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

by Nicholas Best

  After a brief cigarette break, they continued north toward Freidrichstrasse. Several members of the group had dropped out by the time they arrived. There was an artillery barrage overhead, shaking the tunnel with every salvo, sometimes even making the rails tremble. Fearing that the roof might collapse, Mohnke hurried on, leading Junge and the others past Friedrichstrasse station into the tunnel that led under the river Spree toward the north of the city.

  They hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when they came to a giant steel barrier across the track. It was a waterproof bulkhead, closed every night after the last train had left, to seal the tunnel under the river and prevent an accidental flood. No trains had run for the past week, but the nightly ritual continued. Two officials of the Berlin transport company had just closed the barrier and were surrounded by an angry group of civilians urging them to open it again.

  Mohnke joined them, telling the officials to open it at once. They refused, citing a regulation that dated from 1923. They had the regulations with them and showed Mohnke the relevant section. Standing orders were quite clear. The barrier was to be kept shut at night.

  Mohnke was a brigadier-general with a gun. He had come straight from Hitler’s Chancellery. The officials were no-account employees of the U-Bahn company. But they were all German, and orders were orders, there to be obeyed. Against his better judgment, Mohnke backed down. The barrier remained shut.

  Retracing their steps, the group headed back to Friedrichstrasse station. While the others waited below, Mohnke climbed what remained of the stairs to reconnoiter the situation above ground. The river was only a hundred yards from the station. If they could only find a way across, they might discover friendly faces the other side.

  Emerging from the U-Bahn, Mohnke was shocked at what he saw:

  For the first time since fleeing the Reich Chancellery, I now had a panoramic view of the Berlin night time battlefield. It was unlike any previous one I had ever seen. It looked more like a painting, something apocalyptic by Hieronymous Bosch. Even to a hardened soldier, it was most unreal, phantasmagoric. Most of the great city was pitch dark. The moon was hiding, but flares, shell bursts, the burning buildings, all these reflected on a low-lying, blackish-yellow cloud of sulphur-like smoke. I couldn’t make out anything remotely resembling a clear battle line. But I spotted the launch sites of the Katyusha rockets and I calculated they were only about a mile away from us, in the direction of the Tiergarten.9

  The river Spree lay immediately in front of them. They had to cross somehow. There were Russians on the upper Freidrichstrasse, three or four blocks ahead, and the Weidendammer Bridge was blocked by a German anti-tank trap. Mohnke looked for another way across.

  Fortunately, after some reconnaissance, we found a narrow catwalk or swinging bridge just north of us and to our left. It was less than two yards wide. The way was blocked by concertina barbed wire, but we quickly cleared it with our wire cutters. My group—which had now dwindled to twelve—all scurried across at the double, knowing that our silhouettes were casting long dancing shadows on the water below. We made excellent moving targets, like dummies in a shooting gallery. But we all got across. No shots rang out.10

  Traudl Junge was still in the group, sticking close to Konstanze Manziarly and Gerda Christian as they scuttled across the bridge. She remembered an inferno behind them as snipers opened up on others trying to follow them. The plan had been for all the groups breaking out of the Chancellery to keep together after they left, maintaining contact as they tried to rejoin their own lines. It quickly proved unworkable. Even people in the same group had trouble keeping together in the chaos. It was every man for himself as they raced across the bridge and threw themselves down in the rubble the other side.

  They still had a long way to go. They were in no-man’s-land now, an endless vista of blocked streets and ruined buildings, cellars full of frightened civilians waiting for the Russians to appear. There was safety somewhere, but nobody knew where. After resting in a cellar for a few minutes, Mohnke’s group picked themselves up again and set off uncertainly for the north of the city. They had no real plan as they started out. They all knew, without saying so, that they would be lucky to get through the night alive, let alone return safely to their own lines.

