Hitler's Last Day

by Emma Craigie

  At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, British Major Elliott Viney has finished his breakfast and is watching two USAAF P-51 Mustangs fly low over the camp. They perform a victory roll and the men clap and cheer like mad. They can hear the sound of gunfire nearby. They know that liberation is close at hand.

  Also watching and cheering the planes is a former P-51 pilot – 24-year-old Flight Lieutenant Alexander Jefferson is enjoying his first evening of freedom for eight months. In August 1944 Jefferson was shot down just outside Toulon while attacking a radar installation, and he was captured and taken first to a POW camp in Poland, and then, as the Russians advanced, moved with thousands of others to Moosburg.

  Alexander Jefferson is one of the USAAF’s first black pilots. When the US entered the war in December 1941, black people were not allowed to fly planes. In 1943 Jefferson became part of the Tuskegee Institute Experiment, which was set up to determine if black people could, in fact, be pilots. Shortly after, he was assigned to the 332nd ‘Red Tail’ Fighter group; the Germans soon came to respect these ‘Schwarze Vogelmenschen’ or ‘Black Birdmen’ as skilled bomber escorts.

  Jefferson will eventually sail home on the liner Queen Mary two months after being liberated. Years later he recalled the welcome he received: ‘Having been treated in Nazi capture like every other Allied officer, I walked down the gangplank towards a white US army sergeant on the dock, who informed us “Whites to the right, niggers to the left.”’

  About 9.00am/10.00am UK time

  Medical student Michael Hargrave is waiting on the runway at Down Ampney aerodrome by the Dakota transport plane that’s due to take him and other volunteers to Germany to help the sick at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Overnight snow has been brushed from the wings by the ground crew, the student’s luggage is on board and Hargrave is drying his wet gloves on the tail of the plane.

  In central Berlin there’s a sudden lull in the sound of artillery fire. Several Hitler Youth runners arrive in Boldt and von Loringhoven’s office in the upper bunker to report that the Russians are advancing with tanks and infantry towards the Reich Chancellery buildings. For days Boldt and von Loringhoven have been trying to work out how they can get themselves sent out on a combat mission. They have decided that this is their best hope of survival. It is clear that time is running out. Boldt feels sick with tension. The silence of the guns unnerves him.

  On the outskirts of Berlin, Yelena Rzhevskaya is attempting to interrogate a ‘tongue’ – as the Russians call their informants – a 15-year-old Hitler Youth with ‘bloodshot eyes and cracked lips’. Rzhevskaya is with the Russian 3rd Shock Army’s SMERSH intelligence detachment. She’s a German speaker working as an intelligence interpreter. The detachment has just received instructions to make their way to the government district and head for the Reich Chancellery. Their orders are to take Hitler alive, but Rzhevskaya is confused and frustrated as information is ‘scarce and self-contradictory and unreliable’. They aren’t even sure that Hitler is in Berlin. The ‘tongue’ isn’t talking and Rzhevskaya concludes that he knows nothing: ‘He is sitting here looking around but not understanding anything. Just a boy.’

  Claus Sellier and his fellow Mountain Artillery lieutenant Fritz have met for breakfast at the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau, the onetime regional army headquarters. They are enjoying hot coffee and fresh rolls, but their mood is sombre. Claus is thinking of his three best friends at school – the group of them had been nicknamed the Four Musketeers. Now the others are dead – two died in Russia, one was shot down over the Atlantic.

  ‘What do you think we should do now?’ he says to Fritz.

  ‘We’ll go to Traunstein and deliver the last package,’ Fritz replies, then adds bitterly, ‘Do you think Hitler knows that his generals have jumped ship? What are we going to tell Hitler if he calls here? “Yes, Sir, Mein Führer Hitler. No, sir, Mein Führer! Everybody at your headquarters has gone. It’s over, sir! You should go too!”’

  The two men laugh, and then head to their rooms to pack.

  ‘S-3 to all battalions. Upon capture of Dachau, post airtight guard and allow no one to enter or leave.’

