Hitler's Last Day: Minute By Minute Part 4

About 6.00am.

After a night of travelling under fire, Reitsch and von Greim arrive at Plon Castle which has, for the last week, functioned as the headquarters of all German military forces in the north of Germany, under the command of Grand Admiral Karl Donitz.

Robert Ritter von Greim is exhausted from the overnight journey but Hanna Reitsch is still exhilarated by the excitement of all their near misses and she gives Admiral Donitz a pa.s.sionate account of their mission and ferociously denounces Himmler. She pa.s.ses on Hitler's order for Himmler's arrest. Donitz explains that Himmler has the protection of a substantial SS escort battalion and can't easily be arrested.

Reitsch and von Greim will stay in Plon for a couple of days and Reitsch manages to have a brief interview with Himmler. She later claimed that she took the opportunity to convey her disgust at what she considered to be his treachery of the Fuhrer but, given the presence of his SS guard, she was in no position to carry out the heroic arrest she dreamed of.

6.15am/7.15am UK time.

The BBC Home Service is broadcasting a 15-minute programme called The Daily Dozen Exercises for Men and Women based on a fitness programme for young recruits in the First World War.

'Have you taken leave of your senses, gentlemen, laughing so disrespectfully at the sovereign leader of your country?'

About 6.30am.

A young officer, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, wakes his colleague Gerhard Boldt. The two men share a room in the upper bunker, where they sleep and work. Their job is to compile twice-daily reports on the military situation for the Fuhrer's military conferences. Their room contains bunk beds, two desks and two telephones as well as a large map. Part of the room is divided off with a curtain, behind which their boss, General Krebs, sleeps. Von Loringhoven is bursting with news but he doesn't want Krebs to catch him gossiping, so as Boldt sits down to work, von Loringhoven looks up casually and whispers, 'Our Fuhrer got married last night.'

Boldt looks so astonished that von Loringhoven can't suppress his amus.e.m.e.nt and the two of them collapse with laughter, stopped only by the voice of their boss, through the curtain: 'Have you taken leave of your senses, gentlemen, laughing so disrespectfully at the sovereign leader of your country?'

The two men fall silent and von Loringhoven waits until he hears Krebs get up and leave before telling Boldt all he has heard about the events of the night.

At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg outside Munich, British officer Major Elliott Viney is shaving. In the distance he can hear the sound of gunfire.

Viney has been a prisoner since May 1940 when he was captured after the attempt by the Bucks Battalion under his command to defend the town of Hazebrouck during the retreat to Dunkirk. (Later in 1945 Major Viney will be awarded the DSO for his leaders.h.i.+p and bravery at Hazebrouck.) Viney has only been in Moosburg for a fortnight. On 14th April he and other Allied officers were moved south from the POW camp at Eichstatt, just two days before it was liberated by the Americans. On the march, a squadron of USAAF Thunderbolts mistook the British khaki uniforms for Hungarian military uniforms (Hungary being a member of the Axis powers) and attacked. A number of Viney's friends were killed, and he only just escaped. Later that night when he unpacked his rucksack he found a large bullet from a Thunderbolt lodged in a shoe.

Viney has been up since before five as events in the camp are moving so fast. Last night the SS camp guards surrendered control to the prisoners, and some left. Now the prisoners are patrolling their own camp and manning the perimeter fence. Viney heads off to find some breakfast.

Let us not fail to grasp this supreme chance to establish a worldwide rule of reason to create an enduring peace under the guidance of G.o.d.

President Truman, 25th April 1945 On the banks of the River Elbe, Russian and American troops are recovering after days of drinking and dancing.

On the morning of 25th April in Leckwitz, a hamlet in eastern Germany, an American officer named Albert Kotzebue saw a lone horseman he couldn't identify ride into a courtyard; he and his men followed in their jeeps. The man turned out to be a Soviet cavalryman, Aitkalia Alibekov, on a scouting mission. It was 11.30am. The two mighty armies had met for the first time. Germany was cut in two.

Alibekov led Kotzebue and his men to the River Elbe, where they waded knee-deep through bodies of dead Germans to get to the other side. There they met other Russians, and formal salutes were soon replaced by pats on the back and toasts from the Russians to 'our great leaders Stalin and Roosevelt' (they didn't realise that Roosevelt had died a fortnight before and been replaced by Vice President Harry Truman). Over the next few days the men swapped cigarettes, danced and got drunk. There were celebrations in Times Square, and in Moscow 324 guns fired 24 salvos in salute.

