Introduction
PART ONE: SATURDAY, 28 APRIL
Chapter 1: The death of Mussolini
Chapter 2: In Berlin
Chapter 3: Himmler sues for peace
Chapter 4: Nazis on the run
PART TWO: SUNDAY, 29 APRIL
Chapter 5: Chaos in Italy
Chapter 6: Himmler looks to the stars
Chapter 7: Belsen
Chapter 8: Operation Manna
Chapter 9: Dachau
PART THREE: MONDAY, 30 APRIL
Chapter 10: The United Nations
Chapter 11: Assault on the Reichstag
Chapter 12: Curtain call for Lord Haw Haw
Chapter 13: The Americans take Munich
Chapter 14: Italy
Chapter 15: Hitler goes to Valhalla
PART FOUR: TUESDAY, 1 MAY
Chapter 16: The Germans want to talk
Chapter 17: The Nazis regroup
Chapter 18: May Day in Russia
Chapter 19: Operation Chowhound
Chapter 20: Dönitz speaks to the nation
PART FIVE: WEDNESDAY, 2 MAY
Chapter 21: The news is out
Chapter 22: The Nazis consider their positions
Chapter 23: Surrender in Italy
Chapter 24: Berlin falls
Chapter 25: Now that the Führer has gone
Chapter 26: Germany surrenders
PART SIX
Epilogue
Endnotes
Bibliography
Few episodes in history can have shocked the world more than the five days at the end of April 1945 that began with the murder of Mussolini and ended with the news that Hitler had killed himself at his bunker in Berlin. The departure of both dictators had long been expected, but the manner of their going was no less awful for that: Mussolini and his mistress dangling upside down in front of a jeering mob, Hitler’s body reduced to a Wagnerian pile of ashes while Magda Göbbels poisoned her children and demented staff at the Chancellery enjoyed group sex before going to their own deaths. Not even the most operatic of novelists could have made it up.
Equally horrifying were the atrocities being committed by the Russians at the same time as they stormed across Germany. The atrocities were at their worst in Berlin, where mass rape on an unprecedented scale was taking place as the Russians surrounded the capital. That their own menfolk had behaved just as badly in Russia was no consolation to the women of all ages who fled in terror, often committing suicide to avoid gang-rape by troops from the Soviet republics with little experience of such Western niceties as electricity or indoor plumbing.
Horrifying too were the revelations from the concentration camps that were beginning to emerge as Hitler and Mussolini died. Dachau was captured by the Americans on the same day as the Duce was strung up in Milan. Ravensbrück fell a day later, just as Hitler was taking his own life. The first photographs from Belsen and Buchenwald had been released that week and were being shown to an incredulous public. Most were too awful to be published in newspapers. They were exhibited in towns and cities instead, so that people across the free world could see the evidence with their own eyes and understand exactly what had been going on in Nazi Germany.
They had all read the newspapers and heard the rumours about the camps, but they didn’t necessarily believe them. Radio reporter Richard Dimbleby, a man of unimpeachable integrity, had great difficulty persuading a dubious BBC to broadcast his first eyewitness report from Belsen. Others too had been disbelieved as they spelled out what they had seen. During World War One, it had been widely rumoured that the Germans on the Western Front were melting down human bodies for fat. The rumours had later turned out to be false, almost certainly the work of British propaganda. Now the rumours had surfaced again, with additional tales of mass gassings, living skeletons, shrunken heads and lampshades made of tattooed skin. Small wonder that people were sceptical.
Indeed, the London cinema showing the first film from the camps was picketed that week by an angry crowd, outraged that their own government was lying to them again. Their anger was shared by millions of Germans, well aware that bad things had happened in the camps, yet convinced that the atrocities had been grossly exaggerated by Allied propaganda in order to justify the war.
But the photographs didn’t lie. ‘SEEING IS BELIEVING’ was the title of the exhibition sponsored by the Daily Express in London that week. People queued in their thousands to see the Buchenwald pictures and came away speechless. Later, they saw the Belsen film in the cinema: skeletons bulldozed into burial pits and German civilians standing beside the SS at the graveside, all of them filmed in one take so that there could be no accusations of trick photography. The photos didn’t lie. There were too many of them, from too many different places, supported by too many eyewitness accounts for the stories to be false. It simply wasn’t possible.
Yet is there any need for another book on an already well-documented week, no matter how shocking it was? The answer has to be yes if the material is new or intriguingly unfamiliar. Everyone knows, for instance, that Hitler was in Berlin when he died, but how many know that his sister was at Berchtesgaden, living anonymously as Frau Wolff and keeping her own counsel as the other guests in her boarding house discussed her brother’s death? Or that Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite film director, was in an Austrian ski resort, unable to find a bed for the night when people learned who she was? Or that the future Pope Benedict had deserted from the Wehrmacht and was walking home, terrified that he might still be shot or hanged from a tree for dereliction of duty?
