Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (35 page)

“I’ll go and get the doctor,” Göring said at once.

*   *   *

WILLY BRANDT
was in Sweden, attending a May Day rally in Stockholm. He was walking to the platform to say a few words on behalf of the International Workers Council when a note was thrust into his hand telling him that Hitler was dead. He was to announce it in his speech.

The news could hardly have been better timed. Brandt had been an enemy of the Nazis from the very beginning, from long before their rise to power. Born illegitimate under another name, he had been a left-wing activist since his teens, bitterly opposed to everything the Nazis stood for and actively involved in street fighting against their thugs. He had fled Germany in 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, bribing a fisherman to take him to Denmark with a copy of Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
in his luggage.

From Denmark, Brandt had gone to Norway, applying later for citizenship, after the Nazis revoked his passport. He had been forced to flee again in 1940, when the country was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Brandt had spent the rest of the war in Stockholm, one of many like-minded Germans in the Swedish capital. They had formed a center of opposition to Hitler, an essential link between the Resistance movement in Germany and the outside world. Brandt and his friends had known about the gas chambers earlier than most, and had been in close touch with the July 1944 conspirators seeking to assassinate Hitler and bring the war to a quick end.

And now the man was dead at last, perhaps by his own hand. Brandt wasted no time letting his listeners know. He was puzzled by their muted response:

When I announced it to the audience, a deep silence was the answer, no applause, no joyful shouts. It was as if the people simply couldn’t believe that the end had actually come. And at the same time a question stood almost physically in the room: Hitler’s dreadful challenge to all mankind—had it really ended in this way?
16

Only time would tell. But Hitler had certainly gone and wouldn’t be coming back. Brandt knew he would be able to go home as soon as the war was over. Yet where was home now? It was Norway for the moment, the country of which he was happy to be a naturalized citizen. In the longer term, though, Germany was the country of his birth and the land he still loved, despite all the shame of the past twelve years. There was a future for him in Germany, now that the Nazis no longer held sway. A future for millions like him, too, now that ordinary Germans were free to return to their towns and villages to pick up the pieces and begin rebuilding their lives and their country from the ground up.

PART FIVE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1945

21

THE NEWS IS OUT

WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS AT DINNER
WHEN
he learned of Hitler’s death. After returning to London from Chequers, he had gone to the House of Commons that afternoon for the prime minister’s question time. The House had been packed with members hoping to hear that the war was over, but Churchill had been unable to oblige them. “I have no special statement to make about the war position in Europe,” he had apologised, “except that it is definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago!”
1

Back at No. 10, he had held a series of afternoon meetings before hosting a late-night dinner party for senior Conservative colleagues. They were discussing tactics for the postwar general election when Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, burst in with the radio transcript from Hamburg. Learning that Hitler had died fighting Bolshevism, Churchill took the announcement literally.

“Well,” he told his guests, “I must say I think he was perfectly right to die like that.”
2

Lord Beaverbrook was more cynical, replying that Hitler “obviously did not.” It was welcome news, all the same. The dinner party continued until 3:00 a.m., after which Churchill worked on his telegrams until 4:00. Then he went to bed, leaving Colville to sit up a little longer with a red box full of important-looking papers that nobody had yet had time to read.

*   *   *

HAROLD NICOLSON
took his son to dinner at his London club after listening to Churchill at the Commons. He was disappointed that the war still hadn’t ended, yet glad to know at least that Mussolini had been caught and killed. The first pictures of Il Duce’s body had just been released in London:

We had really dreadful photographs of his corpse and that of his mistress hanging upside down and side by side. They looked like turkeys hanging outside a poulterer’s: the slim legs of the mistress and the huge stomach of Mussolini could both be detected. It was a most unpleasant sight and caused a grave reaction in his favour …

