Hitler's Last Day

by Emma Craigie

  Someone has had the idea that the best way to stop the Allies bombing the jail is to paint messages on the roofs, hence the words ‘JAPS GONE’. After a Mosquito bombs the jail later in the day, a pilot will suggest a more urgent message, the RAF slang ‘EXTRACT DIGIT’, meaning ‘get your finger out now’.

  To ensure the POWs safety, Bill Hudson has started negotiations in a nearby house with two organisations that in March had swapped sides and joined the Allied cause – the Indian National Army, and the Burma Defence Army led by 30-year-old General Aung San. Aung San had been such a strong supporter of the Japanese (in the hope that they would grant Burma independence) that Emperor Hirohito had awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun. Aung San soon realised that, in the words of a British general, ‘he had exchanged an old master for an infinitely more tyrannical new one’. Hudson fears that if the Japanese are forced to retreat they may return to Rangoon – he wants to be ready to repel them if they do so, and he needs Aung San’s support and weapons.

  Hudson was escorted out of the jail by RAF Warrant Officer Donald Lomas, who carried an old rifle that hadn’t been fired for years. Lomas wrote in his diary that the meetings were ‘very interesting’ but that he was ‘rather shaky’ (he had been ill for a number of weeks). Hudson had had his first full-length wash with soap for five months, but he still looked scruffy in his tatty uniform, so someone lent him an RAF cap. Somehow he managed to convince Aung San and the INA leader that he was the Allied Supreme Commander Louis Mountbatten’s official representative. Within an hour they provided the POWs with 17 rifles, ammunition and 12 hand grenades. ‘We were no longer toothless,’ Hudson wrote in his diary.

  The POWs will have no need of the weapons. They will be liberated on 3rd May. Many of them are suffering from tropical diseases and malnutrition, and the side effects of eating rich food in the last few days of their captivity, which their stomachs could not cope with. In July 1947, shortly after signing an agreement with the British guaranteeing Burmese independence, General Aung San is assassinated in Rangoon. His daughter, the future Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, is two when her father dies.

  Heinrich Himmler arrives at Plön Castle in a convoy of Volkswagens and armoured personnel carriers. He has surrounded himself with a big team of bodyguards for fear that Admiral Dönitz is planning to arrest him for negotiating with the Allies.

  Dönitz is equally wary of Himmler. He arranges to greet him in his office. He has placed a pistol on his desk, hidden beneath a pile of papers with the safety catch off. As he later wrote in his memoirs, ‘I had never done anything like this in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be.’ In addition to the guards of Plön Castle, the Admiral has a detachment of U-boat sailors at the ready should Himmler’s SS guard attack.

  Himmler sits down opposite him and Dönitz passes him the telegram from Bormann. Himmler’s face goes white. Then he stands up and says, ‘Allow me to become the second man in your government.’ Dönitz tells him that that won’t be possible. Himmler, shocked by the news but relieved that he has not been arrested, takes his leave.

  The new Chancellor of Germany gets down to work. Given the impossibility of holding back the Russians, he decides his top priority: how to get as many Germans as possible into the British and American zones.

  By the light of several candles, on the second floor of the makeshift camp hospital in Königsberg, Dr Hans Graf von Lehndorff and his young assistant Erika Frölich are helping a woman deliver twins. After the horrors of the Russian invasion, and the desperate plight of the other patients around him, this scene offers some comfort.

  ‘Life goes on,’ von Lehndorff thinks.

  © Imperial War Museums (BU 8955)

  Prime Minister Winston Churchill visiting Hitler’s bunker on 16th July 1945.

  The petrol cans used to burn the bodies are in the foreground.

  After April 1945...

  ‘So – that’s the end of the bastard.’

  At 11pm on 8th May, Hitler’s body made an appearance in Wakefield, Yorkshire. A hearse containing his coffin was pulled through the town by 50 British servicemen and women, towards a park where a bonfire was waiting. A marching band played a funeral dirge. Walking alongside the hearse were the mayor, Winston Churchill, President Truman, General de Gaulle and Joseph Stalin (who, the local paper noted, was particularly popular with the local ladies). When the cortege reached the park, Hitler’s body was unceremoniously bundled out of the hearse and into the flames. This spectacular event, staged by the members of the Wakefield Operatic and Dramatic Society, was just one of the many responses around the world to the news of the death of Adolf Hitler.

  The Führer’s death was announced from the Hamburg radio studios of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft at 10.30pm on 1st May. Listeners were told by an 18-year-old announcer that the Führer had ‘fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany.’ When Churchill was told the news moments later – in the middle of a meeting about the forthcoming general election – he said, ‘Well, I must say I think he was perfectly right to die like that.’ Lord Beaverbrook pointed out that he obviously did not.

  In Moscow, Stalin’s response was blunter, ‘So – that’s the end of the bastard.’

  Although Hitler was dead there was still no ceasefire. Some German units made up their own minds about whether to fight on in light of the news. Eighteen-year-old Herbert Mittelstädt was part of an anti-aircraft unit in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. On 1st May his commanding officer declared, ‘I no longer believe that there is any way possible for us to win this war. I am going to discharge you, and whoever wants to, can continue fighting with me as a Werewolf (lone fighter).’ Only one man put his hand up. Dispirited, the officer concluded, ‘The whole thing isn’t worth it. I’m going to discharge myself as well!’