Audrey Hepburn was in Holland, delighted to avoid conscription into a Wehrmacht brothel, but so malnourished that her ambition to become a ballet dancer was looking increasingly unrealistic. Eleven-year-old Roman Polanski was living virtually feral on the streets of Krakow. Bob Dole, badly wounded by a German shell, was lying paralysed in an Italian hospital, listening to the cheers for the end of the war in Italy and wondering if he would ever be able to move his toes again. All sorts of people, some famous at the time, others to become famous later, remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing as the events of those extraordinary five days unfolded around them.
I have told their stories in their own words wherever possible, concentrating on well known or interesting people not normally associated with the events being described. I have covered all the core events of that week as Hitler killed himself and the Nazis scattered, but I have also wondered where Marlene Dietrich was at the time, and Günter Grass, Henry Kissinger, Jack Kennedy and a host of others. I hope it makes for an interesting mix, an unusual picture of Europe at the end of one of the most painful few weeks in its history.
A word of warning. The definitive truth has not always been easy to discover. Quite a few eyewitnesses, particularly in Hitler’s bunker, changed their stories in later years and gave differing and often contradictory accounts of the same events. Others kept silent for decades and then had trouble remembering dates and facts correctly. I have always envied authors who feel able to state with certainty that a particular eyewitness was either wrong or lying. For myself, I prefer to report what the witnesses said, putting it in context where necessary, and then leave it to readers to make up their own minds. But I can say with certainty that what follows, or something very like it, definitely happened!
Warm thanks to Senator Bob Dole and Lord Carrington for their contributions to the book. Also to Peter Devitt, assistant curator of the RAF museum at Hendon, who helped me find out more about Operation Manna, Katharine Thomson of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Alec Holmes, whose surgical knowledge enabled me to make sense of Mussolini’s autopsy. Thanks too to Andrew Lownie, my agent, and Kate Moore and Emily Holmes at Osprey Publishing.
And finally, an apology to President Jimmy Carter for my failure to find an appropriate context for his generous contribution. For the record, he says he was at sea with the US Navy when Hitler died, wishing he could be in Times Square in time to join the celebrations when the war ended. To my great regret, I couldn’t find a suitable place to mention it in the book.
‘Our uniforms are grey and so are our forebodings about a future that gives us not a glimmer of hope. I just want to sleep, sleep and suddenly wake up to discover that it was all nothing but a bad dream…’
Helmut Altner
Time was running out for Mussolini. Fleeing the Allied advance near Lake Como, he had been captured by Italian partisans on the afternoon of 27 April 1945 and taken to a safe house in the mountains where even his few remaining friends couldn’t find him. He and his mistress Clara Petacci had arrived at Azzano in the early hours of 28 April and had spent the rest of the night under guard in a peasant’s house high above the village. They had been watched over by two young partisans who had stayed awake all night outside their door. One of the young men, spying on Clara as she washed in the outhouse before bed, had reported back to the other that Mussolini’s girlfriend had magnificent breasts. He could quite understand why the Duce kept her for his mistress.
Now it was morning again, late morning, and Mussolini had just woken from a deep sleep. Clara had cried during the night, her mascara staining the pillow, but Mussolini had slept very heavily. His eyes were bloodshot when he awoke, his face pale and grey beneath the stubble. It was obvious to his captors that Italy’s former dictator was in the depths of despair as he braced himself for whatever the new day would bring.
He ate little for breakfast, toying with a plate of bread and salami in the bedroom while the partisans stood guard over him. He asked them if the Americans had taken Como during the night, nodding resignedly when they said they had. Afterwards, Clara went back to bed, pulling up the covers and trying to catch up on her sleep while Mussolini sat on the edge of the mattress looking out of the window towards the snow-covered mountains across the lake.
He was still there when the executioners came for him at four that afternoon. They came upstairs in a hurry, led by a tall man in a fawn raincoat who called himself Colonel Valerio. In reality, the man was Walter Audisio, a Communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had remained a committed anti-Fascist ever since.
Audisio was carrying a sten gun as he burst into the room.
‘Quick!’ he told Mussolini. ‘I’ve come to rescue you.’
‘Really?’ Mussolini didn’t conceal his scepticism. ‘How very kind of you.’
‘Are you armed?’
Mussolini had stolen a knife from the kitchen the night before and hidden it in the bed. But he assured Audisio he wasn’t armed.
Audisio turned to Clara. She was still in bed, her face against the wall. ‘You too,’ he told her. ‘Come on. Get up.’
Mussolini put his coat on while Clara rummaged frantically among the bedclothes.
‘What are you looking for?’ Audisio demanded.
‘My knickers.’
‘Don’t worry about them. Just get a move on.’1
Clara was forced to leave her handbag behind as well as her underwear. She clattered reluctantly down the stairs and was escorted out of the house while her lover trailed along in the rear. Lia De Maria, whose house it was, watched from a side window and crossed herself nervously as they disappeared. She liked what little she had seen of Clara. She hoped nothing unpleasant was about to happen to her.
They stumbled down the mountain path, Clara in her high heels clinging desperately to Mussolini, who had no strength left to support her. He almost fell at one point, steadying himself against a wall. Clara tried to help him, but was pushed roughly away. Mussolini had nothing to say to her as they continued past a trio of women washing clothes in a stone trough and made their way towards the main road. They were spotted by an old man coming down the hill with a bale of hay on his back and by a woman strolling with a child. Nobody recognised Mussolini, although they all wondered why the smartly dressed woman with him was crying.
