by Emma Craigie
Patton said to Sparks, ‘You have been a damn fine soldier. Now go home.’
Despite the investigation, rumours persisted that it was Felix Sparks who had ordered the killing of the SS men. Then, in the early 1990s, four photographs were published for the first time, taken by a GI named Robert Goebel who had witnessed the shootings. They showed Sparks firing his pistol in the air, and with his left hand outstretched, desperately motioning to his men to stop. In the background bodies lie in a heap against the wall.
Remain Firm, Fair, Aloof and Aware.
GI Pocket Guide to Germany
About 2.00pm
Today is Nina Markovna’s 17th birthday. Chalked on the wall by her bunk bed are the names of her three American boyfriends. Bob and Mike are both soldiers, and Jack is a pilot. Jack is on his way to see her in a jeep that’s piled high with coats, dresses, hats and shoes.
In May 1942 Nina, her mother and her brother Slava were taken from their home in Russia by the Germans to be Ostarbeiter – Eastern workers in Germany. Nina’s father is away serving with the Red Army.
After a two-week journey by train in a cattle wagon, the Markovna family were taken to a market square in a Bavarian town with hundreds of others and handed over to factory owners eager for cheap labour. They were all given a cloth badge to wear on their chest with OST written on it. It reminded Nina of the slave markets she’d read about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
For the next three years they worked in a number of factories; in one they built explosives for V1 flying bombs; in another they turned second-hand clothes into garments such as aprons. Some of the clothes were very expensive dresses, suits and coats; a Polish worker said that they’d come from Oswiecim, a place the Germans called Auschwitz. The name meant nothing to Nina. Sometimes she would find American dollars sewn into seams. The money came in useful to bribe guards for extra food.
At the end of 1944, the Markovna family were moved to what would be their final camp, based in an abandoned theatre on the outskirts of the German town of Triptis. Twelve people are squeezed into the theatre’s old dressing room; Nina and her brother have a bunk bed by the window. Lying there on 13th February, she watched the night sky turn orange as the RAF bombed Dresden 90 miles away.
Then on 15th April, their SS guards ran into the woods, shedding their uniforms and changing into civilian clothes.
Soon after, the Americans arrived. Nina was fascinated by how they walked – not rigid like German soldiers or undisciplined like Russians, but in an easy, free, yet self-controlled way. Their tight uniforms were particularly appealing. The Americans were unfriendly at first but when they realised Nina was Russian their mood changed.
‘Hey, Russky! Hey, there! War kaput!’
‘Don’t cry. You’re free!’
In the days since then, the Americans have been regular visitors to the abandoned theatre, bringing food and cigarettes for all the ex-prisoners. Nina has been treated to rides on motorbikes and in jeeps. Soon she has her three boyfriends – Bob, Mike and Jack.
Lying on her bunk, Nina hears Jack’s jeep pull up outside. He shouts, ‘Ninochka! Come out! Hurry! Happy birthday, young lady!’
He shows her the jeep, piled high with clothes and shoes.
‘Select what you like! Whatever fits you. The rest pass on to others.’
Nina asks where he got them all.
‘I plundered a few deserted Nazi houses.’
Seeing Nina’s concern – a few days ago she would have been shot for looting – Jack says, ‘Don’t worry, kid, no one will come for these clothes. The Nazis all ran.’
Nina chooses three dresses, a navy-blue coat, a kimono and five hats. Jack tries to persuade her not to take the shoes with heels, as he’s not very tall. Nina says she’ll wear them only when she’s sitting.
Soon Nina’s mother and the other women in the camp are modelling hats and dresses for each other, and laughing in a way they haven’t done for a long time.
Bob, Mike and Jack will have been warned repeatedly about fraternising with the enemy.
‘The Germans must be ostracised,’ General Eisenhower said earlier in the year, and ordered that press photographs of his soldiers fraternising with the German population should be stopped by the censors. He issued GIs with a guide to Germany telling them, ‘You are in enemy country! These people are not our allies or friends.’ There was a $65 fine if they were caught fraternising. The fact that Nina is Russian means that spending time with her and her family is possible.
