Read Online Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany by Emma Craigie, Jonathan Mayo - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Emma Craigie, Jonathan Mayo
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communiqué stated that the Declaration on Liberated Europe meant the establishment of order to enable ‘the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice’
.
But Yalta had merely papered over the cracks. It was clear to most at the conference that the Soviets and the Western powers had very different plans for the future of Europe. ‘The only bond of the victors is their common hate,’ wrote Churchill
.
About 3.15am/4.15am UK time
Flying from Rechlin airfield to Lübeck on the Baltic in a little two-seater, Hanna Reitsch and Luftwaffe chief Robert Ritter von Greim are under attack from Russian fighter planes which have control of the skies. Reitsch, who is one of the most skilled pilots of her generation, manages to dodge all attacks.
In the Hotel Bachmann in the Italian Alps, the news that British MI6 agent Captain Sigismund Payne-Best has been waiting for has arrived. General Vietinghof of the nearby German army garrison is sending a company of infantry to ensure the safety of the
Prominentes
from the SS. Vietinghof has promised to let the advancing Americans know that there are important prisoners in the Hotel Bachmann and in homes in Villabassa.
Relieved at the news, Payne-Best finally goes to bed.
You are free. We are the English army. Be calm. Food and medical help is on the way
.
Loudspeaker announcement to the inmates of Bergen-Belsen, 15th April 1945
Twenty-one-year-old medical student Michael Hargrave is being woken up by an army cook in a transit camp outside Cirencester. It’s bitterly cold and Michael has spent the night dressed in socks, trousers and sweater. He heads quickly to the washhouse, as he leaves for Germany in an hour.
A month ago, Michael saw a notice pinned to a board in Westminster Hospital asking for students to volunteer to help starving Dutch civilians. Yesterday afternoon Michael and 94 other volunteers were photographed by the press and then informed there had been a change of plan – they were not going to Holland at all, but to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in north-western Germany.
The washhouse turns out to be a corrugated iron shed with no door and no glass in the windows. Michael has a very quick wash.
In Bergen-Belsen on the morning of the 15th April, Clara Greenbaum, her eight-year-old daughter Hannah and her three-year-old son Adam heard a strange rumbling sound. Leaving their hut they saw that the watchtowers were empty – in fact there were no guards anywhere. Thousands of emaciated prisoners stood facing the direction of the noise; many others lay on the ground dying. After a while, tanks with Union Flags flying from their turrets appeared, circled the camp twice and then stopped in front of the gates. Then about 500 soldiers arrived, gazed into the camp, and one by one were sick. Prisoners turned away in embarrassment. Clara and Hannah began to cry for the first time in three years. Then soldiers threw food over the fence and a tank smashed through the gates
.
There to greet the British was the Commandant, Josef Kramer, a former unemployed electrician who had joined the SS in 1932. He stayed in the camp because he had been ordered to do so by his superiors
.
Bergen-Belsen was built originally as a camp for well-connected, so-called ‘exchange Jews’, who could be swapped for German POWs. As the Russians advanced west, camps in Poland were evacuated by the Germans and the inmates forced to march on foot or sent in cattle trucks to camps in Germany. By early April,Bergen-Belsen was hopelessly overcrowded. At the end of 1944 there were 15,257 inmates, by April there were 44,000
.
In February there was a massive outbreak of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. It’s believed that between 20,000 and 30,000 died. Two of the victims were 15-year-old Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who had hidden with their parents in a secret annexe in Amsterdam until they’d been discovered the previous
.
But Yalta had merely papered over the cracks. It was clear to most at the conference that the Soviets and the Western powers had very different plans for the future of Europe. ‘The only bond of the victors is their common hate,’ wrote Churchill
.
About 3.15am/4.15am UK time
Flying from Rechlin airfield to Lübeck on the Baltic in a little two-seater, Hanna Reitsch and Luftwaffe chief Robert Ritter von Greim are under attack from Russian fighter planes which have control of the skies. Reitsch, who is one of the most skilled pilots of her generation, manages to dodge all attacks.
In the Hotel Bachmann in the Italian Alps, the news that British MI6 agent Captain Sigismund Payne-Best has been waiting for has arrived. General Vietinghof of the nearby German army garrison is sending a company of infantry to ensure the safety of the
Prominentes
from the SS. Vietinghof has promised to let the advancing Americans know that there are important prisoners in the Hotel Bachmann and in homes in Villabassa.
Relieved at the news, Payne-Best finally goes to bed.
You are free. We are the English army. Be calm. Food and medical help is on the way
.
Loudspeaker announcement to the inmates of Bergen-Belsen, 15th April 1945
Twenty-one-year-old medical student Michael Hargrave is being woken up by an army cook in a transit camp outside Cirencester. It’s bitterly cold and Michael has spent the night dressed in socks, trousers and sweater. He heads quickly to the washhouse, as he leaves for Germany in an hour.
A month ago, Michael saw a notice pinned to a board in Westminster Hospital asking for students to volunteer to help starving Dutch civilians. Yesterday afternoon Michael and 94 other volunteers were photographed by the press and then informed there had been a change of plan – they were not going to Holland at all, but to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in north-western Germany.
The washhouse turns out to be a corrugated iron shed with no door and no glass in the windows. Michael has a very quick wash.
In Bergen-Belsen on the morning of the 15th April, Clara Greenbaum, her eight-year-old daughter Hannah and her three-year-old son Adam heard a strange rumbling sound. Leaving their hut they saw that the watchtowers were empty – in fact there were no guards anywhere. Thousands of emaciated prisoners stood facing the direction of the noise; many others lay on the ground dying. After a while, tanks with Union Flags flying from their turrets appeared, circled the camp twice and then stopped in front of the gates. Then about 500 soldiers arrived, gazed into the camp, and one by one were sick. Prisoners turned away in embarrassment. Clara and Hannah began to cry for the first time in three years. Then soldiers threw food over the fence and a tank smashed through the gates
.
There to greet the British was the Commandant, Josef Kramer, a former unemployed electrician who had joined the SS in 1932. He stayed in the camp because he had been ordered to do so by his superiors
.
Bergen-Belsen was built originally as a camp for well-connected, so-called ‘exchange Jews’, who could be swapped for German POWs. As the Russians advanced west, camps in Poland were evacuated by the Germans and the inmates forced to march on foot or sent in cattle trucks to camps in Germany. By early April,Bergen-Belsen was hopelessly overcrowded. At the end of 1944 there were 15,257 inmates, by April there were 44,000
.
In February there was a massive outbreak of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. It’s believed that between 20,000 and 30,000 died. Two of the victims were 15-year-old Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who had hidden with their parents in a secret annexe in Amsterdam until they’d been discovered the previous
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