by Emma Craigie
American soldiers come to the camp to look at us. A group of them were led to a block. In a washroom lay 50 corpses that had died – starved, exhausted. One of the officers started crying when he saw that. Strange to think of a man coming from battle, who sees corpses all the time... crying at the sight of our dead. But I know what our dead look like, so shocking that even the tears of a warrior are understandable.
Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Dachau inmate
In Dachau US medical officer Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith has walked through the main gate under the metal sign Arbeit Macht Frei. The few inmates who have braved the cold crowd around him and his small team of orderlies. There is the sound of gunfire in the distance.
‘Is it safe?’ one of the inmates asks Smith.
‘Yes. The Nazis are all gone; they will never come back; we have driven them away; soon the war will be over.’
The men try to smile. Smith wishes he had been here yesterday when they were liberated to have seen their faces then.
The inmates volunteer to be guides. The Americans walk to the first barrack block, but they have to wait as the inmates can’t walk as fast as them. There are bodies all around the barracks. Smith goes in.
In Berlin, in the upper bunker corridor, one of the kitchen orderlies is clearing the table of the debris – glasses, bottles of schnapps and cigarette ends left by the overnight drinkers – so that the Goebbels children can have breakfast there.
In the small room which the six children are sharing, Helga and Hilde, the two oldest girls are helping the younger ones get dressed. They have now been in the bunker for a week and their clothes are getting rather grubby. They brought pyjamas but no spare clothes, as their parents didn’t expect them to be staying very long.
To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph
May I suggest that, after his death, Hitler should be buried in an unmarked grave at Buchenwald, amongst his victims? By this means his name would be indissolubly linked, for all time, with the horrors he loosed upon the world, and even Germans would find it difficult to make a national hero out of him.
Yours faithfully
F.W. Perfect, London NW11.
About 8.30am/9.30am UK time
In her house in a village on the outskirts of Coventry, Clara Milburn is reading the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. Clara’s son Alan has been a POW in Germany since Dunkirk in 1940, and she always scans the papers for news of his prison camp Stalag VII-B. There is news of the men liberated from Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, but not of Alan’s camp.
Clara is fascinated by the idea suggested in a letter that when Hitler dies his body should be buried at the Buchenwald concentration camp with his victims, to prevent him becoming a hero and his grave a place of pilgrimage.
Later today Clara will write in her diary about today’s events as she has done for the last five years. (‘Things go well in Burma… but we seem so preoccupied with events in Europe that our minds cannot take in all the happenings there too.’) Clara ends her diary for the 30th April by writing: ‘May tomorrow – the month of Alan!’
Clara’s hunch is right. On 9th May, she receives a telegram from him saying he’ll be home soon. The next day, Alan is back at their kitchen table eating boiled eggs and bread and butter, and then later walking with his mother to the grocer’s for double rations, shaking hands with the people they meet along the way. That night she writes her final ever entry, ‘Here the “Burleigh in wartime” diary ends with victory bells... Alan John is home!’
The Goebbels children are sitting around the upper bunker table, eating a breakfast of jam and butter and bread. One thing that they all appreciate is that here in the bunker they are allowed as much food as they like. Their parents have been very strict about keeping to the rations that ordinary Germans are allowed, and in the fridge at home each child has had their own tiny labelled ration of butter, milk and eggs to last them the week.
Magda Goebbels is lying on her bed. She can hear the chat and clatter of the children from her room, but she can’t face seeing them and has no appetite for breakfast.
‘You know how it is. You have to suppress your feelings a bit in wartime.’
In a hotel called Haus Ingeborg, in the centre of Oberjoch, close to the border with Austria, a 33-year-old scientist named Wernher von Braun is having breakfast. In 15 years’ time, von Braun will be receiving almost as much fan mail as Elvis Presley, be able to count Walt Disney as one of his friends and be known to millions of American children as ‘Dr Space’. Breakfast is a painful process as von Braun broke his left arm in a car accident a month ago, and it’s in a heavy cast. He is waiting for the US army to arrive in the town – he has information he knows they want.