  * * *

  WHILE JUNGE and the others prepared to escape from the Chancellery, Hildegard Knef and Ewald von Demandowsky were on Albrecht-Achillesstrasse waiting to be executed. “You deserted your company,” an officer had told them curtly, when they were brought in. He had ordered them to join a line of similar offenders awaiting sentence. They had all been herded together under the cold eye of a guard, who walked up and down the line telling everyone to keep quiet as they braced themselves to hear their fate.

  “They’re going to hang us,”11 whispered the elderly private next to Knef. She didn’t doubt it for a moment. They had already hanged plenty of others on the streets outside.

  But fate intervened. As they stood waiting, a Russian shell burst through the door, killing several people and wounding others as it spewed shrapnel everywhere. Knef hit the floor at once. Grabbing some of Demandowsky’s cigarettes, she rolled over to the guard and thrust them at him in the confusion, telling him that she was a woman and Demandowsky was her husband. “Take these and let us go,” she pleaded. “Please let us go.”

  The guard stared at her uncomprehendingly. Knef shook him in exasperation when he didn’t reply. Then she saw that he was dead. Seizing the moment, she and Demandowsky ran for their lives. They didn’t look back as they scrambled over arms and legs and rushed for the door just as the wall buckled and the building began to collapse.

  Outside, an old man from the Volkssturm was kneeling in despair with his head between his knees. His wife was buried beneath the rubble in a house that had just collapsed. Slipping past him, Knef and Demandowsky ran down an alley, only to be stopped at gunpoint by a lieutenant. Knef removed her helmet to show that she was a woman. Grinning, the lieutenant tossed them a bar of chocolate and sent them on their way.

  They found shelter in a crater with three soldiers. “Put your lid on!” one of them yelled at Knef as she and Demandowsky joined them. She felt much more comfortable without a helmet, but there were Russians in a nearby house, sniping at anything that moved. Putting it back on, she crouched down in the hole as bullets whizzed past. Demandowsky produced his cigarettes and passed them round. They all sat smoking and keeping watch while they waited for night to fall.

  Once it was safely dark, the soldiers took lengths of rope from their pouches and tied themselves together, like mountaineers. They tied Knef and Demandowsky, too. Emerging cautiously from their foxhole, they set off along the street, keeping a wary eye out for Russians as they probed forward in the gloom. But there were no Russians around. They found only Germans, happy and excited Germans, Germans who had been cheered by some very welcome news:

  Two tanks have collided at the corner. There are soldiers sitting on them, others standing around. “Hitler’s dead!” they shout. “Hitler’s dead, the war’s over!” Someone down the street repeats it, it echoes through the ruins, over the bridge, up and down the canals. They crawl out of their holes and doorways, surge together into a trampling, stamping swelling herd. The rope between us breaks, we shout our names, clutch each other, and are swept forward by an endless torrent.12

  * * *

  THE NEWS was official at last. It had been formally announced on the radio from Hamburg. Solemn music from Wagner and Bruckner had presaged “a serious and important message” for the German people. The music had been interrupted by a roll of drums at three minutes past ten that evening, followed by the somber tones of the radio announcer:

  Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon at his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz his successor. The Grand Admiral and successor to the Führer now speaks to the German people.
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  Dönitz’s address was equally apocalyptic:

  German men and women, soldiers of the German armed forces! Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. The German people bow in deepest sorrow and respect. He was quick to recognise the terrible danger of Bolshevism and dedicated his life to the struggle against it. At the end of the struggle he died a hero’s death in the capital of the German Reich, after having followed an unswervingly straight path through life. It was a unique service for Germany. His mission in the battle against the Bolshevik storm-flood was undertaken on behalf of Europe and the entire civilised world.

