Hitler's Last Day

by Emma Craigie

  Meanwhile Fritz makes a show of ripping up the page with the SS officer’s details, saying, ‘I won’t report you this time.’

  Two days later, from the safety of a forest, Fritz will watch as the same SS officer, together with other SS men, stops wounded German soldiers at a checkpoint. The officer takes the men’s papers and, without reading them, rips them up. The soldiers are then tied with their hands behind their backs, and signs are put around their necks that read: ‘I’m a coward. I don’t want to fight.’ One by one they are hanged from a tree as the SS men shout ‘Cowards!’ at them. Some of the soldiers carrying out the executions are as young as 15. Witnessing this, Fritz will look at the Hitler Youth badge he’s had since school, and for the first time feel ashamed of it. He sits in the forest and weeps.

  ‘Tonight you will hear an Englishman who is speaking to you at his own request and of his own free will...’

  Second Lieutenant Alan Whicker of the British Army Film and Photo Unit is in a radio station in Milan, and through a translator, is asking for an appeal to be sent out for the whereabouts of John Amery – a notorious traitor who has been broadcasting Fascist propaganda since 1942. John Amery is no ordinary traitor – he is the son of the British Cabinet Minister Leo Amery. Whicker knows that the partisans have captured him; he just doesn’t know where he’s being kept.

  Thirty-three-year-old John Amery is in fact only a short distance from Whicker, in the Milan city jail. He is unshaven and wearing a Fascist black shirt.

  Amery is a complicated man and possibly mentally ill. He had a privileged childhood, brought up in the family home on Eaton Square in London and educated at Harrow. His housemaster described Amery as ‘without doubt the most difficult boy I have ever tried to manage... he seemed unable in those days to distinguish right from wrong. He seemed to think he could be a law unto himself.’

  In his early twenties Amery travelled and worked around Europe with his wife Una, a former prostitute. By the time Churchill brought his old friend Leo Amery into his wartime Cabinet in May 1940 and gave him responsibility for India, John was a virulent anti-communist and anti-Semite (which was strange considering he is part Jewish).

  In March 1942, now living in the French Alps, John Amery wrote a letter to a French newspaper criticising an RAF bombing raid on the Renault factory in Paris, in which 623 civilians were killed. He said that a number of his countrymen agreed with his views. MI5 swiftly picked up on the letter, and an official noted in Amery’s file that the letter’s contents should deter Amery from returning to England. ‘Or if he does, he should be assured of a reception at the hands of a firing squad.’ At the same time the German Foreign Office in Berlin also got to hear of this outspoken British Cabinet Minister’s son.

  In November 1942, the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (Reich Broadcasting Company) introduced a new voice to its Germany Calling programme: ‘Tonight you will hear an Englishman who is speaking to you at his own request and of his own free will...’

  Amery spoke about how Britain’s alliance with Russia would lead to communism in Britain; how all the newspapers in London are Jewish-controlled, and in a passage that was probably written by the Propaganda Ministry, he claimed Germany didn’t want to rob Britain of her Empire: ‘There is more than enough room in the world for Germany and Britain.’

  On 20th April 1943 he visited a POW camp in an attempt to recruit British soldiers to join a British Legion of St George to fight the Russians. He had even designed some posters showing a Tommy marching with the German army, with the caption: ‘Our Flag Is Going Forward Too.’ Amery was hissed and booed.

  Amery was becoming an embarrassment to the German Propaganda Ministry. He was frequently drunk and his broadcasts had little impact. Then Amery’s second wife Jeanine (whom he had bigamously married, and was also a prostitute) died after an apparent overdose.

  In September 1943 he moved to Italy and met with Mussolini, who had been installed by the Germans as the leader of the Italian Social Republic in the north of the country, which they controlled. Amery began broadcasting on the state-controlled network. On 25th April 1945 he was arrested by the partisans in Milan and placed in the city’s jail.

  With Amery in jail is his third wife Michelle, whom he met on a train only days after his second wife’s funeral. Like his two other wives, she is also a prostitute. They nervously await their fate. After the death of Mussolini and his mistress, they know the partisans are capable of anything.

  11.30am

  In the Italian Alpine village of Villabassa, the SS guards who have been holding British Secret Service agent Captain Sigismund Payne-Best and the other Prominente prisoners are staring at two machine guns belonging to a small unit of German army infantry. The infantry have arrived to protect the Prominente from the SS who have orders to execute the prisoners today. Thanks to the efforts of Payne-Best, the German army Commander knows that if they are killed, the Allies, now only a few miles away, will hold them responsible.

  The SS start talking among themselves about what they should do. Payne-Best walks up to Lieutenant Bader, the SS officer in charge. The two men have met before – Bader is a member of a Gestapo execution squad which moved round the various concentration camps where Payne-Best was being held.

  ‘Throw down your arms or else those machine guns will go off,’ Payne-Best says. To his amazement Bader and the SS troops do what they’re told and drop their sub-machine guns on the ground. Watching the scene have been a number of Italian civilians, who immediately snatch up the weapons. Bader pleads with Payne-Best to use his influence to let him have some petrol so he and his men can leave Villabassa.