A car was waiting for them on the road, a black Fiat saloon with a Rome number plate. Rosita Barbarita was walking her dogs nearby as the party appeared. Audisio waved his gun and told her to go away. Rosita did so, hastily beating a retreat as Mussolini and his mistress were shoved into the back of the Fiat.
Audisio found a seat on the mudguard as the car started off. His companions stood on the running boards with their weapons at the ready. The two young partisans who had guarded Mussolini during the night followed at a brisk trot, hurrying along behind the car as it headed along the mountain road towards the little village of Mezzegra and the lake beyond.
It hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when it stopped again at a bend in the road out of sight from either direction. The driver pulled up at the gates of the Villa Belmonte. Mussolini and Clara were ordered out and told to stand against the wall. Clara threw her arms around her lover and stared in disbelief as Audisio mumbled a few words about a sentence of death and justice for the Italian people.
‘You can’t do that!’ Clara protested. ‘You can’t shoot Mussolini!’
‘Get away from him!’ Audisio replied. ‘Get away or you’ll die too!’
But Clara Petacci wasn’t listening. She refused to let go of Mussolini. She was still clinging to him, still protesting, when Audisio pulled the trigger.
While Mussolini went to his death, his wife Rachele was in hiding a few miles away, at the southern end of the lake. With nowhere else to go, she and their two youngest children had been taken to Cernobbio, just outside Como, where a friendly Blackshirt had given them shelter in his own home. The house wasn’t safe, but it was better than being on the streets, where Fascists and anyone else associated with Mussolini were being hunted down and killed without compunction.
Rachele Mussolini was in despair as she listened to the gunfire all around. The imminent arrival of the American Army had been the signal for a mass uprising against the remaining Fascists in the north of Italy. Mussolini himself had fled a few days earlier, with a vague idea of making a last stand in the Alps, only to find his supporters melting away as the Americans advanced. In panic, he had written to his wife, telling her to save herself and the children, and had joined a column of German soldiers heading back to Germany. He might have got away with it if an Italian partisan hadn’t recognised his face under a German helmet. Instead, he had been arrested and taken to the mountains to await his fate.
His letter to Rachele had been written when he was still contemplating a last stand in the Alps:
Dear Rachele,
Here I am at the last stage of my life, the last page of my book. We two may never meet again, and that is why I am writing and sending you this letter. I ask your forgiveness for all the harm I have unwittingly done you. But you know that you are the only woman I have ever really loved. I swear it before God, I swear it before our Bruno, in this supreme moment. You know that we must make for the Valtellina. Take the children with you and try to get to the Swiss frontier. There you can build up a new life. I do not think they will refuse to let you in, for I have always been helpful to them and you have had nothing to do with politics. If they do refuse, surrender to the Allies who may be more generous than the Italians. Take care of Anna and Romano, especially Anna who needs it so badly. You know how I love them. Bruno in heaven will help you.
My dearest love to you and the children.
Your Benito.’2
Taking Mussolini at his word, Rachele had left for Switzerland in the middle of the night with fifteen-year-old Anna Maria and seventeen-yearold Romano in tow. The border was only three miles from Como, easily identified by the bright lights twinkling peacefully beyond Italy’s blackout. They had joined a queue of cars at the frontier, where an Italian officer sent by Mussolini was waiting to help them across. They had been within five yards of safety when the Swiss border guards, after a study of their papers and some discreet telephoning, had shaken their heads regretfully and told them they would not be allowed in. It was ‘absolutely impossible’ for the Mussolinis to enter Switzerland.
Rachele had been disappointed but not downhearted as they turned away from the frontier. In fact, she had felt rather relieved at the thought of not having to leave Italy. They had driven back to Como in the dark, along a road clogged with Germans and Italians fleeing in every direction. Anti-Fascist partisans were already streaming back from Switzerland and pouring down from the mountains to seize control of the country. There had been outbreaks of shooting from time to time, although Como itself had been quiet when they returned.
They had driven straight to the Fascist headquarters, only to discover that no one there had any idea what to do with them. Seeing that they were wasting their time, Rachele and her children had left again, Anna Maria sitting disconsolately on the steps outside as they wondered where to go and what to do next. It wasn’t until dawn that help had arrived in the form of a Mussolini supporter who had taken pity on them, as Rachele gratefully recalled:
One of our faithful Blackshirts insisted that it was too dangerous to hang about in the streets. We held a conference and he advised us to take refuge in a house some way away, where he lived. We made for it. Our arrival caused something of an upheaval in the small, poorly furnished cottage. They had no food to spare, and I ended up making breakfast for everyone with what remained of the provisions I had brought with me.
The Blackshirts went off to find news of the Duce and when they came back said they were going to take us to join the column in which my husband was travelling. They also told me that our car had been stolen.