A few hours later an historic conference opened in San Francisco to determine the shape a new international peace organisation called the United Nations should take.

One thousand delegates from all over the world were there. A US delegate wrote to his wife that San Francisco was 'dazzling... there are rich hotels teeming with the diplomatic corps of the world food beyond description wines, liquors, cars for one's beck and call free movies...' It was a world away from the squalor of the battlefields of Europe and the Far East. On flags and on the badges worn by the delegates was a new emblem designed by the graphic artists of the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA) showing a world map set against a blue backdrop, with the US as host nation at its heart. Later the map will be tilted to have the international dateline at its centre.

In San Francisco and on the Elbe, all is not as harmonious as it seems. Russian soldiers in Germany mixing with their Allies have been told to 'take no initiative in organising friendly meetings... give no information about operational plans or unit objectives'. In San Francis...o...b..y the Russians have an 'entertainment' s.h.i.+p called the Smolny, purportedly full of caviar and vodka, but in reality it was fitted out with spying equipment and a secure phone line to send messages back to Moscow.

On 28th April, RAF pilot Eric Lapham, who'd recently left a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany after the guards had fled (the last guard meekly handed over the keys to the gate after a POW bravely walked up to him and stuck his hand out for them), came across some Russian soldiers who spoke English. They talked about the RussianAmerican meeting at the Elbe and then Lapham asked them where they thought their advance would end. 'We were rather shattered when they said "the English Channel"', he recalled.

Our main enemy is America. But the basic thrust must not be delivered against America itself.

Joseph Stalin Stalin is paranoid that he will be betrayed and with good reason. On 22nd June 1941 German forces invaded Russia, breaking their non-aggression pact. Stalin was so shocked he said that someone should 'urgently contact Berlin' as. .h.i.tler surely didn't know about the attack.

This has made him deeply suspicious of his Allies. He is convinced that the US and Britain would like to secure a separate peace with Germany, and then all three countries would turn on Russia. Until Stalin received a telegram from Churchill on 5th June 1944 ('tonight we go...'), he had been unconvinced that the Second Front the invasion of northern Europe led by General Eisenhower would actually take place. Russia has suffered greatly during its four-year battle with Germany. It's estimated that ten million Russian soldiers died in action in the Second World War, representing 65% of all Allied military deaths the proportion of British and US military deaths was 2% each; a further three million Russians died after they became prisoners of war, and seven million Russian civilians were killed.

Stalin is after revenge, and he wants to get to Berlin first, capture Hitler and put him on trial.

At the end of March 1945, General Eisenhower sent a personal message to Stalin, rea.s.suring him that his armies would not march on Berlin. Churchill was furious that Eisenhower could have made such a unilateral decision he was convinced that Berlin should not fall into Russian hands (even though it was well within the agreed Russian zone of occupation).

General Patton confronted Eisenhower: 'We had better take Berlin and quick.'

'George, why would anyone want it?'

'I think history will answer that for you.'

7.00am.

In a square on the outskirts of Padua, New Zealand soldiers are shaving, their mirrors placed on the side of their tanks. Geoffrey c.o.x and the other intelligence officers are having a civilised breakfast round a table covered in a white cloth. Women on their way to early Sunday ma.s.s stop and stare at the scene.

An Italian man runs up to the officers claiming that a British soldier has looted his flat and taken his radio.

'We fight for you, and then you do this. It is not right!'

'You fight for us?' c.o.x replies, 'Who the h.e.l.l do you think we are fighting for here in Italy?'

There has been a great deal of looting throughout the war. In the early years of their conquests in Europe the Germans practised it on a ma.s.sive scale, stripping factories of their machinery, and museums and art galleries of their treasures and s.h.i.+pping them back home. Now the looting is more opportunistic. British tank crews are reversing their tanks through German warehouse doors and stealing the contents; Russian soldiers are grabbing anything of value they find, from watches to cloth, and sending it back home. They are allowed to send a parcel a month. Many exceed their quota.

Red Army officer Akim Popovichenko wrote to his wife a few days ago, 'Today at last I have succeeded in sending you parcels of valuable items... so many silk and wool fabrics, I can't remember how many metres... there are silk stockings for you, I think about eight pairs, all new of course, then two silk ladies' blouses... you would be the richest woman in Smela. I mean that seriously.'