  9.15am

  Corporal Bert Ruffle of the Rifle Brigade has been a POW since he was captured at Dunkirk on 26th May 1940. He’s a prisoner in Stalag IV-C, an all-British camp near Wistritz in the Sudetenland, and like hundreds of others, Ruffle is forced to work constructing the Sudentenlandische-Treibstoff-Werke – an oil refinery. The refinery has taken four years to build and is almost ready to start production. Ruffle never works very hard as he doesn’t see why he should aid the German war effort.

  Normally they’re woken up by a guard bursting into their hut at 4am, but today Ruffle and his friend Frank Talbot of the Queen Victoria Rifles have a more pleasant job. They have been selected to go to the nearby town of Brüx to collect some building material for one of the foremen at the refinery. From the back of their lorry, they can see that the town has been bombed heavily by the Allies.

  Ruffle is glad of any respite from the tough oil refinery work. Over the past few weeks their food ration has dropped – a loaf of bread a day now has to feed eight men rather than six. Last weekend was his 35th birthday and to mark the occasion he made himself a cake out of flour, burned barley ‘coffee’ grounds, potatoes and a small amount of sugar. ‘You never saw such a conglomeration in all your life but we ate it,’ Ruffle wrote in the diary he’s been keeping since January.

  Like many of the other POWs, Ruffle is starting to get dizzy spells and is seeing spots in front of his eyes. Their health suffered in the numerous marches they were forced to take as the Germans moved them away from the advancing Russians; one trek in the January snow and mud lasted over six weeks. On the march Ruffle witnessed many scenes of brutality – a British POW killed for trying to grab a potato from the side of the road; Russian prisoners shot one by one as they marched.

  Ruffle wrote that evening, ‘What would happen was a guard would snatch a prisoner’s hat and then throw it away. The prisoner was told to fetch it and, as he left the column to retrieve it, he was shot. It was nothing for a guard to give a prisoner a push and then shoot him as he staggered. All told, there must have been about hundred Russians who would not see Russia again.’

  9.22am

  Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks is on an important mission. The infantry and tanks of his regiment – the US 157th Infantry of the 45th Infantry Division – have been given the task of taking part in the capture of Munich, the capital of Bavaria and the home of Nazism, and then to push on to destroy Hitler’s mountain residence – the Berghof, outside Berchtesgaden. They have been making good progress, covering on average 50 miles a day, and they’re now only 30 miles from Munich.

  Sparks’ tanks are full of fuel, German opposition is light (little more than a few roadblocks), so Sparks is confident that the city will soon fall.

  A message is radioed to his jeep from headquarters. ‘S-3 to all battalions. Upon capture of Dachau, post airtight guard and allow no one to enter or leave.’

  Sparks hears it with fury. Capturing and taking over a concentration camp is going to slow him down – but he knows he has no choice. Yesterday he and other commanders were told that Dachau would be in their zone of action the next day, and that it was a ‘politically sensitive area’. This morning, Sparks divided his 56 tanks into two units and told them to go either side of the concentration camp and then to proceed to the town of Dachau, and reach Munich by nightfall.

  On 10th July 1943, Sparks landed with the 157th Infantry as part of the Allied invasion of Sicily. It is now day 511 of their long, hard campaign. They fought through Italy to Rome; then sailed to the South of France, fighting across the Alps and into Germany. Six days ago they were in Nuremberg, where in a battle by the opera house, Sparks was forced to abandon his jeep, which had in it letters from his wife Mary and photographs of his year-old son Kirk. Now the only pictures he has of them are stuck on the butt of his Colt .45 revolver
.

  ‘I was looking for pictures, not prisoners...’

  9.30am

  The bodies of Mussolini and his girlfriend Clara Petacci are hanging upside down from meat hooks outside a petrol station on a corner of the Milan square where they had been dumped earlier. As the square filled up, it was hard to prevent the crowd from trampling the bodies, so in an attempt to calm the onlookers, the bodies were strung up. Their names are on placards pinned to their feet.

