The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  By April 25, Berlin was surrounded, although a narrow corridor to the northwest was still open, along which thousands fled in hopes of reaching the refuge of the Anglo-American lines. That day, recalled one of Hitler’s bodyguards, SS staff sergeant Rochus Misch, Hitler stunned those within earshot when he declared the war lost. Yet Hitler, like Himmler, still clung to a final delusion. After a junction between the Germans and the Americans, both armies would then turn to fight the Soviets. “Hitler didn’t think a people like the Englanders would bind themselves with the communists to crush Germany, and he still believed… something could happen. He liked the Englanders,” recalled Misch, “except for Churchill.”146

  That day, Russian and American advance patrols met at Torgau on the Elbe, just seventy-five miles south of Berlin. Germany was cut in half. Churchill and Truman had their first telephone conversation that day, the topic Himmler’s offer to surrender German armies in the west. They pondered the proposal for less than a minute and agreed that Himmler was not a man to deal with and that all German armies must surrender simultaneously to the three powers, on all fronts. Churchill cabled Stalin with the decision. Churchill would remain loyal to Stalin to the end, but in fact he was now one with Himmler on the need to keep the Bolsheviks from reaching the western borders of Germany. “My mind,” Churchill later wrote, “was oppressed with the new and even greater peril which was swiftly unfolding itself to my gaze.” As he contemplated the consequences to Europe if the Russians kept up their westward march (they had reached Paris in 1814 and could do so again now), he pondered a response, a military response.147

  On Saturday, April 28, the Russians moved into Potsdamer Platz, a mere block from Hitler’s bunker. The seismic footfalls grew closer. By early the next morning, Hitler had heard enough. He put Dönitz in charge of the government, such as it was, and then dictated his last will and testament, in which he blamed “the ruling clique in England” and “International Jewry” for the war and its forty million dead. Sometime before dawn on the twenty-ninth, Hitler and his somewhat dim-witted mistress of twelve years, Eva Braun, were married in a civil ceremony witnessed by Bormann and Goebbels. The bride wore a dark-blue silk dress; a small private reception followed. The guests listened as the Führer rambled on about the old days, the good days. Later that afternoon, Hitler received one of the last reports to reach him from the world outside. Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been murdered the previous day by Italian partisans. By the time Hitler learned of the deaths, their bodies had been brought to Milan and strung up by the heels from lampposts. Garbled communications spared Hitler from learning of the other momentous event that took place that day in Italy: General Heinrich von Vietinghoff agreed to surrender his Italian forces on May 2. Above the Chancellery, the Red Army swept down the avenues of Berlin.148

  As Hitler toasted his bride, Churchill dispatched a long telegram to Stalin in a final attempt to salvage the agreements on Poland made at Yalta. In effect, it was a final attempt to salvage the peace. The plan for Poland agreed upon at Yalta, Churchill wrote, called for “universal suffrage” and truly democratic elections. “None of this has been allowed to move forward.” Britain had gone to war for Poland, Churchill reminded Stalin. “The British people can never feel that this war has ended rightly until Poland has a fair deal in the full sense of sovereignty, independence, and freedom on the basis of friendship with Russia.” Rumors were now coming out of Poland that indicated Polish patriots were disappearing (indeed, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, was orchestrating mass liquidations of Polish officers and men). In late March, sixteen Polish republicans had been granted safe passage from Warsaw to Lublin in order to meet with Soviet generals. They had disappeared. Molotov, attending the San Francisco conference of the United Nations, at first refused to divulge to Eden any information on the goings-on in Poland. The Allies had agreed at Yalta that representatives from each government were to have free access to areas controlled by the others. Yet, Churchill declared to Stalin, “neither I nor the Americans are allowed to send anyone into Poland to find out for themselves the true state of affairs.” A horrific crisis was in the making, Churchill warned: “There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate… are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their associates… are on the other. It is quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces.” Colville thought the telegram a “masterly… final appeal to resolve the Polish crisis.”149

