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

by Nicholas Best

Von Braun was a scientist before he was anything else. He wanted to deliver his entire team to the United States to ensure that their expertise was safely preserved for the benefit of all mankind. Nobody knew more about rockets than von Braun and his men. They could go to the moon with their rockets, once the technical challenges had been overcome. But they could only do it with American help.

  Conferring with his brother Magnus, von Braun decided that if the Americans weren’t coming to them, they must go to the Americans. Magnus spoke the best English of the party. If the Americans hadn’t arrived by the next day, it was agreed that he should go and fetch them on his bicycle. If he went down the mountain, he could surely find some American troops somewhere and bring them back to the hotel. The Americans would be delighted to arrest von Braun and his team, once they realized that all the research and rocket data from Peenemünde was hidden in a mine shaft in the Harz Mountains, and only von Braun knew where.

  * * *

  FARTHER EAST, the trickle of soldiers deserting from the Wehrmacht was threatening to turn into a flood as the remaining forces in Bavaria joined the retreat toward the mountains. With Munich gone and the war obviously lost, there seemed little point in continuing the fight any longer. Soldiers were voting with their feet instead, abandoning their units and slipping quietly away, shedding their uniforms and heading for home to be reunited with their families.

  Among them was Josef Ratzinger. As an eighteen-year-old conscript, small and distinctly unmilitary, Private Ratzinger had been against the war from the very beginning. He came from a family of devout Catholics who had been forced to move house before the war because of his policeman father’s anti-Nazi outbursts. The Ratzingers had never wanted anything to do with German militarism.

  Ratzinger himself had been in a seminary, training for the priesthood, when he was called up. He had served initially in an antiaircraft battery, defending the BMW works north of Munich and then the Dornier factory west of the city. The battery itself had been attacked once, with a man killed and others wounded. With no stomach for the war, Ratzinger had been delighted to hear of the Allied invasion of Normandy, if it meant a quick end to the fighting. He lived only for getting back to the seminary and catching up on his Latin and Greek.

  He had been released from the flak battery late in 1944, when he became old enough to join the real army. The SS held a recruiting session soon afterward, hauling the young men out of bed one night and calling on them to volunteer in front of their peers. Quite a few had obliged, too sleepy and malleable to say no. Ratzinger had refused, pointing out that he was going to be a Catholic priest after the war. The SS had sneered at that, sending him out of the room to a chorus of abuse. Ratzinger hadn’t minded. He had seen slave laborers from Dachau and had watched Hungarian Jews being transported to their deaths. He didn’t want to be in the SS.

  Sent home instead to Traunstein, near Berchtesgaden, Ratzinger had done his basic training at the local barracks, marching through the streets with his platoon, singing military songs to reassure the local population. But his heart had never been in it. He was just waiting for the war to stop so that he could go back to the seminary and become a priest.

  And now his wish was coming true. The war was almost over. Ratzinger’s family lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Traunstein. He could be there in an hour, if he was prepared to slip away from his barracks.

  It was still dangerous, of course. Deserters were still being hanged if they were caught, or shot against the nearest wall. But the risk seemed worth it to Ratzinger as the Wehrmacht began to disintegrate. He decided to try his luck:

  I knew that the town was surrounded by soldiers who had orders to shoot deserters on the spot. For this reason I used a little-known back road out of the town, hoping to get through unmolested. But, as I walked out of a railway underpass, two soldiers were standing at their posts, and for a moment the situation was extremely critical for me. Thank God that they, too, had had enough of war and did not want to become murderers. Nevertheless, they still needed an excuse to let me go. Because of an injury I had my arm in a sling, and so they said: “Comrade, you are wounded. Move on!”7

  Ratzinger needed no urging. Putting the war behind him, he set off for home without a backward glance.

  * * *

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Alps, Leni Riefenstahl was on her way to Mayrhofen. After completing the dubbing of her latest film, Tiefland, she had abandoned her studio at Kitzbühel and was heading for the mountains to stay with an old lover until the war was over. As a public figure indelibly linked to Hitler, she did not want to be in Kitzbühel when the Allies arrived. She would feel a lot safer with Hans Schneeberger, keeping a low profile at his cousin’s boarding house in the mountains.

