To Himmler’s dismay, his entreaties to the western Allies met the same response as those of Ribbentrop or the many generals who had made the same attempt. He was flatly refused.
With Russian troops driving to within several city blocks of the bunker, Hitler’s slippery grasp of reality had given way to a solemn determination to deny the Russians the satisfaction of capturing him. The decision was made that those who remained in the bunker would die by their own hands, a pact that no one dared to dispute openly. On April 28, near midnight, in a ceremony marked solely by gloom, Hitler married Eva Braun. In the hours that followed, Hitler dictated his will, as much a political harangue for the causes of the war as any personal bequest. In the decay of Hitler’s mind, the blame for the war had to be laid squarely on the shoulders of the Jews. Hitler’s rage brought forth yet another call for extermination, an order that all Jews still remaining in concentration camps would be put to death at once. What Hitler could not grasp was that, again, there was no longer anyone outside of Berlin loyal enough, or dedicated enough to his cause, to carry the order to its conclusion.
On April 29, the street fighting close to the wreckage of the Chancellery was pushing in on the bunker from three sides. Faced with the total collapse of the world around him, Hitler seemed to withdraw from any role in his own government. He focused instead on his dog, the German shepherd Blondi. Hitler ordered the dog poisoned rather than have the dog fall into Russian hands. The death of the dog created an eruption of emotion in Hitler, a strange bit of illogic for those who observed the master ordering the animal’s death. Hitler had killed what even he knew was the most loyal member of his family. What most of the staff did not know was that Hitler was using the dog as a test of the effectiveness of the poison ampoules, containing prussic acid, brought to him by his new doctor, Werner Haase, the same ampoules that were distributed to the others around him. Hitler now trusted the doctors least of all.
Near midnight on April 29, Hitler learned of the execution of his sole remaining ally, Benito Mussolini. Though Mussolini had been little more than a symbol to the fading hopes of Italians fascists, his execution by machine gun had been followed by a shockingly gruesome display. The once all-powerful Italian dictator was hung by his feet in a square in Milan, alongside the corpse of his mistress. For hours, Italians reacted to the spectacle by abusing the bodies with rocks and sticks, a public display of disrespect and revenge that shocked Hitler, and strengthened his own resolve that the leader of Germany’s Reich would not be captured.
The next day, April 30, Hitler issued his final order, sent by hand to the senior officers still engaging the Russians short blocks from the bunker. The order granted permission for any soldiers who had exhausted their ammunition to break out of Berlin, with a further order that they continue the fight in the forests beyond the city. Whether there was ammunition or not, those few soldiers still participating in the incredible viciousness of what was now house-to-house fighting seemed to care nothing at all about escape.
At three thirty P.M., after a quiet farewell to those who remained in the bunker, Hitler retired to his private room, accompanied only by his new wife. Within minutes, a single shot was heard. Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche and his valet Heinz Linge entered the room alongside Martin Bormann. The couple were seated at either end of a couch, Eva Braun dead from ingesting a prussic acid ampoule. Hitler had shot himself, a single wound to his right temple. Within short minutes, Günsche, acting on specific orders he had received from Hitler, supervised the movement of both bodies up and out of the bunker, to a shallow pit only a few feet from the bunker’s entrance. With Russian mortar and artillery shells impacting close by, the bodies were doused in gasoline and cremated.
As paralysis spread through the bunker, one man performed an act of loyalty that Hitler would have certainly approved. Joseph Goebbels had moved his entire family into the bunker as a show of unity with his Führer, and there was only a final act to perform. His wife, Magda, had accepted the necessity of what was to come, but had become too incapacitated by grief to carry out the duty alone. In her stead, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger obeyed the orders of Dr. Goebbels, and, accompanied by the children’s mother, Stumpfegger administered morphine to put each of the children to sleep. Then, as Magda Goebbels hurried from the room, the doctor placed a poison ampoule into each child’s mouth and crushed it by his own hand. Within seconds, all six children, aged three to fourteen, were dead. Joseph Goebbels carried out the final part of his plan. Accompanied by his grief-stricken wife, he stepped up into the open air outside the bunker, where a Gestapo orderly obeyed Goebbels’s final order and shot Goebbels and his wife in the back of their heads. Then, in the open shell-pocked grounds of the Chancellery, their bodies were cremated as well.
