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

by Nicholas Best

  Dönitz sent General Hans Kinzel and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg to Montgomery’s headquarters on May 3 to ask for terms. “Who are these men?” Montgomery demanded when they presented themselves at Lüneberg Heath. “What do they want?”1 He was using the words traditional since medieval times for the opening of a parley.

  The men offered to surrender to the British all the German forces in Holland, Denmark, and northern Germany, including those fighting the Russians. Montgomery refused, insisting that the Germans fighting the Russians must surrender to the Russians. He warned that the fighting would continue to the bitter end if the Germans did not agree. “I shall go on with the war, and will be delighted to do so, and am ready. All your soldiers will be killed.”2

  Von Friedeburg and an aide returned to their own side to consult Dönitz. They were back again the next day to agree to Montgomery’s terms. Leonard Mosley was with a party of war correspondents who watched them arrive:

  Montgomery kept the German delegates waiting, standing miserably about in the rain, first while he told us of the events which had led up to the armistice, and later while he conferred with his aides inside the caravan. With their backs towards us, von Friedeburg and his three companions stood there, on the spot where all of them must, at some time in their careers, have watched German armies manoeuvring on the plain below in the exercises of pre-war days, and where now unending convoys of British troops were moving. Montgomery kept them standing there, letting them watch and think, letting the rain splash over them, until he judged the moment right; and then he sent Colonel Ewart clattering down the steps to round the Nazi generals up and shepherd them to the tiny army tent on the lip of Lüneberg tor, where the Kleig lights were ready, and the microphones, for photographs to be taken and records made of the signing ceremony.3

  The Germans were shown to a plain trestle table covered by an army blanket. They sat in glum silence as Montgomery put on his spectacles and read the terms of the surrender to them. He was loving every minute of it:

  “You will now sign,” he said, and, meekly, one by one, they came. The Post Office pen scraped on the paper; the delegates sat down again, expressionless, and waited. There was a moment, while the last photographs were being taken, when von Friedeburg turned his full face into the lights, an expression of tremendous anguish in his eyes as he posed for the pictures; and then the flap of the tent dropped and it was over.4

  Almost. Friedeburg went to Eisenhower’s headquarters the next day to negotiate the surrender of the remaining forces in southern Germany and elsewhere. He repeated his plea for a separate peace, but the Americans proved no more receptive than the British. Chief of staff Bedell Smith told Friedeburg coldly that the surrender was unconditional and had to be simultaneous on all fronts. In desperation, Dönitz tried to buy more time for the Germans fleeing the Russians by sending Jodl to Reims to argue their case. Jodl had no more success than Friedeburg. Dönitz finally accepted defeat in the early hours of May 7, when he authorized the surrender of all Germans everywhere on the terms stated.

  Jodl signed on his behalf at 1:41 a.m. Bedell Smith signed for the Allied Expeditionary Force and General Ivan Susloparov for the Soviet High Command. The surrender was to come into effect at midnight on May 8. After the brief ceremony was over, Jodl stood up and made a short speech, beginning in English and continuing in German:

  Sir, with this signature, the German nation and the German armed forces are at the mercy of the victors. Throughout this war, which has lasted for five years, both have performed more, and perhaps suffered more, than any other nation on earth. At this hour, we can only hope that the victors will be generous.5

  He was greeted with stunned silence. The suffering of the German people had not been uppermost in anyone’s thoughts as they watched the surrender being signed. When no answer came, Jodl snapped to attention, saluted, and left the room. The war in Europe was over.

  EPILOGUE

  RACHELE MUSSOLINI WAS IN MONTECATINI AS the Germans surrendered, staying at the Hotel Italo-Argentine. She and her children were on their way to a British internment camp, where they remained until the end of July. They were then taken to the island of Ischia, in the bay of Naples, and set free to resume their lives.

