Hitler's Last Day

by Emma Craigie

  Hitler slowly stands up again. He shakes the three officers by the hand. ‘Give my regards to Wenck. Tell him to hurry or it will be too late.’

  On the island of Okinawa, the commander of the Japanese forces General Mitsuru Ushijima has called his staff together in a spacious cave 100 feet beneath ancient Shuri Castle, the headquarters of his 32nd Army. On 1st April, Easter Sunday, US forces launched a massive amphibious assault on the south of the island – 1,200 vessels landed over 170,000 soldiers. General Ushijima has 77,000 Japanese and 24,000 Okinawan auxiliaries to fight them, and so far, in slow, bloody battles reminiscent of the First World War, they have succeeded in holding the Americans back.

  General Ushijima’s Chief of Staff General Cho is holding forth: ‘We must mount a massive counter-attack while we still have the strength! In a few weeks attrition will have eaten away at our forces, and we will be too weak to take the offensive. We must strike now and destroy the Americans, even at the risk of losing our whole army!’

  General Cho is famous for his hard drinking and his extreme views. In the 1930s he advocated holding the Emperor at knife-point until he introduced military rule in Japan. Facing Cho at the meeting is the man responsible for the strategy for the defence of Okinawa, Colonel Yahara. He guessed exactly where the Americans would land and had prepared an impressive line of defensive fortifications, with Shuri Castle at its centre. He has no time for Cho’s fiery rhetoric.

  ‘The Americans have suffered great losses… but it would be folly to attack, because to break through the American lines on the high ground would demand much greater forces than we possess. Therefore, the army must continue its current operations, calmy recognising its final destiny, for annihilation is inevitable, no matter what is done.’

  Cho is unimpressed and starts to outline an audacious plan.

  12.35pm

  The Sherman tanks of the US 14th Armoured Division are crashing through the ten-foot-high wire fence of Stalag VII-A at Moosburg outside Munich. The tanks are immediately swamped by emotional POWs. An American Air Corps lieutenant kisses a Sherman, saying, ‘God damn, do I love the ground forces!’ A bearded paratrooper climbs onto a tank and kisses its crew commander, tears running down his cheeks. ‘You damned bloody Yanks, I love you!’ a tall Australian shouts, throwing his arms around a shocked jeep driver. One member of a tank crew recognises his brother among the POWs. British Major Elliott Viney – a prisoner for nearly five years – writes in his diary, ‘AMERICANS HERE.’

  Another British officer wrote optimistically in his diary later that day, ‘God bless the bastards… after five years, free at last. May be home next Sunday.’

  A few hours later General George Patton will arrive and point to the swastika flying from the camp’s flagpole, and yell: ‘I want that son-of-bitch cut down, and the man that cuts it down, I want him to wipe his ass with it!’

  In the last few weeks conditions in the camp, built for only 10,000, have become extremely harsh. There are now 80,000 prisoners in Moosburg. A long trench had been dug as a latrine and hundreds were suffering from dysentery. Most of the guards have fled.

  In the five years since the British POWs like Elliott Viney and Bert Ruffle were captured, there have been many changes to the Allied armies. One group of RAF prisoners failed to recognise the uniform of their British liberators, and had hidden in a tree for hours until they heard their accents. Elsewhere, reporter Alan Moorehead overheard a POW say in awe, ‘So that’s what a jeep looks like!’

  About 12.45pm

  Bert Ruffle and Frank Talbot have finished the job in Brüx. Instead of the usual work building the oil refinery, they were sent with a camp guard to pick up some materials for one of the refinery foremen. Next to them in the truck, under a tarpaulin, is a crate of beer they discovered in Brüx – they are taking some surreptitious swigs. The guard spots them, but says nothing. The men offer him a bottle.

  1.00pm

  I Company is marching through the town of Dachau. The soldiers are impressed – it is well kept with neat flower beds, cobbled streets, numerous small shops and a pretty river. Above the houses is an old castle. There had been a short firefight on the outskirts of the town but little else in terms of opposition. White sheets are hanging out of windows – the town has surrendered.

  Some soldiers are following a railway line that leads out of the town.