  But the SS truck never leaves the square. Denied petrol, Bader and his men decide to walk to the town of Bozen about 60 miles away. En route they are attacked by Italian partisans and a number of them are hanged from telegraph poles by the road. In their abandoned truck in Villabassa are 300 Red Cross parcels intended for prisoners in Dachau, which the SS had stolen.

  ‘Sometimes I think, with horror, that in her heart that child saw through the pretence of the grown-ups.’

  11.45am

  Underneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the six children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels are playing in the corridor of the upper bunker. Most of them are excited to be there. They call the bunker a ‘cave’. They feel completely safe from the bombs as they wait for the victory their parents have promised. They have made friends with some of the people working here. Misch, the gentle giant at the switchboard, is a particular favourite and they have made up a rhyme about him which the four-year-old, Heide, sings every time they see him: ‘Misch, Misch du bist ein Fisch!’

  In the words of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, who has been helping to look after them, ‘They were charming, well brought-up, natural-mannered children. They knew nothing of the fate awaiting them, and the adults did all they could to keep them unaware of it… Only the oldest, Helga, sometimes had a sad, knowing expression in her big brown eyes. She was the quietest, and sometimes I think, with horror, that in her heart that child saw through the pretence of the grown-ups.’

  11.50am

  The three couriers of Hitler’s testaments, Lorenz, Zander and Johannmeier, finally leave the bunker. They have stuffed their pockets with food from the breakfast trolley but have no money or papers. All morning they have been discussing possible routes. They will travel together until they get past the Russian encirclement. Johannmeier is instructed to then make his way to General Schörner in Czechoslovakia; Zander is to head for Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters in Plön and Lorenz is to go with him with the ultimate aim of flying to Munich to the Nazi Party headquarters. If any of the couriers fail to get to their destination their orders are to aim for British and American territory, which is now about 50 kilometres to the west. There is a strong belief in Germany that the Allies treat prisoners better than the Russians do. At least there is no Siberia in the west.

  They leave through the underground garages below the Reich Chan
cellery building. Johannmeier leads the way along Hermann-Göringstrasse, with the help of a young soldier called Hummerich. They check each road crossing is safe from snipers and beckon Lorenz and Zander with hand signals. The wide street is lined with ruined houses and the road is blocked by debris.

  Midday/7.00am EWT (Eastern War Time)

  Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks has given the task of liberating Dachau concentration camp to I Company – a reserve unit. The rest of his regiment is heading towards Munich to take part in the capture of the city as planned. Sparks has been told that the concentration camp is a ‘politically sensitive area’, so he is travelling with I Company in his jeep. They are now only about a mile east of Dachau.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell we’re running into,’ Sparks told I Company Commander Lieutenant Bill Walsh, ‘I’ll give you an extra machine gun platoon. A heavy weapons company will go with you.’ Twenty-five-year-old Walsh knows nothing about concentration camps. He assumes they are POW camps, full of Allied soldiers. He’d once seen a POW camp in New York State full of German prisoners; he guesses it might look like that.

  Unaware that they’ve narrowly escaped being executed by the SS, 120 of the Prominente prisoners are assembled in the dining room of the Hotel Bachmann. Standing on one of the tables are British secret agent Captain Payne-Best and fellow prisoner Colonel Bogislav von Bonin. They tell the expectant prisoners – von Bonin in German and then Payne-Best in English and French – that they are free. But they add that they must stay close to their hotels as it is rumoured that there are still armed SS men around, and the war is not yet over.

  Payne-Best tells them that they are all to be taken by the local partisans to the safety of a hotel higher in the Alps. It can be accessed only via a single-track road that is easily guarded; there they will wait for the Allies to arrive.

  Payne-Best discovers something strange. He can speak French without difficulty, but English is an effort. During his five and a half years of imprisonment he has tried to speak only German and so it’s hard to recall the correct English words and phrases. Also, for some reason his false teeth made by the Sachsenhausen dentist make speaking English hard – but are no trouble when he is speaking in French and German.

  President Truman is sitting at his desk in Blair House, a large Georgian property just over the road from the White House. His study is quiet – no one else is up. Truman, his wife Bess and their daughter Margaret moved here a couple of days after the death of President Roosevelt on 12th April; they plan to move into the White House once the redecoration and cleaning they’ve ordered has finished. (In fact it will soon be discovered that the building is structurally unsound, and so the Trumans don’t move in until 1952). The President is writing a letter to his mother and sister, who live in Missouri; he conscientiously writes to them every week. The new President is finding the intrusion of the press into his family life especially irksome.

  ‘Dear Mamma and Mary,

  ‘I hope you haven’t been bothered too much. It is a terrible – and I mean terrible – nuisance to be kin to the President of the United States. Reporters have been haunting every relative I ever heard of… A guard has to go with Bess and Margaret everywhere they go – and they don’t like it. They spend a lot of time trying to beat the game, but it can’t be done. In a country as big as this one there are necessarily a lot of nuts and people with peculiar ideas…’

  Although Truman doesn’t like press intrusion, he tolerates the weekly press conferences, even when the questions are wide-ranging (in his first press conference he was asked about the new Polish government but also his views on the disposal of synthetic rubber plants).