  Stalin, that week, imparted his philosophy of war to Milovan Djilas, a guest at the Kremlin: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise…. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, it is because Russia has no army which can reach to Paris in 1945.”150

  Austria’s turn to go under the Soviet boot came later, on April 29, when Moscow radio announced the formation of a provisional government in Vienna. American troops occupied the western two-thirds of the country, but in spite of that and in spite of the agreement made at Yalta, the Soviet government refused to allow American or British missions to enter Vienna. In reality, there was not that much left to enter; the Germans had burned St. Stephen’s Cathedral and much of the old city on their way out of town.

  In Berlin early the next day, Monday, April 30, Hitler was told the city’s defenders would run out of ammunition by nightfall. Late that afternoon, after testing the effect of a cyanide capsule on his Alsatian bitch, Blondi, Hitler proffered one to his new wife. Frau Hitler dutifully took the capsule, and bit down. Adolf Hitler had murdered his last German. A moment later, the widower put the barrel of a German pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The Americans occupied Munich that morning, and in Italy they entered Turin, where Italian partisans had been fighting Germans for three days. The war in Italy was effectively over, although Albert Kesselring, now commanding all German forces in the west and south, sacked von Vietinghoff, who had proposed to surrender. Two days later, Kesselring saw the futility of his situation, and surrendered the Italian armies to Alexander.

  On the thirtieth, Eisenhower guaranteed the Soviet deputy chief of staff that the right wing of Patton’s Third Army in Austria would not advance farther than “the general area of Linz,” the city where Hitler had spent most of his childhood and where he had intended to build his Führermuseum, to house his stolen art. His tomb, too, was to be in Linz, to which he presumed Nazi pilgrims would journey for centuries. A model of the museum had been brought down into the bunker; the Führer could not have helped seeing it as the Russians closed in. Two hundred miles north of Linz, the left flank of Patton’s Third Army was just sixty miles west of Prague, and under orders from Eisenhower to proceed no farther east. To Truman, Churchill pleaded the case for Patton to continue. The president backed Eisenhower, who had told him that he would not contemplate “any move which I deem militarily unwise.” Churchill’s concerns, as they had been since before Yalta, were not strictly military. He told Truman: “There is little doubt that the liberation of Prague… by your forces might make the whole difference to the post-war situation in Czechoslovakia and might well influence that in nearby countries.” Truman and Eisenhower held firm. Eisenhower, in fact, assured the Russians that when the surrender came, Allied troops would withdraw 140 miles from those areas within the Russian zone agreed upon at Yalta. The Russians took Prague on May 4. “The [American] failure to take Prague,” Eden later wrote, “meant the Red Army was able to put its creatures firmly in command.” The was not the sort of “mutual assistance” Eduard Beneš had in mind when he signed the twenty-year treaty of friendship with Stalin eighteen months earlier.151

  Also on the thirtieth, Tito’s partisans entered Trieste, and by nightfall they were fighting Italians within the city limits. Churchill ordered New Zealand troops to occupy the city, advising that no violence sh
ould occur, except in self-defense. But Tito had won the race for Trieste, and Istrea. “It’s hard to see how he can ever be dislodged,” Colville told his diary. Yet Tito’s claim on northeast Italy, Colville wrote, “may split the Italian Communist party and thus at least save Italy from the Russian imperialist clutches.” It did, and Churchill’s show of force ended with the Yugoslavs returning home by mid-June. Truman took a strong stand in support of Churchill on the matter, leading Churchill to conclude that the new president would likewise be stern with the Russians if the need arose, which appeared more likely with each passing day. Colville thought the prospect of the Soviets and their Yugoslav proxies dominating Europe “from the North Cape to Trieste” depressing, but for the fact that “the Americans occupy de facto great parts of Germany which belong de jure to the Russian zone of occupation.” He and Churchill were as yet unaware of Eisenhower’s pledge to move his armies out of the Russian zone.152