The sound of shooting came nearer. We looked down the road through the tiny window and witnessed scenes of panic. Our hosts were terrified and I spent all my time encouraging them. Helping others made my own distress more bearable. A young boy, recognised to be a Fascist, was murdered before our eyes. A single denunciation was enough for immediate execution. Every now and then we listened to the radio broadcasting orders to hunt the Fascists down without mercy. From a nearby hospital badly wounded soldiers, wearing whatever they could find, came flying out to scatter all over the town. The whole world seemed to have turned into a living hell. The children were panicstricken.3
In the circumstances, it had proved impossible for Rachele and her children to rejoin Mussolini. And now it was too late, although they didn’t know it yet. They had been hiding in the Blackshirt’s house for the past two days, too scared to show their faces outside while civil war raged all around. Rachele knew, though, that they would have to leave soon because they were putting the Blackshirt in grave danger by staying. He and his whole family might be dragged out and shot if they were caught with the Mussolinis under their roof. The decent thing to do was to hide somewhere else until the killing had stopped. But where? With chaos in the streets and everybody against them, Rachele Mussolini was uncomfortably aware that she and her children had nowhere else to go.
The execution of Mussolini did not go as planned. The sten gun jammed when Audisio fired. Cursing, he grabbed his revolver, only for that to jam as well. Seeing what was about to happen, Mussolini threw open his coat, according to one eyewitness, and faced Audisio squarely, defying him to do his worst. ‘Shoot me in the chest,’ he said.
One of Audisio’s men hurriedly gave him his own weapon. This time there was no mistake. Clara Petacci was hit first and died at once. Mussolini fell back against the wall next to her and slid to the ground, still alive. Walking over, Audisio shot him again at close range. Mussolini jerked convulsively and then lay still, his body just touching Clara’s by the wall. Everyone else watched in horror, aghast at what they had just seen. It had happened so fast that they all remembered it differently when they talked about it afterwards.
Audisio needed a cigarette when it was all over. The driver had one too, although he didn’t smoke. No one said anything as they stooped to pick up the spent cartridge cases. Behind the wall, the people at the villa had heard the gun shots but were waiting a while before coming to investigate. They didn’t want to get mixed up in anything that didn’t concern them.
The time was still only a quarter past four. The rain that had been threatening all afternoon was beginning to fall as the partisans finished their cigarettes. Leaving the two young men to guard the bodies in the drizzle, Audisio and the others got back in the car and set off for the town of Dongo, where they carried out a number of further executions, among them several of Mussolini’s ministers and Clara Petacci’s brother. Then they returned to the Villa Belmonte.
Clara and Mussolini were taken down to the main road and thrown into a removal van, on top of the other bodies. The van was then driven through the darkness to Milan. The plan was to put the bodies on display in the Piazzale Loreto the next day, where fifteen hostages had been shot by Fascists the previous August. It would be justice, of a sort, now that the war was coming to an end. Audisio’s only serious worry, as the van set off, was that American patrols might intercept them on the way and prevent them from reaching their destination.
While Mussolini met his end, Adolf Hitler sat shaking in Berlin, so debilitated in mind and body that he could barely understand what was happening as the ceiling reverberated above his head. The bunker at the Chancellery was solidly constructed, concrete piled on concrete to withstand the heaviest bombardment, but Berlin is built on sand and the walls rattled whenever a Russian shell came close, dislodging lumps of plaster that fell in dusty showers all over the floor. The shelling had begun several days before and was drawing nearer all the time as the Russian Army closed in. It was obvious to everyone in the bunker, even Adolf Hitler, that it would only be another day or two at most before the Russians were knocking on the door.
Hitler had a map in front of him as the shelling continued, an ordinary civilian map showing the approach roads to the city. He was using it to plot the advance of General Walther Wenck, who had been ordered to relieve Berlin with his troops. Hitler had no idea how far Wenck had got, or how many soldiers he had left, or even where the Russians were any more. But he was going through the motions anyway, constantly arranging and rearranging a set of buttons across the map, moving them here and there with quivering fingers as if disposing his forces in a game of chess. Every now and again he shouted orders as well, barking out commands to no one in particular. In his mind, if nowhere else, Hitler was still winning this war against the Bolsheviks.
The Russian Army had completed the encirclement of Berlin three days before. Its troops could see the Reichstag through their field glasses, the big, domed Parliament building that stood at the very heart of the city. Elsewhere in Germany, the Russians had linked up with the Americans on the Elbe and the British were pushing towards the Danish border, encountering increasingly feeble resistance as they went. In another few days, no matter what happened in Berlin, the war would be over and Germany would be defeated for the second time in a generation.
The defeat had always been inevitable. Hitler’s generals had always warned him that it would come to this, right from before the war, when they had examined the British, French and Russian armies in their war games and had concluded that however they fought it, Germany was bound to lose in the end. The economists had agreed, pointing out that Germany’s soil was thin, reminding Hitler that the country lacked the mineral resources to fight a sustained campaign. Hitler had accepted their view initially, arguing in Mein Kampf that fighting the British was a mistake to be avoided, that a war on two fronts was never a good idea. But he had ignored his own assessment in the summer of 1939 and now the whole country was paying for his folly.