The British soldiers too were warned about fraternisation. A War Office guidebook said, ‘You are about to meet a strange people in a strange, enemy country. Many of them will have suffered from overwork, underfeeding and the effects of the air raids and you may be tempted to feel sorry for them. [But their] hard luck stories will be hypocritical attempts to win sympathy. Germans must be regarded as dangerous enemies.’
‘I’m very sorry I can’t give you a better farewell present.’
2.00pm
Hitler is lunching with Eva Braun and the secretaries. Until the autumn of 1942, shortly after the start of the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler used to eat with his adjutants, but he found himself put off his food by conversation about what was turning out to be the bloodiest single battle in history. He began to share meals only with women. The secretaries had a rota to make sure that someone was with him for every meal, including tea in the early hours of the morning. They were instructed not to bring difficult issues into the conversation, but today it is Hitler who raises a difficult subject, which has been preying on his mind.
‘I will never fall into the enemy’s hands, dead or alive. I am leaving orders for my body to be burned so that no one can ever find it.’
Traudl Junge eats mechanically, without noticing what she is eating, as the conversation turns to the best method of suicide.
Hitler says, matter-of-factly, ‘The best way is to shoot yourself in the mouth. Your skull is shattered and you don’t notice anything. Death is instantaneous.’
Eva is horrified. ‘I want to be a beautiful corpse… I’m going to take poison.’
She shows the secretaries a little brass box that contains a phial of cyanide, which she keeps in the pocket of her dress.
‘I wonder if it hurts very much? I’m so frightened of suffering for a long time… I’m ready to die heroically, but at least I want it to be painless.’
Hitler assures her that death by cyanide is painless: ‘The nervous and respiratory systems are paralysed within seconds.’
Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge exchange glances, and then turn in unison to the Führer. ‘Do you have any phials which we could use?’ Neither woman is keen to commit suicide, but they believe that the poison could be preferable to capture by the Russians.
The Führer nods. He will make sure that they each get one. ‘I’m very sorry I can’t give you a better farewell present.’
Nicolaus von Below, who has been waiting in the corridor to speak to the Führer, gets his opportunity after lunch. He asks permission to attempt a breakout.
Hitler is discouraging. ‘It is no longer possible to get through the Russian lines.’
Von Below is determined. ‘Mein Führer, I believe I will be able to reach General Wenck in the south-west.’
‘If you get that far you should head for Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters in the north. I will give you a written permission. Alles gute.’
Dönitz’s headquarters is the ideal destination as his wife and children are not far from Plön Castle, along the Baltic coast. Von Below goes to prepare. He decides he will take only the permission, some food and a machine gun.
Thirty-two-year-old British Lieutenant Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job is speeding in his jeep away from the port of Bremen. He is heading towards a vast arsenal of mines belonging to the German navy, which he believes is hidden in woods nearby – it’s been completely undetected throughout the war.
Dalzel-Job is a naval intelligence officer with exceptional skills �
� he can navigate midget submarines, dive, parachute, and in 1940 he helped evacuate 5,000 civilians from the Norwegian city of Narvik (for which King Haakon of Norway awarded him the Ridderkors or Knight’s Cross). In 1942 Dalzel-Job was back in occupied Norway leading commando raids to assess the strength of the German forces there.
Now in Germany, Dalzel-Job is a member of the British 30 Assault Unit whose job it is to secure enemy intelligence material before the Germans have time to destroy it – and also before Allied troops overrun it (Dalzel-Job wrote later that his own side was ‘often the bigger risk to their preservation’).