  Mussolini’s body was stolen by Fascist supporters in 1946 and spent several months in a trunk before reappearing at a Franciscan monastery in Pavia. It was secretly reburied in another monastery at Cerro Maggiore until 1957, when it was handed over to Rachele. It lies now in a crypt at Predappio, Mussolini’s hometown, where it enjoys a steady stream of visitors.

  The sliver of Mussolini’s brain taken to America for further examination was returned to Rachele in 1966. The American consul in Florence was happy to report that they had found nothing wrong with it. In 2009, Mussolini’s granddaughter Alessandra complained that samples of his blood and brains were for sale on eBay.

  * * *

  ALESSANDRA’S AUNT, Sofia Villani Scicolone, outgrew her dismal childhood in Naples. Changing her name to Sophia Loren, she pursued her mother’s dream and became one of the world’s most famous film stars.

  * * *

  AUDREY HEPBURN and her mother left for London after the war, living in genteel poverty while Audrey trained as a ballerina. Her height and wartime diet would have prevented her from reaching the top, so she turned to acting instead. She, too, became a much-loved star.

  * * *

  HILDEGARD KNEF was captured by the Russians and had a fraught time as a prisoner of war before eventually making her way back to Berlin, where she starred in many films. As Hildegard Neff, she played opposite Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but her German background—she refused to reinvent herself as an Austrian named Gilda Christian—meant that her Hollywood career never took off.

  * * *

  LENI RIEFENSTAHL TRIED to get back into mainstream cinema after the war, but was blacklisted because of her Nazi past. She never worked seriously again.

  * * *

  REUNITED WITH HIS FATHER after the war, Roman Polanski pursued his fascination with light shows on the wall, first in Poland, later in France, and the United States. He became one of the finest film directors of his generation, but his personal life continued to be deeply troubled.

  * * *

  SPIKE MILLIGAN acted occasionally in films, but was happiest performing his own material on British radio and TV. With Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe, he starred in The Goon Show, one of the funniest radio comedies of the 1950s, but always remained at the mercy of his mental health.

  * * *

  EZRA POUND was arrested by the U.S. Army at the end of May and taken to America to stand trial for treason. His plea of insanity was accepted, and he spent twelve years at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., where Mussolini’s brain was already under examination. Released in 1958, he, too, returned to Italy.

  * * *

  KURT VONNEGUT was released from prison camp in May and repatriated to the United States. His Dresden experiences later inspired his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Joseph Heller was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford after the war and then wrote Catch-22, a thinly disguised account of his own service in the Mediterranean, borrowing part of his friend Yohannon’s name for the main character Yossarian. Both novels were masterly indictments of the idiocy of war.

  * * *

  ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, followed by exile for life to Kazakhstan. The experience gave him the material for some remarkable books, including Cancer Ward, The Gulag Archipelago, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, none of which he expected to see published in his lifetime. Exonerated in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Stalin, he later won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  * * *

  GÜNTER GRASS was captured by the Americans and spent some time in a prison camp at Bad Aibling, where he made friends with the deserter Josef Ratzinger. He, too, became a writer and put his wartime experiences to good use, most
notably in The Tin Drum. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

  * * *

  JOSEF RATZINGER got home safely after escaping from the Wehrmacht, but was picked up later by the Americans. Released in June, he became a priest and spent much of his career in Rome. His Polish colleague Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978. Ratzinger succeeded him as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

  * * *

  LIEUTENANT ROBERT Runcie, MC (Military Cross), teamed up with an attractive ex-Nazi named Ingeborg after the war. Her boyfriend had been killed while in the SS. Later Archbishop of Canterbury, Runcie officiated at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.

  * * *

  ARMY LIFE had taught Runcie’s brother officer Willie Whitelaw that he was best suited to be a second-in-command. He became deputy prime minister to Margaret Thatcher. Peter Carrington served in the same government before becoming secretary general of NATO. Spain was admitted to the United Nations in 1955. General Franco remained head of state until 1974 and died a year later.

  * * *

  JACK KENNEDY won the U.S. presidency in 1960 and established a close personal rapport with British prime minister Harold Macmillan.

