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

by Nicholas Best

  Wiesenthal was a storyteller, prone to exaggerating his escapades. Yet his sufferings were real enough as he lay in Block VI waiting for the Americans to come. A friendly prisoner had supplied him with pencils and paper, and he was whiling away the time by making sketches of the Nazi leaders—using his skills as an architectural draftsman to produce grim caricatures of a monster Himmler and a death’s-head Hitler behind a mask.

  He had also made a sketch of Franz Ziereis, Mauthausen’s commandant. Ziereis was a coldblooded murderer who once gave his son a birthday present of fifty Jews for target practice. Wiesenthal had captured his features perfectly on paper: a useful guide for the Allies, if Ziereis tried to disappear in the next few hours, rather than wait to be hanged for his crimes. The Allies would know exactly what he looked like as they hunted for him after the war—and thousands of other Nazis, too, if Simon Wiesenthal had anything to do with it.

  * * *

  IN UNTERBERNBACH, it had been snowing as Victor Klemperer set off for Kühbach to see his first American soldiers. He was cold and ragged as he walked, but he had a full stomach for the first time in months, because the Germans in the village had just slaughtered all their pigs rather than let the Americans have them. Klemperer was feeling well fed and happy as he went forward to search for provisions and meet his liberators.

  The shops were closed when he reached Kühbach, but the village was full of American troops. The first ones he saw were black, the crew of a vehicle recovery team, making friends with the village children in the square. Slipping down a side street, Klemperer approached a young blond woman and asked why the shops were shut. She replied that the Americans had looted everything when they arrived, but had otherwise been well behaved.

  “The blacks, too?”

  “They’re even friendlier than the others,” the woman beamed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Back in the square, Klemperer asked two old ladies the same question and received the same answer:

  Exactly the same beam of delight because the negroes were the especially good-natured enemies. (I thought of all the black children’s nurses, policemen and chauffeurs in our life). And what had been said about the cruelty of these enemies—that had all been nothing but slogans, that was only rabble-rousing. How the populace is being enlightened!4

  There was a woman in the back streets, Klemperer learned, who could sell him a loaf of bread for ninety pfennigs. He went that way with a spring in his step.

  * * *

  AT BRÜNNLITZ, in the Czech Sudetenland, the Jews of Oskar Schindler’s metalworking factory had learned of Hitler’s death from radios that their employer had illegally installed in the offices of key personnel. He had also arranged for one of his car radios to be permanently under repair, so that the repairman could plug his earpiece into the BBC and pass the news on to prisoners in another part of the camp.

  Schindler’s Jewish workers had been at Brünnlitz since leaving Krakow to escape the Russians. There were more than a thousand in all, including wives, children, and some with physical handicaps. Schindler had saved them from almost certain death by placing their names on an official list, insisting to the Nazis that they were all skilled workers, essential for the war effort. He had also spent a fortune in bribes, using all the profits from the factory and what was left of his own money to grease the right palms and make sure that none of his Jews was harmed.

  He was afraid, nevertheless, that the SS would massacre the lot as the war came to an end. Josef Leipold, the SS commandant, was perfectly capable of giving the order. To forestall him, Schindler had filed an official complaint against Leipold in mid-April, protesting that he wanted to kill “sophisticated technicians engaged in the manufacture of secret weapons.” By some accounts, he had then plied Leipold with alcohol before getting him to sign an order that Leipold thought was for the liquidation of the Jews but that was actually a request for him to be sent to the front. Whatever the truth, Leipold had been transferred to a front-line unit soon afterward. Schindler had driven him there just as Hitler died.

  The rest of Leipold’s troops had gone with him, to be replaced by older, meeker men who looked to Schindler for orders. Now that Hitler was dead, they were very keen for the Jews to know that they had only recently been drafted into the SS, for guard duty, and had no intention of harming anyone.

  The Jews remained skeptical. They were ready to defend themselves if they had to. With Schindler’s help, they had been stockpiling weapons for weeks: rifles, machine guns, a few pistols, and hand grenades. The weapons were hidden under bales of wire and other innocent-looking places around the camp. They were available at a moment’s notice, if need be.

  Schindler himself was preparing to flee the camp before the Russians came. A Czech-born German and paid-up Nazi, he could expect short shrift from the Czechs and Russians when they took over. He was very reluctant to abandon his Jews at such a critical time, but they were adamant that he must, for his own safety.

  Unknown to Schindler, they were also making a farewell gift to present to him before he left. Gold teeth had been sacrificed to produce a small ring in the metalworking shop. The ring was to be a present from them all, engraved with a saying from the Talmud. It put into words what every Jew in the camp felt about Oskar Schindler:

  Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

  * * *

  SCHINDLER’S JEWS had been lucky to escape from Krakow. Most of the city’s Jewish population had been rounded up and liquidated during the German occupation. The survivors had only recently begun to trickle back, emerging from their hiding places after the Germans’ departure in January. There were precious few of them. The Jewish quarter seemed like a ghost town as they wandered the cobbled streets, desperately searching for a face they knew.

