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

by Nicholas Best

  They managed to stay together until nightfall. Konstanze Manziarly was still wearing her Wehrmacht jacket, but decided that civilian clothing would be less conspicuous. She went off to find something suitable while Gerda Christian and Else Krüger looked around for a place to hide for the night. They all lost contact after that. The last Junge saw of Manziarly, she had reappeared in the company of two Russian soldiers, who were leading her down toward the entrance of a U-Bahn tunnel.

  “They want to see my papers,” she yelled over her shoulder, as she disappeared into the gloom.9

  She was never seen again.

  * * *

  WHILE JUNGE emerged nervously from the brewery, Martin Bormann was lying dead and unrecognized near the Lehrter railway station, across the river from the Reichstag. He had Hitler’s last will and testament with him, unless he had lost it during the night.

  Bormann had been with the third group to break out from the bunker. The plan had been for him to slip through the Russian lines and then fly north with the pilot Hans Baur to deliver the will to Dönitz. Following the first two groups, they had set off along the U-Bahn tunnel from the Kaiserhof station, but had taken a wrong turn somewhere and got lost. Surfacing at Stadtmitte, they had headed along the street instead, aiming for the Weidendammer Bridge across the river. The tank trap that had prevented Junge’s group from crossing had just been blown to pieces by Tiger tanks from the SS. Baur and Bormann lost touch as they scuttled across, but linked up again on Friedrichstrasse, where Baur found Bormann on the steps of a bombed-out house with a dead Russian sprawled in front of him.

  The way north was blocked by the enemy, so they turned west instead, heading past the Reichstag toward the Lehrter station. According to Baur, they were taking shelter in a ruined tenement when they spotted twenty Russians in the backyard. With only an hour left to daybreak, they made a hurried exit, keeping the river to their left as they continued toward the station.

  Snipers soon spotted them. Baur lost sight of Bormann again as they dived for cover behind the railway embankment. He was next seen by Artur Axmann, the Reich youth leader who had lost an arm on the Russian front. Axmann’s group joined forces with Bormann and Dr. Stumpfegger and crept forward with them along the bridge toward the station:

  Several of us jumped down from the bridge and found, to our dismay, that there was a whole Russian infantry platoon camped underneath. They promptly surrounded us. But to our joy and amazement they simply kept announcing in a boisterous chorus: “Hitler kaputt, Krieg aus!”

  They then chatted very pleasantly to us in broken German. They all seemed fascinated by my artificial arm. I kept showing it to them as if it was the latest product from some Nuremberg toy factory. Then they graciously offered us papirosi—cigarettes with paper tips. Apparently they thought we were simple Volkssturm men returning from a long, hard evening at the front.

  What spoiled this little fraternisation was a psychologically inept move by the drunken Bormann and Dr Stumpfegger. They began to edge away and finally ran off. This put the Russians on their guard, but Weltzin and I were able to shuffle off as casually as possible without being noticed.10

  Continuing on their way, Axmann and his aide, Günther Weltzin, ran into more Russians, prompting them to retrace their steps and try a different route. They had reached a bridge over the railway lines leading to the Lehrter station when:

  We now came across the bodies of Martin Bormann and Dr Stumpfegger, lying very close together. I leaned over and could see the moonlight playing on their faces. There was no visible evidence that they had been shot or hit by shellfire. At first, they looked as if they were unconscious or asleep. But they weren’t breathing. I assumed then, and I am sure today, that both men had taken poison. Weltzin and I didn’t hang around to take their pulses. We were in danger ourselves, hardly interested in the historical significance.11

  Axmann was right about the poison. Accidentally unearthed near the Lehrter in 1972, Bormann’s skull was found to have glass splinters from a cyanide capsule embedded in its teeth. Tested later, the DNA in the skull matched Bormann’s too.

  * * *

  HILDEGARD KNEF was in Spandau, the suburb northwest of Berlin. From the window of an apartment block, she and Ewald von Demandowsky were watching the old town burn across the river. After walking all night, both were exhausted as they ate the last of their rations and waited for the order to break through the Russian lines.

