THE EMERALD LAKETHE EMERALD LAKE
HANS RATTENHUBER LEFT HITLER’S BUNKER ON SUNDAY, 8 April, to get some air. He unlocked three iron gates, climbed twelve spiral steps, and opened a gas-proofed steel door. It led out to the ruins of the chancellery garden. As Rattenhuber picked through smashed statues, he met Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Security Office. Kaltenbrunner had come up to smoke, and he had a story to tell.1
For nearly nine months, Kaltenbrunner had probed plots to kill Hitler. Because Rattenhuber had the job of protecting the Führer, he followed the findings with a kind of mortified rapture. In the last week, Kaltenbrunner said, the story had taken a wild turn. The finding of Canaris’s diaries, at Zossen, had confirmed what Hitler long suspected: that many of the threats to his life and his power traced to “the Vatican, which Hitler . . . regarded as the greatest center of espionage in the world.”2
The evidence had implicated Canaris and six of his colleagues. Their case file, originally opened by Heydrich, still carried the code name Black Chapel. The SS would hang them in secret. Where other conspirators had faced show trials, the Black Chapel plotters would vanish in night and fog. No one would know their punishments, crimes, or names. Hitler imposed absolute silence on the case. The true sources of the plot, Kaltenbrunner related, could not be revealed.3
Rattenhuber put a hand on Kaltenbrunner’s elbow. “But you’ve crossed my friend Josef Müller off the list for me, haven’t you?” Kaltenbrunner said he couldn’t remember. One life less, or more, did not much matter in the “witch’s sabbath” of those last days. The SS decided who died with a wave of the hand.4
Nazi court politics gave Rattenhuber an opening, however. He knew that Kaltenbrunner considered Himmler a cowardly crank and coveted his job as SS chief. Playing on those feelings, Rattenhuber recalled how Müller had told the Gestapo, in 1934, that he wanted to have Himmler shot. The Führer had vowed not to let Germany’s internal enemies survive this war, as they had the last. But shouldn’t “Joey Ox,” who defied even Himmler, remain to rebuild from the ashes?5
When Kaltenbrunner did not demur, Rattenhuber pressed the point. Instead of killing Müller, the Nazis could use him as bait. Through Müller, they could ask Pius to seek a separate peace with the West. Reportedly, Himmler was making feelers through a Benedictine monk, Hermann Keller. Wouldn’t a move through Müller stand a better chance? Especially since, as Kaltenbrunner had already told Hitler, “the pope personally” married Müller in Saint Peter’s crypt?6
Kaltenbrunner said he would consider it. He would have his adjutant telephone Flossenbürg, to learn whether “the prisoner Müller was now, as instructed, in safety.” Rattenhuber returned to the bunker and went down the spiral stairs.7
MÜLLER STOOD AT THE GALLOWS FOR NEARLY TWO HOURS. PLANES flew over Flossenbürg, deep-droning bombers. He heard distant detonations. Finally, one of the guards came up to him. “Something unforeseen” had happened. They sat him down in a blockhouse between the main building and the camp gate.8
A group of skeletal prisoners arrived. The travel warden argued with a camp officer. Müller heard someone yell, “They’re not interested in names any more, just numbers!” The SS began beating a prisoner near the entrance. Stavitzki strode into the blockhouse. Seeing Müller, he started yelling, “That criminal is still walking around!”9
The guards led Müller back into the gallows yard. He awaited the order to mount the steps below the noose. Nothing happened. Gradually he wondered whether the SS meant only to play a game with him. Perhaps they wanted to prompt a “gallows confession.” He clung to that straw and found fresh hope that he could survive, although he had no idea how.10
Twilight closed in. The commandant shouted that they’d have to continue “tomorrow.” One of Müller’s guards came over and said, “We’re done for today.” They took him back to his cell and shackled him to his pallet.11
That night Müller could not sleep. Someone yanked open his cell door and yelled, “Are you Bonhoeffer?” He hoped Dietrich was safe, that they couldn’t find him in the chaos. Harsh light filled the cellblock; a strange unrest prevailed. Dogs kept barking. Toward dawn, the corridor began to bustle. Guards called cell numbers, two at a time, and the command, “Out, fast.” Müller heard the familiar voice of Admiral Canaris. The hangmen called again, “Out!” Müller expected to hear his number, seven, called next. Instead, a silence fell.12