  Riefenstahl had moved to Kitzbühel in 1943 to escape the bombing. She had set up a makeshift studio in the town, storing her film archive in an old castle at first to protect it from air raids. Changing her mind as the fighting came closer, she had sent the originals of some of her most important films to German HQ in Italy for safekeeping. Three metal boxes containing the negatives of Triumph of the Will and other Nazi films had been taken by car to Bolzano in April, but Riefenstahl had heard nothing of them since. With all the chaos on the roads, she didn’t even know if the car had reached its destination.

  She was leaving Kitzbühel with reluctance. Her mother was still there, and her film crew. Riefenstahl wanted to stay with them, sticking together as the enemy arrived, but they were all adamant that she should go. They didn’t want to be associated with her when the Allies came, particularly if the Russians got there first. The Riefenstahl name would jeopardize them all if she stayed. Even her mother had begged her to go.

  She was all alone as she set out. Her brother was dead, killed by a grenade on the Eastern Front. Her husband was in the army somewhere, possibly Berlin, since that was where she had last heard from him. As Hitler’s most talented filmmaker, Riefenstahl had once had everyone at her beck and call, senior Nazis falling over themselves to accommodate her wishes and provide her with everything she needed. But they had all melted away as Hitler’s star faded. Even the Nazis in Kitzbühel, subservient lickspittles in the past, were tearing up their party cards and reinventing themselves as resistance fighters. Nobody knew if it would be the Russians or the Americans who reached the town first, but there were already banners across the street welcoming the liberators, whoever they might be. The only certainty was that nobody wanted Riefenstahl.

  Adolf Galland, the air ace, had managed to procure twenty liters of petrol for her car. It was just enough to get to Mayrhofen. Riefenstahl was full of gloom as she started out, wondering if she was ever going to see her mother again, or her husband, wondering if she would ever make another film. She was taking all her remaining valuables with her, including her most cherished possession, the original negative of Olympia, her prizewinning account of the 1936 Olympic Games. It was one of the most admired films of all time, not least for Riefenstahl’s nude dancing in the prologue and the Olympic torch run into the stadium, an idea she had dreamed up with one of the officials to add drama to the opening ceremony. She was just hoping that she would be able to hang on to it in the days ahead and then continue her film career uninterrupted once the war was finally over.

  20

  DÖNITZ SPEAKS TO THE NATION

  BACK IN BERLIN, MAGDA GÖBBELS WAS about to kill her children. She had six by Göbbels: a son and five daughters. Kind Dr. Stumpfegger was waiting with sedatives to send them to sleep, after which their mother was going to poison them with cyanide. Rochus Misch, the bunker’s switchboard operator, was one of the last to see them alive:

  “All of the children were now wearing white nightgowns. This was their usual time for bed. Five were sitting in chairs. Heidi had scrambled up onto the table. She was still suffering from tonsillitis and had a scarf around her neck. Helga, the tallest, oldest and brightest, was sobbing quietly. I think she dimly suspected the mayhem about to come. She was most defin
itely Daddy’s girl, with no great fondness for her mother.”1

  Misch squirmed as Magda Göbbels made a great play of combing the children’s hair and kissing each of them affectionately, as she had every evening for the past week. “I watched all of this with apprehension. I was appalled. I still have it on my conscience today that I did nothing but sit there on my backside, because I sensed what was about to happen. At the same time, watching the mother, I just couldn’t believe it. I suppose I didn’t want to believe it.”2

  Without a word to anyone, Magda took the children upstairs to their room. Heidi, the youngest, turned back to Misch for a moment before climbing the stairs. “Misch, Misch, du bist ein Fisch,” she giggled. Misch watched miserably as she disappeared, then began to say his rosary for them, praying that even at this late stage Magda might still relent and let the children go.