  After leaving his farm to fight in the First World War, Truman opened a haberdashery in Kansas that soon went bust. That and his inexperience in foreign affairs has led to a certain amount of snobbery about him in Washington. Alistair Cooke was at that first press conference, and before they went in, the other reporters were saying they ought to be gentle with Truman, as he would probably ‘fumble it’. They were in for a surprise. Cooke said later, ‘We staggered out after taking a drubbing from a sergeant-major. He always knew what he wanted. He might have failed as a haberdasher, but he plainly had no intention of failing as a president.’

  Roosevelt’s death, despite his long-term health problems, came as a shock to the nation – and to the Vice President. Truman wrote later, ‘I had hurried to the White House to see the President, and when I arrived, I discovered I was the President…’ He had only been Vice President for 82 days.

  On 25th April the United States Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson came to see President Truman to tell him something that had been kept secret from him as Vice President – that the war with Japan could soon be over.

  ‘Within four months, we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.’

  On 29th July Truman will authorise the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

  During his term as Vice President, Truman met with Roosevelt privately only twice. He knew very little about what had been decided at Yalta, in fact, he wrote later, the President never spoke to him about ‘the war, about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for peace after the war’. But Truman is a shrewd man and a keen student of history – he has examined the lives of many great war leaders, from Hannibal to Robert E. Lee. Truman once boasted he’d read every book in his home-town library.

  12.15pm/1.15pm UK time

  Intelligence officer Major Geoffrey Cox is getting ready to move out of Padua. Around him, other members of the 2nd New Zealand Division are loading up their trucks. News has arrived that the route to Venice, 30 miles away, is almost secure. The plan to capture the city is codenamed Operation Merlin.

  For the past few days the New Zealanders have driven through villages where girls have thrown flowers and blossom as they passed. It is a small reward for the tough slog through Italy in the past few months. They feel that they are the forgotten army – their battles rarely knock news of the advances in northern Europe from the front pages. Some of the jeeps of the 2nd New Zealand Division have ‘D-Day Dodgers’ scrawled on the side in chalk – the unfair nickname that some have given them back home.

  Most of the troops in the Italian campaign feel unfairly maligned. On 3rd May 1945 Major Neil Margerison will write to his fiancée from Italy, ‘People in England don’t understand the conditions which have prevailed in Italy. They think that we have been disgustingly slow about the job, and that any propaganda regarding the difficult terrain and terrible weather are an official excuse for our procrastinations…. Chaps serving in Italy are “good time boys” or “D.D.D.s” (D-Day Dodgers). Chaps who have returned from overseas service in the Med. (4½ years) take a back place to the chaps who are serving in France and receiving leave every six months...’

  On the BBC Home Service, Lieutenant J. Trenaman is presenting one of a series of 15-minute programmes called Teaching Soldiers to Read.

  The BBC has a policy both on the Home Service and on the Forces Programme to educate and inform servicemen, as well as to provide entertainment. One such innovation is a round-table discussion called The Brains Trust (its name taken from Roosevelt’s nickname for his circle of advisors) that tackles such varied questions as ‘What is democracy?’ and ‘What is a sneeze?’ It began in 1940 on the Forces Programme but proved so popular it’s repeated on the Home Service. By 1945 it has an audience of 12 million. One factory worker wrote in his diary: ‘The favourite topic on Mondays seems to be the previous day’s Brains Trust. Hardly anyone ever confesses that he didn’t hear it, or if they do, take care to give adequate reason for so doing.’

  ‘Give my regards to Wenck. Tell him to hurry or it will be too late.’

  12.30pm/8.30pm Okinawa time

  ‘Mein Führer,’ General Krebs begins, ‘there are three young officers who are keen to try and break out of Berlin and make contact wit
h General Wenck so that they can update him on the situation here and support the speedy attack of the 12th Army on the capital.’

  There is a silence of several seconds before Hitler replies. He seems weary. It has been a difficult situation conference. All the reports are extremely discouraging.

  ‘Who are these officers?’

  Krebs gives him their names.

  ‘Who are Boldt, Weiss and von Loringhoven? Send them in.’

  Standing at the back of the conference room, the Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below listens carefully to what follows. Like these young officers he is desperate to find a way to survive. With the telephone lines down he has no means of contacting his pregnant wife and children on the Baltic coast.

  The three officers file in and von Loringhoven sets out the plan. He is surprised how calm the Führer seems. He points out their possible route options on the large map laid out on the table. The second option involves travelling down the River Havel. Hitler immediately prefers it.

  Von Loringhoven elaborates, ‘Once we reach Pichelsdorf Bridge we will take a rowing boat and row up the River Havel, between the Russian lines as far as Wannsee Lake.’

  Hitler interrupts, ‘Bormann, supply these officers with a motor boat, otherwise they will never get through.’

  Boldt feels a rush of panic. If the mission depends on Bormann obtaining a motor boat in the current circumstances it will never take place. But no one is supposed to contradict the Führer. Boldt has to risk it: ‘Mein Führer, we will get hold of a motor boat ourselves and deaden the noise. I’m convinced that we will get through.’