  In the Sudetenland, Michael Etkind was part of a group of Jews being forced by the SS to march away from a labour camp and the advancing Russians. Resting in a barn for the night, they heard their guards saying, ‘Hitler is dead.’ The news spread quickly around the exhausted prisoners. One man, who Etkind had nicknamed ‘the Joker’ because he kept them all going with his sense of humour, leapt up and started to sing a spontaneous song:

  ‘I have outlived the fiend

  My life-long wish fulfilled…’

  The others watched in horror as he sang and danced his way to the open barn door. One of the guards took aim. Etkind recalled, ‘We saw the “Joker” lift his arms again… turn around surprised (didn’t they understand, hadn’t they heard that the Monster was dead?) and like a puppet when its strings are cut, collapse into a heap.’

  The killing only stopped in Europe, when on 7th May, General Alfred Jodl, who had been Hitler’s senior military advisor, signed a simultaneous and unconditional surrender on all fronts.

  John Amery

  John Amery was tried for high treason at the Old Bailey in November 1945. His family tried to prove that, during his pre-war European travels, he’d become a Spanish citizen, and therefore treason against the British Crown was impossible. But when in the dock on 28th November, Amery was asked whether he would plead guilty or not guilty, he shocked the court by replying, ‘I plead guilty on all counts.’ On 18th December 1945 John Amery was hanged at Wandsworth Prison.

  Nicolaus von Below

  Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant was given some civilian clothes by a farmer who lived on the edge of the River Havel. He registered as a civilian under a false name on 4th May and was given an identity pass and a ration book. He then worked his way, doing odd jobs, towards his in-laws’ home near Magdeburg, 100 miles south-east of Berlin, where he arrived on 20th June. He remained there with his pregnant wife and their three children, but he was recognised in the clinic where his wife gave birth to their fourth child, and was forced to flee. He hid with friends in Bonn until 7th January 1946, when he was denounced to the British. He was imprisoned a
nd used as a ‘material witness’ at the Nuremburg trials. He was finally discharged on 14th May 1948. He spent the rest of his working life as a pilot for Lufthansa. He died in 1983.

  Gerhard Boldt, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven and Rudolf Weiss

  The three adjutants who escaped from the bunker joined a small German army unit which had become trapped between the Great and Little lakes of Wannsee, just south of Berlin. On the night of 1st May they attempted a breakout with the aim of reaching Wenck’s 12th Army. Most of the men who took part in the breakout were gunned down by Russians. Weiss was captured. Boldt and von Loringhoven managed to hide in a pine thicket.

  On 3rd May Boldt and von Loringhoven succeeded in obtaining civilian clothes. They learned of Hitler’s death the same day. Disguised as civilians, they made their way to American-controlled territory, which they finally reached on 11th May. They then separated.

  Boldt headed to Lübeck to join his wife and child. He reached them at the end of May. He was arrested by the Allies in the spring of 1946, and wrote his memoir, Hitler’s Last Days, An Eye-witness Account, while in an internment camp. He died in 1981.

  Von Loringhoven headed for Leipzig but he was arrested by the Americans before he could reach his wife and son. He was taken to a British interrogation camp near Hannover. There he was interrogated by a man calling himself Major Oughton, who was, in fact, the British spy and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Von Loringhoven was very unhappy with his treatment. He had no news of his family, was often hungry and treated aggressively by guards. There was one occasion when he appealed to ‘Major Oughton’ for help after three days of being sprayed with water and kicked, kept cold and naked and forced to sleep on a wet floor. After he spoke to Oughton, his treatment improved. Von Loringhoven was finally freed in January 1948 and reunited with his family. In the following years he was involved in the recreation of the German army, and represented Germany at the NATO Standing Group in Washington. He died in 2007.

  Weiss spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Poland. He died in 1958.

  Martin Bormann

  Bormann had worked for Hitler for ten years before entering the Führerbunker with him in January 1945. He had originally been appointed to oversee building renovations of Hitler’s property in Obersalzberg. Whenever Hitler was at his mountain retreat, Bormann would be in attendance. He began dealing with all Hitler’s correspondence in Obersalzberg, and gradually took control of his personal finances. After the flight of Rudolf Hess in 1941, Bormann became head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, which gave him power over legislation and civil service salaries and appointments. He became inseparable from Hitler and he earned the nickname ‘Brown Eminence’ long before he was given the official title of Personal Secretary to the Führer in 1943. All communication with Hitler went through him. Throughout his career he was virtually unknown by the German public and became famous only after his death.

  On the night of 1st May 1945, Bormann was in the third group to leave the bunker. The group of 15 men included a pilot, a surgeon and a small troop of soldiers. They gathered in the Reich Chancellery cellar at 11pm and watched the first two groups leave – in small subgroups of five or six, through a shell-hole. When the third group’s turn came at 11.40pm they decided to run for it together through the main Chancellery doorway. They raced to the nearest underground station where they found it was pitch dark. They had to feel their way along the tracks as very few in the group had brought torches. It was a bad mistake. The group missed a crucial turning and became separated. Bormann was at a particular disadvantage as he had very little knowledge of Berlin.

