by Emma Craigie
On 3rd May, a Norwegian named H. Bloemraad wrote to Hibberd and the other BBC newsreaders from his home in Larwik. He’d been in hiding since December when the Germans conscripted all men between 17 and 40.
‘It was a welcome quarter of an hour at nine o’clock in the evening, when your well-known voices told us of the day. In spite of the Germans and their prohibitions and the betrayers they made use of, we have been able to listen to your news regularly. And our relationship, although we are unknown to each other, became ever closer.
‘And now, at the bottom of our misery and hunger, we are hearing your voices telling us of rumours about peace… As soon as our Germans are in their cages I’ll bring this letter to the post office.’
In his diary the politician Harold Nicolson notes the response of Mrs Grove, his London housekeeper, to the news of the deaths of Mussolini and Clara Petacci. Mrs Groves thinks the Italian dictator thoroughly deserved what he got, ‘a married man like that driving about in a car with his mistress...’
8.15pm
The Royal Marines attached to Dalzel-Job’s 30 Assault Unit are finding it hard to fight the German troops in the woods surrounding the naval arsenal. They’ve sent out patrols, but the Germans are either small in number or unwilling to take them on. They keep disappearing into the trees. Fortunately, the aim of the German mortars is erratic, so there are no British casualties so far – but a German self-propelled gun is being more precise.
30 Assault Unit will be forced to defend the arsenal for another two days. On 1st May the Irish Guards send a platoon to help them deal with the remaining German resistance. Remarkably Dalzel-Job never has a man killed or wounded under his command. ‘From the first I held a firm and quite irrational faith that unlike my father [who died on the Somme when Dalzel-Job was three years old] I should survive and that no man of mine should be killed.’
The [Allied] soldiers were mentally packing their bags for home while they were still shooting their last shots.
Photographer Robert Capa
About 8.45pm
Nina Markovna’s 17th birthday is ending with a dance. They are making good use of the old theatre that is her family’s temporary home. Nina has looked forward to dancing with the soldiers and pilots who visit the camp. In ballet school before the war she had learned to tango and waltz, and she wants to impress the young Americans with the ‘Western Salon’ dances she knows.
But the Americans don’t want a formal dance; instead they are showing Nina their newest craze, which they call ‘the Jitterbug’. To Nina they do resemble large jittering bugs as they move furiously across the dance floor. She tries to copy them, but just feels stiff and ridiculous, while they dance as if they were born to do it.
In Rome, 41-year-old Military Policeman Benedict Alper is writing one of his regular letters to his wife Ethel at home in the US. Since he was posted overseas in September 1943, he has written to her almost every day. (He missed two days after they had a spat when Ethel accused him of having fallen in love with a young army nurse.)
Alper tried to enlist only hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but was turned down because he was over the draft age and he didn’t have 20/20 vision. Still keen to do his bit, he went on to try and join Marine Intelligence, the Coast Guard, the Harbor Antisubmarine Patrol – even the Red Cross. After a year of trying, he was accepted by the Military Police.
Alper writes to Ethel, ‘Here all we think of is when do we go home, now it’s in its final hours… we have lost time together, my sweet, chances to make love, but not love itself, that is, if anything stronger than it was. Surely we will never take each other for granted again, and I promise not to be inconsiderate ever again, or angry, or any of the silly things I have kicked myself for so many times since.’
‘It takes a proper chap to run straight down the course.’
9.30pm
General Sir Bernard Montgomery is retiring for the night, as he always does at this time. His TAC HQ (Tactical Headquarters) is based in an isolated group of farm buildings outside Soltau, south of Hamburg. It is his 26th TAC location since the D-Day landings the previous June. Monty is not staying in the farm itself; he has his own caravan, which was captured in the North African desert two years ago from an Italian officer. In it Monty keeps photographs of enemy generals to help him decide what sort of men they are, and how they might react to any moves he may make against them.