30 Assault Unit (named after the number of their underground office in the Admiralty) are the invention of the deputy to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming, a man who Dalzel-Job finds ‘kind, but cold with an eye to the main chance’. They are not Fleming’s only invention. T-Force is a unit designed to track down all non-naval intelligence, and are currently still working in Bremen. Dalzel-Job has no time for T-Force. As far as he is concerned they always arrive late and are little more than looters. (Dalzel-Job is tough on looters. A few days ago near Bremen he found that a royal marine had taken two watches from a shop. He made the marine go back and return them to the owner. ‘It seemed to me that an army which was supposed to be fighting for a principle could not afford the traditional soldiers’ perquisites of looting and rape,’ he said later.)
30 Assault Unit are in effect Fleming’s own private army, and were so successful in North Africa and Italy that they now have a whole Marine commando unit assigned to them. As a result, the scout cars and jeeps that make up Dalzel-Job’s team are carrying as many marines as they can as they race through the north German countryside.
Bremen has been a great success for 30 Assault Unit. Last Thursday, 26th April, Dalzel-Job himself was asked by the Burgomaster to accept the surrender of the city, and he placed the police and all other services at his disposal. But Dalzel-Job was more interested in getting to Bremen’s shipyards where he’d heard from German POWs and civilians that there were some of the new and much-feared Type XXI U-boats. Sure enough, in the shipyards he discovered 16 new U-boats and two destroyers. His team worked all through Thursday night sifting through technical data left behind by the naval engineers.
On Friday more British troops arrived, along with the press and army officials. Dalzel-Job recalled, ‘When a staff officer arrived from 52nd Division and asked me to sign a receipt for the 16 submarines, it was the last straw. I told the Royal Marines to put up a sign saying the shipyard belonged to 30 Assault Unit.’
They are now getting close to the town of Hesedorf and the naval arsenal. Dalzel-Job and his team have been travelling across Europe since D-Day and are experts in gathering information from both German soldiers and civilians. He finds that the civilians in particular are often willing to talk ‘in the first shock of seeing us arrive’. It’s through these contacts that he’s established the whereabouts of the valuable arsenal.
Although Patrick Dalzel-Job was not especially inspired by Ian Fleming, it seems Fleming was inspired by him. Many years later, Fleming told Dalzel-Job that James Bond was in part modelled on him. As soon as the first books came out in the early 1950s, Peter Jemmett, a former member of 30 Assault Unit, recognised Dalzel-Job as the Bond prototype. ‘In contrast to a number of people who have claimed that they were James Bond, Patrick has never made any fuss about it,’ Jemmett said. Dalzel-Job wrote that Fleming could write witty minutes on operational intelligence reports, ‘but was the last person I would have suspected of writing best-sellers.’
About 2.15pm/7.45pm Burmese time/9.15am EWT
Wing Commander Lionel ‘Bill’ Hudson is wide awake now – from the balcony in his prison block in Rangoon jail he can see a small fire beyond the main gate. The jail is divided into different compounds like spokes in a wheel – one for the British and Australian troops; one for the Indians and Gurkhas; and another for captured Chinese. Hudson looks towards the Japanese guards’ compound and it seems to him suspiciously quiet. He wrote later, ‘Some intuition, or was it the extraordinary stillness, told me that something strange was in the air.’
Under the light of a full moon, Hudson walks round the balcony until he comes to the front of the prison block. There is no guard. He decides to wait to see if one appears. It is wise to be cautious – even a minor transgression, like failing to bow to a guard, can result in a beating.
Hudson climbs onto the low balcony wall and drops to the ground.
The American military have arrived in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. They’re ordering that the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress be taken down from the meat hooks where they’ve been hanging and delivered to the city morgue so that autopsies can be carried out.
A US army photographer will accompany the bodies to the morgue where he arranges the couple in a macabre embrace for a picture that will be sent around the world.
In Caserta, near Naples, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff signs the surrender of German forces in Italy – just under one million men – to the Allies. Lieutenant General Morgan signs on behalf of Field Marshal Alexander. American, Russian and British officers look on in silence.