I dined at Pratt’s. Lionel Berry was there (the son of Lord Kemsley) who told us that the German wireless had been putting out Achtungs about an ernste wichtige Meldung, and playing dirges in between. So we tried and failed to get the German wireless stations with the horrible little set which is all that Pratt’s can produce. Having failed to do this, we asked Lionel to go upstairs to telephone to one of his numerous newspapers, and he came running down again (it was 10:40) to say that Hitler was dead and Dönitz had been appointed his successor. Then Ben and I returned to King’s Bench Walk and listened to the German midnight news. It was all too true. “Unser Führer, Adolf Hitler, ist…”—and then a long digression about heroism and the ruins of Berlin—“… gefallen.” So that was Mussolini and Hitler within two days. Not a bad bag as bags go.
3

*   *   *

BBC RADIO
was quick to pick up the story. Music on the Home Service was interrupted at 10:30 with an urgent announcement by the news reader Stuart Hibberd. “This is London calling. Here is a newsflash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. I repeat, the German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.”

That was all. The BBC knew no more. Normal service resumed with Evening Prayers on the wireless, while those who had been up for the newsflash wondered if it was true as they prepared for bed. With her husband serving in Germany, Elsie Brown was one of many who hoped it was as she made herself a cup of tea in London’s East End:

I was still warming the pot when I heard the news that Hitler was dead. At first I didn’t believe it, then I thought, well, it’s on the BBC so it must be true. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to tell someone, but both the kids were asleep and I didn’t want to wake them, so I decided to run next door. My neighbour, Vi, worked the late shift on the buses and was always up till after midnight so I went round and banged on her door and when she opened it I shouted something like “He’s dead, the old bugger’s dead!” And she said, “What old bugger? Alfie?” Alfie was an old bloke who lived at the end of our road and really was a miserable old bugger, always shouting at the kids. So I said, “No, not Alfie, Adolf!”
4

*   *   *

ON FLEET STREET,
the newspapers hastily remade their pages with Hitler’s death on the front page and a long-prepared obituary inside. In Germany, the few remaining papers did the same, struggling to produce an issue edged in black in time for distribution next morning. Elsewhere, though, there was little immediate reaction to the announcement of Hitler’s death. Staff at Field Marshal Montgomery’s new headquarters at Lüneberg Heath had already gone to bed when the word came over the radio at ten thirty. They were in bed, too, at Reims, where General Eisenhower had his headquarters. The announcement had come too late at night for most people in Europe, particularly in Germany, where millions were on the move or no longer had access to electricity. It wasn’t until well into the following day that most of them realized that Hitler was dead at last and Admiral Dönitz was Germany’s new Führer.

Captain Charles Wheeler of the Royal Marines was among those who didn’t hear the news until Wednesday morning. He had just reached a camp full of German prisoners outside Hamburg when Hitler’s death was announced on the radio:

I could speak pretty good German and I asked the army officer in charge of the camp if anyone had told the prisoners. He said no and so I asked if I could. There must have been about a thousand German prisoners standing there behind barbed wire in the rain. It was what they called a cage—basically just a gathering place enclosed by a couple of strands of barbed wire where prisoners could be held until they were properly sorted out.

I got up on the roof of a truck, shouted for silence and then I told them, in German, that the Führer was dead. I’ll never forget their reaction. First there was a long silence, probably about four seconds, then someone in the crowd started to clap slowly and rather uncertainly. Then someone else joined him, then more, and then the whole lot started clapping together and cheering wildly.

Wheeler was surprised at the Germans’ reaction. After thinking about it, he concluded that the prisoners were probably applauding the end of the war and a chance to go home at last, rather than taking any pleasure in their Führer’s death.

*   *   *

A FEW MILES AWAY,
Lieutenant Robert Runcie of the Scots Guards was in Lüneberg when he heard the news. As a troop commander in charge of three Churchill tanks, he was sitting in a traffic jam that morning, stuck in a hopeless snarl-up of military vehicles heading north through the streets of the ancient town. Runcie’s battalion was part of a force ordered forward to the Baltic to capture Lübeck before the Russians and prevent them sweeping on to Denmark. The Scots Guards had crossed their start line promptly at 2:00 a.m., only to find themselves stuck in Lüneberg at eight. With nothing to do until the military police got the traffic flowing again, they were sitting in their tanks with their engines idling, listening to the wireless while they waited for the road to clear.