On May 2, the Russians seized control of most of Berlin. The two armies had each struggled in a desperate race to exterminate the other, as two vicious animals locked together in a cage. When the fighting began to quiet, the Russians rolled over and through the remains of Hitler’s stronghold, past the charred corpses that someone had the curiosity to grab up and hustle away. The German soldiers who survived the fight were marched out of the city, prisoners of a hell they had fought desperately to escape.
As a sickly peace settled over Berlin, it began to rain. Through the debris and carnage that covered the streets of the once-grand city, the water gathered in shell craters and pits of destruction. The muddy water grew deeper, spilling and flooding into the cracks and crevices, carrying the blood and filth of the soldiers and, with it, the mad and vicious dreams of a twisted little man who destroyed lives and dreams and all he touched.
In the weeks that followed the liberation of Ohrdruf, more camps were overrun and exposed to the eyes of the Allied command. The names were already becoming known throughout the army, and in newspapers across the Atlantic: Buchenwald and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. The Russians liberated camps of their own, including the largest camp at Auschwitz in Poland, where more than a million prisoners, most of them Jews, had been either starved, gassed, or gruesomely exterminated by what German doctors described as medical experimentation.
Ohrdruf had been a satellite of the much larger Buchenwald camp, and it was Patton’s men who continued to bring the light of day to so many more of the horrifying atrocities they had witnessed at Ohrdruf. The fury that Patton had always carried to the battlefield had grown into a raging fire for this particular enemy, an enemy he was still trying to comprehend. For the first time he had experienced something far beyond his passion for war, the clear and poignant need to kill his enemy. At the Nazi camps, he had come face-to-face with the raw concept of hate.
In Patton’s world, war did not involve civilians. But the atrocities he had seen raised a new and infuriating question, a fierce curiosity to know how much the German civilians knew of the camps, if they knew anything at all. It defied logic to him that civilians in the towns around Buchenwald had no idea what their soldiers and the SS guards were doing there. With those camps still within his jurisdiction, he would at least try to answer that dilemma, if only for himself. Whenever possible, he had ordered that his soldiers march through the various camps. Now that same order was issued to the towns and villages that spread out around those places like Buchenwald. Patton would hear no excuses, no explanations. Before he moved on to completing his drive into Czechoslovakia, he would see that the German civilians who lived nearby toured the camps as well. If the MPs needed bayonets to persuade them, that was fine with him.
He ordered his MPs to round up as many civilian officials as they could locate. Some of those were obvious, the men who still occupied civil offices, controlling utilities or some other function of the German government. Others had to be ferreted out, many of those given up by their own people, local citizens finally able to strike back at the Nazis by pointing out those men who had exercised some local role in party politics. Even the lowest-level Nazi officials were not eager to be found by the Americans, and most insisted
they had no knowledge of what went on behind the wire. They certainly accepted none of the blame. Patton didn’t care. Despite the occasional protest by civilian officials outraged to be lumped together with the military in their supposed crimes, Patton ordered the tours to begin. More than fifteen hundred Germans would be guided through the camps, forced through every nook, every building where some of the most gruesome sights could still be seen.
BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP
MAY 2, 1945
Patton stood up on the turret of a tank, made very sure that his MPs saw that he was watching them do their jobs. The tank had parked just inside the main gate, and his vantage point allowed him a view of most of the enormous spread of buildings and barracks. Even now, the smells found him, sickening, inescapable, his eyes watering from the powerful odor of burnt flesh and chemicals. He forced himself to stand tall, crossed his arms over his chest, waiting. From the road behind him, he could hear the engines of the trucks, didn’t need to see them, knew they were escorted by men in jeeps with machine guns. The brakes were squealing, the trucks parking to one side, behind him, and he turned slowly, said nothing, watching as men in rumpled suits climbed out, helping their women, who had dressed for the occasion with surprising formality, as though they had been escorted to some sort of festivity. But there was nothing festive in their mood. Patton watched them milling about; then, as more of the trucks arrived, the MPs put them into line, and directed them through the gate.