  It was an hour before she reappeared. Accounts vary as to how the children died. They may have been injected with morphine or drugged with chocolates laced with Finodin “to prevent air sickness.” From the bruises on her body, twelve-year-old Helga may have woken up and struggled as her mother forced a cyanide capsule between her teeth. Whatever the manner of the children’s death, Magda Göbbels was red-eyed with weeping when she came downstairs again. Misch couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t have the children with her: “At first she just stood there, wringing her hands. Then she pulled herself together and lit a cigarette. She did not speak or even nod to me, though she was only a few feet away as she passed by.”3

  There was a small champagne bottle on the table in the corridor. Misch watched as Magda took it into the little room that Göbbels had been using as a study:

  She had left his door open. I got up, walked past, and could see that she had taken out a pack of small cards and had begun to play patience [solitaire]. Instinctively, I knew that her children were no longer of this world. Another ten minutes or so passed. Then she got up and stalked out. Again, we didn’t speak to each other. What was there to say? 4

  Magda went to join her husband. Göbbels had completed the last entry in his diary, the seven-page summary of his life’s work for posterity. Entrusting it to Werner Naumann, his ministry secretary, for safekeeping, he sat with Magda and Bormann for a while, drinking champagne and chain-smoking as they reminisced over old times. Various people drifted in and out, coming to say goodbye. The Göbbelses withdrew for some private time together and then reappeared just before eight thirty that evening. General Mohnke and two junior officers, Schwägermann and Olds, were the only ones still present. Mohnke watched as Göbbels gave Schwägermann an autographed picture of the Führer as a farewell gift and then set off to commit suicide:

  Going over to the coat-rack in the small room that had served as his study, he donned his hat, his scarf, his long uniform overcoat. Slowly, he drew on his kid gloves, making each finger snug. Then, like a cavalier, he offered his right arm to his wife. They were wordless now. So were we three spectators. Slowly but steadily, leaning a bit on each other, they headed up the stairs to the courtyard.5

  They passed Misch as they went. “I don’t need you any more,” Göbbels told him. “Les jeux sont faits.”6 Continuing upstairs, he and Magda paused for a moment at the exit to the bunker, then stepped out together into the Chancellery garden.

  Shots followed. As soon as he heard them, Schwägermann went out with some SS men to burn the bodies. As Göbbels had earlier requested, one of the men fired a bullet into each corpse to make sure they were dead. Then they sprinkled gasoline over them and set the bodies alight. The flames burned for a few minutes and then went out, leaving the charred remains of Göbbels and his wife still perfectly recognizable amid the rubble. But nobody took any notice. They had already forgotten about Göbbels and were thinking only of saving themselves as night deepened and they prepared to make their breakout from the bunker.

  * * *

  TRAUDL JUNGE was in the first group to escape. She had watched in dismay as a nurse and a man in a white coat emerged from the children’s room in the upper bunker lugging a heavy crate between them. The crate had been followed by another, both of them the right size for a child’s body. Shocked, Junge was glad to leave the bunker soon afterward. Passing Hitler’s door as she went, she saw that his gray overcoat was still hanging on the coat stand, with his cap above it, his pale suede gloves, and a dog leash. The stand looked like a gallows to her.

  Hans Baur, one of Hitler’s pilots, had earlier taken the Führer’s portrait of Frederick the Great out of its frame and rolled it up, claiming that Hitler had left it to him as a souvenir. Junge thought of taking one of Hitler’s gloves, but although she reached for it, she couldn’t quite bring herself to. She wasn’t taking Eva Braun’s fur coat, either. All she had as she left the bunker for the last time were her pistol and the cyanide capsule Hitler had given her as a farewell present, apologizing that it wasn’t anything nicer.

  Otto Günsche led the way to the New Chancellery. Junge and Konstanze Manziarly followed, keeping close behind him as he pushed through the crowds with his broad shoulders. Some women packed a bag before they made their escape, but Junge had decided to take very little with her when they left: no money, clothes, or food, just a few treasured photographs and a supply of cigarettes. She had already destroyed her identity papers. In boots and steel helmet, she was ready and waiting when the order was given for everyone to assemble in the garage underneath the Chancellery’s Hall of Honour, facing the Wilhelmstrasse and the U-Bahn station beyond.

