Hitler's Last Day

by Emma Craigie

  Just a month ago Orwell’s wife Eileen died during a routine operation to remove a growth in her womb. Last summer they adopted a baby boy called Richard; he’s being looked after by a friend’s wife. Orwell decided to return to Europe, because, as he explained to a friend, ‘perhaps after a few weeks of bumping about in jeeps etc. I shall feel better.’ Orwell’s reports for the Observer are bleak, reflecting his grief and also the fact that he is ill with pneumonia; ill enough to have drawn up a document at the end of March entitled ‘Notes for My Literary Executor’ – a list of works he wanted republished and those he did not. Orwell sent it to his wife to sign, but by then she was already dead.

  George Orwell is not yet known as a writer. His first book Homage to Catalonia sold only 700 copies, but he has great faith in a short ‘fairy tale’ that he’s just finished that he knows will be controversial. Animal Farm is a satire on the Russian Revolution and tyranny in general. Many publishers in the UK and the US have turned it down as the Soviet Union is a war ally, but Secker and Warburg have taken it on and plan to publish it when more paper, which is severely rationed, is available. They may also be waiting for Hitler to be defeated and for the end of the alliance with Stalin. The manuscript that Secker and Warburg are working with is crumpled and dirty – it is in Orwell’s words ‘blitzed’ after a V1 exploded near their London flat in June 1944 and brought the ceiling down.

  Orwell has taken advantage of the delay, and even as late as last month he’s been tinkering with the proofs, asking to change the scene in which the windmill blows up, so that ‘all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces’ becomes ‘all the animals except Napoleon’. Napoleon – ‘Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon’ – is a pig who rules Animal Farm and is based on Stalin. Orwell explained to his publisher that this change was to be fair to Stalin who had chosen to stay in Moscow during the German invasion rather than flee.

  Orwell has with him in Stuttgart a Colt .32 pistol, lent by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. In Barcelona in 1937, Stalin’s agents almost had Orwell imprisoned. This has left him paranoid that they’ll attack him again.

  7.15am/8.15am UK time

  On the BBC Forces Programme they are playing ‘Morning Star’ by Frank Sinatra.

  In Munich, 47-year-old teacher Anni Antonie Schmöger and her sister are at seven o’clock mass. They’ve decided to come to an early service in case there is an air raid later. On the way to church, Anni was disappointed to see that some of her neighbours had white flags hanging outside their houses. She can’t bear to think that Americans will soon be marching through her city.

  Suddenly air raid sirens sound and the congregation hear the sound of bombs exploding close by. Everyone runs for the door, including Anni and her sister. Then they change their mind and turn back - they haven’t yet had communion.

  Everywhere regimental staffs without regiments and division staffs without divisions are looking for picturesque boltholes. They are unemployed now… sleeping late, breathing in the mountain air... destroying ambiguous documents, discussing the situation, coordinating future answers to awkward questions…

  Author Erich Kästner, April 1945

  7.30am

  Twenty-year-old German Lieutenant Claus Sellier, wearing only his underwear, is looking out of the window of the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau in Lofer, Austria. He’s watching orderlies putting luggage in the back of jeeps parked in a row along the street. Standing nearby are a group of sombre-looking officers; they shake hands and one by one drive off. Sellier and his colleague and friend Fritz (writing in later life, Claus Sellier never mentions Fritz’s surname) are now the only guests left in the hotel.

  Both men are in the 79th Mountain Artillery Regiment and were recently promoted, along with all their fellow cadets, to mark Hitler’s birthday on the 20th April. That same day, Claus and Fritz were summoned to the office of a distraught-looking Colonel Rauch, who was in charge of their artillery training school in Rokycany, German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Rokycany was surrounded by Allied forces and the telephone lines were down. Colonel Rauch gave Claus and Fritz a mission to deliver two packages – one to army regional headquarters, which the colonel thought was possibly in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, and a second to army provision headquarters in Traunstein, Bavaria. Claus suspected they contained requests for urgent supplies. Rauch’s collar was unbuttoned and his face was flushed.