  ‘That’s the closest I’ve been to a free man on our side for more than four months.’

  About 1.00pm/6.30pm Burmese time

  Royal Australian Air Force Wing Commander Lionel ‘Bill’ Hudson is lying in the cell he shares with 20 others in Rangoon jail in Burma, listening to a commotion by the main gate. He’s half asleep and can’t be bothered to investigate what’s going on. This morning there had been the regular tenko (roll call) at 6.45, followed by a Sunday service, and then Hudson had headed back to his cell to have a nap – it’s been a hot week in Rangoon.

  It has been a strange few days. There have been explosions and fires to the east of Rangoon. The Japanese guards lit their own fire in the jail compound and started burning papers and what looked to the POWs to be medical records. Four days ago at 9.30 in the evening an Allied aircraft flew low over the jail. ‘That’s the closest I’ve been to a free man on our side for more than four months,’ Hudson confided to his diary later. Then the following day 200 of the fittest POWs were led away by some of the Japanese guards to an unspecified destination. Hudson asked why he was being left behind (he is the nominal leader of the Allied servicemen in the camp). ‘You – troublemaker,’ one guard replied. Hudson fears that the 200 men will be used as hostages in negotiations with the advancing British and Australian forces.

  The guards who left have been replaced by raw recruits, with new shoes and uniforms, and they don’t mind if the POWs forget to bow to them.

  Hudson, an Australian from New South Wales, was captured by the Japanese through what he knows was his own stupidity. On 19th December 1944, he flew his Mosquito from his base in Assam into Burma – he had no specific mission; Hudson just wanted to test out his guns on what’s known as a low-level ‘rhubarb’ – seeking targets of opportunity. Hudson and his navigator Jack Shortis were flying just above the treetops when the Mosquito hit a branch, which badly damaged the port engine. They dropped out of the sky ‘like a falling leaf’, Hudson wrote later, and were soon captured and taken to Rangoon jail. Rangoon, like the rest of Burma, had been overrun by the Japanese in early 1942; it took the invaders only 127 days to push the British out of the country. The fall of Burma, following the loss of Hong Kong and Malaya, had been a humiliating defeat.

  The Japanese are brutal conquerors. When Hong Kong was taken, hospital patients were bayoneted in their beds, and nurses and nuns raped. Prisoners of war are treated with contempt for having surrendered. The Allied prisoners in Rangoon jail have witnessed many examples of sadistic cruelty. The badly burned crew of a USAAF Flying Fortress were left to die a slow death in solitary confinement; those who are too sick to work in the jail’s candle factory are given two bottles every morning, and expected to fill them with dead flies. When the able-bodied return in the evening, they help collect flies and put them in the bottles, so the sick can evade punishment.

  1.10pm

  Operation Merlin is underway. Minutes ago, B Squadron of the 12th Lancers had radioed to say that they had successfully driven over the causeway into Venice. Now Geoffrey Cox and the rest of the 2nd New Zealand Division are heading east out of Padua, and people are on the streets and hanging out of windows cheering them. Italian flags are being thrown at the vehicles as they pass, and the Kiwis are obligingly wrapping them around their canvas canopies and gun barrels. As the Kiwis pass partisans on the road they shout ‘Ciao!’ in their best Italian.

  Claus Sellier and Fritz are eating a large lunch in a hotel dining room in the German town of Reichenhall. They’ve walked across the border from Austria this morning. The hotel had been turned into a makeshift army hospital a few months ag
o, but now all the patients have gone. As they helped themselves to food a doctor came in and told them, ‘Eat as much as you want! The kitchen doesn’t know how many patients we have in the hotel - nobody told them that there aren’t any.’

  ‘Let’s get those Nazi dogs! Take no prisoners! Don’t take any SS alive!’

  1.15pm

  In a railway siding outside the town of Dachau, men from Felix Sparks’ 45th Infantry Division have found a long line of railway wagons. Lying in and around them waist-deep are hundreds of decomposing corpses – some naked, others in shredded blue and white uniforms. Some have crawled out of the wagons and have then been butchered by the tracks. Many of the dead in the wagons have their eyes open, as if staring at the Americans.