  The Führer has appointed me as his successor. Fully conscious of the responsibility, I assume the leadership of the German people at this fateful hour …

  Dönitz’s primary task was to save the Germans in the east from the advancing Bolsheviks. The war had to go on for that reason alone, he told his listeners. It had to go on against the British and Americans, too, since they were hindering the fight against Bolshevism. Calling on all Germans to maintain order and discipline in the difficult days ahead, Dönitz urged them to do everything they could to stave off collapse. “If we do all that is in our power to do,” he assured them, “God will not abandon us after so much suffering and sacrifice.” In an afterword to the Wehrmacht, he added that the oath they had sworn to Hitler was now owed to him, as Hitler’s successor. Any soldier who shirked his responsibilities and thereby brought death and enslavement to German women and children was a coward and a traitor. “German soldiers!” he ended sternly. “Do your duty! The lives of our people depend on it!”

  * * *

  IN THE BARRACKS at Ruhleben, Helmut Altner could not conceal his dismay at Dönitz’s words. There had been no mention of peace in the broadcast, no talk of the war coming to an end. Only of holding on and continuing the fight. But for what, when Germany was already overrun and Himmler was rumored to be negotiating with the Western Allies? To Altner, a little drunk on the Schnapps that had been distributed earlier in the day, Dönitz sounded just the same as Hitler, ranting about the Bolsheviks and ordering everyone else to keep fighting when it was obvious the war was lost and further resistance was useless. It made little sense to him.

  I go back across to the sleeping room. With the effects of the alcohol, everyone is merry and having a good time. Then somebody says what he is going to do when peace comes. The general feeling is that Dönitz will not continue the fight. Meanwhile, the can is being refilled again and again. Everyone is drinking as much as possible, and the company sergeant major, the lieutenant and the other officers are looking on quietly. It occurs to me that they are letting us do this because not many of us will survive tomorrow.

  Suddenly the company commander enters the room and waves down those who start to get up. He sits down and takes a drink of schnapps with us. Then he speaks about the order of the day from the new head of state and tries to explain to us why the fighting has to go on. “We will have peace with the western powers within the next few days,” he says. “Then it will only be against the Bolsheviks, and that won’t go on much longer, only until the summer, and then you can all go home. And the oath to our glorious Führer is transferred to his successor. Anybody wanting to desert will be shot. The war goes on!”13

  An unhappy silence followed the company commander’s speech. If the war was to go on, then the dying would continue, too. Peace had been dangled in front of everyone, then cruelly snatched away again, as far out of reach as ever. Turning back to the Schnapps as the company commander left, the soldiers poured more drinks and consoled themselves with alcohol as they contemplated a dismal future.

  In the next room, the SS girls could be seen through the open door. Some were sitting at the table, but others were lying on beds alongside the soldiers. Two of the girls came through to Altner’s room draped in a blanket. Throwing it dramatically aside, they stood stark naked for a moment, while everyone roared with laughter. Then the girls returned to their own room “like sheepish poodles” and went back to the war.

  * * *

  LENI RIEFENSTAHL was in Mayrhofen. She had arrived after a long drive to find the streets crowded with soldiers retreating from the Russians. Heading for the hotel where she had arranged to meet Hans Schneeberger, she had taken a room and fallen asleep at once, exhausted after her journey. She awoke later that evening to find Schneeberger’s wife, Gisela, standing over her.

  Gisela was half-Jewish, an attractive redhead who worked for Riefenstahl in the photo lab at the film studio. She had recently been in prison, facing almost certain death for complaining about Hitler on a railway train. She had been saved by Leni, who had used her influence with the Gestapo to get her out. Leni had put a lot of effort into it in the hope that doing something for a Jew might count in her favor when the day of reckoning came.

  Gisela had been grateful at the time, but seemed less so now. There was a distinct chill in her voice as she contemplated Riefenstahl’s luggage and asked, perhaps sarcastically, if that was all there was. Riefenstahl was puzzled.