  ‘I selected you because you have excellent records, and you are from Bavaria. You must get there! Those documents are very important. Guard them with your lives! I’m relying on you.’ He gazed at a map. ‘It won’t be easy – it looks like we’re cut off.’

  The two young lieutenants were flattered. When Claus thought about the headquarters, he envisaged the sort of place he’d seen in the newsreels – generals standing around a table, moving divisions across an enormous map. He pictured the oak table that saved the life of the Führer when Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded under it.

  ‘I will be standing near it when I present these important documents,’ Claus thought at the time.

  The reality is somewhat different. Claus never imagined that the army regional headquarters would be in a hotel. When they arrived on foot last night, after an exhausting four-day journey, they handed over the first package to the major on duty. He’d been more interested in reading his magazine than acknowledging the new arrivals. The major glanced at their package and then threw it over his shoulder; it landed on the floor among other papers and envelopes. Claus was furious that they’d risked their lives only for the document to be discarded.

  ‘I guess you didn’t know that the army headquarters was dissolved today?’ the major said.

  ‘Dissolved? Do you mean the war is over?!’ Claus said.

  ‘No, I didn’t say that. I said that this headquarters is no longer in existence, as of today. As far as I know the war continues.’

  That evening, Claus and Fritz had eaten in the hotel, whilst a group of generals, told jokes and drank plenty of wine. No one returned the young men’s greeting of Heil Hitler.

  Claus walks away from the hotel window and starts to put on his uniform.

  ‘My vision grew a little misty. Perhaps it was the rain on the Perspex…’

  8.00am/9.00am UK time

  In the corridor dining room of the upper bunker three young officers, Lorenz, Zander and Johannmeier, are having breakfast. They have been given the mission of delivering the three copies of Hitler’s and Goebbels’ testaments: one to Grand Admiral Dönitz, whom Hitler names in the political testament as his successor as Chancellor of Germany; one to Field Marshal Schörner, named as the new head of the army, and the final copy to the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. A carbon copy has been kept for the bunker.

  The three officers help themselves to food from a stacked trolley. There is fresh bread from Berlin’s only surviving bakery, plus salami, roast beef, pickles and cheese from the vast stores in the Reich Chancellery cellars. The couriers eat as much as they can and stuff their pockets. Only Wilhelm Zander is gloomy. The 34-year-old has begged to be excused from this mission. He wants to die in the bunker. If this is the end for Nazism he can see no reason to carry on.

  A couple of miles away, in a neighbour’s Berlin flat, 34-year-old journalist Marta Hillers has just finished a breakfast of ersatz coffee and bread and butter when a group of Russian soldiers stride in. Her neighbour keeps the front door unlocked to avoid having it smashed. They are used to invasions of boorish Russian soldiers but one of today’s intruders seems different. Marta Hillers described him briefly in her diary which was published anonymously after the war: ‘Narrow forehead, icy blue eyes, quiet and intelligent.’ His name is Andrei, and he is a school teacher by profession. He tells her that it isn’t Hitler who is to blame for the war, but the capitalist system which created him. ‘The conversation did me a lot of good… simply because one of them treated me as an equal, without once touching me, not even with his eyes.’
<
br />   Most days, since the Russians arrived, Marta Hillers has been raped. The previous afternoon two grey-haired Russian soldiers barged in. One of them stood guard as the other threw Hillers onto a bed. He smelled of brandy and horses. He raped her and then forced open her jaws and ‘with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth’. The assault over, he got up to go and thumped down a crumpled pack of Russian cigarettes on the bedside table. ‘Only a few left,’ Hillers noted. ‘My pay.’

  Stalin refused to punish Russian soldiers who treated women brutally. He explained his position to Milovan Đilas, the Yugoslav communist: ‘Imagine a man who has fought… over a thousand kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful about having fun with a woman after such horrors?’