A guard removed Müller’s leg shackles. “I don’t know what’s going on,” the guard sighed. Berlin had branded Müller a “vile criminal,” but now they didn’t know what to do with him. The guard proffered a mug of broth and a piece of bread. Müller paced to circulate his blood.13
Around ten o’clock, white flecks drifted in through the barred window. They looked like snowflakes but smelled like fire. Abruptly the hatch in his cell door opened again. A captured British secret agent, Peter Churchill, said, “Your friends have been hanged already and are now being burned behind the ridge.” Müller shook with grief and wept as he realized that the flakes whirling into his nose and mouth were all that remained of his friends.14
ON 11 APRIL, MÜLLER HEARD THE RUMBLE OF THE APPROACHING front. When Storm Leader Stavitzki entered his cell, Müller expected the beatings to resume. Instead, Stavitzki invited “Herr Doktor” to listen to the war news on a radio in the camp office. Hearing that the Americans had reached the Elbe, Müller asked what would happen to him now. “You’ll be taken away from here, and then your fate will be decided,” Stavitzki said. The SS man added that he worried about his own family. Müller said that he had a family, too, and hadn’t heard anything about them for months. Yet, Müller recalled, “I did not have the courage to spit on him, which was my first impulse.” Stavitzki began fussing with a backpack. Because he took an ice ax, like mountain climbers used, Müller inferred that the SS meant to make a last stand in the Alps.15
On 15 April, the SS loaded Müller and other special prisoners into a truck. Low-flying aircraft buzzed them as they crossed a long bridge. When they stopped for an air raid at Munich-Freising, Müller wanted to toss out a business card, so that friends in the cathedral chapter might know he still lived. But the guards seemed nervous, and Müller did not want to get shot if they misconstrued his move. The truck rattled southwest across the moors.16
The next day, Müller arrived at Dachau. The guards marched him over a bridge that spanned a twelve-foot-wide ditch, filled with water and fringed with barbed wire, into a special bunker for enemies of the regime. He could not leave the cell except during air raids. But an elderly SS officer, Edgar Stiller, told him, “Fräulein Anni Haaser will now be happy to know that you’ve arrived!” Soon afterward, Anni stood at the camp gate with a suitcase. “It was a moving reunion,” Müller recalled, “overshadowed by the thought that it might be our last.” On his way to meet her, Müller had seen train cars stacked with corpses.17
Vassili Kokorin kept close to Müller, treating him almost as a living totem. On 20 April, when Müller worried about making it home through the chaos, Kokorin wrote out a letter in Russian. He wanted his Catholic friend to have a communist safe-conduct pass. “The Red Army is in control out there! If anyone speaks Russian to you, show him that letter and you will be set free at once!”18
HITLER PINNED HIS HOPES ON A LAST GAMBLE TO PLUG THE BREACH in his front lines. On 21 April, he ordered SS General Felix Steiner to push his troops south during the night. If Steiner succeeded, he would cut off the Red Army north of Berlin; if he failed, the Reich would collapse.19
Steiner stalled. He had not troops to attack with, but he could not disobey a direct order. The next day, when Hitler learned that the counterattack had not begun, he turned purple and his eyes bulged. “That’s it,” he shouted. “The war’s lost! But if you gentlemen imagine I’ll leave Berlin now, then you’ve another thing coming. I’d sooner put a bullet in my brains!”20
On 23 April, Himmler’s Lieutenant General Gottlob Berger arrived. Hitler ordered him to collect the prominent prisoners at Dachau and truck them to the Alps. Hitler’s hands, legs, and head shook, and all that he kept saying, Berger remembered, was “Shoot them all! shoot them all!”21
THE GUARDS AT DACHAU LOADED THE SPECIAL PRISONERS INTO buses. As they passed through Munich, Müller barely recognized the bombed-out city. A direct hit had even demolished the figure of Christ the Savior at St. Michael’s cathedral. Müller saw little chance that his own home on the Gedonstrasse had survived.22