  The aim was to get through somehow and then head across country to find the Americans. They would much rather surrender to them than the Russians. The soldiers around Knef had managed to convince themselves that the Americans would never leave Berlin to the Russians. They must surely be out there somewhere, coming to save the city.

  The breakout was made by tanks, fifty men with each vehicle. Knef and Demandowsky went with the second, sticking close but not too close as they followed it over the bridge into Spandau. They had barely crossed the river when the tank blew up, hit by Russian fire. Knef was hit, too. She was whisked through the air by the force of the explosion, then her head smashed against something hard.

  Her clothes were ripped, and blood was trickling from her hairline as she and Demandowsky picked themselves up and ran for cover. They took shelter in a ruined shop, hunkering down as Russian flamethrowers gushed past the windows. They could hear Russian voices outside and the urgent sound of Russian boots and machine guns. There were mortars, too, and dead bodies everywhere. But there were also ploughed fields not far away, and darkness was fast approaching. If they could just hang on for a bit longer, stick it out until nightfall, they might still manage to get through and make their escape.

  * * *

  HELMUT ALTNER was in Spandau, too. His unit had left Ruhleben at dawn to link up with Wenck’s army at Potsdam. They had joined a long column heading west: men, women, children, guns, tanks, horse-drawn artillery, farm carts, prams piled high with possessions, staff cars carrying suitcases and expensive mistresses in fur coats. Altner had struggled to keep in touch with the rest of his company as they all crowded along the road together.

  The town hall was in flames when they reached Spandau. Ammunition was exploding from a burning tank, and machine guns were chattering ahead. They were also under fire from low-flying aircraft. When mortars opened up as well, Altner and the others ran for cover in a ditch. An SS officer ordered them out at gunpoint, but was ignored. They weren’t obeying orders anymore.

  Pressing on when the firing eased, they pushed through Spandau and turned south toward Staaken, and then west again toward Döberitz. Their lieutenant had told them that Wenck’s army was waiting for them beyond Döberitz. He had promised that they would be given several weeks’ rest when they arrived, in huts that Wenck’s army had already set up for them. Dönitz, their new Führer, would come to brief them about the next phase of the war.

  Altner hitched a ride for part of the way, clinging to the wing of a truck for the wounded and refusing to let go. They were driving along a country road, in full view of the Russians, when a vehicle ahead got stuck on a bend and the traffic came to a halt:

  Suddenly shells explode close to the road and a truck in front of us bursts into flames. The passengers jump off and run into the field with their clothes on fire. Another truck is hit and torn bodies with their limbs ripped off are hurled into the air and fall around, blood spurting everywhere. The car in front of us can’t move because a mangled corpse is stuck between its wheels. Then the explosions start all around us, slamming into the tangle of vehicles that have run into each other, throwing bits of metal and bodies around.

  The next shell could hit our truck, so I jump off the wing and go over to the right, where a trench runs under the fence into the field. Suddenly something hits me, knocking me down. I look at it with horror. It is a bloody something without either head, hands or feet, just a bloody, smashed torso.12

  Drenched in blood, almost crippled by a shell splinter in his right foot, Altner stumbled on for hours, hobbli
ng across country until he reached Döberitz. There was no sign of Wenck’s army when he arrived, no sign, either, of the huts the lieutenant had promised. No one in Döberitz had even heard of Wenck. Potsdam had been Russian for days. All the talk of a relief army for Berlin, all the talk of hanging on by their fingertips until help arrived to deliver them from the Red Menace, all of that had been a lie from the very beginning.

  25

  NOW THAT THE FÜHRER HAS GONE

  WHILE MARTIN BORMANN LAY DEAD IN BERLIN, his eldest son was in a village near Salzburg, wondering if he, too, should kill himself now that Hitler was dead. Martin Bormann, Jr., was only fifteen, innocent of any crime, but he could see no future for himself with the Führer gone and his father probably dead as well. The people around him were taking their own lives. He was trying to pluck up the courage to do the same.

  Bormann Jr. had been a pupil at Feldafing, the school near Munich for the sons of the Nazi elite, until its closure on April 23. The other boys had been given a hundred Reichsmarks each and told to make their own way home, but Bormann had been issued false papers in the name of Martin Bergmann and driven to Salzburg. His father’s staff from Berchtesgaden had regrouped there after the bombing of Hitler’s mountain retreat.

