Authors: Japanese Reaping the Whirlwind: Personal Accounts of the German,Italian Experiences of WW II
There were other advantages of having the British around:
In 1946, the owner of my parent’s corner shop came back. There was a shop over the road run by two women who were big shots in the Nazi party. The British took the shop off them and gave it to my parents.
By this time, Hitler was dead. He had committed suicide on 30 April 1945, at the age of 56. He left a ‘Private Testimony’ disposing of his property:
What I possess belongs, in so far as it has any value at all, to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State and, should the State be destroyed, there is no need for any further instructions on my part. The paintings in the collections which I had bought in the course of the years were never collected for private purposes, but solely for the gradual establishment of an art gallery in my home town of Linz. It is my heartfelt wish that this bequest should be duly executed. As executor I appoint my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann.
Bormann died trying to escape through the sewers. Hitler also explained why he and his new wife, Eva Braun, chose to take what others would see as the coward’s way out:
I myself and my wife choose death in order to escape the disgrace of flight or capitulation. It is our wish that our bodies be burnt immediately in the place where I performed the greater part of my daily work during the course of my 12 years’ service to my people.
Hitler also left a ‘Political Testament’ in which he insisted that the war had had not been his fault – it was the fault of the British and, of course, the Jews. And though he was dead, others should go on fighting.
Many very brave men and women have resolved to link their lives with mine to the last. I have asked, and finally ordered, them not to do this but to take part in the continuing struggle of the nation. I ask the commanders of the Armies, the Navy and the Air Force to strengthen by all possible means the spirit of resistance of our soldiers in the spirit of National Socialism, with special emphasis on the fact that I myself, as founder and creator of this movement, have also preferred death to a cowardly flight or, worse still, capitulation …
I hope that my spirit will remain amongst them and always go with them. Let them be hard, but never unjust; above all let them never allow fear to counsel their actions, and esteem the honour of the nation above everything else in the world. Finally, let them be conscious of the fact that our task of building a National Socialist state constitutes the work of the coming centuries and that this places every single person under an obligation always to serve the common interest and to subordinate his own advantage to it …
Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the racial laws and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.
Both documents were signed by Hitler at 0400 hours on 29 April 1945 and were witnessed by Bormann and Goebbels.
In his Private Testimony, Hitler made provision for his family, including his younger sister Paula, who was interviewed after the war in an attempt to find out what had made her brother tick. As a child, she said, he liked playing cops and robbers with his mates and always took the leading role. This led to conflict with their father.
Adolf always came home late. Every evening he got a sound thrashing because he did not come home on time.
Adolf, she admitted, had no feeling for his family.
But it is inherited, I believe. My father never bothered about his relatives either. Only our mother’s relatives were real relatives for us. The Schmidts and the Koppensteins are our relatives, especially a cousin Schmidt who married a Koppenstein.
Their father died in 1903, then in 1907 they lost their mother.
Our mother’s death made a deep impression on Adolf and me. After mother died, Adolf didn’t come home any more.
Adolf disappeared.
Since my father had been a [customs] official, we shared an orphans’ pension of 50 kronen. The money should have been divided between Adolf and me, but I could do nothing with 25 kronen. Then my guardian heard that Adolf was living in Vienna. He was located there and renounced his share in my favour … I wrote a letter to him about it in 1910 or 1911, but he didn’t answer it. He always hated to write. From 1908 to 1921 I never heard anything from him. I didn’t know if he was still alive. It wasn’t until 1921 that he came to Vienna to find out about me. I did not recognize him when he stood at the door … I told him that it would have been much easier for me if I had had a brother [to help]. As an answer, he said: ‘I had nothing myself and couldn’t help you. And since I couldn’t help you, I didn’t get in touch with you.’ My brother had actually just fallen from heaven. I was so accustomed to having no one. The first thing that made a big impression on me was that he took me shopping … He looked me up again about a year later. We went to visit our parents’ grave at Linz. He wanted to do it … I myself went to Munich in 1923 and looked him up there. That was before the putsch of 8 November 1923.
She did not see him again for another six years.
Then I saw my brother Adolf at the Nuremberg Party Day in the summer of 1929. It was the first time he had invited me to a Party Day. I got my card to the events just like everyone else. He received me at the hotel, the Deutscher Hof. I saw him again in 1930 and once every year until 1941. We met once in Munich, once in Berlin, once in Vienna. I saw him in Vienna after 1938.
While Hitler made his life in Germany, Paula remained in Austria, working for an insurance firm in Vienna. However, his growing fame impinged on her. Her firm was Jewish-owned and Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitic views eventually got her fired. Hitler compensated her with a pension of 50 schillings a month. When he took over Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, this was increased to 500 marks a month. At his request she changed her named to ‘Wolf’ and retreated to a life of seclusion.
He was already very serious in 1940. On one occasion I said to him, ‘Whenever I see a chapel on a mountain, I go in and pray for you.’ Then he was touched and said, ‘You know, I am absolutely convinced that God is holding a protecting hand over me.’ … The last time I saw him was in March 1941 in Vienna. I must say in all honesty that I personally would have preferred him to have become an architect, which was what he originally wanted to do. The world would have been spared much sorrow.
During the war, Paula Wolf became a hospital clerk, but had to give up work through ill health. Then in the last weeks of the war came a surprise:
One morning in the middle of April I saw a car in front of the door. A chauffeur came into the house and told me that he had been ordered to take me to the Obersalzberg. … Half way to Berchtesgaden, the driver told me that he hadn’t expected that I would be coming along … I took my meals in my own room and didn’t mix with the others. I knew no one there.