Daily Express journalist Alan Moorehead, travelling with British troops in Germany, watched a wine warehouse in the village of Steyerberg being looted. Villagers and refugees helped themselves to bottles of the finest wine he had ever seen a child carried a case of Chateau Yquem; his parents used a wheelbarrow to carry their haul. Others struggled to hold onto large magnums, jeroboams and rehoboams of Rothschild Chateau Lafite 1891. Many were dropped and smashed.

Last weekend the BBC's Wynford Vaughan-Thomas told his radio listeners about the former slave labourers he'd seen take tractors, bicycles, lorries, even eggs and chickens from the farms where they'd been forced to work. Vaughan-Thomas concluded, 'Yes, the Germans are in for a grim winter. But then, they might have thought of that before they based their agriculture on slave labour.'

In nine days' time, on VE Day, the world will discover the full extent of the art treasures the n.a.z.is have stolen. In a salt mine at Altaussee in the Austrian Alps, American soldiers will come across a vast network of caves transformed into an underground art gallery, and will be closely followed by a team of experts known as the Monuments Men who will catalogue what has been found. The items hidden away from the threat of Allied bombers include 6,577 paintings, 2,300 drawings and watercolours, 954 prints, 137 pieces of sculpture and 181 cases of books.

Also on VE day, in another salt mine, this time in Weimar in Germany, another team of Monuments Men led by sculptor Walter Hanc.o.c.k, will make an even more bizarre discovery. In a hidden chamber in the mine there are four large caskets. On each is a piece of Scotch tape on which has been scribbled in red crayon the name of the body inside: 'Feldmarschall von Hindenberg', 'Frau von Hindenberg', 'Friedrich Wilhelm, der Soldaten Konig', and finally the king whose portrait Hitler has hanging up in the bunker, 'Friedrich der Grosse' Frederick the Great. Slave labourers who've worked in the caves will tell Hanc.o.c.k that in early April the German army brought the caskets to the mine, 'to preserve the most potent symbols of the German military tradition around which future generations might rally'.

The people of Berlin emerge from their shelters in ruins and overcrowded underground bunkers to search for food. sixteen-year-old Armin Lehmann, who is working as a Hitler Youth courier, is horrified by the desperation he has witnessed in recent days. He is haunted by the high-pitched sound of a squealing horse which had been injured by shrapnel. Two men were hacking at its flesh with a knife and a saw. They didn't have the ammunition to kill it first.

The Russian journalist Vasily Grossman, who has accompanied the Soviet 3rd Shock Army is surprised to find the gardens and allotments of Berlin's suburbs full of blossom on this spring morning. He notes, 'A great thunder of artillery in the sky. In the moments of silence one can hear the birds.'

Forty-one-year-old journalist George Orwell is spending a second morning billeted with a German family in the suburbs of Stuttgart, as all the hotels in the city are closed. His only possessions are a typewriter and a large suitcase. Orwell is travelling with the US Third Army as a correspondent for the Observer newspaper, and is dressed in the regulation British army reporter's uniform. Yesterday Orwell filed a piece for this morning's paper about the widespread looting by former camp inmates who have got hold of trucks and cars, and with newly acquired rifles are 'letting fly at pieces of driftwood in the stream'.

The German family with whom Orwell has been staying has told him they are keen for the British and Americans to occupy as much of Germany as possible; they dislike the French and fear the Russians. They, and many other Germans Orwell has spoken to, don't believe that the Allies are in agreement about their aims for Germany. Everywhere Orwell goes the Allies hoist only their own flag in the zones they're occupying. The headline above his piece in this morning's Observer reads: 'THE GERMANS STILL DOUBT OUR UNITY. THE FLAGS DO NOT HELP.'

Orwell has been writing for the Observer since 1942. They had wanted him to report from North Africa in 1943, but he failed the medical the army requires journalists to take. It's believed that Orwell made it to Germany only thanks to the Observer's owners, the Astor family, exploiting their many contacts in the government.