  It was the night before May 1, Walpurgisnacht (a traditional festival in Europe in which witches are said to await the arrival of spring). For centuries on this night, from Romania to the Baltic, peasants lit bonfires intended to keep at bay demons who they believed roamed the landscape. They stoked the flames with hopes of surviving to the morrow, May Day, the ancient pagan day of rebirth. For a dozen years under Adolf Hitler, Walpurgisnacht was also a sacred Nazi holiday when good Germans celebrated the fertility of Nazi youth destined to breed glorious Nazi babies. Soon after the Führer had put an end to himself, a small contingent of SS men hauled his corpse and that of Eva Braun into the courtyard of the Chancellery, rolled them into a bomb crater, and with the help of twenty gallons of gasoline, added one more pyre to the inferno that was Berlin. It was twelve years and three months to the day since Hitler became chancellor of Germany. His thousand-year Reich would survive him by a week.153

  Goebbels survived him by a day. Two years earlier the little doctor had drawn a bittersweet picture of family life in his diary: “In the evening I am able to devote a little time to the children, with whom I’m having much fun…. Once the war is over I shall be able to devote myself more than hitherto to their upbringing. I could not think and wish for any more beautiful task for the coming peace.” With the war now over, the peace Goebbels planned for his children would be everlasting. On the evening of May 1, Herr Doktor and Frau Goebbels poisoned their six children. The little bodies were taken aloft to the courtyard, where two SS officers, as ordered by Goebbels, dispatched the doctor and his wife with two shots to the back of the head. Then the Goebbels family was doused with gasoline and set aflame. Not enough gasoline was available to make a decent job of it, and the Red Army soldiers found the smoldering remains the next day.154

  By the evening of May 1, the abandoned Führerbunker had been set ablaze by the Red Army. The Reichstag had been shelled at point-blank range by eighty-nine Red Army field guns, and then taken after a fifteen-hour gunfight between Russians, who occupied the second floor, and a band of Germans, who occupied the third. The civilian population of Berlin took shelter in the city’s basements. The streets above contained only Soviet troops and dead Berliners. The last Nazi holdouts were fighting from the sewers. Bormann and several hundred of Hitler’s entourage had taken refuge at the New Chancellery. They attempted a breakout on foot to the River Spree by way of a subway tunnel under the Wilhelmsplatz. Hunched over in their filthy gray greatcoats, they leaned into the walls and crept through the destruction en masse in the dark. Bormann didn’t make it, the victim of a shell that crashed into a tank he had hoped would afford him shelter.155

  Across the Continent, April had brought splendid weather, with temperatures more reminiscent of the dog days of summer than early spring. “Nobody seems to remember such weather in April before,” Colville told his diary. “Surely there has never been such a spring…. The cherries are weighed down with blossom, the chestnuts and the lilac are already out, as is the wisteria in Great Court, before the daffodils have faded.” Beneath a “China blue sky” tall elms wore their early coats of pale green. In London during the early hours of May 1, after two weeks of such glorious weather, a wet, heavy snow fell. By daybreak, window boxes were encrusted and lilacs bent under the hoary cloak, but their stubborn blooms pushed through the puffs of snow, an odd sight but somehow appropriate for the day of rebirth. Late in the afternoon, as Churchill strolled through the smoking room of the House, he was asked by an MP how the war was going. He replied, “Yes, it is definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago.”156

  That evening Hamburg radio interrupted Hitler’s favorite Wagner, Götterdämmerung, with the announcement that “Unser führer, Adolf Hitler, ist… gefallen.” He had died bravely, according to Hamburg, “fighting with his last breath against Bolshevism.” Wagner himself wrote the original program note for Götterdämmerung: “The will that wanted to shape an entire world according to its wish can finally attain nothing more satisfactory than… annihilation.”157