  One GI feels it’s as if they are saying, ‘What took you so long?’

  Sparks arrives on foot, looks at the scene and vomits on the ground. Around him, his men are angry; he can hear them shouting.

  ‘Let’s get those Nazi dogs!’

  ‘Take no prisoners!’

  ‘Don’t take any SS alive!’

  They have counted 39 wagons – all of them full of bodies. Sparks orders one group of men to follow him into the camp, and another group to follow I Company Commander Lieutenant Bill Walsh. Walsh realises now that a concentration camp is nothing like a New York POW camp.

  The railway wagons had come from Buchenwald concentration camp as part of the Nazi policy to keep the prisoners away from the invading armies. At the start of the journey three weeks ago there were 4,800 prisoners; by the time the train arrived at Dachau, only 800 had survived. They were left to die in the wagons.

  On the other side of the camp’s perimeter wall, Sparks finds himself in a rose garden at the back of a large house. The contrast with what he’s just seen makes his head reel. Together with two men, Sparks explores the house, keeping an eye out for booby traps. In one room they find children’s wooden toys scattered on the floor, and other signs of a hasty departure. Sparks reckons it must have been the home of an SS officer who has long since fled with his family.

  By the railway tracks, Bill Walsh and his men have discovered four SS men with their hands on their heads. Walsh pushes them into a wagon and shoots them with his pistol.

  1.30pm

  At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, Major Elliott Viney is roaring with laughter as their former SS guards are humiliated. As the guards are led out of the camp, the newly liberated POWs shout to the GIs whether the German was ‘good’ or not. Those hated by the prisoners are given a heavy kick up the backside by a GI only too happy to oblige.

  In Milan, Second Lieutenant Alan Whicker is waiting in the office of the governor of Milan’s city jail with one of his British army cameramen. A short time after his appeal for information regarding the whereabouts of the suspected traitor John Amery, he was sent a message giving his location. Amery walks in looking very pale and says straightaway, ‘Thank God you’re here. I thought they were going to shoot me!’

  With Amery is his third wife Michelle, described later by Whicker as ‘an appealing brunette in a dark trouser suit’.

  Amery is keen to win Whicker’s sympathy.

  ‘I’ve never been anti-British. You can read the scripts of my broadcasts through the years and you’ll never find anything against Britain. I’ve just been very anti-communist, and if at the moment I’m proved wrong, well – one of these days you’ll find out that I was right...’

  Amery is relieved as Whicker leads him and Michelle from the jail and away from the threat of the partisans. Whicker hands them over to Sergeant John Martin of the Intelligence Corps. John Amery strikes Whicker as ‘pleasant and reasonable’ – but Amery’s troubles are far from over.

  Boldt, von Loringhoven and Weiss are setting off on their mission to meet up with General Wenck. They leave the Führerbunker through the underground garage carrying maps, sub-machine guns, camouflage jackets, steel helmets and sandwiches from the dining-room trolley. Von Loringhoven cuts the red staff officer bands off his trousers. If they are caught by the Russians he won’t want his captors to know that he is officer rank. The three men emerge from the exit on Hermann-Göringstrasse and are immediately forced to shelter from a mortar attack. Moments later a round of machine gun fire whistles over their heads; the bullets embed in the wall behind them. As they cross Hermann-Göringstrasse heading for the Tiergarten, they pass the first dead bodies, soldiers and civilians lying where they fell. The smell of decomposition is overwhelming.

  Back in the upper bunker, Nicolaus von Below, the Luftwaffe adjutant who also hopes to leave, is suggesting to General Burgdorf that he would also be more useful if he were sent on a mission. Burgdorf tells him that that is a decision for Hitler. Von Below goes down to the Führerbunker and waits in the corridor to speak to the Führer.

  Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks has walked further into the residential part of the Dachau complex. Suddenly he sees Lieutenant Bill Walsh chasing a German soldier. Walsh is shouting, ‘You sons of bitches! You sons of bitches!’

  Walsh catches the German and starts beating him over the head with the barrel of his rifle, yelling, ‘Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!’ Sparks shouts at him to stop, but Walsh keeps hitting and hitting. Sparks draws his .45 and cracks Walsh over the head with its butt. Walsh falls to the ground and lies there weeping.