Just a month ago Orwell's wife Eileen died during a routine operation to remove a growth in her womb. Last summer they adopted a baby boy called Richard; he's being looked after by a friend's wife. Orwell decided to return to Europe, because, as he explained to a friend, 'perhaps after a few weeks of b.u.mping about in jeeps etc. I shall feel better.' Orwell's reports for the Observer are bleak, reflecting his grief and also the fact that he is ill with pneumonia; ill enough to have drawn up a doc.u.ment at the end of March ent.i.tled 'Notes for My Literary Executor' a list of works he wanted republished and those he did not. Orwell sent it to his wife to sign, but by then she was already dead.

George Orwell is not yet known as a writer. His first book Homage to Catalonia sold only 700 copies, but he has great faith in a short 'fairy tale' that he's just finished that he knows will be controversial. Animal Farm is a satire on the Russian Revolution and tyranny in general. Many publishers in the UK and the US have turned it down as the Soviet Union is a war ally, but Secker and Warburg have taken it on and plan to publish it when more paper, which is severely rationed, is available. They may also be waiting for Hitler to be defeated and for the end of the alliance with Stalin. The ma.n.u.script that Secker and Warburg are working with is crumpled and dirty it is in Orwell's words 'blitzed' after a V1 exploded near their London flat in June 1944 and brought the ceiling down.

Orwell has taken advantage of the delay, and even as late as last month he's been tinkering with the proofs, asking to change the scene in which the windmill blows up, so that 'all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces' becomes 'all the animals except Napoleon'. Napoleon 'Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon' is a pig who rules Animal Farm and is based on Stalin. Orwell explained to his publisher that this change was to be fair to Stalin who had chosen to stay in Moscow during the German invasion rather than flee.

Orwell has with him in Stuttgart a Colt .32 pistol, lent by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. In Barcelona in 1937, Stalin's agents almost had Orwell imprisoned. This has left him paranoid that they'll attack him again.

7.15am/8.15am UK time.

On the BBC Forces Programme they are playing 'Morning Star' by Frank Sinatra.

In Munich, 47-year-old teacher Anni Antonie Schmoger and her sister are at seven o'clock ma.s.s. They've decided to come to an early service in case there is an air raid later. On the way to church, Anni was disappointed to see that some of her neighbours had white flags hanging outside their houses. She can't bear to think that Americans will soon be marching through her city.

Suddenly air raid sirens sound and the congregation hear the sound of bombs exploding close by. Everyone runs for the door, including Anni and her sister. Then they change their mind and turn back - they haven't yet had communion.

Everywhere regimental staffs without regiments and division staffs without divisions are looking for picturesque boltholes. They are unemployed now... sleeping late, breathing in the mountain air... destroying ambiguous doc.u.ments, discussing the situation, coordinating future answers to awkward questions...

Author Erich Kastner, April 1945.

7.30am.

Twenty-year-old German Lieutenant Claus Sellier, wearing only his underwear, is looking out of the window of the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau in Lofer, Austria. He's watching orderlies putting luggage in the back of jeeps parked in a row along the street. Standing nearby are a group of sombre-looking officers; they shake hands and one by one drive off. Sellier and his colleague and friend Fritz (writing in later life, Claus Sellier never mentions Fritz's surname) are now the only guests left in the hotel.

Both men are in the 79th Mountain Artillery Regiment and were recently promoted, along with all their fellow cadets, to mark Hitler's birthday on the 20th April. That same day, Claus and Fritz were summoned to the office of a distraught-looking Colonel Rauch, who was in charge of their artillery training school in Rokycany, German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Rokycany was surrounded by Allied forces and the telephone lines were down. Colonel Rauch gave Claus and Fritz a mission to deliver two packages one to army regional headquarters, which the colonel thought was possibly in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, and a second to army provision headquarters in Traunstein, Bavaria. Claus suspected they contained requests for urgent supplies. Rauch's collar was unb.u.t.toned and his face was flushed.

'I selected you because you have excellent records, and you are from Bavaria. You must get there! Those doc.u.ments are very important. Guard them with your lives! I'm relying on you.' He gazed at a map. 'It won't be easy it looks like we're cut off.'

The two young lieutenants were flattered. When Claus thought about the headquarters, he envisaged the sort of place he'd seen in the newsreels generals standing around a table, moving divisions across an enormous map. He pictured the oak table that saved the life of the Fuhrer when Count Claus von Stauffenberg's bomb had exploded under it.

'I will be standing near it when I present these important doc.u.ments,' Claus thought at the time.