  * * *

  WILLY BRANDT became mayor of West Berlin and then chancellor of West Germany. He was standing at Kennedy’s side in 1963 when the U.S. president declared himself to be a Berliner.

  * * *

  BOB DOLE recovered from his wounds but was never able to lift his right hand above his head again. Long a Republican senator for Kansas, he ran for the presidency in 1996 but lost to Bill Clinton.

  * * *

  CHAIM HERZOG became president of Israel.

  * * *

  HENRY KISSINGER was secretary of state and foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon. Despite a controversial role in the Vietnam War, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS the war ended, Victor Klemperer and his wife returned on foot to the ruins of Dresden to find that their house had been “Aryanized” in their absence. Klemperer reclaimed it and resumed his life as a university professor, becoming a significant figure in postwar East Germany.

  * * *

  SIMON WIESENTHAL devoted the rest of his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice. He was never as successful as he claimed, but thousands of Nazis slept less easily in their beds knowing that staff at the Simon Wiesenthal Center had their details on file and were actively looking for them.

  * * *

  OTTO FRANK returned to Amsterdam to be told that both of his daughters had died in Belsen. All that remained of them was Anne’s diary of the family’s time in hiding, kept safe for him by Otto’s friend Miep Gies.

  * * *

  OSKAR SCHINDLER’S story was told in the award-winning movie Schindler’s List. He ran into financial difficulties after the war and was helped out several times by Jews from his factory. Named by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, he is the only former member of the Nazi Party to be buried in Jerusalem’s Roman Catholic cemetery.

  * * *

  WERNHER VON BRAUN became an American citizen and played a leading role in the U.S. efforts to land a man on the moon. The British never took to him.

  * * *

  LEE MILLER married an Englishman and spent the rest of her life in the United Kingdom. Badly traumatized by her wartime experiences, she took refuge in alcohol and went into a downward spiral for many years.

  * * *

  ODETTE SANSOM married an Englishman too, but not before bringing the commandant of Ravensbrück to justice. He released her from the prison camp on May 3 and drove her to the American lines in his black Mercedes. “This is Frau Churchill,” he told the Americans when they arrived. “She has been a prisoner. She is a relation of Winston Churchill.”1 Sühren was hoping to save his skin by delivering such an important figure, but Odette confiscated his pistol at once and denounced him as the commandant of Ravensbrück. He was executed by the French in 1950.

  * * *

  JOSEF KRAMER, the ex-commandant of Belsen, and Irma Grese, his onetime lover, were hanged with nine others at Hameln prison on December 13, 1945. Kramer appealed for clemency to Field Marshal Montgomery but was turned down. Fritz Klein, another of the condemned men, refused to appeal, accepting that he deserved to die for what he had done.

  * * *

  RUDOLF HÖSS obeyed Himmler’s last order to him and disappeared into the armed forces at the end of the war. Disguised as a bosun’s mate (a naval petty officer), he found work on a farm near Flensburg and lived there anonymously until March 1946, when a tipoff led to his arrest. He was executed at the scene of his crimes on April 16, 1947. An open-air gallows was specially constructed for the purpose behind Auschwitz’s first, experimental gas chamber. Gallows and chamber are both still there.

  * * *

  “SMALL, ILL-LOOKING and shabbily dressed” after a week of sleeping rough, Heinrich Himmler had shaved off his moustache and was wearing an eye patch when the British picked him up at a check point. His arrogance aroused their suspicions, and he readily admitted his identity. He was stripped naked and his body cavities searched for poison. A doctor ordered him to open his mouth, but Himmler bit the man’s fingers and then crunched on a hidden cyanide capsule. Despite frantic attempts to prevent him from swallowing, he was dead within a quarter of an hour.