‘Ich habe Schmerzen – Schmerzen.’
Geoffrey Cox’s Venice-bound convoy has stopped for a moment by a small park. A man who is looking very pale and is being helped to walk by his wife and two daughters approaches the New Zealander’s jeep.
‘This is my first day out of hiding for a year,’ he says in Italian. ‘A year in a cellar. A year in a cellar. A year in a cellar…’ he says again and again.
The convoy moves on and soon comes across the aftermath of a battle that ended only a short time before. Cox gets out of his jeep and heads towards a ditch near the road. There he sees a group of about 20 German soldiers lying dead or dying. The partisans have taken their guns.
A middle-aged soldier mouths to Cox, ‘Ich habe Schmerzen – Schmerzen.’ ‘I’m in pain – pain.’
A group of press photographers arrive and start taking pictures; a priest dashes over and starts hearing the German soldiers’ mumbled confessions. The photographers ask the priest to shift position so they can get a shot of him where the light is better. He obliges.
Every day Cox sends out an intelligence report for the division. In the report for 23rd April he explained why the Germans continue to fight: ‘Even though it is obvious to the vast majority that Germany has lost the war, they are quite prepared to fight on so long as it is the easiest thing to do and so long as there is somebody there to tell them to do it.’
‘I hope there is no word or phrase in this outpouring of my heart that unwittingly gives offence.’
President Truman is not having a relaxed Sunday morning. He is reading a cable sent by Churchill to both him and Stalin about the vexed question of Poland. Churchill expresses his ‘distress’ at the misunderstandings that have arisen about the plans agreed at Yalta for the future of Poland. The British and Americans want a new Polish government to include those politicians who have been in exile in London. Stalin, Churchill suspects, wants the government he’s installed in Lublin to be the sole government of Poland. As to Stalin’s recent suggestion that Yugoslavia should be the model for Poland, Churchill refuses to accept that, as ‘Marshal Tito has become a complete dictator’. Churchill goes on to say that, in 1944, the Allies agreed to the Polish–Russian border (known as the Curzon Line) and now Stalin should meet his side of the bargain, ‘namely the sovereignty, independence and freedom of Poland…’ Truman reads the final paragraph of Churchill’s cable. He remembers its words for a long time to come.
‘There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you [Stalin] and the countries you dominate, plus the Communist parties in many other states, are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their associates are on the other. It is quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces and that all of us leading men on either side who had anything to
do with that would be shamed before history… I hope there is no word or phrase in this outpouring of my heart that unwittingly gives offence.’
There is little that Truman can do today. He will wait on developments at the UN Conference in San Francisco when it reconvenes in the afternoon. He begins to get ready to go to church.
This telegram from Churchill was considered by his assistant private secretary Sir Jock Colville to be ‘a final appeal to resolve the Polish impasse’. The Prime Minister had written it on 27th April and sent it to the Foreign Office to be approved, with a note saying, ‘Pray consider this very carefully with your experts in the Russian section and make me any suggestions you like. But do not try to mar the symmetry and coherence of the message.’
‘You son of a bitch, if you touch another of my men, I’ll kill you right here.’
2.15pm
Felix Sparks has reached the prison compound within the Dachau complex. It is surrounded by a water-filled moat about 15 feet wide, and a ten-foot-high barbed-wire fence. There is a large wrought-iron gate. Above it is a sign saying ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Sets You Free’). On the other side of the fence are thousands of celebrating prisoners shouting, ‘America! America!’
Some others are tearing informers limb from limb. Elsewhere prisoners are hunting down their former guards, some of whom have disguised themselves in camp uniforms, and are beating them to death with shovels.
Flags of the Allied nations are hanging on the perimeter wire. The prisoners had been secretly making them over the past few weeks out of bits of cloth.
Sparks orders his men not to throw food as he fears it will start a fight among the starving prisoners. There are over 30,000 people in Dachau – Poles, Russians, Catholic priests and Jews.