They passed right below him, orderly, no talking, the German way, a perfect show of ignorant efficiency. Some looked up at him, no acknowledgment of his rank, no smiles. Most of them seemed to be curious, glancing around, as though seeing the barracks and the guard towers for the first time. He marveled at that, thought, is it possible … they really didn’t know? What about the smell, for God’s sake?
The guards led them farther into the camp, more of his soldiers standing beside open doors of various wooden buildings, the guards guiding the civilians that way, marching them through every place that mattered, every building where the sights would make the point. For the first time, they began to show some reaction, the women first, some turning away, soft whimpering cries. One man surged away from the line, was sick, dropped to his knees, some words Patton couldn’t hear. The MPs were relentless, the man dragged up by the coat, Patton’s orders obeyed. He watched the man, saw him glance back toward Patton, and the tank, and Patton thought, it gets worse, you Kraut son of a bitch. I want you to see every damn horror there is to see. Then go home and tell your children how much glory there is in your goddamn Hitler.
The reports came back to him from some of the liaison officers, the men who were already engineering the protocols for an army of occupation. Patton’s organized tour through the death camp had produced a graphic result, which was, to him, the best possible outcome. Several of the civilian officials had reboarded the trucks, returned to their homes, and committed suicide.
Patton tapped the pilot on the shoulder, the plane banking sharply, moving low, a casual flap of the wings, the sign for any idiotic antiaircraft gunner to pay attention to the plane’s markings. He knew the staff hated it when he did this, when he took the opportunity to make a brief flight over some piece of the battlefields. Codman had been stern with him, as stern as Patton would allow, but Patton had faith in his own officers to keep control over their gunners. The argument from Codman had been futile, the colonel finally giving up, no one more familiar with Patton’s stubbornness. Patton would never give in, but even now he knew that down below there were many itchy fingers among those who manned the anti-aircraft guns, who had yet to shoot down what was a nonexistent German air force.
“That’s the extent of it, sir.”
Patton didn’t need the pilot telling him what he was seeing. The ground beneath him was a vast sea of debris, shattered buildings and wrecked streets, fires and black smoke. It was the city of Nuremberg. But it was no city at all. It was a wasteland. He had expected to feel the usual rush of satisfaction, gloating to himself over the devastating conquest of one more enemy stronghold. But he knew enough of history to know that destroying such a place did very little to end the war beyond killing those few Germans who remained to defend it. He turned away, had seen enough, a quick motion to the pilot with his hand. Home. The plane banked again, the pilot obeying, and Patton sat back in the small seat, stared ahead into blue sky. It’s the price they have to pay, he thought. All that history down there, the entire city like a big monument to past glories. Gone. Bombed to hell. No other way to do it, I guess. He knew he was making excuses for himself, that no one else would say anything about it, not Eisenhower certainly, not the newspapers, who covered their front pages with the sought-after photographs of massive destruction. He knew the bomber barons had a bloodlust of their own for this kind of obliteration, had been practicing it for more than two years now. The targets were big and obvious, and the high-flying heavy bombers had laid carpet after carpet of their bomb loads on anything standing. Stupid waste of explosives, he thought. Always was. They’ll claim they won this war, but all those stupid bastards did was make work for our engineers. Every main road has to be repaired now, clearing away all that busted-up junk so I can get my people where they need to be. If I’d been in charge … he let the thought drift away, had been through that exercise too many times. Yeah, maybe we’d have won the war a hell of a lot quicker. And somebody in the British chief of staff’s office would have had me shot. At least they’re still letting Ike do his job.
He stared at the sky, the plane drifting lower, close to his new headquarters. He could see the massive structure, thought, a full-grown palace. There’s more useless crap in that place. I oughta let my boys grab it all up, ship it home for souvenirs. He knew that would never go over with SHAEF, that the army had been adamant about the theft of German artifacts. No, I’ll just live with it. Not bad for a headquarters, but by damn, if I stub my toe in the middle of the night over some idiot statue, I’m hauling it out for target practice.