  * * *

  PIERRE LAVAL tried to remain in Spain until tempers had cooled, but was flown back to Austria in July and delivered to the Americans, who handed him over to the French. The jury at his hastily convened trial heckled him, and the presiding judge demanded a verdict before France’s forthcoming general election. Sentenced to death by firing squad, Laval took poison instead, only to discover that the poison was old and had lost its strength. His stomach was pumped, and he was placed in front of a wall at Fresnes prison on October 15, 1945. He died bravely, crying “Vive la France!” as he was shot. The election was held six days later.

  * * *

  VIDKUN QUISLING sent a telegram to Dönitz on May 2, expressing the Norwegian people’s condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, but he knew that he had backed the wrong horse. Like Laval, he was hoping that his countrymen would come to share his view that collaboration was the most sensible course in a country under military occupation. Sentenced to death instead, he was shot at Oslo’s Akershus Fortress on October 24, 1945.

  * * *

  UNABLE TO FIND a boat to Sweden, William Joyce, the Nazi propaganda broadcaster, was hiding in Flensburg when the British arrived. He foolishly spoke to a couple of officers and was recognized at once from his voice. The officers shot him through the thighs when he reached unexpectedly for his false identity card. After a controversial trial, Joyce was hanged for treason at Wandsworth prison on January 3, 1946. It was said that an old street-fighting scar running from his mouth to his cheek burst wide open under the impact of the drop.

  * * *

  ADOLF EICHMANN escaped from captivity in 1945 and lived anonymously in Germany before immigrating to Argentina in 1950. Israeli agents tracked him down ten years later and spirited him back to Israel. After a sensational trial, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged at Ramla prison on May 31, 1962. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea, outside Israeli waters.

  * * *

  AFTER ESCAPING FROM BERLIN, Helmut Altner was captured by the Russians on May 3 and held prisoner for the next eighteen months. With American permission, he published a book of his experiences in 1948 and later worked as the Paris correspondent for several German newspapers.

  * * *

  MARTIN BORMANN, JR., never escaped from his father’s shadow. He became a Roman Catholic priest for a while and worked as a missionary in the Congo. He also toured German schools, talking about the evils of Nazism, and visited Israel to apologize to Holocaust survivors. But his name followed him everywhere, blighting his career and making it impos
sible for him to enjoy a normal life.

  * * *

  PAULA HITLER was interrogated by the Americans in July 1945 and broke down in tears at the thought of her brother’s death. She returned to Vienna after the war and worked in an arts and crafts shop before retiring quietly to Berchtesgaden, where she was looked after by former members of Hitler’s entourage. She died in 1960.

  * * *

  TRAUDL JUNGE was captured by the Russians and questioned closely about the last days in the bunker. She resumed work as a secretary after the war and was often pestered by people wanting to shake the hand that had shaken Hitler’s. She tried to immigrate to Australia at one point, but was refused permission. Junge was played by Alexandra Maria Lara in the 2004 film Downfall, about Hitler’s last days.

  * * *

  ELSE KRÜGER, Martin Bormann’s secretary in the bunker, was questioned by the British after the war and fell in love with her interrogator. They married in 1947 and moved to Cheshire, England.

  * * *

  THE REST OF THE TOP NAZIS were brought to trial at Nuremberg in the autumn of 1945. Most were sentenced to death, but some received only prison sentences, and three were acquitted of all charges, although they were later imprisoned by German denazification courts.

  Admiral Dönitz got ten years. Along with the others, he served his time at Spandau prison in Berlin. He was released in 1956 and died in 1980. His funeral was attended by a number of elderly U-boat commanders illegally wearing their wartime caps.

  Albert Speer freely admitted his guilt in court. Sentenced to twenty years, he wrote several books after his release and is said to have contributed most of the royalties anonymously to Jewish charities. In London to appear on a television programme, he died of a stroke in 1981.

  Rudolf Hess got life. There was doubt about his state of mind during the trial. Some people thought he was faking insanity to avoid execution, but his behavior in prison grew steadily more bizarre. He was Spandau’s only remaining inmate when he hanged himself in 1987.

  * * *