Monty is a skilled military commander, much loved by the British people. He is a complex man. Major Peter Earle sat next to him at an evening meal on 12th April and summed up Monty in his diary that night as ‘a bounder: a complete egoist, a very kind man, very thoughtful to his subordinates, a lucid tactician, a great commander’.
Monty frustrates General Eisenhower with both his caution in battle and his tendency to mislead him with his ‘successes’. Monty always tries to keep ‘Winston’s podgy finger’ out of his campaigns, much to the Prime Minister’s frustration (Churchill came close to sacking Monty on a visit to TAC HQ in July 1944).
Monty knows that the end of the war is in sight and his staff can see that he is more relaxed. He has more time to write to his 15-year-old son David, a pupil at Winchester College. On 10th April, using paper captured from the commander of the German VI Army Corps, he wrote to David about his school report: ‘I do not think that this report is very good; except for the Chemistry. I should say that you have been playing the fool a good deal… You must give up trying to dodge the rules, and fooling the masters. Anyone can do that, but it takes a proper chap to run straight down the course.’
Last week there was better news for David. His father sent two parcels – one contained captured pictures of the German field marshals Rommel and Kesselring, the other containing a cake, a box of chocolates and a tin of sweets.
On 3rd May, a German peace delegation led by Admiral von Friedeburg will arrive unexpectedly at Monty’s headquarters, offering the surrender of all the forces in the north of Europe. Monty emerges from his caravan looking deliberately casual in old corduroy trousers and a grey turtle-necked sweater and trademark black beret.
Monty greets von Friedeburg by bellowing, ‘Who are you and what do you want? I’ve never heard of you!’
One of Montgomery’s staff whispers to a colleague, ‘The chief is putting on a pretty good act.’
To which the colleague replies, ‘Shut up, you son of a bitch, he has been rehearsing this for six years!’
Monty will then lecture von Friedeburg about the bombing of Coventry and the mass murder of Jews at Belsen. Later he sends a message to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke in London, ‘I was persuaded to drink some champagne at dinner tonight.’
In the Sudetenland, Corporal Bert Ruffle is standing up to his knees in a mud-filled railway truck with three other POWs. They had been promised some light night work by the Stalag IV-C guards – all they had to do was empty the trucks of rubble, then claim extra rations when they finished the job. But Ruffle can see that the Germans were lying – the truck is filled with mud, bricks and large boulders. The men open the side gate of the truck and the mud pours out in a torrent. They start shifting the bricks and boulders.
‘Hanging upside down.’
About 10.00pm/11.00pm UK time
The Allied POWs of Stalag VII-A have been celebrating their liberation by cooking the produce the GIs brought with them, and a lucky few have been smoking cigars. Now they are being told by the Americans that the news of the liberation of their camp was read out on the BBC an hour ago.
Major Elliott Viney writes in his diary of the joy of a better diet at last, ‘A bash [celebration] lunch and a potato-less dinner. So ends four years, eleven months and one day.’
Hitler is sitting at the table in the Führerbunker conference room, reading a transcript of a radio broadcast which announces the death of Mussolini. The announcement of Il Duce’s death was accidentally picked up by an orderly who was trying to tune a shortwave radio. Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, is standing b
ehind him. One of Linge’s responsibilities is to ensure that the Führer has access to pencils, spectacles, magnifying glasses, atlases and compasses at all times. On this occasion Hitler needs neither spectacles nor a magnifying glass as the transcript has been typed on a special typewriter in extra-large Führer font. He does, however, require a pencil, which he uses to underline three words: ‘hanging upside down’.
Hitler’s mind turns immediately to the question of the timing of his suicide. He has not completely given up hope that Berlin can be relieved. Oblivious to military realities, he envisages a multiple assault: General Wenck’s 12th Army, with the support of General Busse’s 9th Army, attacking in the south, and General Rudolf Holste’s Panzer Corps in the north. As the telephone no longer works, he orders Rochus Misch to send a radio message to General Alfred Jodl to try to establish the military position:
‘Inform me immediately:
1. Where are Wenck’s spearheads?
2. When will they attack?
3. Where is the 9th Army?
4. Where is the 9th Army going to break through?
5. Where are Holste’s spearheads?’
Hitler’s questions reflect his complete disconnection from the military realities. None of his commanders believe in the possibility of saving Berlin any more. Wenck’s 12th Army is desperately trying to create an escape route to enable the remnants of Busse’s 9th Army to retreat to the River Elbe; 25,000 soldiers and many civilians who have fled the city are trapped without supplies in the Spree forest to the south-east of Berlin, and are now collapsing with hunger and exhaustion. Meanwhile General Holste in the north is making plans to abandon his troops and escape with his wife and his two best horses.
Boldt, Weiss and von Loringhoven, the three young officers who are trying to escape to Wenck’s 12th Army, have become trapped in a shelter in the south-west corner of the Tiergarten. Berlin’s great park resembles no-man’s-land from the last war. It is full of muddy craters, and the trees are shredded to ribbons. The shelter is so tightly packed with people that it is difficult to breathe and impossible to sit. The three men have no idea how they are going to find the River Havel in the darkness of this moonless night. A colonel from the Home Guard, very impressed by the fact that these men have come from the Führerbunker, offers them use of an armoured vehicle and a guide.
‘You know you must never be frightened of me when I snap.’
In the long gallery at Chequers, Churchill is watching a movie with some of his staff. One of his secretaries leaves the room to take a call. It is a message from the staff of Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander saying that the German Army in Italy has surrendered. Delighted at the news, Churchill dictates a telegram for Stalin: ‘It looks therefore as if the entire German forces south of the Alps will almost immediately surrender.’
Churchill is an avid fan of films; screenings are a regular occurrence at Chequers. ‘Let it roll!’ Churchill shouts when he is ready for the film to start. The night before it had been a 1939 film of Gilbert and Sullivan’s, The Mikado; ‘Yet again, with the PM accompaniment singing all the songs,’ his secretary Marian Holmes noted in her diary. Favourites include the wartime Noël Coward film In Which We Serve, Walt Disney’s Bambi and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s epic Lady Hamilton (which the Chequer’s projectionist’s notebook records he watched 17 times. Nelson’s line about Napoleon – ‘You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them – wipe them out!’ – must have been especially popular with the Prime Minister). Such was his dedication to his films that on 10th May 1941, when he was told that Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess had been captured in Scotland, he declared, ‘Hess or no Hess, I’m going to watch the Marx Brothers.’
Hitler is also a great film lover and before going into the bunker he liked to watch a film a night. Mrs Miniver, the story of a British family struggling heroically at the start of the Second World War, is one of his surprise favourites. He loves The Hound of the Baskervilles and Mutiny on the Bounty and he is a massive fan of Mickey Mouse. For Christmas 1938 Joseph Goebbels gave Hitler 12 Mickey Mouse film reels.
Churchill is loved and revered by most of his staff, but he can have a nasty temper. When Marian Holmes first met him in 1943, he shouted at her, ‘Dammit, don’t go!’ as she headed for the door when she thought the dictation was over. When he had finished all his papers, Churchill looked at her over his spectacles and said with a smile, ‘You know you must never be frightened of me when I snap. I’m not snapping at you but thinking of the work.’
This apology may have had something to do with a letter that Churchill’s wife Clementine had written to him in 1940, in which she told him that his ‘rough sarcastic & overbearing manner’ meant that he was in danger of being ‘generally disliked by [his] colleagues & subordinates’. Clementine went on, ‘It is for you to give the Orders & if they are bungled – except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury & the Speaker you can sack anyone & everyone – therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm... You won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness...’
The letter would have had particular impact as it is believed to be the only letter Clementine wrote to her husband that year.