For the past few years, Wernher von Braun has been the leading rocket scientist in the world, helping devise, develop and build the V2 (Vergeltungswaffe-2, Retaliation Weapon-2). With him in the hotel are other leading German rocket scientists, together with trunks, briefcases and boxes containing the crucial data they need to continue their work in the west.
At the end of 1943 von Braun had shown Hitler colour footage of the V2 and explained what it was capable of. The rocket is 46 feet long, can travel at 3,600mph and can carry a ton of explosives. Its range is 225 miles, so if launched from Holland, much of the south-east of England is within its reach. Hitler declared that it would be ‘the decisive weapon of the war’ and ordered its mass production. The burden of producing both the V2 rocket and the V1 flying bomb was given to slaves working under appalling conditions in secret factories in Germany. The first V2s didn’t roll off the production line until January 1944, because von Braun and his team had made over 63,000 modifications to its design.
The first V2s fell on England that September, and soon began to inflict tremendous casualties. On 25th November a V2 landed on a Woolworth’s store in New Cross in London killing 160 people and injuring 108. By the end of April 1945, V2s had killed 2,754 people and injured 6,523.
George Orwell wrote in December 1944, ‘People are complaining of the sudden wallop with which these things go off. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you got a bit of warning” is the usual formula. There is even a tendency to talk nostalgically of the days of the V1. The good old doodlebug did at least give you time to get under the table.’
In June 1945, when von Braun will be in Bavaria in the middle of negotiations with the Americans about coming to the US, he will give an interview to Gordon Young of the Daily Express. He speaks about a visit he’d made to London in 1934, ‘I did all the regular things you know – the British Museum and the Houses of Parliament, and lunched at the Savoy.’
‘But didn’t you feel a bit odd about trying to smash it up afterwards?’ Young asks.
Von Braun laughs. ‘Well, you know how it is. You have to suppress your feelings a bit in wartime.’
Von Braun always maintained that his reason for developing the V2 was for space exploration.
A few days later, von Braun would be on his way to the United States; several V2 rockets were shipped out soon after. His work for NASA in the 1950s and 1960s (in particular his development of the Saturn V booster rocket) would be decisive in putting man on the moon. In 1960 a Hollywood film was made about his life called I Aim at the Stars. Some suggested at the time the full title should be I Aim at the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London.
In Dachau, medical officer Lieutenant Marcus J. Smith is staring at a German diary for 1940 that he’d picked up a few days before. He is reeling from the squalor he has just seen in the barracks. Smith looks for a blank page and comes across a list of important German dates.
‘May 1st. Public Holiday.’
‘I wonder if it will be celebrated here?’ he thinks.
‘May 22nd 1813 Richard Wagner’s birthday.’
‘May 29th 1921 Hitler becomes leader of the Nazi Party.’
Smith finds a blank page and starts a list, thinking, ‘What do these people need? Everything.’
‘George Thomann from Akron, Ohio.’
9.00am
The Russian army reaches Ravensbrück camp, 56 miles north of Berlin. They find about 3,500 sick and dying women and several hundred men. It is estimated that about 50,000 women died at the camp in the six years since 1939.
Thirty-four-year-old Leo Goldner is one of the prisoners at the Allach sub-camp at Dachau where prisoners are employed in the production of porcelain. He is close to the gate when the first American soldier of the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division arrives.
The soldier shouts, ‘You are free!’
‘What’s your name? And where are you from?’ Goldner shouts back.
He never forgets the answer: his liberator is George Thomann from Akron, Ohio.
Another Allach prisoner, a Hungarian woman called Sarah Friedmann, is collapsing with hunger when the Americans enter the camp. She only arrived a couple of weeks earlier, having survived a death march from Birkenau. The soldiers start handing out cans of food and oil. Friedman eats a little but, as she later recalled, ‘Many of us perished that day as a result of overeating, because they were not used to such fat and nourishing food in their stomachs.’ Those who died are known as ‘canned-goods victims’ – people who survived concentration camps and death marches but who now die of overeating the rich food.
Across Germany hundreds of camp inmates and starving civilians are dying every day from eating food that their intestines can’t cope with. Canadian troops hand out cookies, which cause acute thirst, and then the water taken to assuage the thirst causes the undigested biscuits to swell – resulting in burst stomachs and death.
In the Bavarian Alps 15-year-old Barbara has taken the two young German lieutenants Claus and Fritz to an elderly neighbour so they can listen to her radio and get news of the war.
‘I don’t listen to it any more,’ the old lady says. ‘All day long they play military music, and there are bits of news in between, but it’s always the same: “We’re winning the war…” Yet in town they are saying there are American tanks on the Autobahn. I don’t know who to believe.’
They all sit and drink milk and listen to a station broadcasting from Rosenheim near Munich. The woman is right – the newsreader says emphatically that the Germans are winning and Hitler is in control.
A neighbour arrives – a tall, skinny farmer aged about 80. He has heard from the girls that the young officers need a lift into Traunstein. He’s happy to take them to the door of the army provision headquarters.
‘Maybe they’ll trade their stores for my apples,’ he jokes. ‘They won’t need what they’ve got for much longer.’
The farmer also knows that it will be far safer for him to travel if he has two army officers in his truck.
I think they have forgotten us entirely in England. I don’t think there’ll be many left to ring Victory bells. The BBC has forgotten us too.
Letter from a Channel Islander, late 1944
9.30am/10.30 UK time
In Britain the BBC bulletins and newspapers are full of the news about the death of Mussolini and the battle for Berlin. As usual there is no news of the only part of the British Isles occupied by the Germans – the Channel Islands. The islands are an embarrassment to the government, and they have decided that any reference to the occupation in the press or by the BBC would be bad for the public’s morale. There was no mention of the islands in the King’s Speech last Christmas, and as recently as March Churchill refused a request from the Home Secretary to mention the suffering of the islanders in a speech. ‘I doubt if it will be possible for me to introduce the subject into my broadcasts. These have to be conceived as a whole, and not as a catalogue of favourable notices.’ The Channel Islands are a reminder to him of the humiliating invasion of June 1940 and Britain’s inability to recapture territory only 12 hours away by boat.
The government knows a little of what has been happening on the islands thanks to escapees who have sailed over to liberated France. They’ve told how a group calling themselves the ‘Guernsey Underground Barbers’ has got together to punish women who have ‘misconducted themselves with Germans’. They’ve also reported that the German troops are reduced to eating horsemeat and their uniforms are falling apart, and that the islanders are starving too. The British government was initially reluctant to help, fearing that providing supplies for the island would only prolong the occupation. However, on 27th December 1944, after a long delay, a ship named the Vega docked at St Peter Port with 100,000 food parcels.
The painting of V-signs is a particular issue for the Germans. One man chalked a ‘V’ on a German soldier’s bike saddle so it would leave the mark on his trousers – for which he got 12 months in prison. ‘V’ badges made of British coins are pinned inside many lapels.
But there is by no means a united front against the German occupiers. For the past four years radios have been illegal – to be caught in possession of one means many months in prison, and at one point in 1943, the police were getting 40 anonymous letters a day denouncing neighbours for owning a radio (it’s believed they were paid £105 each for the information). The islanders have been constructing their own radios – every public telephone box on Jersey and Guernsey is out of action as the handsets have been stolen to make headphones.
By the end of April, the occupying forces have more important matters to worry about. Food is so scarce that German troops have been eating limpets from the seashore, and stealing crops from fields. One farmer has been murdered protecting his property. But the majority of German soldiers are showing discipline, even when the islanders deliberately eat their Red Cross parcels in front of them to provoke them.
It’s said that there are no pets left on the Channel Islands as they’ve all been eaten.