  At about 3.30am on 2nd May Artur Axmann, the head of the Hitler Youth who had also been in the third group, came upon the bodies of Ludwig Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann, lying side by side, close to a bridge over a railway line. He noted that they were both uninjured and assumed that they had taken cyanide. In 1973 the bodies were found and in 1998 DNA tests proved that they were the bodies of Stumpfegger and Bormann, quashing decades of rumours that the Brown Eminence had escaped to South America.

  Martin Bormann and his wife Gerda had ten children. Bormann also had a series of mistresses. Gerda died of cancer in April 1946 and the children were dispersed to foster homes. Bormann’s oldest son, Martin Bormann junior, became a Catholic priest before leaving the church to marry. He spent the second half of his life working as a theologian and peace campaigner.

  General Wilhelm Burgdorf

  Burgdorf, the man who killed Rommel, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head on 2nd May 1945.

  Gerda Christian

  Dara, as she was known – a shortening of her maiden name, Daranowski – escaped from the bunker, together with Hitler’s other secretary Traudl Junge, in the breakout on 1st May 1945. She succeeded in making her way to American-held territory. She died in 1997.

  Winston Churchill

  In the general election of July 1945, a war-weary Britain voted for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party rather than Churchill’s caretaker Conservative government. On the afternoon of the result, Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, told him he thought the British people were ungrateful. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t call it that,’ Churchill replied. ‘They have had a very hard time.’ In 1951, Churchill bounced back, winning office once more. He served as an MP until 1964, dying, aged 90, a year later.

  Geoffrey Cox

  After the war Geoffrey Cox returned to journalism and joined the News Chronicle as a political correspondent, and by the mid-1950s was deputy editor. Keen to work in television, he joined ITN and was its editor-in-chief from 1956 to 1968. In 1967 he started News at Ten, ITN’s flagship half-hour evening news bulletin. Sir Robin Day described Cox as ‘the best television journalist we have ever known in Britain’. Geoffrey Cox was knighted in 1966, and died in 1993, aged 97.

  Patrick Dalzel-Job

  On 3rd May 1945, Patrick Dalzel-Job wrote in his diary after a skirmish with German troops, ‘I realised with some feeling of regret that this was likely to be one of the last times we should face enemy fire; the German resistance was everywhere collapsing.’ He had lost not a single man in his 30 Assault Unit and had enjoyed the thrill of his wartime experience.

  Immediately after the war, Dalzel-Job travelled to Norway to find a girl called Bjørg Bangsund, who he had sailed with in the summer of 1939. Three weeks after he tracked her down, they married in Oslo. Their son Iain has a senior officer’s report on his father that says he is ‘an unusual officer who possesses no fear of danger’.

  Dalzel-Job agreed he may have inspired Ian Fleming’s famous spy but said, ‘I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style. And I only ever loved one woman, and I’m not a drinking man.’ Patrick Dalzel-Job died in 2003, aged 90.

  Admiral Karl Dönitz

  Having been named as Hitler’s successor, Karl Dönitz was head of the German government until it was dissolved by the Allies on 23rd May. He was tried at Nuremberg and found guilty of planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and of crimes against the laws of war. He was imprisoned in Spandau Prison for ten years and released in October 1956. He later wrote his memoirs. He died in 1980.

  Gretl Fegelein

  Eva Braun’s sister gave birth to a daughter, Eva, on 5th May in Obersalzberg, where she, her mother and her other sister were staying.

  They had been expecting Hermann Fegelein, Hitler and Braun to join them, but that hope ended when Hitler’s aide, Julius Schaub, arrived on 25th April bringing documents from the bunker, which Hitler wanted preserved. He also brought Eva Braun’s last letter to her sister, which she had written on 23rd April, setting out her wishes for her jewellery in the case of her death. ‘The Führer himself has lost all faith in a successful outcome. All of us here, including myself, will carry on hoping as long as we live. Hold your heads up high and do not despair! There is still hope. But it goes without saying that we will not allow ourselves to be captured alive.’

  Gretl Fegelein later remarried. She
died in 1987. Her daughter Eva committed suicide in 1971 at the age of 27 following the death of her boyfriend in a car crash.

  Sister Erna Flegel

  Flegel, who had become hysterical when saying goodbye to Hitler, remained with the patients in the emergency hospital in the Reich Chancellery cellars until the Russians arrived on 2nd May 1945. She was handed over to the Americans and briefly interrogated. She died in 2006.

  Joseph, Magda, Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide Goebbels

  On the night of 1st May, after Dr Stumpfegger had administered cyanide to the six children, Joseph and Magda Goebbels went up to the Reich Chancellery garden and committed suicide. They probably took cyanide. They may also have shot themselves. Goebbels had given instructions for his adjutant Günther Schwägermann to burn their bodies, but Schwägermann wasn’t able to source much petrol, so when the Russians arrived the following day they were easily able to identify the bodies.