10.15pm
Johannmeier, Lorenz and Zander, the three couriers who are carrying Hitler’s testaments, have climbed down underneath Pichelsdorf Bridge. They manage to find two small rowing boats. Johannmeier takes one, Zander and Lorenz the other. They set off, under cover of darkness, south down the River Havel. They plan to row for about ten kilometres to the Wannsee bridgehead where they hope to find Wenck’s 12th Army. Behind them the smouldering capital glows red, ahead the darkness of the river on a moonless night.
10.30pm
Lieutenant Claus Sellier is lying awake in the straw of Barbara’s alpine barn, pondering what to do next. Fritz is asleep close by. In Claus’s jacket is the second of the two packages that they’ve been asked to deliver by their camp commander. This one has to go to the army provision headquarters at Traunstein about 20 kilometres to the north.
After arriving at the barn, they spent the rest of the afternoon splitting wood and helping prepare the evening meal. They talked about the war and reassured the girls that, despite rumours in the village, when black GIs arrive, they won’t eat them alive. Claus told them about 23-year-old Jesse Owens, the black American athlete who won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and had become friends with his German competitors.
Protecting Barbara and the girls seems more important than their army mission right now. He and Fritz could use Barbara’s father’s clothes and pretend to be farmers until he comes home. Yet he has a duty to finish their task. Undecided, Claus can’t get to sleep.
Off the Arctic Coast U-boat captain Willi Dietrich and his crew on the U-286 are still celebrating the success of their attack on HMS Goodall. But the convoy escorts are hunting for them – and the frigate HMS Loch Insh has detected a strong signal. As the ship passes above U-286, Captain Edward Dempster orders depth charges to be released. All 51 men on board U-286 are killed.
‘One gradually assumes the attitude of a lion-tamer… To show fear is to fare worst of all with them, it provokes them visibly to attack.’
11.00pm
In a camp run by the Soviet law enforcement agency the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) in Rothenstein on the outskirts of the East Prussian city of Königsberg, 35-year-old Dr Hans Graf von Lehndorff is helping carry the last of 400 patients up to the second floor of his makeshift hospital. Yesterday the number of patients dying increased dramatically as dysentery and typhoid spread through the camp, and the Russians want the diseases contained. The camp is being used to detain and interrogate prisoners (including Jews who had looked forward to being liberated by the Russians). Many are kept in a large cellar that is so crowded the inmates are forced to stand.
Von Lehndorff has been a prisoner here since Königsberg surrendered in early April. Before that he w
orked as a surgeon in the city, where he witnessed the apocalyptic scenes as the Russians fought for the town. The Red Army has behaved with particular brutality in East Prussia. Drunk after raiding a brewery, the soldiers stormed through Von Lehndorff’s hospital raping nurses and even patients in their beds – many wanting to avenge what the German troops had done in their homeland. Even the official Soviet history of the war will conclude ‘not all Soviet troops correctly understood how they had to behave in Germany… In the first days of fighting in East Prussia, there were isolated violations of the correct norms of behaviour’.
Von Lehndorff could have fled Königsberg, but his Christian faith compels him to stay and help the sick. He comes from an aristocratic family (Graf means Count) and he is a member of the Confessing Church – the Protestant movement opposed to Nazism (whose leaders include Pastor Martin Niemoller, who is currently a prisoner with Payne-Best). Von Lehndorff’s mother, also a member of the Confessing Church, has been arrested by the Gestapo, and his cousin was executed for being part of the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.
Von Lehndorff looks with dismay at the second floor of the hospital. A group of Polish prisoners have been forcibly removed to make way for the 400 patients, and have left the rooms in a disgusting state. Von Lehndorff and the other medics lack mops and water to clean the floor, but they do what they can. Some of the sick are in bed, others are lying on the floor or on the wooden boards on which they were carried up. Von Lehndorff had hoped to put them in rooms according to their illness, but there’s only been time to separate the men from the women.