In the public library on Berlin’s Ravennee-Strasse, 53-year-old teacher Willi Damaschke is hiding among the bookshelves. He had to flee his house a few days ago, and since then has been moving from place to place – last night he broke in through the library’s front door.
Outside the battle is raging. Damaschke looks at the spines of the books – August Winning’s The Book of Science; Felix Timmerman’s The Hernat Family; books by Wilhelm Scholz and Regina Holderbusch. Damaschke reflects on how he used to spend time among these shelves in peacetime.
Damaschke gets out a pocket diary from his coat. In it he writes, ‘A wretched life! I’d like to get back to the house, but the courtyard’s under heavy fire...’
10.00am/11.00am UK time
On the other side of the city, Russian tanks and self-propelled guns are rolling over Moltke Bridge to support the infantry assualting the Reichstag. The first company has suffered many casualties. The survivors are trapped. The sky above them is as black as night.
Martin Bormann rises from the corridor bench in the Führerbunker, nursing a hangover. He makes his way to the upper bunker to grab some sandwiches from the trolley in the corridor. He takes a couple to eat and stuffs some extras into his pockets.
In Prague, the Nazi leader of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the police Karl Hermann Frank makes the first of a series of broadcasts on Czech radio announcing that any uprising against German rule will be ‘drowned in a sea of blood’.
The population know what Frank is capable of. Following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Frank orchestrated massacres in the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky in order to punish the local population. These villages were burned to the ground. All the men were shot. The women and children were separated and initially sent to concentration camps. All pregnant women were forced to have abortions. Eventually most of the children were gassed, though a few were considered suitable for ‘aryanisation’ and were sent to live with German families. Of the 94 children living in these two villages only 19 survived.
In the Danish border town of Padborg, a freight train made up of 56 carriages has arrived at the station. Inside are 4,000 women from Ravensbrück concentration camp 440 kilometres away in Germany. None of the women are Danish.
Hans Henrick Koch from the
Danish Ministry of Social Welfare is watching the massive train pull in. Koch has spent the past two years trying to get aid to the Danes (mostly Jews and communists) who have been sent to concentration camps and prisons in Germany.
Koch watches as railway staff open the doors of the carriages, and women surge out – they refuse to be held back. The women then search for wood and kindling, and make fires all along the railway track. They’ve brought with them small pans in which they start to cook potatoes. Koch wrote later that it was a ‘strange and sad sight’.
This is not the last trainload of women to arrive at Padborg. Two days later Hans Henrick Koch witnesses the arrival of 2,800 women who are in an even worse state. When they leap out of the carriages, half-naked and crying, they start eating grass and potato peelings left over from the trackside cooking of the 30th April. Some Danes throw them bread, and the women fight over it ‘like wild animals’, Koch observes.
The majority of the people crossing the border from Germany into Denmark in the final days of the war were Danes and Norwegians. Between April 1940 (when Germany invaded Norway and Denmark) and May 1945, 9,000 Norwegians were imprisoned in Germany. The majority survived, although 736 of the 760 Norwegian Jews arrested died. From a total of almost 6,000 Danes, 562 died, including 58 Jews. Food parcels sent by their governments helped keep the non-Jewish death rate low, but so did the attitude of the Nazis to Scandinavians, whom they regarded as racially similar. The Reverend Conrad Vogt-Svendsen, a Norwegian minister, asked a Nazi official why Germany was letting these Scandinavian prisoners go free.
‘It is now time to save the best of the remaining people of western Europe,’ he replied.
Most of the Scandinavian prisoners were collected in an initiative organised by the neutral Swedish government, known as ‘White Buses’, after the Red Cross vehicles used to transport the prisoners. Lisa Borsum, who as a member of the Norwegian resistance had smuggled Jews into Sweden, remembered dancing with joy in the aisle of the bus that had rescued her from Ravensbrück. It looked, she said later like ‘a garland of white hope’ when she first saw it.