When asked about Hitler’s death, she began to cry.
His fate grieves me as his sister, more than I could ever tell you … After all, he was my only brother.
A devout Catholic, Paula found consolation in her faith. And her brother?
I don’t think that my brother ever became an apostate. I don’t know though.
The Allied officers who interviewed her concluded:
It was not necessary to arrest Paula Hitler since she had had no part in her brother’s triumphs, only in his defeat … she was connected to him only by the accident of birth, and not by temperament, ability or genius, either good or evil.
Some did not escape so lightly. At the end of the war Hebert Winckelmann had heard that Hitler was dead but, due to radio silence, nothing more was known. Even though they did not even have a map Winckelmann and five comrades decided to try to reach Austria and surrender to the Americans. But they did not make it.
We were spotted by two Russians on motorcycles waving a large white flag. Without hesitation they rode up to us shouting, ‘Comrades,
wojna kaputt – domoj, domoj
’ (‘Comrades, war is over – go home, go home’). They were young, friendly officers who were fluent in German. As is the custom among soldiers, when they meet, we exchanged cigarettes and sat down to chat as we had not done for a long time. Each of us was relieved that the horror of war was over and showed one another pictures of home. During our conversation we learned that Germany had surrendered five days ago … They advised us to go to one of the gathering places to be sent home. I can still hear, ‘Why do you want to get killed when the war has already ended days ago?’ With these words, they jumped on their motorcycles and were off. The decision as to where we should go had been left to us. They hadn’t even asked for our weapons.
Winckelmann and his comrades wandered around for a few days then, on the afternoon of 11 May 1945, they gave themselves up.
At the gathering placed where hundreds of German soldiers who were scarcely guarded, we were once more greeted with the slogan, ‘
Wojna kaputt – domoj, domoj
.’ The guards checked, correctly, only for weapons, nothing else was taken from us.
At first they were treated well, protected by Cossacks from harassment and plunder by other Russian soldiers. But soon they found themselves in cattle trucks on their way to labour camps in the Caucasus. There their personal possessions were taken and they were forced to work on starvation rations, though Winckelmann admitted that the Germans were treated no worse than the Russian inmates of the gulags. Many died.
While Winckelmann was away in the Caucasus, Germany was under occupation. When a 21-year-old Nazi supporter from the Focke-Wulf factory in Bremen was interviewed on 21 June 1945 and asked how she found life under the occupation, she had few complaints:
I have had no trouble with the occupation government or the troops. My bicycle is gone; it was stolen by the Poles. I tried to enlist the help of some English soldiers and have the impression that they would have helped me except for their inability to understand me. By the time I made it clear to them what I wanted them to do, the Poles had gone … I and all of us only believe what we were told in the newspapers, etc. I believed that all men up to the age of 65 would be taken to work elsewhere. I believed that we who remained behind would have to do hard manual labour in a slave status, breaking up stones, removing rubble and so on. I feared we would be moved about arbitrarily from one city to another. I feared we would not get enough food to support life. I feared rape and general violence and disorder. Also I feared severe limitations on civilian movements. I expected to be allowed out of doors only two or three hours a day. On the other hand, I expected freedom from air raids; that was a partial consolation.
The 25-year-old housewife from Duisburg who was interviewed on 27 July 1945 said:
I had great anxiety when I saw the first Americans who came here. Although neither I nor any of my family was ever a Nazi, I fled out of the city into a village. I did not think that we who were not Nazis would be punished, but I was afraid nevertheless … I thought that because the Jews had been treated so badly we would have to pay doubly. It has however gone very well. It is much better than before. There are no more fears of bombing attacks. Yesterday my sister and I went out in the fields picking berries. Some planes flew over and we remarked that it was so nice not to have to fear that they would attack us …
Although bombing had destroyed her home, she had reasons to be joyful.
My husband was a prisoner of war, but he had been released and now has his old job back at the telegraph office in Duisburg. At present we have no place to live and no furniture …
However she was sanguine.
It would not have been better if Germany had won the war. We would have had to work hard to built the cities again and there would have been no freedom.
Meanwhile a number of top German generals captured during the war in North Africa and France were being held at Trent Park in Hertfordshire, the former country home of the Sassoon family. There, British intelligence officers were able secretly to record their conversations to judge their reactions to the progress of the war. Here are General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma and Major-General Gerhard Bassenge discussing the Holocaust.
THOMA: I read in the papers today about the poisonings, the gassing business. I know very well it’s true because I heard it from the men who actually did it.
BASSENGE: I certainly didn’t know about it, but I accept it a hundred per cent.
THOMA: The SS and Gestapo, they were the boys who rounded up the Jews and got the stuff together, and since there were no specialists among them, they got chemists from the gas department of the Arms Office (
Waffenamt
) to work with them. One of them told me with horror that in Russia at that time it was absolutely appalling for him – I tell you, I wouldn’t have done it … As I have both the German and British intelligence reports, I can roughly work out what the truth is.
BASSENGE: Quite right. Everyone tells lies in war, before marriage and after hunting! And here we have an equal opportunity to hear both sides.w
THOMA: We’re better placed than the generals in command at the front.
BASSENGE: We’ve never been so well informed as we are here.
Despite Germany’s ignominious defeat and the revelation of the Holocaust, some German soldiers felt no shame. Fritz Langanke, who fought with the 2nd SS tank division ‘
Das Reich
’ in the Battle of the Bulge, recalled: