Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (44 page)

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RUDOLF HÖSS
obeyed Himmler’s last order to him and disappeared into the armed forces at the end of the war. Disguised as a bosun’s mate (a naval petty officer), he found work on a farm near Flensburg and lived there anonymously until March 1946, when a tipoff led to his arrest. He was executed at the scene of his crimes on April 16, 1947. An open-air gallows was specially constructed for the purpose behind Auschwitz’s first, experimental gas chamber. Gallows and chamber are both still there.

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“SMALL, ILL-LOOKING
and shabbily dressed” after a week of sleeping rough, Heinrich Himmler had shaved off his moustache and was wearing an eye patch when the British picked him up at a check point. His arrogance aroused their suspicions, and he readily admitted his identity. He was stripped naked and his body cavities searched for poison. A doctor ordered him to open his mouth, but Himmler bit the man’s fingers and then crunched on a hidden cyanide capsule. Despite frantic attempts to prevent him from swallowing, he was dead within a quarter of an hour.

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PIERRE LAVAL
tried to remain in Spain until tempers had cooled, but was flown back to Austria in July and delivered to the Americans, who handed him over to the French. The jury at his hastily convened trial heckled him, and the presiding judge demanded a verdict before France’s forthcoming general election. Sentenced to death by firing squad, Laval took poison instead, only to discover that the poison was old and had lost its strength. His stomach was pumped, and he was placed in front of a wall at Fresnes prison on October 15, 1945. He died bravely, crying “Vive la France!” as he was shot. The election was held six days later.

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VIDKUN QUISLING
sent a telegram to Dönitz on May 2, expressing the Norwegian people’s condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, but he knew that he had backed the wrong horse. Like Laval, he was hoping that his countrymen would come to share his view that collaboration was the most sensible course in a country under military occupation. Sentenced to death instead, he was shot at Oslo’s Akershus Fortress on October 24, 1945.

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UNABLE TO FIND
a boat to Sweden, William Joyce, the Nazi propaganda broadcaster, was hiding in Flensburg when the British arrived. He foolishly spoke to a couple of officers and was recognized at once from his voice. The officers shot him through the thighs when he reached unexpectedly for his false identity card. After a controversial trial, Joyce was hanged for treason at Wandsworth prison on January 3, 1946. It was said that an old street-fighting scar running from his mouth to his cheek burst wide open under the impact of the drop.

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ADOLF EICHMANN
escaped from captivity in 1945 and lived anonymously in Germany before immigrating to Argentina in 1950. Israeli agents tracked him down ten years later and spirited him back to Israel. After a sensational trial, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged at Ramla prison on May 31, 1962. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea, outside Israeli waters.

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AFTER ESCAPING FROM BERLIN,
Helmut Altner was captured by the Russians on May 3 and held prisoner for the next eighteen months. With American permission, he published a book of his experiences in 1948 and later worked as the Paris correspondent for several German newspapers.

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MARTIN BORMANN, JR.,
never escaped from his father’s shadow. He became a Roman Catholic priest for a while and worked as a missionary in the Congo. He also toured German schools, talking about the evils of Nazism, and visited Israel to apologize to Holocaust survivors. But his name followed him everywhere, blighting his career and making it impossible for him to enjoy a normal life.

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PAULA HITLER
was interrogated by the Americans in July 1945 and broke down in tears at the thought of her brother’s death. She returned to Vienna after the war and worked in an arts and crafts shop before retiring quietly to Berchtesgaden, where she was looked after by former members of Hitler’s entourage. She died in 1960.

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TRAUDL JUNGE
was captured by the Russians and
questioned closely about the last days in the bunker. She resumed work as a secretary after the war and was often pestered by people wanting to shake the hand that had shaken Hitler’s. She tried to immigrate to Australia at one point, but was refused permission. Junge was played by Alexandra Maria Lara in the 2004 film
Downfall
, about Hitler’s last days.

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ELSE KRÜGER,
Martin Bormann’s secretary in the bunker, was questioned by the British after the war and fell in love with her interrogator. They married in 1947 and moved to Cheshire, England.

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THE REST OF THE TOP NAZIS
were brought to trial at Nuremberg in the autumn of 1945. Most were sentenced to death, but some received only prison sentences, and three were acquitted of all charges, although they were later imprisoned by German denazification courts.

Admiral Dönitz got ten years. Along with the others, he served his time at Spandau prison in Berlin. He was released in 1956 and died in 1980. His funeral was attended by a number of elderly U-boat commanders illegally wearing their wartime caps.

Albert Speer freely admitted his guilt in court. Sentenced to twenty years, he wrote several books after his release and is said to have contributed most of the royalties anonymously to Jewish charities. In London to appear on a television programme, he died of a stroke in 1981.

Rudolf Hess got life. There was doubt about his state of mind during the trial. Some people thought he was faking insanity to avoid execution, but his behavior in prison grew steadily more bizarre. He was Spandau’s only remaining inmate when he hanged himself in 1987.

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THE OTHER NAZIS
were hanged at Nuremberg in the early hours of October 16, 1946. Three black-painted gallows were erected in the prison gymnasium, thirty yards from the cells. Working through the previous night, the carpenters tried hard to keep quiet, but the prisoners all heard the sound of banging as the gallows were constructed on what had formerly been the basketball court.

It had been agreed that the prisoners should be executed in the same order as their indictments at the trial. Göring should have gone first, but he cheated the gallows by taking poison, either concealed during numerous body searches or obtained by bribing a guard. The remaining prisoners were immediately handcuffed to American soldiers to prevent them from following suit. Wearing black silk pajamas under a blue shirt, Göring’s body was placed on a stretcher and laid to one side until the hangings were over.

In Göring’s absence, it fell to Ribbentrop to be hanged first. Dressed in a dark suit, he entered the gym at 1:11 a.m. and climbed the thirteen steps to the platform without hesitation. “My last wish is that Germany realise its entity and that an understanding be reached between east and west,” he announced as he stood on the trap. “I wish peace to the world.”
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He looked straight ahead as a black hood was pulled over his face and the trap gave way.

Field Marshal Keitel went next, the first soldier to be condemned under the new international doctrine that obeying orders was no defense against war crimes. He had burst into tears as he prayed with the chaplain in his cell, but pulled himself together by the time he reached the scaffold. He mounted it in military uniform as if reviewing a parade. “I call on God almighty to have mercy on the German people,” he declared. “More than two million German soldiers died for the Fatherland before me. I now follow my sons—all for Germany.”
3

There was a pause while an American doctor and a Russian disappeared behind the curtain concealing Ribbentrop’s body to confirm that he was dead. The watching reporters were allowed to smoke as his body was removed and Kaltenbrunner replaced him on the trap. “I am sorry my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge,”
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Kaltenbrunner announced. “Germany, good luck.”

Hans Frank, the governor of Poland, had converted to Roman Catholicism after his arrest. “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased,”
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he had told the court at his trial, repenting of his sins a little too late. Nervous, swallowing frequently, he expressed thanks for his kind treatment during captivity and called on God to accept him with mercy as he died.

With the collar of his Wehrmacht uniform half turned up, Jodl was visibly scared as he climbed the steps to the scaffold. “My greetings to you, my Germany,”
6
he said miserably, as the hood went over his head. He was later granted a posthumous pardon by a German denazification court.

The last to die was Seyss-Inquart. With a club foot, he had to be helped up the steps by the guards. “I hope this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War,” he told his audience, “and that the lesson taken from this world war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany.”
7

Jodl and Seyss-Inquart were still dangling from their ropes when Göring’s body was brought in to show the witnesses that he was dead. Once Jodl and Seyss-Inquart’s deaths had been confirmed as well, the bodies were all laid out in an adjacent room and photographed by a volunteer from the Signal Corps. Several of the hangings had been botched by the hangman. Perhaps overwhelmed by the numbers, Master Sergeant John Woods and his two assistants, one of them German, had not always calculated the drop correctly to produce a clean snap of the neck. Woods left the country later to avoid German retribution.

St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington had asked for the Nazis’ brains to add to its collection, but the request was refused. Instead, the bodies were driven to the concentration camp at Dachau and cremated soon after dawn. That evening, after the ashes had cooled, they were taken to the outskirts of Munich and thrown into a tributary of the Isar River, to ensure that Hitler’s henchmen should have no final resting place.

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THE RUSSIANS SPENT SEVERAL DAYS
looking for Hitler’s body in the ruins of the Chancellery. They thought they had him when a mischievous German identified the wrong corpse for them. They eventually took away a jawbone and several other bits and pieces, but were never able to identify them beyond dispute. Some of the fragments went to the Kremlin. The rest were buried at a Soviet base near Magdeburg, Germany, until 1970, when they were dug up and thrown into the Biederitz River.

The balance of probability is that very little of Hitler survived his cremation in the Chancellery garden. His ashes were almost certainly scattered to the wind in the hours that followed. Assertions to the contrary are rarely supported by established fact.

The Chancellery remained under Russian control after the war and was soon razed to the ground. The site was a wasteland for many years, but has now been rebuilt as a modern apartment block. Where Hitler once strutted, there are now parking spaces, a playground, and a Chinese restaurant. The exact site of his cremation is surrounded by street furniture to prevent large crowds from gathering. Tourists arrive in small groups, and Germans stand in awe as Turkish mothers wheel their prams across to the swings.

“I shall never leave this place,” Hitler had told his people grandly when they begged him to flee the bunker. “I shall stand watch here for ever, in sacred ground.”

Dogs do their business on the spot.

NOTES

1.
The Death of Mussolini

1
. Christopher Hibbert,
Benito Mussolini
, London: Longmans, 1962, p. 328.

2
. Rachele Mussolini,
My Life with Mussolini
, London: Robert Hale, 1959, p. 176.

3
. Ibid., p. 179.

2.
In Berlin

1
. H. R. Trevor-Roper,
The Last Days of Hitler
, London: Macmillan, 1978, p. 180.

2
. Helmut, Altner,
Berlin Dance of Death
, Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2002, p. 62.

3
. Ibid., p. 146.

4
. Ibid., p. 151.

5
. Hildegard Knef,
The Gift Horse
, London: Granada, 1980, p. 82.

6
. Ibid., p. 83.

3.
Himmler Sues for Peace

1
. Count Folke Bernadotte,
The Fall of the Curtain
, London: Cassell, 1946, p. 61.

2
. Walter Schellenberg,
The Schellenberg Memoirs
, London: Andre Deutsch, p. 452.

3
. Wilhelm Wulff,
Zodiac and Swastika
, London: Arthur Barker, 1973, p. 177.

4
. Bernadotte,
The Fall of the Curtain
, p. 62.

5
. Ewan Butler,
Amateur Agent
, London: George Harrap, 1963, p. 193.

6
. Ibid., p. 199.

7
. Gitta Sereny,
Albert Speer
, London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 535.

4.
Nazis on the Run

1
. Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970, p. 484.

2
. Ibid., p. 469.

3
. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fränkel,
Hermann Göring
, London: Heinemann, 1962, p. 302.

4
. Edwin Hoyt,
Göring’s War
, London: Robert Hale, 1990, p. 186.

5
. Willi Frischauer,
Göring
, London: Odhams Press, 1951, p. 265. The telegram did not survive, but eyewitnesses recalled it from memory.

6
. Emmy Göring,
My Life with Göring
, London: David Bruce and Watson, 1972, p. 123.