  Churchill hosted a political dinner in the Annexe that night; no military marshals sat in. It was nigh time to reposition himself as England’s best choice as peacetime leader. The Japanese had yet to be vanquished, but the war in Europe—England’s war—was over. A general election would have to be called. Beaverbrook (and Eden, from San Francisco) argued for a June vote, when victory would be fresh in the minds of the people, rather than a later date. Joining Churchill at dinner were the Beaver, Oliver Lyttelton, the chief whip James Stuart, and Ralph Assheton, all of them Tory political operatives, the field marshals of their party. Brendan Bracken did not attend. Tory regulars had begun to “look askance at the Brendan-Beaver combination,” Colville later wrote, in part because these two supreme Churchill loyalists violently opposed the liberal Tory stance on national health care, housing, and education, which Churchill (an old Liberal) supported. His support of reform in those three spheres, he believed, would deliver him and the party a victory in the general election. He was thus forced to preserve party unity by relegating one of his two best friends to the sidelines. It was Bracken, soon awarded first lord of the Admiralty for his services and loyalty. He had desired the Exchequer, an office even his old friend Winston Churchill knew he was unqualified for. For the first time in five years, Adolf Hitler was not a subject of dinner conversation, or wasn’t until Jock Colville brought Churchill the news of the Führer’s death. The Old Man, believing Hitler had died fighting, said, “Well, I must say I think he was perfectly right to die like that.”158

  And with that, the party caucus resumed, and continued on past 3:00 A.M. A plan took shape, which had been fermenting since late March, to ask Attlee and Labour to continue the national government until the defeat of Japan, at which time a general election would be held. That might take the elections well into 1946, when Churchill would presumably still be basking in the light of victory. Attlee and Labour, for their part, sought an election by October at the latest, regardless of the status of the Pacific war. All believed that an invasion of Japan would be necessary, a bloody business in which Churchill fully intended Britain would meet its obligations.

  Hitler’s cannonade of June of 1941 had announced his intention to liquidate Russia; Zhukov’s twelve-day barrage had reduced Berlin to rubble. Russian Katyusha rockets now raked the rubble, which heaved from underground explosions as Soviet sappers used dynamite and flamethrowers to clear subway tunnels where Nazi holdouts fought on, and from where the stench of burnt flesh drifted up to the streets. The Russians outnumbered the three hundred thousand defenders of Berlin by more than five to one, outnumbered them in artillery by fifteen to one, and in tanks by six to one. When the end came, the Soviets had suffered 350,000 casualties, including almost 80,000 killed. Within the city limits, where barricaded defenders could hold off large numbers of Soviet attackers, five times as many Red Army troops as Germans had been killed. More than 125,000 Berliners died, many by suicide, and as many women were raped, although exact counts were impossible to ascertain given the fury of
the final days. To this day, bones of the dead are unearthed. Hitler’s bones will not be among them. The Soviets scraped together Hitler’s remains by the night of May 1 and sent them east, toward Russia. Immediately a rumor took hold across the Continent: Hitler had escaped, to his mountain redoubt, to the west, to places unknown. Churchill suspected the Russians were behind it. They were. Weeks later, Stalin “speculated” that Hitler and his top aides might have escaped to Japan via giant U-boats. It was a clever way of manipulating popular fears, a twist on Walpurgisnacht that held out the terrible possibility that Hitler might emerge from hiding to rekindle the ashes of his Reich. In fact, parts of Hitler’s jaws and skull made it to Moscow. The rest of him was buried beneath a military parade ground in Magdeburg, Germany, which the Soviets occupied for more than forty years. Sometime in the 1970s, the Führer’s remains were exhumed and incinerated for a second time. The ashes were flushed into the city’s sewer system, where they suffered the fate of Mary Shelley’s monster, borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.159

  By May 1, Eisenhower had shifted his attention to the Pacific theater. He was sending the First Army as soon as possible, and he was likely to send Patton and the Third Army as well. Half the American air forces in Europe would be going. In Germany, those American units that had overshot the agreed-upon Soviet and Anglo-American lines of demarcation were already retiring westward.