  Milton Bracker, a reporter for the New York Times, is pushed towards the bodies by the ecstatic Milanese, into what he would call later ‘the circle of death’. The crowd think Bracker’s driver, Private Kenneth Koplin, is an American colonel on an official mission to see the bodies, and push him from his jeep to take a close look. Koplin feels sick and can’t wait to get away.

  In the crowd, taking one of his last photographs of the 600-day Allied war in Italy is a young second lieutenant working for the British Army Film and Photo Unit. Twenty-four-year-old Alan Whicker has seen plenty of fighting – including the Allied amphibious landings at Anzio in January 1944 and the liberation of Rome the following June (where he attended a press conference with Pope Pius XII where US photographers were shouting ‘Hold it, Pope!’).

  On 25th April he and his team of cameramen arrived in Milan, ahead of the advancing Americans, Whicker having swapped his jeep for a large Fiat limousine. They were told by Italian partisans that the SS holding out in the city would only surrender to an Allied soldier. Whicker wrote later, ‘I was looking for pictures, not prisoners, but allowed myself to be led towards the enemy stronghold.’ There, an SS general, clearly disappointed at Whicker’s low rank, nevertheless clicked his heels and handed over his revolver.

  Now, four days later, Whicker is in front of the Milan petrol station taking pictures as the mob spit and scream at the bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci. He too is appalled at the scene. ‘It was not, at that moment, a very splendid victory,’ he wrote later.

  Alan Whicker’s day is not yet over. He has a traitor to catch.

  The Italy section of the British Army Film and Photo Unit took over 200,000 still pictures during the Italian campaign, and over half a million feet of film. It came at a high price. Eight of the 40 officer and sergeant cameramen were killed and 13 seriously wounded.

  10.00am

  A Hitler Youth runner appears in von Loringhoven and Boldt’s office in the upper bunker to report that the Russian tanks are now about 500 metres from the Reich Chancellery.

  In Padua, New Zealand senior intelligence officer Geoffrey Cox is watching a Sherman tank roar up to his command post. On the front is John Shirley, one of the finest radio experts in the division.

  John Shirley has proved to be invaluable to Geoffrey Cox’s intelligence team. It’s clear from the interrogations of German prisoners that they have considerable knowledge of Allied troop movements, and Shirley has helped establish that they’ve been using First World War techniques to eavesdrop. The Germans have been laying their own telephone lines alongside the Allies’, and so have picked up, thanks to the physics of induction, what was being said.

  In Padua, through interrogations and examining captured files, it was also discovered that during the famous battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, the Germans had employed another ingenious method to get information. At one point Allied telephone cables had been laid along a railway embankment that ran towards German positions. The rails worked as reliable conductors, so all the Germans had to do was attach listening equipment to them to discover vital intelligence.

  Further back on the Sherman tank, holding white flags in one hand and holding on with the other, are four German officers. Cox orders the men to be put in a disused office building with other German POWs. Prisoners are becoming a real problem; that morning the Italian partisans captured 5,000, and the Allies can’t spare men to guard them.

  Cox arrives to speak to the four officers and arrange for their transfer south. They give him the Nazi salute. One of them, a general, asks if he can take with him a basket filled with bottles of cognac. But Cox is in no mood to be helpful, having heard the general’s aide de camp and other officers making comments about their Maori guard, calling him a ‘Neger’.

  Cox picks up the basket of cognac and hands it over instead to the guard.

  Like many Allied soldiers, Geoffrey Cox’s attitude to the Germans has hardened since the publication a few days ago of photographs from Bergen-Belsen in the forces’ newspaper Union Jack. He has seen death both as a correspondent and as a soldier, but those pictures shocked him – and his men. Cox wrote later, ‘To the troops who saw them now, as they jolted forward in the back of their three-tonners… they were one more stimulus to an aggressiveness that was already a flood tide.’

  Two days ago, Cox ripped out a picture of Belsen from Union Jack and gave it to his interrogator Mickey Heyden.

  ‘Stick this up in your truck when you’re interrogating and see what they say about it…’

  ‘I will – but I know in advance what they will say – “Gräuelpropaganda” [atrocity propaganda].’