  Amazed at her attitude, I was about to ask her what had happened, when suddenly there was uproar in the restaurant underneath us. Gisela ran downstairs and returned an instant later, did a dance of joy and shouted, “Hitler is dead—he’s dead!” What we had been expecting for a long time had finally come, and I cannot describe what I felt at that moment. A chaos of emotions raged in me. I threw myself on the bed and wept all night.14

  * * *

  EMMY GÖRING was in bed, too. Plagued with heart problems and sciatica, she had gone to bed early in the gloomy castle at Mauterndorf, while the SS kept guard outside. Still worried that his telegram of April 23 had been interpreted as disloyalty to the Führer, Hermann Göring had learned of Hitler’s death from their doctor’s radio. He went at once to tell Emmy.

  My husband came to my bed and said simply: “Adolf Hitler is dead.” I immediately felt an indescribable relief. I thought I should make some reply but I could find absolutely nothing to say. After a fairly long pause, Hermann said: “Now I’ll never be able to justify myself to him, to tell him to his face that he’s slandered me and that I’ve always been faithful to him!” He repeated these words several times.15

  Göring was so upset that Emmy wondered if he was losing his mind. She knew he was on heavy medication, not thinking straight. Worried that the shock of Hitler’s death might push him over the edge and cause him to do something rash, she decided to divert Göring’s attention to her own problems.

  “I suddenly cried: ‘Hermann, I don’t feel well! I’ve got a terrible pain in my heart!’ It was obviously a rather childish device in the circumstances, but I had instinctively found the words that saved the situation.”

  “I’ll go and get the doctor,” Göring said at once.

  * * *

  WILLY BRANDT was in Sweden, attending a May Day rally in Stockholm. He was walking to the platform to say a few words on behalf of the International Workers Council when a note was thrust into his hand telling him that Hitler was dead. He was to announce it in his speech.

  The news could hardly have been better timed. Brandt had been an enemy of the Nazis from the very beginning, from long before their rise to power. Born illegitimate under another name, he had been a left-wing activist since his teens, bitterly opposed to everything the Nazis stood for and actively involved in street fighting against their thugs. He had fled Germany in 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, bribing a fisherman to take him to Denmark with a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in his luggage.

  From Denmark, Brandt had gone to Norway, applying later for citizenship, after the Nazis revoked his passport. He had been forced to flee again in 1940, when the country was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Brandt had spent the rest of the war in Stockholm, one of many like-minded Germans in the Swedish capital. They had formed a center of opposition to Hitler, an essential link between the Resistance movement in Germany and the outside world. Brandt and his friends had known about the gas chambers earlier than mos
t, and had been in close touch with the July 1944 conspirators seeking to assassinate Hitler and bring the war to a quick end.

  And now the man was dead at last, perhaps by his own hand. Brandt wasted no time letting his listeners know. He was puzzled by their muted response:

  When I announced it to the audience, a deep silence was the answer, no applause, no joyful shouts. It was as if the people simply couldn’t believe that the end had actually come. And at the same time a question stood almost physically in the room: Hitler’s dreadful challenge to all mankind—had it really ended in this way? 16

  Only time would tell. But Hitler had certainly gone and wouldn’t be coming back. Brandt knew he would be able to go home as soon as the war was over. Yet where was home now? It was Norway for the moment, the country of which he was happy to be a naturalized citizen. In the longer term, though, Germany was the country of his birth and the land he still loved, despite all the shame of the past twelve years. There was a future for him in Germany, now that the Nazis no longer held sway. A future for millions like him, too, now that ordinary Germans were free to return to their towns and villages to pick up the pieces and begin rebuilding their lives and their country from the ground up.

  PART FIVE

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1945

  21

  THE NEWS IS OUT

  WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS AT DINNER WHEN he learned of Hitler’s death. After returning to London from Chequers, he had gone to the House of Commons that afternoon for the prime minister’s question time. The House had been packed with members hoping to hear that the war was over, but Churchill had been unable to oblige them. “I have no special statement to make about the war position in Europe,” he had apologised, “except that it is definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago!”1