  In the cellar of her grandparents’ large house in Oosterbeek near Arnhem in the Netherlands, 15-year-old Audrey Hepburn-Ruston is hiding with her mother Ella. She has not been outside since the beginning of March when she narrowly escaped a round-up by Nazis looking for young women to staff Wehrmacht kitchens. Her family has suffered a great deal – her older brother has been taken off to a German labour camp and her uncle has been shot.

  Before the German invasion, Audrey was training to be a ballerina and she has taken part in secret performances to raise money for the Dutch resistance. But Audrey, who is using the name Edda van Heemstra, because English-sounding names are too dangerous, is now too ill to dance. She and her mother Ella are malnourished – their diet consists of tulips and turnips.

  ‘Tulip bulbs. It sounds terrible,’ Audrey Hepburn recalled later. ‘You don’t just eat the bulb. Tulip bulbs actually make a fine flour that is rather luxurious and can be used for making cakes and cookies.’ Nonetheless, Audrey is suffering from respiratory problems, acute anaemia and oedema caused by malnourishment. The oedema will leave stretch marks on her ankles for the rest of her life.

  Audrey passes the time in the cellar doing puzzles and drawings by the light of a lantern.

  The Allies have already recaptured parts of Holland, but there are still about 200,000 Germans holding out in the north of the country, including in the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. General Eisenhower has a dilemma – the manpower needed to defeat the German army in Holland will delay the Allied victory. ‘[The] most rapid means of ensuring liberation and restoration of Holland may well be the rapid completion of our main operations,’ he wrote. This is no comfort to the thousands of Dutch who are starving. British intelligence has learned that there has not been a live birth in occupied Holland for nine months due to the malnutrition of the mothers. In a desperate search for firewood, the citizens of Amsterdam have cut down all the city’s trees, removed the sleepers from under the tramlines and stolen floorboards and bookshelves from the empty houses of deported Jews and labourers.

  General Eisenhower has made sure the Allies are prepared for an airdrop of food – stores are ready to feed a million people every 24 hours, and the RAF and USAAF are well rehearsed. What is needed is a safeguard from the Germans that their planes won’t be attacked as they carry out the food drop. Yesterday, in a small school called St Josef’s in the village of Achterveld just inside Allied lines, the Allied representatives, led by Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand, met with the German delegation, led by Ernst Schwebel – ‘one of the most revolting men I have ever seen,’ de Guingand wrote later. At the meeting the Germans agreed to the creation of safe air zones where Allied planes could fly without being attacked.

  What has been dubbed Operation Manna is under way. Two RAF Lancasters are now lifting off from their base in Lincolnshire with eight specially built panniers in their bomb bays, containing tea, sugar, dried eggs, tinned meat and chocolate. The crews in the air and those getting ready to fly are apprehensive because the Germans have so far only given a verbal agreement to safe air zones. Flight Sergeant Bill Porter of 115 Squadron recalled, ‘As we crossed the Dutch coast on 29th April we could see the German gunners standing by their guns, but the barrels were horizontal.’

  Lancaster pilot Robert Wannop kept a war journal and recalled his first flight, just 500 feet off the ground. ‘Children ran out of school waving excitedly – one old man stopped at a crossroads and shook his umbrella… Nobody spoke in the aircraft. It wasn’t the time for words. My vision grew a little misty. Perhaps it was the rain on the Perspex, perhaps it wasn’t. One building was painted with huge white letters “THANK YOU RAF”. Those brave people who had so often risked their lives to save an RAF aircrew and return him safely to England. Who had spied for us and done countless other deeds that may never be revealed. They were thanking us for a little food. I felt very humble.’

  Two days after the Yalta Conference, on 13th February, Robert Wannop had been part of a massive RAF and USAAF bombing raid on the historic city of Dresden. The orders given to him and other RAF pilots were to ‘hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front… and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do’. Wannop wrote a few days later, ‘Above it all we sat sombre and impassive, each man concentrating on the job in hand. The whole city was ablaze from end to end. It was like looking at a sea of liquid flames, inspiring in its intensity. It was so bright at bombing height that we could easily have read a newspaper.’ The firestorm killed at least 25,000 people. It melted the road surfaces and burned people to cinders.