  A short while later, Cox went to see several hundred captured German soldiers. Taken with them were four Russian women, who the Germans claimed were hospital workers, but Cox could see that was a lie. All the women were crying; one was staring at the Germans with total hatred. A Kiwi guard offered them some chocolate cake, but they were too frightened to take it.

  As he watched them, a prisoner in his late thirties came up to Cox and said he was a lecturer in English from Hanover. Cox was too tired to fully interrogate the officer, so he decided to see where the man’s sympathies lay.

  ‘I have always loved England,’ the German said. ‘I have made this war with a very heavy heart. Many Germans have made this war with a heavy heart.’

  Cox showed him the pictures of Belsen, saying, ‘Enough Germans had light enough hearts to accomplish this.’

  The man looked at the pictures but was clearly unconvinced. Cox pointed out the Russian women.

  ‘Do you feel no shame about that sort of thing? Does it not seem evil to you to take girls like that and drag them from their homes to be used as slaves?’

  ‘It is ugly. But it is one of those things which come from war.’ Then the German officer said, ‘May I ask you one question? What will happen to us?’

  The way the captured soldiers looked at the women had enraged Cox, and he thought of all the atrocities he’d seen in Italy, including just this past Sunday – the bodies of men who’d been dragged out of mass, put up against the church wall and shot.

  ‘You will be handed over to the Russians to rebuild some of what you have destroyed,’ Cox lied. The man looked terrified, and as Cox walked away he heard the prisoners start whispering, ‘…den Russen übergeben!’ and he took some satisfaction that he’d scared them.

  Lieutenant Claus Sellier and his friend Fritz are walking out of the Austrian town of Lofer and heading for the German border and the army provision headquarters in Traunstein to deliver their final package – what Sellier suspects is a request for urgent supplies for their beleaguered training camp. Claus feels free and strangely elated, since the generals have all disappeared. They come across three German soldiers – one has a bandaged foot and is being helped by the others.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Claus asks the wounded soldier.

  ‘Home to Berlin...’

  ‘But that’s 1,000 kilometres! And you’re limping – how will you get there?’

  ‘What else can we do? We were told to leave the hospital and so we’re going home. I don’t care how far it is. Anyway – do we have a choice?’

  ‘But there’s a big battle round Berlin… Aren’t you scared?’

  The soldier shows Claus a letter from a doctor. It says, ‘Released from the hospital. Do the best you can! We need the beds for the next bunch of wounded soldiers that comes in.’

  ‘I’m going home. I have a bed there – I hope.’

  The soldier
s go their separate ways.

  10.30am

  In his bedroom office in the upper bunker, the monocled General Krebs is on the telephone to army headquarters in Berlin. He is told that the German defence is collapsing on all fronts. Then the line suddenly goes dead. The air balloon which supports the radio-telephone communications has been shot down. All telephone communication between Berlin and the outside world has ended.

  Almost immediately a Hitler Youth runner arrives with news of a report that General Wenck’s 12th Army is still holding out south-west of Berlin. Officers Boldt and von Loringhoven exchange glances. This could be the escape opportunity that they have been waiting for. They need to convince General Krebs that they can do most good by breaking out and fighting with Wenck. They know that if there is any suspicion that they are trying to flee, they will be executed.

  Sixteen-year-old Armin Lehmann is one to the Hitler Youth runners. Once the telephone line goes down he finds himself making several trips a day across Berlin’s central street, Wilhelmstrasse, taking messages between army headquarters and the Führerbunker. He recalled these last days in a memoir published in 2003:

  ‘It was a nightmare.

  ‘It was a game of Russian Roulette and those who stepped out from cover were taking their life in their hands. At best they would get a mouthful of the constant cloud of phosphorus smoke and poisonous petrol from the incendiaries; at worst they would be sliced down by a Russian rocket. By then Wilhelmstrasse stank with the smell of scorched bodies… It was a particularly nauseating, sickly sweet smell… If a katyusha strike hit anywhere near where one was, it often produced sudden blindness and a terrible disorientation. That was the most dangerous moment. One had to find one’s feet straightaway otherwise the next strike could be for you… The crossing had become an open air burial pit.’