  They were in the Gaststube (lounge) at the village inn when they learned of Hitler’s death. It was two o’clock in the morning, as Bormann recalled. The room was small and they were packed tightly together on the benches when the announcement came over the radio. Like everyone else, Bormann sat stunned, unwilling to believe that his godfather was dead:

  I can’t describe the stillness of that instant, which seemed to last for hours. Nobody said anything, but very soon afterward people began to go outside, first one—then there was a shot. Then another, and yet another. Not a word inside, no other sound except those shots from outside, but one felt that that was all there was, that all of us would have to die.1

  Bormann didn’t want to die. At fifteen, his whole life lay in front of him. But his family had been very close to Hitler. They had had a special edition of Mein Kampf printed on human skin, until his mother got rid of it. If his father’s staff were killing themselves, he saw little option but to do the same.

  A gun was put into his hands. Reluctantly, desperately wishing that there was an alternative, Bormann accepted the inevitable. Getting to his feet after a long period of introspection, he took the weapon and went outside to shoot himself.

  My world was shattered. I couldn’t see any future at all. But then, out there, in the back of that inn, where bodies were already lying all over the small garden, there was another boy, older than I—he was eighteen. He was sitting on a log and told me to come and sit with him. The air smelled good, the birds sang, and we talked ourselves out of it. If we hadn’t had each other at that moment, both of us would have gone—I know it.2

  * * *

  IN MARIENBAD, far to the north, Private Günter Grass of the Waffen-SS accepted Hitler’s passing with far more equanimity. Lying wounded in a hospital bed, he wasn’t in the least surprised to be told that Hitler had fallen in Berlin. Something of the sort had long been inevitable, nothing to get upset about. At the very least, they could all joke about him now, and that had to be good for something.

  Grass was seventeen, old enough to be a tank gunner in the SS but not old enough to have participated in the atrocities on the Eastern Front. There had been no mention of atrocities during his training. Drafted into the SS at sixteen, he had been happy to join an elite unit in the fight against Bolshevism. It was only later, after being advised to ditch his SS markings for his own safety, that he had had to admit to himself what kind of unit he was in.

  On his way to the front he had passed through the ruins of Dresden, seeing what might have been dead bodies lying in charred bundles beside the track. The first bodies he had seen for sure had been Wehrmacht soldiers, old men and young boys hanging from trees with placards of cowardice around their necks. He had wet himself when he first came under fire, urinating uncontrollably as Russian shells whistled overhead. Picking himself up afterward, he had turned to see the tangled intestines of the young man he had just been talking to.

  Later, caught in another firefight behind Russian lines, Grass had played dead as the rest of his patrol scattered in the darkness. He had retreated with a Wehrmacht lance corporal, only for both to be arrested as deserters since they had no written orders to explain their absence from their units. Locked in a farmhouse to await summary court-martial, they had taken advantage of a Russian attack to make their escape, joining a column of refugees along the road to Spremberg.

  The corporal had told Grass to change his SS jacket for a Wehrmacht one from a dead man. Bribing a sergeant to give them official marching orders, they had continued on their way, only to come under fire again, from Russian tanks. Grass had been hit in the right thigh and left shoulder. The corporal had been hit in both legs. On the way to the dressing station, he had asked Grass to check his balls for him to make sure they were still okay. It was all good material for the novel Grass was hoping to write one day.

  The corporal’s legs had been amputated, while Grass had been evacuated to a rear hospital in Marienbad. Strafed en route by an American fighter-bomber, he had just managed to roll into a ditch before his truck went up in flames. He eventually reached Marienbad days later, unconscious, on the back of a military policeman’s motorbike.

  Grass was glad to be in the hospital. The bed was freshly made, and the nurses were solicitous as they bandaged his thigh and probed the splinter in his shoulder. Their light touch meant much more to him than the announcement of Hitler’s death in faraway Berlin. It was May now, and the lilacs were in bloom. The war was almost over, and Grass was out of it for good. Like millions of German soldiers, he couldn’t get too upset about the death of Adolf Hitler if it meant an end to all the fighting.