They crossed into Austria. The buses wended the Tyrolean passes to Reichenau, a concentration camp near Innsbruck. The scene did not suggest that their path of sorrows had ended. Hoping for outside help, Müller gave one of his business cards to a guard and asked him to take it to Josef Rubner, general manager of the Innsbruck Tiroler Graphik, whom Müller himself had appointed as the newspaper’s fiduciary trustee. The guard returned and reported that Rubner had said, “I don’t know this man.”23
FATHER RÖSCH WENT TO SEE THE WARDEN AT LEHRTERSTRASSE prison. After some consideration, Rösch chose four o’clock on the afternoon of 25 April, the octave of the protective feast day of the Holy Joseph and Mark, as the most sacrally auspicious moment. The warden’s authority derived from a defunct regime, Rösch argued, and nobody cared about his decisions anymore, except the Russians, who would soon learn the wrong he had done. He should release the inmates and run for his life. After stalling a few minutes, the warden agreed. Rösch raced down the iron stairway into the cellar, shouting the news.24
Berlin’s last prisoners passed spectrally through the jail gates. In the street, they turned around and saw the building as their soul’s eyes had longed to see it, from the outside. “Suddenly, the heaviest artillery-fire came down on us,” Rösch recalled. He darted through explosions, ducking into doorways when the whistling came close. Just as the Russians arrived, Rösch found refuge in the Monastery of Saint Paul, where his Dominican co-plotter Odlio Braun kept an Orders Committee safe house.25
THE SS DROVE ITS SPECIAL PRISONERS TO THE BRENNER PASS. ON 28 April, they crossed the Alps into Italy. “We were evacuated in a group of about 150, in about six or seven buses with SS outriders, and a jeep taking up the rear with hand grenades and guns,” recalled British prisoner Jimmy James. “We wound up to the Brenner [Pass], we stopped at midnight. We just stopped in the shadows and we didn’t know what was going on. The SS had disappeared and we wondered what the score was.” Müller suspected the Nazis would keep them hostage in a castle. Other rumors had it that, after the “final victory,” Himmler would convict them in a show trial. “I found out years later,” James said in 2000, “that the SS were going to machine gun the lot of us and say we had been killed by bombs.”26
But their SS minders had split into factions. Obersturmführer Edgar Stiller led about thirty older conscripts. They “behaved decently,” Müller recalled. Jailed Protestant Pastor Martian Niemöller button-holed Stiller, trying to learn what would happen to them. “We got the impression that Niemöller treated the SS officer as his own adjutant, and, what was more, that Stiller had tacitly accepted this.” A less friendly attitude prevailed among their SS escort detail: “twenty sinister characters, armed to the teeth.” The group’s leader, Untersturmführer Bader, had led a liquidation squad at Buchenwald.27
Müller sensed that Bader had something against him. Stiller had referred to an order from above: “Lawyer must not fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” Had Stavitzki sent Bader out from Buchenwald, Müller wondered, to pull him back to the gallows? He decided to stay close to Colonel Bolgislav von Bonin, who, despite retreating from Warsaw against Hitler’s orders, remained an “honor prisoner” and carried a pistol.28
The SS returned in the early morning. They took the prisoners down the east side of the Brenner Pass, to the Tyrolean Valley. At a railway crossing, on the edge of the town of Villabassa, the caravan came to a sudden halt. The SS seemed uncertain what to do, but let the captives stretch their legs. One of the buses had a flat tire, fuel was running low, and no orders had arrived from Berlin. So the SS detachment got drunk.29
Some of the prisoners met in the railway hut to plan an escape. Two captured British Special Operations executive commandos formed a plan with captured Italian partisan General Sante Garibaldi, a descendant of the nineteenth-century Italian guerrilla hero. That night, with the help of locals loyal to their cause, Garibaldi and his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Ferrero, slipped out of Villabassa, aiming to contact their compatriots in the surrounding mountains. They promised to return with guerrillas and attack the SS guards.30