  The vehicles in the garage had been pushed aside to make room for the escape. Ernst-Günther Schenck watched quietly as people began to appear:

  From the dark gangways, they kept arriving, in small groups, both the fighting troops being pulled in from the outside, then the officers and men of the Reich Chancellery group. The troops, many very young, were already street fighting veterans. Other soldiers had stubble beards, blackened faces. They wore sweaty, torn, field-grey uniforms, which most had worn and slept in, without change, for almost a fortnight.

  The situation was heroic; the mood was not. The official announcement of Hitler’s suicide had not yet reached the lower ranks. But they guessed as much—from the silence of their officers. There was little talk now of “Führer, Folk and Fatherland.” To a man, each German soldier was silently calculating his own chance of survival. For all the discipline, what was now building up was less a military operation in the classic sense than what I imagine happens at sea when the cry goes out to man the lifeboats.7

  General Mohnke was in command. He was carrying copies of Hitler’s testaments for delivery to Dönitz and had a bagful of diamonds in his underwear, the kind used for decorating the Knight’s Cross. The escape was to be made in ten groups, leaving the Chancellery at twenty-minute intervals. The first group was to consist mainly of those who had been in the bunker with Hitler, including the three female secretaries and Konstanze Manziarly, his cook. They waited as troops broke open the bricked-up window looking out on the Wilhelmstrasse. Pistol in hand, Mohnke was first through, checking the street for Russians. Seeing none, he gave the all-clear, and the rest of the first group followed him in rapid succession, scrambling through the window and hurrying frantically along the street toward the U-Bahn station a hundred yards away across the square.

  Traudl Junge remembered it thus:

  We clamber over half-wrecked staircases, through holes in walls and rubble, always going further up and out. At last the Wilhelmsplatz stretches ahead, shining in the moonlight. The dead horse is still lying there on the paving stones, but only the remains of it now. Hungry people have come out of the U-Bahn tunnels to slice off pieces of meat.

  Soundlessly, we cross the square. There’s sporadic shooting, but the gunfire is worse further away. Reaching the U-Bahn tunnel outside the ruins of the Kaiserhof, we go down and make our way forward in the darkness, climbing over the wounded and the homeless, past resting soldiers …8

  It wasn’t quite as simple as t
hat. The stairs down to the U-Bahn had been shot away, forcing Junge and the others to scramble over the wreckage as best they could. They were reluctant to use their flashlights in case the Russians were waiting for them at the bottom. Stumbling toward the station platform, they stood listening for a moment, wondering if they were about to be attacked. There were certainly people on the platform, because they could hear them moving about in the darkness.

  The people were German. The platform was packed with civilians and wounded soldiers, some of whom had been there for a week. As one of them explained to Mohnke: “We kept as quiet as mice, putting out all our candles and hushing the babies. We thought you were all Ivans.”

  Pushing through, the bunker party jumped down onto the railway track. The next station was Stadtmitte, to the east. From there, they intended to turn north and head along the tunnel under the Russian lines, aiming for Friedrichstrasse, the main-line station on the banks of the Spree. If they reached Friedrichstrasse without mishap, they planned to cross the river and link up with other German units believed to be still fighting in the northern outskirts of the city.

  It was a terrifying experience. Worried that they might bump into Russian soldiers at any moment, Mohnke forbade the use of flashlights as they set off. In fact, the Russians were very wary of the subway system, fearing that the Germans intended to flood it, but Mohnke didn’t know this. Nor did he know if the third rail was still electrified. An attempt to short-circuit it by stringing field telephone wires across the other two rails had suggested not, but the power plant was now in Russian hands, and there was nothing to stop them reconnecting the supply at any moment.

  Mohnke and Günsche went first. The rest followed, strung out over a hundred yards along the tunnel. Schenck put himself in charge of the women, patting their behinds every so often to keep them moving. They reached Stadtmitte without any trouble and found the platform crowded with refugees, just as the Kaiserhof had been. An abandoned subway car had been turned into a makeshift operating theater, with several surgeons working nonstop by candlelight.