Yet there was still hope, in Hitler’s mind at least. He had long since lost confidence in his other generals, but he still had some faith in General Wenck. If anybody could get to Berlin, Wenck could. Once he was there, pushing the Russians back, a corridor could be opened out of the city, a lifeline to the American Army in the West. The Americans were the key now. Hitler had persuaded himself that they would never allow a cultured country like Germany to fall into Bolshevik hands if they could prevent it. The Americans would come to Germany’s aid first, if that was what they had to do to keep the Communists out of Europe.
But they couldn’t do it without Wenck. His troops were said to be near Potsdam somewhere, still struggling towards the capital. Until they arrived, there was nothing for Hitler to do except sit and wait, obsessively pushing buttons around the map while shells rained down and the bunker continued to reverberate. From time to time he dictated increasingly frantic telegrams to his staff – ‘Where is Wenck? What is happening to the Ninth Army? When will Wenck and the Ninth Army join?’1 – but without receiving any answer. Nobody in the bunker had any real idea of what was happening in Germany any more.
Up above, on the streets of Berlin, the fighting was fast and furious as the Russians advanced towards the city centre. Every available German was struggling to hold them back. The outskirts had already fallen, and most of the suburbs, but the Germans were still clinging to the central area around the Tiergarten and the Brandenburg Gate, stubbornly refusing to capitulate. Hitler had promised them that help was on the way, the tanks and guns of Wenck’s army hurrying to save them from the Red menace. The Germans in the centre were hanging on by their fingertips, desperate not to give in before Wenck arrived.
They were fighting like men possessed, even the ones who no longer believed a word Hitler said. They fought because they had no realistic alternative. They knew only too well what would happen if they surrendered to the Russians. The men would be taken for slave labour, transported to the Soviet Union for the rest of their natural lives. The women would be mass-raped, as they already had been wherever the Russians had found them. There was nothing for the Germans in surrender. Even if they did want to give up, their own side wouldn’t let them. Fanatics from the SS and the Hitler Youth were hanging men from lamp posts or shooting them on the spot if they showed any sign of wavering. The Germans in Berlin were trapped between a rock and a very hard place.
For Helmut Altner, it was the fear of capture that kept him fighting. Still only seventeen, he did not want to spend the rest of his life in a Soviet prison camp. He had been conscripted at the end of March and given only four days’ training before being sent to the front. A girl had offered to hide him as he advanced, but he had been too scared to accept. Instead, he had gone into battle with his comrades, most of whom had long since been killed. Altner was a veteran now, after the hard fighting of the past two weeks.
It seemed an age ago, but was actually only a few days, that he had heard the battalion commander promising his troops victory within twenty four hours. The man had come forward to address them at a position just behind the line:
Hitler has issued an order: ‘Hold on another twenty four hours and the great change in the war will come! Reinforcements are rolling forward. Wonder weapons are coming. Guns and tanks are being unloaded in their thousands. Hold on another twenty four hours, comrades! Peace with the British. Peace with the Americans. The guns are silent on the West Front. The Western Army is marching to the support of you brave East Front warriors. Thousands of British and Americans are volunteering to join our ranks to drive out the Bolsheviks. Hundreds of British and American aircraft stand ready to take part in the battle for Europe. Hold on another twenty four hours, my comrades. Churchill is in Berlin negotiating with me.’2
It was wishful thinking. Winston Churchill wasn’t in Berlin and no one was coming to their rescue. Hitler might not be in Berlin either, for all Altner knew. The only reality for him was the constant shelling from the Russians in the western suburbs, the rattle of machine guns that had begun before dawn that day as the Russians advanced across the Reichssportfeld towards the barracks at Ruhleben. Altner had woken in the dark to the sound of incoming fire and had gone into action at once, grabbing his rifle and a few belts of ammunition and rushing outside to find out what was happening. It had been impossible to say for sure in the dark. The only certainty was that they were being attacked from several different directions at once and that chaos reigned all around.
The Germans had managed to halt the Russians after a while, although not before they had captured the Reichssportfeld. The fighting had died down towards dawn as both sides consolidated their positions. A Russian tank had appeared shortly after first light, filling Altner with dread as it rumbled to a halt in front of his trench. He had failed to spot the white flag it was carrying and thought his last moment had come. Instead, a head had emerged and a Russian with a loud hailer had exhorted the Germans to surrender: ‘You will be well treated, and you will be able to go home as soon as hostilities are over. Soldiers, there is no point any more. Do you really want to lose your lives in the last hours of a war already lost?’3
Several Germans had taken the Russians at their word, quietly making a break for the enemy lines as soon as they thought no one was looking. Ordered to shoot them down from behind, Altner had fired over their heads instead. He had no quarrel with anyone who wanted to desert. He would have deserted too if he hadn’t been so terrified of capture.
