Hitler's Last Days (18 page)

Early in the war, Hitler confers with his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

His source of hope is the soothing voice of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Palsied tremors make it impossible for Hitler to turn the pages of a book, so he commands Goebbels to read aloud to him from Thomas Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great; the eighteenth-century Prussian warrior king has always been an inspiration to the F
ü
hrer.

Hitler specifically chooses the biography by Carlyle because he set forth the great man theory of history, which states, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

Leonidas was a great man.

Frederick was a great man.

Hitler considers himself a great man.

Reclining on the bed in his personal quarters as Goebbels sits in a nearby chair, Hitler is calmed by words that make a vivid comparison between Frederick and his own current situation. It is a passage describing the winter of 1761–62, when all seemed lost during the Seven Years' War. Frederick had few allies at the time and was facing a multinational force that threatened to annihilate his Prussian troops. Hitler is also facing the end. Russian troops are poised to enter his capital city. So he finds solace in the lessons learned by this great man whom he reveres deeply.

*   *   *

Just days later, Adolf Hitler receives another sign that Germany could still win the war. He summons all his top generals and ministers to the bunker to show them the news. “Here, you never wanted to believe it,” he crows, distributing the report that he has just received.

The bunker erupts in cheers.

The news could not be more shocking: Hitler has outlived one of his biggest opponents.

American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dead.

At the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, allies (front row, left to right) Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill meet to discuss the governance of post–World War II Axis countries.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

CHAPTER 21

BAD HERSFELD, GERMANY

APRIL 12, 1945

G
EORGE
P
ATTON IS JUST FINISHING
his daily journal entries. The hour is late, but today has been extraordinary, and he needs to put every last detail on paper before going to bed. Finally, he closes his journal and puts down his pen.

Patton notices that his wristwatch needs winding. So he turns on the radio in the small truck trailer that serves as his field bedroom. He hopes to get the exact time from the British Broadcasting Corporation's evening broadcast. Instead, he hears the shocking news that FDR is no more.

This is the wretched conclusion to what has been the most nerve-wracking day Patton has endured thus far in the war. Just after breakfast, he met with Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley at his headquarters in an old Wehrmacht fort in Bad Hersfeld, one hundred miles east of the Rhine. Together they traveled to the town of Merkers, where Patton's army had made an incredible find.

Generals Bradley, Patton (behind Eisenhower), and Eisenhower inspect paintings stolen by the Nazis and stored in a salt mine in Merkers, Germany, April 12, 1945.
[Alamy]

The three men entered the mouth of a massive cave, where they boarded a flimsy wooden elevator that lowered them two thousand feet into a salt mine. The shaft was pitch black, so once the daylight above them narrowed to a pinprick during the descent, Patton could not see the other occupants of the car. Noting that the elevator was suspended from a single thin cable, Patton couldn't help but quip about their plight. “If that clothesline should break,” he joked grimly, “promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.”

“George, that's enough,” shot back a nervous Eisenhower. “No more cracks until we are above ground again.”

The purpose of their descent is of worldwide significance. Troopers in Patton's Third Army accidentally discovered the Merkers mine while interrogating local citizens. The bombing of Berlin had forced the Nazis to smuggle their financial reserves out of the official bank in Berlin to a place of safety. They chose this remote salt mine. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of gold bars, currency, and priceless works of art were stored underground two hundred miles from Berlin. As Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley stepped out of the darkness of the elevator into the brightly lit cave, the scene was surreal. Bags of gold and cash stretched as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of paintings and sculptures, one a bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, lined the walls, along with world-famous paintings by Titian and Manet. That the wealth is now in the Allies' possession signifies the dissolution of the Nazi government. Without money, it can no longer wage war.

A soldier of the Third U.S. Army holds a painting by the famous Spanish artist Goya that the Nazis had hidden in a wooden crate at the Merkers mine.
[Alamy]

General Eisenhower examines a suitcase full of silver items stolen from prisoners and stored at the Merkers mine.
[Alamy]

“In addition to the German Reichsmarks [currency] and gold bricks, there was a great deal of French, American, and British gold currency. Also, a number of suitcases filled with jewelry, such as silver and gold cigarette cases, wristwatch cases, spoons, forks, vases, gold-filled teeth, false teeth, etc.,” Patton wrote in his journal. The majority of the currency had been looted from the various nations conquered by Nazi Germany; the jewelry and gold and silver items were taken from prisoners at concentration camps; and the art from fourteen German museums.

*   *   *

Later in the day, George Patton's mood abruptly shifted. The three generals lunched together, then toured the newly liberated concentration camp at Buchenwald, twenty-six miles east of the Merkers mine. It was Patton's Fourth Armored Division—the first tanks into Bastogne and the first to reach the Rhine—that had discovered Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. Unlike Auschwitz, where guards were so rattled by the approaching Russians that they fled before executing the inmates, the SS here had tried to kill the remaining prisoners. Most were shot. Many were so emaciated and malnourished that the bullet wounds in their skulls did not even bleed.

The work camp tour was horrendous. Each of the generals had seen death in many forms during their time in the military. They had seen men blown to pieces and others lose their faces to exploding shells. But nothing they had ever witnessed prepared them for Ohrdruf. “It was the most appalling sight imaginable,” Patton will write in his journal.

Four survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of David Cohen]

“The smell of death overwhelmed us,” Bradley wrote in his memoirs. “More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been thrown into shallow graves. Others lay in the street where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames.” The generals saw the gallows, where men were hanged for trying to escape, and the whipping tables, where beatings were administered at random.

At one point, Patton excused himself from the tour, then walked off to vomit at the side of a building. Ike's face “whitened into a mask” at the horror, Bradley wrote. “I was too revolted to speak.”

Now, the news of Roosevelt's death and Harry Truman's ascendency to the office of president brings this day to a close.

A former prisoner stands near a gallows at Buchenwald.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Frank W. Towers]