It had been a manic few months for Runcie. As a young subaltern before the invasion, he had thought he was living dangerously when he visited London’s Bag O’ Nails club in the company of officers more worldly than himself, who didn’t share his fear of the clap and thought nothing of picking up a prostitute for the night. The invasion had taught him the real meaning of living dangerously. Runcie had come of age as his battalion pushed through Normandy and Belgium into Germany. He had seen twelve British tanks destroyed in his first action, watching helplessly as friends of his were blown to bits or burned to death before anyone could help them. He had killed Germans in his turn, often very young ones, dispatching them without a moment’s hesitation as his troop advanced. It was only afterward, when he had a chance to contemplate his handiwork close up, that Runcie had come to think about what he had done:

A German standing up bravely with a bazooka, and you training your gun on him, and just blowing him to smithereens as you went through. That was the first kind of “this is for real” feeling … When I’d been very successful in knocking out a German tank, I went up to it and saw four young men dead. I felt a bit sick. Well, I was sick, actually.
5

Runcie had found himself behind German lines more than once, surrounded by Wehrmacht troops as startled to see him as he was to see them. He had always proved equal to the challenge. His men knew him affectionately as “Killer.” He had been recommended for the Military Cross in March, after an action in Holland in which his tanks had knocked out several German guns. Runcie was still waiting to hear if it had been awarded.

But the news that morning was about Hitler. As they sat in their traffic jam, the Scots Guards learned of his death from the wireless in their turrets. They lost no time sharing the information with Lüneberg’s inhabitants. Hatches opened and heads popped up all along the line as the Scots cheerfully shouted to every German in sight that their leader was no more. Unlike Charles Wheeler’s prisoners, the Germans in Lüneberg didn’t seem pleased to hear it. In fact, they seemed “very glum.” Their gloom was the only bright spot in a very tedious day as the Scots Guards inched forward through the town and spent the rest of the day in one traffic jam after another on their way to the river Elbe first and then the Baltic beyond.

*   *   *

TO THE WEST,
Lord Carrington’s battalion of the Grenadier Guards had come to a stop at Mulsum, a few miles short of Hamburg. After liberating a minor concentration camp at Sandbostel, the battalion had just been sent to Mulsum to regroup and await further orders before continuing the advance.

It had been a long haul from Normandy. The Grenadiers had matched the Scots Guards’ progress all the way from the Channel coast, keeping tidily abreast of their sister regiment as they pushed through Belgium into Holland. Carrington’s squadron had done particularly well during the battle for Arnhem, when its tanks rolled across the river Waal at Nijmegen before the Germans had time to blow the bridge. They had later taken pot shots at a motorized column that had included Heinrich Himmler, as they afterward discovered.

Now they were at Mulsum, just short of the river Elbe. The way ahead led to Hamburg, still in German hands and heavily defended. But with Hitler’s death on the radio and no orders forthcoming, it was beginning to look as if their war might be over. Carrington, for one, would be“extremely relieved” if it was.
6
He had fought as well as anyone during the past few months, but he shared the general lack of enthusiasm for any more fighting, now that survival was beginning to look possible. All the Grenadiers wanted to do was sleep for the next few days before saddling up and moving forward again.

*   *   *

IN HAMBURG ITSELF,
the Germans were in two minds about what to do as the news of Hitler’s death spread. Some wanted to lay down their weapons at once and surrender to the British. Others wanted to fight on, defending the city street by street. Gauleiter Kaufmann had declared Hamburg an open city on May 1, but he had acted on his own initiative, without consulting Admiral Dönitz or the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s death only added to the confusion as ordinary citizens hunkered down in the rubble and braced themselves for whatever was going to happen next.