  ‘I’m taking command of the company!’ Sparks shouts to the men around him.

  It takes seven men to take Walsh away and calm him down.

  We stood aside and watched while these guards were beaten to death… we watched with less feeling than if a dog were being beaten.

  Dachau inmate Rabbi David Eichorn’s

  letter home, 29th April 1945

  About 1.40pm

  Those Dachau inmates who haven’t been held in the prison area of the complex are slowly starting to emerge from their huts and are running as fast as they can towards their liberators. They surround the GIs and kiss and shake their hands. A weak old man holds out a stained cigarette to a GI, who hesitates.

  ‘Take it,’ another inmate says, ‘That’s the only thing the guy owns in the world.’

  Albert Guerisse is a Belgian doctor who worked for the British Secret Operations Executive (SOE) under the pseudonym of Pat O’Leary. He has been a prisoner of the Germans for two years, after the escape line for Allied airmen he was running was infiltrated and betrayed. In Dachau he has been tortured and is under sentence of death. Liberation has come just in time.

  Guerisse watches as an immaculately turned-out SS officer, Lieutenant Heinrich Skodzensky, approaches an American officer as if he’s on a parade ground.

  ‘Heil Hitler! I hereby turn over to you the concentration camp of Dachau, 30,000 residents, 2,340 sick, 27,000 on the outside, 560 garrison troops.’

  The American officer hesitates for a moment, then shouts at Skodzensky, ‘Du Schweinhund! Sit down here!’ and points to the back of a jeep. The officer then turns to Guerisse and gives him an automatic rifle saying, ‘Come with me’, offering Guerisse a chance to take his revenge on the SS officer. But Guerisse is too weak to move.

  ‘No, I’ll stay here...’ he says.

  The American drives out of the camp with Skodzensky. Then Guerisse hears gunshots.

  A group of about 50 SS prisoners are being lined up in front of an eight foot wall in Dachau’s coal yard. The yard is now empty except for a layer of black coal dust on the ground. Felix Sparks has ordered that a light machine gun be trained on them. A private from I Company comes up to him.

  ‘Colonel, you’d better see what we found…’

  Sparks sets off and has walked about 50 feet when the machine gun suddenly goes off behind him. Another GI then opens fire. Sparks turns and runs back into the coal yard. He pulls out his .45 and, firing shots into the air, orders his men to stop. Sparks then runs towards the machine gunner who is still firing, kicks him in the back, grabs him by the collar and drags him away from the gun.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?
!’ Sparks shouts.

  ‘Colonel, they were trying to get away!’

  Sparks knows that’s a lie. Looking towards the Germans, he can see about 17 have been killed; many others have dived to the ground. Sparks orders that the wounded be taken into the hospital in the camp grounds.

  Two of the battalion medics refuse to help the wounded SS men.

  The shooting in the coal yard will haunt Felix Sparks for many years to come. Arland Musser, a stills photographer, and Henry Gerzen, a film cameraman, recorded what happened. Their pictures were sent to the head of the Seventh Army, General Arthur A. White, who decided that the shootings needed to be investigated. On 1st May Sparks was told he was being sent back to the United States.

  The investigation took place a couple of days later – 23 men gave their testimony. The investigation discovered that I Company Commander Lieutenant Bill Walsh, after becoming ‘hysterical in Dachau shortly before the shootings in the coal yard, had given the order to the machine gunner to “let them have it.”’ The report concluded that the 17 deaths were in effect executions ordered by Walsh.

  On his way home, Sparks got as far as Le Havre and was then told he had to return to Seventh Army headquarters, which by now had been successfully set up in Munich. General Patton himself wanted to see him. When the two men met, Sparks was in for a surprise.

  ‘Didn’t you serve under me in Africa and Sicily?’ Patton asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, I did. I would like to explain what happened in Dachau...’

  ‘There is no point in an explanation. I have already had these charges investigated, and they are a bunch of crap. I’m going to tear up these goddamn papers on you and your men.’

  And he did so there and then.