Fighting had resumed later as hundreds of Hitler Youths arrived from their homes in a desperate attempt to recapture the sports complex and the Olympic stadium. By mid-afternoon they had succeeded in pushing the Russians back, but only at a dreadful cost in killed and wounded. Altner found himself now with a handful of unfamiliar soldiers, ordered down to the subway station to try to reach the city centre along one of the U-Bahn tunnels and then attack the Russians from the rear. With much of the line already in enemy hands, it seemed like a suicide mission to Altner as he followed the rest of his squad into the tunnel:
Our uniforms are grey and so are our forebodings about a future that gives us not a glimmer of hope. I just want to sleep, sleep and suddenly wake up to discover that it was all nothing but a bad dream, that there was no war, that there are no ruins, no dead and ripped apart bodies, but that there is peace and that the sun shines and life pulses without the threat of coming to an end at any moment. But this is only wishful thinking. We are condemned to death and do not know why, nor do we know why we are not allowed to live!4
While Altner disappeared into the gloom, actress Hildegard Knef and her lover were a couple of miles south, on their way to fight the Russians at Schmargendorf. Film producer Ewald von Demandowsky had been called up into the Volkssturm – the German home guard – and sent straight into the front line. Hildegard had insisted on accompanying him, rather than stay behind on her own. Just nineteen, ravishingly pretty, she had no illusions about what would happen if the Russians got hold of her. She preferred to remain with her boyfriend and take her chances in the fighting.
She had tried to disguise herself as a man for the purpose, but despite her deep voice had been rapidly unmasked when they reported for duty. Nevertheless, she had been given a helmet, a machine gun and a handful of grenades and shown how to use them. She had acquired a jackknife as well and tucked it into her boot, reminding herself to cut upwards if she ever had to use it, upwards from the wrist rather than across.
Now she was on her way to Schmargendorf’s freight yard with Demandowsky and a few others. There were ten of them in all, a ragbag assortment of Russia veterans, Hitler Youth, SS and old men spaced at twenty-yard intervals as they made their way across the rubble. They were crawling some of the way, running and jumping the rest to avoid becoming a target. They managed to reach the freight yard unharmed, but were spotted by Russian snipers when they tried to cross. Hopping over the rails like a kangaroo, Hildegard sprinted for an abandoned train and dived underneath a freight car as the snipers opened up. She made it in time, but one of the Hitler Youths with her wasn’t so lucky. Hildegard could still hear the sound of him calling for his mother as he died.
The German front line lay across the yard, a row of foxholes hastily dug beside the tennis courts. Hildegard and Demandowsky found shelter in a garden shed, next to a lieutenant who was surveying the tennis courts through his field glasses. He had camouflaged his helmet and shoulders with foliage, looking to Hildegard as if he was about to go on stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
There was a dead SS man outside. Hildegard and Demandowsky were trying to move his body when the Russians launched an attack:
Orrraaaay! It’s coming from behind us, behind the tennis courts. The lieutenant looks up. They screech like monkeys, he says, when they attack they always screech like monkeys. He raises his fist and slams it down in the mud, twenty machine guns start rattling and chattering, we pull ours up and stick an ammunition belt into it. It starts heaving and bucking, wants to go it alone, resents our meddling, starts throwing itself from side to side, gets hot, jams, dies. EvD picks it up, crawls out and runs for the shed. The houses behind us are on fire.5
The Russians were beaten off and did not attack again before dark. Hildegard was grateful for the respite, if only because it gave her the chance to have a pee at last. She volunteered for the first turn on guard duty that night, occupying a foxhole all to herself while Demandowsky got some rest in the shed. Early evening was the best time to be on guard, because the Russians rarely attacked in the early evening. That was their time for getting drunk and raping women, as Hildegard soon discovered:
I stand there in my hole, in the water, keep a firm hold on the machine gun and the pistol, peer through the glasses over the yard, see shadows, chew the rest of the cheese, hear something crack and rustle, hear screams, dreadful heartrending screams, high thin shrill. I call out softly to the next hole: ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s that screaming?’
Russians are in that house over there started on the women shitshitohshitohshit.6
Hildegard was terrified, acutely aware of the horrors the Russian Army inflicted upon helpless women. She had heard it first-hand from East Prussian refugees at Dahlem. The Russians had raped the women of East Prussia repeatedly before beating their brains out. One woman had told Hildegard that her sister’s breasts had been cut off and her husband crucified against a door. Crouching miserably in her foxhole as the screaming continued, with a gun in one hand and her knife in the other, Hildegard Knef was determined that nothing of the sort would ever happen to her if she could avoid it.
While the fighting raged in Berlin, Heinrich Himmler was on his way to Lübeck, returning to his Baltic headquarters after a Wehrmacht conference at Neuroofen. With so many refugees on the road, the journey was taking him most of the day, although normally it would only have been a couple of hours.
Himmler was not a happy man as he drove. With Berlin about to fall and the German Army in full retreat, he was uncomfortably aware that a day of reckoning was fast approaching for the Nazi leadership, a calling to account for all the atrocities committed over the past five years. As head of the SS, he knew the Allies would show no mercy when they caught up with him. His only real chance of survival was to have something to offer them in return for his own life, a bargaining chip to get him off the hook.
