful as May Day was celebrated and the war was over and the news filtered through of Mrs. Churchill’s visit. All they needed now was a ship to take them home.

  * * *

  OTTO FRANK was not one of those who met Mrs. Churchill, but he took great comfort from her arrival. Everyone in his camp was given thirty cigarettes in honor of her visit, and a double ration of chocolate. The cigarettes were particularly welcome, because they could be traded outside the camp for supplies of white bread.

  Frank had been in Odessa since April 24. After their arrest in Amsterdam the previous August, he and his family had been deported to Auschwitz, where they had been separated on arrival. His wife had later been selected for the gas chamber, but had managed to escape to another barrack block, dying eventually of disease. His two daughters had been sent to Bergen
-Belsen. Frank himself had been lucky to escape execution. He had been in the camp hospital, weighing just over a hundred pounds, when the Russians liberated Auschwitz in January.

  The long journey home had begun in March. Frank had been taken initially to a refugee camp at Katowice, where he had enjoyed his first decent bath in months. There he had learned from another inmate of his wife’s death. No one knew anything of his children, so he presumed they were still in Germany somewhere, perhaps already on their way home.

  The onward journey to Odessa had taken three weeks by train, meandering past the Carpathians via Tarnow and Czernowitz. Frank had traded a shirt for bread at one point and a blanket for apples. At other times he had been well fed by local people, Jews and Gentiles alike, who had given him what they had and refused any payment. He had been irritated to learn on April 17 that he was not to proceed to Odessa with the other refugees because he was German born (and had fought for the Kaiser on the Western Front). But the order had been rescinded a few days later and Frank had arrived in the port without further delay.

  One of his shoes had split during the walk to the refugee camp, but Frank had taken it in his stride. With his bartering skills, he would soon find another from somewhere. He had had a bath and been deloused again when he arrived, and then fed by the Red Cross: “Butter, meat, cheese, jam, soap, egg, salmon, chocolate, tea, milk, oatmeal.” It all seemed like a dream, after Auschwitz.

  Best of all, though, better even than Mrs. Churchill’s visit or the chocolate or the cigarettes, was the news that Otto Frank was about to go home. A ship was sailing in two days’ time, and his name was on the list. Another forty-eight hours and he would be on the Black Sea. A few days after that he would be back in Europe somewhere, liberated Europe, on his way to Amsterdam.