THIRD ARMY HEADQUARTERS, REGENSBURG, GERMANY
MAY 4, 1945
“Sir! It’s official! They printed it in Stars and Stripes, can’t get much more official than that!”
The aide slowly slid the paper toward him, and Patton pretended to ignore it.
“That damn paper is useful for one thing: the bottom of a birdcage. We don’t have a bird, do we?”
“Uh, no, sir. But, sir! They printed news of your promotion!”
The man seemed to ache for Patton to pay attention, and Patton was already tired of the joke. He glanced at the article, said, “I guess maybe the new president has something on the ball. About damn time, though.”
The sergeant was utterly exasperated with Patton’s lack of enthusiasm, and Patton could feel the energy of the man’s frustration, trying to keep his mouth in line with his position.
“Sir! At least … permission to congratulate you, sir!”
Patton looked up, allowed a smile to slip through.
“Fine. Congratulations accepted. Now get out of here. You’ve got work to do, right?”
The man was satisfied, his mission complete.
“Yes, sir! Right away!”
The sergeant disappeared through the office door, and Patton sat back, picked up the army newspaper, read the article. He caught motion from the door, heard Codman.
“Ah, good, I see you’ve read it. Nice of them to give you that kind of press.”
“Oh for chrissakes, Colonel. You too? I knew this was coming, sooner or later. It’s not like we should have a damn party.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you, sir. Four stars. That’s saying something in a man’s career, especially … um … your career.”
“Just what I need, a wise guy. The best news about this is that my promotion dates two days before Hodges’s. About time those idiots in Washington got something right.”
Codman said nothing, no response required, and Patton turned the page, made a l
oud grunt.
“Dammit!” He tossed the paper to one side. “Well, I lost that war! They’re still going to print that idiot cartoon. Son of a bitch. This was Ike’s doing.”
“What, sir?”
“Willy and Joe. That damn cartoonist, Mauldin, first time I saw his piece of crap, it boiled my blood. This army doesn’t need its soldiers portrayed as slobs and misfits. I insisted I wouldn’t put up with it, told Stars and Stripes I was gonna ban the paper from the whole damn Third Army if they didn’t stop printing that guy’s scribbling. Turns out I’m the only officer in the whole damn theater who feels that way. Even Ike thinks it’s just fine to encourage a lack of discipline, as though these damn cartoons represent our boys in action. Pissed me off then, pisses me off now. If it wasn’t for Harry Butcher …” Patton paused. “Gotta give Harry credit. He’s the hardest damn worker on Ike’s staff. Does a hell of a lot more than Beetle Smith, but you can’t tell Ike that. You were off somewhere, Paris, I think. Butcher actually brought Mauldin down here, planted him in my office, tried to make peace. Here I am face-to-face with a damn sergeant, and Butcher’s got the guts to tell me we should be pals. I would have tossed that bastard in the stockade, but Butcher knew what the hell he was doing. It turns out this Sergeant Mauldin’s been wounded in action. I never have an easy time knocking teeth out of a guy who’s earned a Purple Heart. Mauldin stands there looking at me with his jaw dangling, but at least he dressed for the occasion. I expected him to look like his damn characters, and I’d have had to fine him or shoot him or something. Of course, it didn’t hurt Butcher’s case that he had already told Ike the whole story, so sure as hell, Ike gives me his standard speech about army morale, that the GIs like Willy and Joe. Fine. Ike’s got nothing better to do than go to bat for a guy who draws cartoons. So, yeah, I lost that war.” Patton chuckled. “But … if Sergeant Bill Mauldin ever shows his face around the Third Army again, you make sure the MPs know to throw him in the stockade. I’ll figure out a reason why.” Patton looked up at Codman, who was stifling a smile. “Yeah, go ahead and laugh. You know I’ve got the best damn staff in Europe, and you’re part of it. But I better not see anybody in this HQ laughing at Willy and Joe.”