  Eleven-year-old Roman Polanski had been one of the lucky ones. He didn’t look Jewish, for one thing, passing himself off as an ordinary Polish boy, so long as no one saw that he was circumcised. Son of a metalworker, he had sometimes slipped out of the ghetto in the early days, removing his Star of David and roaming the streets without his parents’ knowledge. He had once seen a German officer shoot a Jewish woman simply because she was too old to keep up with the others.

  His own mother had followed, taken away one day while Polanski was out, and never seen again. The rest of the ghetto had been liquidated in March 1943. Polanski had managed to escape through a hole in the barbed wire, trailing after his father as the Germans marched him away. He had been looked after by Poles, who sent him into the country to stay with a peasant family so poor that they had no electricity and had never seen a motor car.

  Back in Krakow, as the Germans withdrew, Polanski had seen German prisoners beaten and spat on, and had watched Poles defecating on German corpses. He had lived on the streets with other little boys, picking up the discarded weapons of war—signal flares and explosives—and making fireworks out of them. One gang of boys had killed themselves blowing up a supply of cordite. Polanski had nearly done the same with a German grenade.

  He had also looted toys from a deserted garret, trading them for a magic lantern that could project picture postcards onto a wall. The lantern was a simple epidiascope, a cardboard box with a lens and a bulb holder, but it meant the world to Polanski. He loved the idea of projecting images onto a wall. It was a way of forgetting the horrors all around him.

  He was living with his uncle when the news came of Hitler’s death. They had just bumped into each other on the street, neither aware that the other was still alive. After years of a feral, school-free existence, the illiterate boy was living in a real apartment again, on the sixth floor of a block overlooking the town.

  He was also hoping to be reunited with his parents, now that Hitler was gone. People were beginning to return from the camps, flinging their arms around each other as they arrived in prison garb at the railway station. Polanski often went to the station to see if his own parents might come, but they never did. Instead, he had to watch bi
tterly as the lucky few celebrated while he remained out in the cold.

  He was so traumatized as the war ended that he was spending more and more time alone in his uncle’s apartment, sitting with his magic lantern and his pictures on the wall. The pictures were the only reality to him, the only thing that mattered. As long as he could make pictures and project them on the wall, he could forget about his parents, forget about the Germans, forget about all the horrors of the past five years. The pictures on the wall meant everything to Polanski. They were his whole world.

  * * *

  WHILE POLANSKI was grieving and the rest of Krakow was celebrating Hitler’s death, Karol Wojtyla was quietly rebuilding the life he had had before the war. He had been nineteen on the first day of the war, saying his prayers in the cathedral as the Luftwaffe roared overhead to attack the city. Jagiellonian University had been shut down as soon as Krakow had fallen. Many of its staff had been sent to concentration camps, but Wojtyla had continued his studies regardless, attending clandestine classes throughout the German occupation.

  He had worked in a quarry for much of the war, blasting rocks with dynamite by day, continuing his studies by night. Every stick of explosive had to be scrupulously accounted for, on pain of death if even a few ounces found their way to the Resistance. Wojtyla had been arrested in a café once, pulled in by the Gestapo in a mass roundup of suspects. Most of the arrested men had been sent to Auschwitz, where twenty-five had soon been shot. Wojtyla had escaped because he had an Ausweis, or identity card, identifying him as a vital worker. The card had been given to him by his employer, a friendly Pole who used the cards to protect intellectuals and members of the Resistance from Nazi persecution.

  Wojtyla had helped others in turn, hiding Jews from the Germans, arranging new identities for them, providing them with baptism certificates to show that they were Christian. His mentor, Archbishop Sapieha, had made repeated pleas to the Pope on behalf of Poland’s Jews, but there had been no meaningful response from the Vatican. Wojtyla wondered what kind of Pope they had in Rome who sat back and did nothing while the Jews suffered all over Europe. It wasn’t Christian charity as he understood the term.

  He had been hiding in the Archbishop’s palace when the Germans left Krakow, sheltering in the cellar from Russian artillery fire. Tiles had been shattered and all the windows blown out, but the palace had survived. Wojtyla and his colleagues had prayed and sung hymns as they waited for the Russians to come. The first ones had arrived late at night, to be greeted with bread and tea, which were all the Poles had to offer.

  That had been in January, but there was still plenty to do before life returned to normal. Wojtyla and a few others had volunteered to restore the theological seminary after the Germans’ departure. The building had been occupied by the SS and then almost destroyed by a nearby explosion. Every window pane had been smashed, every roof tile blown off. The lavatories were piled high with frozen excrement, which had to be chopped into smaller pieces before it could be taken away. Wojtyla had flung himself into the work, breathing only through his mouth to avoid retching. The stink had been horrendous.

  But the seminary was restored now and the Germans were gone and Hitler was dead. Wojtyla had just found a proper job as well, one that might have been tailor-made for him. He had been appointed assistant theology lecturer at the university. Another few months and he would be ordained a Roman Catholic priest, free to devote the rest of his life to the mother church. His cup could hardly have been fuller.

  * * *

  PIERRE LAVAL was in Spain. He had just flown in after a frantic search for a country prepared to admit him. As a Vichy Frenchman, formerly head of the government and arch-collaborator with the Germans, he was persona non grata all over Europe. Nobody wanted to give him shelter, if it meant offending the victorious Allies.

  The Vichy government had been transported to Germany in September 1944, but had been left to its own devices as the Allies approached. Marshal Pétain had decided to return to France to face trial for treason, but Laval knew he would be executed if he went back. Determined to escape to a neutral country, he had approached Switzerland and Liechtenstein first, only to be refused permission for a stay of anything longer than twenty-four hours. He had tried to cross the Swiss frontier every day for a week, only to be turned back each time. Bursting into tears at one point, he had complained to unsympathetic Swiss officials that they were condemning him to death.

  The Spanish didn’t want him, either. A colonel was waiting at Barcelona airfield as Laval’s Junkers 88 touched down. The colonel told him bluntly that Spain was not prepared to give him asylum. He suggested that Laval take another plane immediately, either to Portugal, where a day of mourning had just been announced for Hitler’s death, or to southern Ireland, which had not signed the international convention on war crimes and therefore would not extradite him.

  Laval was a collaborator, but he did not see himself as a war criminal. He tried to go over the colonel’s head by telephoning Spain’s foreign minister, formerly the ambassador to the Vichy government, to plead his case. But the minister declined to come to the phone. It could not have been clearer that Laval had no friends in Spain.

  He had none in Portugal or Ireland, either. When he refused to leave for either country, the colonel told him that he had orders to intern him instead, while the Spanish government decided what to do with him. Without further ado, Laval and his wife were taken by car to the citadel of Monjuich, high above the port, where accommodation had quietly been prepared for them in the newly built officers’ mess.

  * * *

  WHILE LAVAL was driving to Monjuich, Irish prime minister Eamon de Valera was on his way to Dún Laoghaire to see the German ambassador. He was going to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler.

  The German embassy was in Ballsbridge, a smart Dublin suburb, but de Valera was visiting the ambassador in his private home. The Germans still had no official confirmation of Hitler’s death, beyond what they had heard on the radio, but the embassy swastika was flying at half mast, and people from Ireland’s tiny German community had been calling all day to pay their respects. De Valera may have decided to avoid the embassy to escape the unwelcome publicity that might have come with it.

  The ambassador was at home when de Valera arrived. Eduard Hempel was an old-style Prussian officer who had been in the post since 1937. The Irish had stipulated that the German minister in Dublin should not be a Nazi, so Hempel had waited until after his arrival before quietly joining the party. He had had an active war, making contact with the IRA and sending thousands of reports back to Berlin by radio or telegraph. He had transmitted weather forecasts for the Luftwaffe and recorded the effects of their bombing raids on Britain. It was said that his reporting of Canadian troop movements along the south coast had doomed the Dieppe raid of 1942 to failure. The Americans had become so incensed at his activities that they had persuaded the Irish government to seize the embassy’s radio transmitter in 1943.

  Hempel was visibly distressed as de Valera’s car drew up, wringing his hands and complaining repeatedly that it was all so humiliating. Whether he was referring to Germany’s defeat or de Valera’s visit was not clear. Hempel’s wife insisted later that he hadn’t been wringing his hands, merely chafing at the eczema between his fingers. But he was not a happy man as he received the Irish prime minister in his own home on the occasion of Adolf Hitler’s death.

  They didn’t discuss Hitler for long. The conversation soon turned to other matters: the safety of the Hempels’ relations in Germany and the question of asylum for himself and his family. Hempel was hoping to remain in Dublin after the war, rather than return to Germany. He was afraid, though, that anti-German feeling might make his life difficult if he tried to set up in business. If all else failed, his wife was prepared to sell homemade cakes and buns to make ends meet.

  De Valera was surprised to find Hempel so abject. He knew the man well and thought he was made of sterner stuff. But Germany’s col
lapse had unmanned him. Without the Nazis behind him, Hempel was just a middle-aged official wondering how to survive with his salary cut off and no other visible means of support. His career as a diplomat was over.

  De Valera himself was riding into a storm, although he had yet to realize the full extent of it. He had taken advice before offering his condolences on Hitler’s death. Some people had agreed with him that it was the correct protocol for a neutral prime minister, implying no approval of Hitler or his regime. Others had begged him not to go, arguing that the visit would be misconstrued, that he would be seen as a Nazi lover bringing great shame on Ireland if he did anything so stupid. Bloody-minded as ever, de Valera had decided to go ahead.

  The Irish were not pleased, as the implications sank in. They had remained studiously neutral during the war to avoid occupation by either Britain or Germany, but there had never been any doubt whose side they were on. They had seen the pictures from the camps. They had flocked to Britain in tens of thousands to fight for the Allies. They didn’t want their prime minister commiserating with the Nazis now that Hitler was dead. As the news of de Valera’s visit went out over the wires that night, the rest of the free world shared their outrage. De Valera had scored a spectacular goal of his own, one that was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

  26

  GERMANY SURRENDERS

  EVENTS MOVED SWIFTLY OVER THE NEXT few days. With Hitler dead and Berlin in Russian hands, the Germans had little incentive to fight on. The best they could do now was get as many people as possible to the west before accepting the inevitable and agreeing to surrender.