Hitler's Last Day: Minute By Minute Part 15

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 s.p.a.ce exploration.

A few days later, von Braun would be on his way to the United States; several V2 rockets were s.h.i.+pped 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 t.i.tle 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 n.a.z.i 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 Ravensbruck 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.suage 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 embarra.s.sment 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 s.h.i.+p 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 seash.o.r.e, 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-Stra.s.se, 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 a.s.sualting 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 Fuhrerbunker, 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 n.a.z.i 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 a.s.sa.s.sination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Frank orchestrated ma.s.sacres in the Czech villages of Lidice and Leaky 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 ga.s.sed, 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 Ravensbruck 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 ma.s.sive 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 gra.s.s 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 att.i.tude of the n.a.z.is to Scandinavians, whom they regarded as racially similar. The Reverend Conrad Vogt-Svendsen, a Norwegian minister, asked a n.a.z.i 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 Ravensbruck. It looked, she said later like 'a garland of white hope' when she first saw it.

Part of the White Buses deal was that every other vehicle should carry a Gestapo officer. Many joined in the celebrations of the liberated prisoners laughing and sharing their food.

With the encouragement of his Swedish ma.s.seur, Felix Kersten, Himmler himself authorised the Scandinavian prisoners' removal as a goodwill gesture, as part of his plan to negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies. Such was Kersten's influence that on 21st April 1945, Himmler hurried back from Hitler's birthday celebrations in Berlin to Kersten's estate at Hartzwalde a few miles from Ravensbruck concentration camp to meet the Swede Norbert Masur of the World Jewish Congress and agree to spare the lives of the remaining 60,000 Jews in camps in Germany.

At Euston Station in London, 17 German army generals are being escorted by Military Police to a train that will take them to POW camps in the north of England.

10.30am

Traunstein has recently been wrecked by Allied bombs and is deserted. A farmer is driving Claus Sellier and Fritz through town. They tell him to pull up outside the headquarters of the town's military commander. Suddenly they hear a female voice inside yell, 'American tanks are in the town!'

Then there is a single shot. The two men run inside and find the military commander slumped dead on the floor, the muzzle of his rifle still in his mouth.

Forty kilometres away, in the village of Prutting, Annmarie Cramer is settling into a lakeside holiday hut with her six children. It is a place she knows from pre-war family holidays. She and the children left their home near Breslau in January. Her husband, an academic turned ordinary soldier, Ernst Cramer, managed to get them onto one of the last planes to leave Breslau before the Russians arrived. It took them to Berlin, where they caught a train, which took two weeks to reach Bavaria. She feels very lucky that she has managed to get here with all the children. The train was absolutely packed and one of her sons had to be heaved in through a window after it had started moving. They had only just pa.s.sed through Traunstein Station before it was destroyed by bombs. At least they didn't leave on foot, like many others she knows, or on a s.h.i.+p like the Wilhelm Gustloff where so many thousands lost their lives.

Annmarie doesn't yet know that her husband has just been killed in a gun battle with Americans near Leipzig. He was a very reluctant soldier. As a teenager he had fought in the First World War and been held in France as a prisoner of war.

In January, when he said goodbye to his family at the airport in Breslau, he asked his oldest daughter to help her mother with the little ones. He didn't think he'd survive. He felt he'd used up all his luck in the last war.

On 30th January, the Wilhelm Gustloff had set off from Gotenhafen on the Baltic coast. It was taking part in Operation Hannibal, the evacuation of German civilians and military personnel from East Prussia before the Russian army swept in. There were believed to be 10,582 people on board, including the crew and about 5,000 children. At 10pm Hitler's final broadcast to the nation was played on the s.h.i.+p's loudspeaker system. Shortly after it finished the s.h.i.+p was. .h.i.t by a torpedo from the Russian submarine S-13. The Wilhelm Gustloff was travelling with a motor torpedo boat escort but the submarine sensors had frozen. Only 1,252 people were rescued. It remains the most catastrophic loss of life in a single sinking.

The streets are deserted. There are no more streets. Just torn-up ditches filled with rubble between rows of ruins. What kind of people used to live here? The war had blown them away.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, diary entry, 30th April 1945

About 11.00am

In Traunstein, Claus and Fritz are digging a grave for the town's military commander in his housekeeper's back garden. She is in tears, as she feels responsible for his death. She'd told him she'd heard that American tanks had arrived. As a proud officer who'd never recovered from defeat in the First World War, he could not bear the shame of losing another war.

A white ox is walking through the rubble of the streets of Berlin. Through the bars of her bas.e.m.e.nt window, 34-year-old Ruth Andreas-Friedrich watches it, transfixed by its large gentle eyes and heavy horns. Also watching the ox are other members of the small anti-n.a.z.i resistance group she helped found. For the past few days they have had little water and hardly any food.

They slip out of the bas.e.m.e.nt as quickly as they can, grab the ox by its horns and pull it into a courtyard. They have brought knives with them.

Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity.

David Niven Infantry platoon leader John Eisenhower is walking through a forest by the Mulde River near Leipzig. He is part of the 3323rd SIAM (Signals Information and Monitoring) company; a unit of officers who have been trained as observers, operating between headquarters and the frontline. For the past few weeks he has spent time with Patton's Third Army, moving at speed throughout Germany, in what a journalist has described as 'the greatest armoured joy ride in history'.

John has with him a camera that his father the Allied Forces Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent him a few months ago. In it are pictures he took at Buchenwald concentration camp on 14th April. John had tried to conceal the camera for fear of being intrusive, but the inmates repeatedly urged him to take pictures of the emaciated prisoners and hundreds of corpses.

John Eisenhower's unit is collecting weapons and equipment from German soldiers who have surrendered. As he walks through the forest a German officer suddenly appears. Eisenhower points his pistol at the man's chest. The officer clicks his heels and gives a n.a.z.i salute, saying, 'I surrender.'

John Eisenhower is unimpressed. What he's seen at Buchenwald has made him angry at the way the German army expects to be treated in a civilised manner. Eisenhower thinks that the arrogant n.a.z.i salute is not worthy of a soldier who is, in effect, now a prisoner of war.

'Sie saluten comme ca, do you get it?' Eisenhower says.

The German bows slightly and follows Eisenhower meekly to his jeep.

John Eisenhower's mother Mamie has been concerned for her son's safety ever since he arrived in Europe in November 1944, and hopes that her husband can get John a safer posting.

The General wrote to Mamie, 'Don't forget that I take a beating every day... I constantly receive letters from bereaved mothers, sisters, wives, and from others that are begging me to send their men home, or at least outside the battle zone, to a place of comparative safety... As far as John is concerned, we can do nothing but pray. If I interfered even slightly or indirectly he would be so resentful for the remainder of his life...'

In fact, Eisenhower's staff have ensured that John is kept away from the battlefield. In the autumn of 1944, General 'Sandy' Patch's son had been killed in action, and Patch was so shattered by the loss that he was unfit for duty for some time, plus they don't want John Eisenhower captured by the Germans.