“In the meantime the SS men in charge of the group had all got very tight on schnapps,” James recounted. “One of them more or less passed out, and one of our chaps said, ‘Well look, give him a bit more schnapps and then take his pocket book.’ Which is what happened, and we found an order that the Allied officers and the various others were not to fall into Allied custody.” Bader had by now told one of the prisoners that the SS had prepared a “special room.”31
The hostages decided not to wait for Garibaldi’s partisans. Some enterprising British prisoners hot-wired an old Volkswagen and drove over the mountains, hoping to reach an American headquarters and return with a rescue team. Colonel Bonin found a telephone in the town hall and asked the commanding general of the German 10th Army at Bolzano, about sixty miles southwest, to take the prisoners into protective custody. The general’s chief of staff promised that a well-armed company would drive through the night and arrive by dawn the next day. “We went up and down the narrow streets with some trepidation, because the SS had originally planned to liquidate us in this isolated part of the Tyrol,” Müller recalled. No one knew what final orders Himmler might have given, or when Allied forces might reach the area. Relatives of the Stauffenberg and Goerdeler families sought sanctuary with the local parish priest, who hid them in his rectory.32
The other prisoners bedded down on straw in the town hall. After midnight, the door flew open. An SS officer pointed to Müller: “You, come out here!” Colonel von Bonin jumped up and ordered the SS man to halt. The black shirt defiantly positioned himself in the threshold and repeated, “You, out!” Bonin drew his Luger and said, “I’ll count to three. On two, you’re a dead man!” The SS officer turned and fled.
But no one rested easily. James recalled an acute awareness of “SS men at each end with cocked Schmeisser [machine pistols]. That night was literally the Night of the Long Knives, because the SS were expecting something, possibly the [Italian] partisans to attack.”33
ON 29 APRIL, HITLER CALLED HIS COMMANDERS INTO CONFERENCE. They told him that Russian troops had reached the nearby Potsdam station. The Wehrmacht had run out of bazookas and could no longer repair its tanks. The fighting would end within twenty-four hours. A long silence followed. With great effort, Hitler lifted himself from his chair and turned to go. His commanders asked what his troops should do when their ammunition ran out. He replied that he could not permit the surrender of Berlin. But whoever wished might try break out in small groups.34
At 3:00 p.m. the next day, Hitler’s inner circle gathered in the lower bunker. Hitler had dressed in his usual olive-green shirt and black trousers. His mistress, Eva Braun, wore a blue dress with white trim and a favorite gold bracelet, set with a green jewel. Artillery shells crashed overhead. His eyes bleary, Hitler shook hands with Rattenhuber, Bormann, and Goebbels, and fewer than two dozen others. He spoke a few words in a low voice to each. Then, slowly, he walked with Eva Braun back to his study and closed the double doors.35
Eva Braun sat on a narrow couch. She kicked off her shoes and swung her legs up onto the blue-and-white fabric. Hitler sat next to her. They unscrewed brass casings that looked like lipstick containers and extracted thin glass vials filled with amber liquid. Eva bit the glass and rested her head on his shoulder. Her knees drew up sharply in agony. Controlling his trembling hand, Hitler raised the Walther to his right temple, clenched his teeth on the vial in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.36
Rattenhuber heard no voices, and not even the sound of a shot. Hitler’s butler, Heinz Linge, standing near Rattenhuber, remembered only the smell of gunpowder. When Hitler’s entourage entered the room, they saw blood trickling down his cheek. His right temple had a red hole in it the size of a German silver mark. Eva sat with her head on Hitler’s shoulder. In dying, she had flung her arm onto the table and overturned a vase of flowers.37