  At RAF Witchford the Lancaster crews of 115 Squadron are being briefed about their mission. It is a relief for them to be dropping food rather than bombs.

  Eighteen-year-old Dutch girl Arie de Jong wrote later, ‘There are no words to describe the emotions experienced on that Sunday afternoon. More than 300 four-engined Lancasters, flying exceptionally low, suddenly filled the horizon. I saw [one] aircraft tacking between church steeples...’

  At the end of April and the beginning of May, hundreds of tonnes of food will be dropped over Holland. Some crews tie home made parachutes to the food parcels sent from their families at home and drop them to the starving people below. In among one consignment containing bags of flour and chocolate an airman left a note:

  ‘To the Dutch people.

  ‘Don’t worry about the war with Germany. It is nearly over. These trips for us are a change from bombing. We will often be bringing new food supplies. Keep your chins up. All the best.

  ‘An RAF man.’

  A few Dutch civilians wear what the USAAF have nicknamed ‘happiness hats’ – brightly coloured headgear made from the parachute silk from downed Allied airmen; they are so bright they can be seen by the low-flying aircraft. The parachutes had been hidden but now are being worn proudly as a sign that they had helped the Allied cause. The crew of one USAAF bomber were flashed by a woman wearing a ‘happiness skirt’ – and no underwear.

  8.15am

  Lieutenant Claus Sellier is standing in the lobby of the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau, which until yesterday was the temporary German army headquarters for the region. He is now dressed in the full uniform of a member of the 79th Mountain Artillery Regiment. On his chest are medals that he won fighting the Russians in Hungary. Claus looks over the receptionist’s desk and sees that the package he brought yesterday is still lying on the floor, unopened. Claus wonders if he should go round and open the package and check whether it contains what he assumes – a request for urgent supplies from his commanding officer. Instead he gives it a kick, then makes the sign of the cross over it. He’s done all he can to complete the first part of the mission – although Claus can see that no one here is interested. In his room is the second package that must be delivered soon.

  About 8.30am/9.30am UK time

  In a large detached house named Burleigh, in a village outside Coventry, the telephone is ringing. Mrs Clara Milburn answers; it’s her friend Mrs Greenslade.

  ‘Aren’t you excited?’ she begins and explains that she’s seen a story in yest
erday’s Daily Telegraph that POWs from Oflag VII-B have been liberated. Clara Milburn’s son Alan has been a prisoner in Germany since Dunkirk. Mrs Greenslade means well, but Alan is in Stalag VII-B not Oflag VII-B.

  Alan has written regularly over the years; the last letter Clara and her husband Jack received was on 23rd March – it had taken over two months to reach them. Alan wrote about his working party doing gardening in the local town and how cold the weather’s been – ‘the old ears and fingers get nipped first thing’. Seven other men from the 7th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment were captured with him; three have been moved to other camps.

  Last Wednesday a young man named Jack Mercer came to see the Milburns. He had been in Stalag VII-B with Alan up until 18 months ago, but then had been moved to another camp by the Germans. Jack’s camp was liberated by the Americans and he’d got home five days ago. Clara and her husband appreciated the young man’s visit, especially as he’d cycled 60 miles from Stoke to see them.

  Later today Clara will get out an old exercise book on the first page of which she has written ‘Burleigh in Wartime’, and she will write up the latest war news: ‘... Berlin is being hammered street by street and house by house. Thousands of Germans are killed each day and their sufferings must be ghastly, but how unnecessarily they have made others suffer – and are not sorry.’ Clara has kept this diary since the day Alan was called up in 1939.

  Clara is not alone in keeping a diary; hundreds of others around the country are doing the same thing, feeling that they want a record of these momentous days. Many, like Clara, are taking cuttings from newspapers to stick alongside their diary entries.