Himmler had been careful not to mention it at the conference, but he had made a clandestine approach to the Americans on 23 April, requesting peace negotiations through the good offices of Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte. At Bernadotte’s suggestion, he had written a letter offering to surrender all German forces in the West to the Anglo-Americans, but without saying anything about the troops still fighting the Russians in the East. Bernadotte had undertaken to deliver the letter in secret to the Western Allies, with the caveat that in his view they would be very unlikely to consider any German surrender that did not include the Russians as well.
The Allies’ reply was waiting for Himmler when he got back to Lübeck. It was not what he had been hoping for. As Bernadotte had anticipated, the British and Americans were not prepared to contemplate a separate peace without the Soviet Union:
A German offer of surrender will only be accepted on condition that it is complete on all fronts as regards Great Britain, the Soviet Union as well as USA. When these conditions have been fulfilled, the German forces must immediately on all fronts lay down their arms to the local Allied commanders. Should resistance continue anywhere, the Allied attacks will be ruthlessly carried on until complete victory has been gained.1
That was not all. Himmler was appalled to hear that the Allies had released the details of his approach to the press. He had made the approach in strictest confidence, without Hitler’s knowledge, intending to negotiate a surrender package behind the Führer’s back that would ensure his own survival unpunished, perhaps even as head of a post-war German government. But the Allies had betrayed him. They had deliberately leaked the story to the newspapers that morning and it had been picked up by foreign radio. Himmler’s treachery would be all over Germany by the next day.
As if on cue, there was a phone call for him soon after he got back to Lübeck. It was from Grand Admiral Dönitz, who had heard the news from Wehrmacht headquarters and wanted to know if it was true. Himmler hastily assured him it wasn’t. He assured the Wehrmacht as well, ringing army headquarters of his own accord to deny the radio reports and insist that he had had no contact with the Allies. Then he sent for SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, his go-between in the negotiations with Count Bernadotte in Denmark. He wanted to hear from Schellenberg why the negotiations had failed, and why his name was all over the news when Schellenberg had been under strict instructions to conduct the whole business in secret.
Schellenberg went to meet Himmler with deep reluctance. He was under no illusions about the summons. Himmler had a bad habit of blaming others for his own miscalculations and leaving them to face the consequences. As he drove to Lübeck late that afternoon, it seemed distinctly possible to Schellenberg that he might be taken out and shot as soon as he had made his report to Himmler.
Schellenberg had been hoping that Count Bernadotte would accompany him to the meeting for moral support, but Lübeck was now too close to the front line for that. Instead, rather than face Himmler alone, Schellenberg telephoned ahead and arranged for someone else to go with him. ‘I realised that my position with Himmler would now be so difficult that I should have to face the fact that I might be liquidated. I therefore arranged for an astrologer from Hamburg to accompany me. Himmler knew this man personally and thought very highly of him. He could never resist having his horoscope read, and I felt this would soften his reaction to the disappointment.’2
The astrologer was Wilhelm Wulff, a self-appointed seer who by his own account had been one of hundreds of German astrologers arrested after Rudolph Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941, interrogated by the Gestapo as they sought an explanation for Hess’s behaviour. Wulff had been released after a while but remained under observation, threatened with severe punishment if his horoscopes proved to be inaccurate. He was almost as nervous as Schellenberg as an SS car collected him from Hamburg and drove him to Lübeck, where he was to meet Schellenberg before reporting to Himmler later that evening.
‘Make sure that Himmler sends me to Stockholm,’ were Schellenberg’s first words when they met.3 Wulff asked to be left alone for an hour while he consulted his charts and prepared some horoscopes. Then the two of them set off for the police barracks in the suburbs that housed Himmler’s headquarters.
It was getting on for midnight by the time they arrived. They were taken down a dimly lit corridor and shown into a room containing beds, a table and wooden benches around the walls. They sat down to wait, but Himmler did not appear. Midnight came and went, heralded by an air raid siren sounding the all clear, but there was still no sign of the SS leader. Schellenberg and Wulff were evidently in for a long night. Settling down on one of the benches along the wall, they ran once more through the points they were going to raise with Himmler when he arrived, and then resigned themselves to a lengthy wait.
While Schellenberg went to meet Himmler, Count Bernadotte had remained in Denmark, horrified to learn from the radio that his discussions with the Allies had gone public. He was staying with a Danish official when he heard his own name on the news, followed by an announcement that he had been conducting negotiations with Himmler for a German surrender.
Bernadotte’s first reaction was one of despair. As a cousin of the King of Sweden, his main object in agreeing to act as a go-between was to ensure a peaceful German withdrawal from Norway and Denmark, one that left his fellow Scandinavians unscathed as the Wehrmacht pulled out. He had negotiated mainly with Schellenberg, but he had seen Himmler too, meeting him secretly at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck on 23 April. They had had a long talk by candlelight in the aftermath of an air raid. Himmler had admitted that Germany was beaten and had told Bernadotte that if Hitler was not already dead, he soon would be. He had asked Bernadotte to approach the Anglo-Americans about a possible surrender, adding privately that if his overtures were rejected he himself would go to the Russian front and seek an honourable death in battle.