The reality is somewhat different. Claus never imagined that the army regional headquarters would be in a hotel. When they arrived on foot last night, after an exhausting four-day journey, they handed over the first package to the major on duty. He'd been more interested in reading his magazine than acknowledging the new arrivals. The major glanced at their package and then threw it over his shoulder; it landed on the floor among other papers and envelopes. Claus was furious that they'd risked their lives only for the doc.u.ment to be discarded.

'I guess you didn't know that the army headquarters was dissolved today?' the major said.

'Dissolved? Do you mean the war is over?!' Claus said.

'No, I didn't say that. I said that this headquarters is no longer in existence, as of today. As far as I know the war continues.'

That evening, Claus and Fritz had eaten in the hotel, whilst a group of generals, told jokes and drank plenty of wine. No one returned the young men's greeting of Heil Hitler.

Claus walks away from the hotel window and starts to put on his uniform.

'My vision grew a little misty. Perhaps it was the rain on the Perspex...'

8.00am/9.00am UK time.

In the corridor dining room of the upper bunker three young officers, Lorenz, Zander and Johannmeier, are having breakfast. They have been given the mission of delivering the three copies of Hitler's and Goebbels' testaments: one to Grand Admiral Donitz, whom Hitler names in the political testament as his successor as Chancellor of Germany; one to Field Marshal Schorner, named as the new head of the army, and the final copy to the n.a.z.i Party headquarters in Munich. A carbon copy has been kept for the bunker.

The three officers help themselves to food from a stacked trolley. There is fresh bread from Berlin's only surviving bakery, plus salami, roast beef, pickles and cheese from the vast stores in the Reich Chancellery cellars. The couriers eat as much as they can and stuff their pockets. Only Wilhelm Zander is gloomy. The 34-year-old has begged to be excused from this mission. He wants to die in the bunker. If this is the end for n.a.z.ism he can see no reason to carry on.

A couple of miles away, in a neighbour's Berlin flat, 34-year-old journalist Marta Hillers has just finished a breakfast of ersatz coffee and bread and b.u.t.ter when a group of Russian soldiers stride in. Her neighbour keeps the front door unlocked to avoid having it smashed. They are used to invasions of boorish Russian soldiers but one of today's intruders seems different. Marta Hillers described him briefly in her diary which was published anonymously after the war: 'Narrow forehead, icy blue eyes, quiet and intelligent.' His name is Andrei, and he is a school teacher by profession. He tells her that it isn't Hitler who is to blame for the war, but the capitalist system which created him. 'The conversation did me a lot of good... simply because one of them treated me as an equal, without once touching me, not even with his eyes.'

Most days, since the Russians arrived, Marta Hillers has been raped. The previous afternoon two grey-haired Russian soldiers barged in. One of them stood guard as the other threw Hillers onto a bed. He smelled of brandy and horses. He raped her and then forced open her jaws and 'with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth'. The a.s.sault over, he got up to go and thumped down a crumpled pack of Russian cigarettes on the bedside table. 'Only a few left,' Hillers noted. 'My pay.'

Stalin refused to punish Russian soldiers who treated women brutally. He explained his position to Milovan ilas, the Yugoslav communist: 'Imagine a man who has fought... over a thousand kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful about having fun with a woman after such horrors?'

In the cellar of her grandparents' large house in Oosterbeek near Arnhem in the Netherlands, 15-year-old Audrey Hepburn-Ruston is hiding with her mother Ella. She has not been outside since the beginning of March when she narrowly escaped a round-up by n.a.z.is looking for young women to staff Wehrmacht kitchens. Her family has suffered a great deal her older brother has been taken off to a German labour camp and her uncle has been shot.

Before the German invasion, Audrey was training to be a ballerina and she has taken part in secret performances to raise money for the Dutch resistance. But Audrey, who is using the name Edda van Heemstra, because English-sounding names are too dangerous, is now too ill to dance. She and her mother Ella are malnourished their diet consists of tulips and turnips.

'Tulip bulbs. It sounds terrible,' Audrey Hepburn recalled later. 'You don't just eat the bulb. Tulip bulbs actually make a fine flour that is rather luxurious and can be used for making cakes and cookies.' Nonetheless, Audrey is suffering from respiratory problems, acute anaemia and oedema caused by malnourishment. The oedema will leave stretch marks on her ankles for the rest of her life.

Audrey pa.s.ses the time in the cellar doing puzzles and drawings by the light of a lantern.