  * * *

  IN ODETTE SANSOM’S CAMP, the prisoners had tried to escape that morning, making a concerted rush for the gates in full view of the guards. The SS had opened up at once, raking the compound with machine-gun fire. Odette had watched in horror as the prisoners crumpled and fell, pathetic bundles of blue and white lying dead or dying while the SS looked on without concern.

  As soon as it was over, Odette went to complain to the commandant. As Frau Churchill, she demanded to see Fritz Sühren. The radio was playing while they fetched him. Quietly eavesdropping, Odette learned that Berlin had fallen and the British were in Lübeck. The German army in Italy had surrendered. It was no surprise that Sühren was in tears when he appeared.

  “Why don’t you open the gates of the camp?” Odette demanded. “The war’s over. It’s useless murder to keep people here.”

  “They’d die on the roads.”

  “Better to die on the roads than be killed here.”

  But Sühren wasn’t interested in the prisoners. “Adolf Hitler is dead,” he told Odette despondently. “He died a hero in the forefront of battle.”

  “Really?” Odette managed to suppress her grief. “Are you going to do the same, die a hero?”

  “Go back to your hut. I haven’t finished with you yet.”

  “Will you open the gates? I’ve never asked a favour of you in my life. I do now. For God’s sake!”

  “No. The war isn’t over.”3

  Odette returned to her hut. There was no food. Toward evening, those prisoners who still had the strength formed a working party to make a pile of the bodies in the compound. After dark, they made bonfires of doors and bed boards from the huts and danced hysterically around them, half mad with fear and loathing as they waited to be set free. The gates were still shut, and the SS were still there with machine guns, but their release couldn’t be much longer now.

  * * *

  AT MAUTHAUSEN, near Linz, the prisoners were only a day or two away from freedom as Patton’s army swept into Austria. They, too, were counting the hours, because they badly needed the Americans to come. Malnutrition had reduc
ed the camp to cannibalism: when an Allied bomb killed some of them by mistake, the survivors had fed on the dead.

  Mauthausen was a work camp attached to a stone quarry. The prisoners hewed rock all day for the rebuilding of German cities. By order of Himmler, every block they hewed had to weigh at least 110 pounds, which was heavier than most of them. They then had to carry it above their heads up 186 steps to the surface of the quarry. Prisoners lacking the strength were routinely thrown over the cliff for the amusement of the guards. They called it “parachute jumping” as they watched the prisoners tumble to their deaths.

  Peter van Pels, the Jewish teenager arrested with Anne Frank, may have been in Mauthausen, if the records claiming that he had reached the camp from Auschwitz were correct. Simon Wiesenthal was certainly there, very close to death, by his own account. He was lying in Block VI as the news of Hitler’s death circulated. Block VI was the death block, where prisoners were left to expire when they were no longer able to work.

  Son of an Austrian officer killed in the First World War, Wiesenthal had been an architect in Poland until the Red army invasion of 1939. He had escaped a Russian pogrom only to be arrested later by the Germans. An SS man had installed a Polish prostitute in Wiesenthal’s apartment when Wiesenthal had been sent to a labor camp to paint swastika-and-eagle shields on captured Russian locomotives.

  He had been well treated by some of the German guards, closet anti-Nazis who bore Jews no ill will. Others had been less humane. According to Wiesenthal, he had narrowly escaped death in 1943 when a group of drunken SS had decided to shoot a few Jews to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Wiesenthal had been stark naked, waiting to be executed, when a friendly German had insisted that he was needed to finish painting the signs for the birthday celebrations.

  Later, as the casualties at the front mounted, the SS had become much more solicitous toward their Jewish prisoners, keeping them all alive in the hope of avoiding active service by having someone to guard. It had been six SS guards to every prisoner at one point. Then normal service had resumed as Wiesenthal arrived at Mauthausen. Dropping out of the four-mile march from the station, he had been shot at by an SS man as he lay helpless in the snow. It was only next morning, when the prisoners were carrying his body to the crematorium, that someone had noticed that he was still alive.