Himmler had spoken in strictest confidence, as had Bernadotte when he relayed Himmler’s message to the British and American ambassadors in Stockholm. It was frustrating, therefore, to hear their names on the radio and know that they had been exposed. But was it a disaster? Bernadotte certainly thought so at first. ‘My initial reaction was that this had spoilt everything, and that there was no further possibility of negotiations.’4 Thinking it over, however, he wasn’t so sure. It certainly meant that Himmler was out of the picture, but was that really so bad, when the Allies were refusing to deal with him anyway?
It might actually be good, if Hitler was forced to appoint someone else to succeed him instead, as he would surely have to. Whoever Hitler appointed would not be as distasteful to the Allies. Either way, Bernadotte’s main concern was still to ensure a peaceful capitulation of the German forces in Norway and Denmark. He had told Schellenberg so that morning, before the SS man set off back to Lübeck to explain himself to Himmler.
Himmler, Schellenberg and Bernadotte all assumed that they had been deliberately let down by the Allies, who had leaked the news of their negotiations to the press. In fact, the Allies had done nothing of the kind – not officially, anyway. The decision to leak the story had been taken by a lowly British official at the United Nations conference in San Francisco. He had acted on his own initiative, without telling anyone else what he was doing.
Jack Winocour, a press officer for the British delegation, had first learned of Himmler’s approach on 27 April, when Anthony Eden, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, had mentioned it casually at a briefing. Winocour had assumed that the story was being released to the newspapers, but had seen no mention of it anywhere. As the afternoon of the 27th wore on, and the wire services still hadn’t run the story, he had wondered if it was being deliberately kept secret, and if so, why?
It was Himmler who still controlled the ghastly administrative apparatus of the Nazi state. It was he who would surely be Hitler’s heir, and who would attempt to perpetuate the legend. Surely Hitler now knew of Himmler’s treachery? Or if he did not know why had we not begun to tell the world with every means at our command that Hitler’s comrade-in-arms had betrayed him?
There had been a long silence throughout the day. I had earlier been convinced that Eden was merely announcing to us what must soon be a matter of common knowledge in the nerve centres of war in Washington and London. The Foreign Secretary would not have taken thirty people into his confidence on a matter of this kind, if it was intended that secrecy should be maintained.5
But the silence had continued into the evening. Winocour was preparing for bed when Paul Scott Rankine of Reuters news agency rang after midnight to ask if he had anything for the afternoon papers in Europe. Winocour hesitated for only a moment. Speaking strictly off the record, he gave Rankine the story. Half an hour later, every paper in Europe was remaking its front page and the BBC was broadcasting the news of Himmler’s treachery across the world.
Winocour woke later that morning to find the San Francisco correspondents in an uproar as they hurried to find out more. At the ten am briefing at the Palace Hotel, it was reported that Himmler had said that Hitler had suffered a brain haemorrhage and only had a few more hours to live. For mischief, Winocour added quite untruthfully that Himmler had offered to deliver Hitler’s body to the Allies as proof of his good intentions. Winocour knew he wasn’t telling the truth, but he knew too that Hitler would be outraged if the story reached him. The power of black propaganda was not to be underestimated in war.
By late afternoon on the 28th the story had spun completely out of control. Assured that it was about to happen, the Associated Press took a gamble and put out a news flash announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender. There was no truth in the rumour, but the UN meeting in San Francisco’s opera house almost broke up in disarray as the delegates flooded outside to learn more, leaving Russia’s Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov vainly trying to restore order with his gavel. President Harry Truman was consulted in Washington, but could shed no light on the matter. He knew about Himmler’s approach to the Allies, because he had discussed it with Winston Churchill on the transatlantic telephone, but he had heard nothing of surrender. Truman got Admiral William Leahy to telephone General Eisenhower in Europe to ask if it was true. Eisenhower’s people in turn rang Churchill’s in the middle of the night, but no one had heard anything. If the Germans had surrendered, it was news to anyone in Europe.
Accordingly, Truman decided to scotch the rumour. Just after half past nine that evening, he summoned the White House correspondents to the Oval Office. Refusing point blank to discuss Himmler’s approach, he confined himself instead to a short statement about the so-called surrender. ‘I just got in touch with Admiral Leahy and had him call our headquarters’ commander-in-chief in Europe,’ he told the correspondents. ‘There is no foundation for the rumour. That is all I have to say.’6
In Berlin, Adolf Hitler learned of Himmler’s treachery at about nine o’clock that evening. The news was brought to the bunker by Heinz Lorenz, head of the German Information Office, who came hurrying over from the Propaganda Ministry with a radio transcript of the Reuters report, apparently confirming an earlier report by Radio Stockholm. Telephone operator Rochus Misch saw him arrive:
Hitler was sitting on the bench outside my switchboard room with a puppy in his lap when Lorenz, whom I had heard arrive at a run, handed him the paper on which he had jotted down the radio dispatch. Hitler’s face went completely white, almost ashen. ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘he’s going to faint.’ He slumped forward holding his head with his hands. The puppy plumped to the ground – silly how one remembers such trifles, but I can still hear that soft sound.7
der treue Heinrich