Hitler’s guards carried the bodies up to the chancellery garden. His chauffer poured ten cans of gasoline on the corpses. Rattenhuber lit matches and tossed them onto Hitler and Eva where they lay. The matches kept going out. Rattenhuber pulled some sheets of paper from the cuff of his sleeve and twisted them into a torch. He lit the paper and threw the improvised kindling onto the cadavers. A tongue of flame leaped up. Rattenhuber stood at attention and raised his arm in the Hitler salute. Before he turned away, he saw the bodies curling and their limbs twitching in the fire.38
SNOW HAD FALLEN WHEN THE PRISONERS AT VILLABASSA AROSE ON 30 April. The SS guards at the town hall had all gone. In thanksgiving, French Bishop Gabriel Piquet, jailed for giving false papers to Jews, held a Mass in the local Catholic church. “Everybody went,” British POW Jimmy James remembered. “Not only Catholics and Protestants, but Orthodox prisoners from Russia. It was very moving.” During the service, the long-awaited Wehrmacht company arrived. The prisoners went to the town square. Brandishing a machine gun, Colonel von Bonin disarmed the few SS who had not already disappeared. The army company absorbed a few SS, identified by Stiller as “trustworthy and decent,” and gave the others the chance to flee or try their luck with the Allies. “Bader and a few of them went down the valley,” James recounted, “and I heard later that they had been stopped by the [Garibaldi] partisans and strung up.”39
The Wehrmacht moved the prisoners to the Hotel Pragser Wild-see. One of the grand hotels of Europe’s skiing nobles, it overlooked an emerald lake enclosed by white cliffs and dark woods. The Wehrmacht emplaced machine guns on the ridgelines, above the access road that snaked up the Pragser valley, creating a better defensive position against any SS Werewolf units. “It snowed continually and it was bitter cold in the hotel,” Müller remembered.40
General Privalov held a May Day party in his room. As the liquor flowed, Vassili Kokorin began to weep. His “uncle,” Stalin, would never trust him if he allowed himself to be liberated by “England, that whore.” The Soviet security police would suspect the English secret service had turned him into a double agent. Kokorin had therefore decided to link up with Garibaldi’s guerrillas at Cortina d’Ampezzo, about twenty-five miles south. Müller tried to dissuade him. The snow still stood three feet deep; frostbite had damaged Kokorin’s feet when he parachuted behind German lines; the deprivations of a long custody had further weakened him. But Kokorin said that as partisan officer, he must rejoin the “struggle.” After a bear hug and Russian kisses, he vanished into the night.41
HANS RATTENHUBER STRAPPED ON A STEEL HELMET. IN THE PREDAWN hours of 2 May, he broke through the bricked-up window of the Reich chancellery cellar with a crowbar. He clambered up and out onto the sidewalk of the Wilhelmstrasse under the Führer’s balcony, cocked pistol in hand. Pausing and peering around, like an Indian scout, he gave a hand signal to the half-dozen Hitler henchmen behind him. They planned to bolt through subway tunnels and emerge northwest of the city, beyond the Russian zone.42
Rattenhuber crossed the Wilhelmsplatz, lit up by firelight. Hungry children sliced flesh from a dead horse. At the Kaiserhof subway station, Rattenhuber slid down the rubble-heaped chute of the stairwell and walked along the tracks, directly below the Soviet lines. By the beam of his flashlight, he picked his way over stiff corpses and half-wrecked staircases, past wounded troops and homeless families crowded against the tunnel walls. He surfaced at the Friedrichstrasse station. For another four hours, he crawled through cavernous connecting cellars, ran through burning buildings, and staggered down dark streets. In the morning a Soviet sniper’s bullet finally claimed him, just a few yards from the Schultheiss brewery.43
“Two soldiers bring in the wounded Rattenhuber,” Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge wrote in her diary. She huddled in the brewery’s cellar, a prearranged meeting point for Hitler’s fleeing entourage. “He has taken a shot in the leg, he is feverish and hallucinating. A doctor treats him and puts him on a camp bed. Rattenhuber gets out his pistol, takes off the safety catch and puts it down beside him. A general comes into the bunker. We discover that we are in the last bastion of resistance in the capital of the Reich. The Russians have now surrounded the brewery and are calling on everyone to surrender.”44
ON 4 MAY, A FORD JEEP SNAKED UP THE ROAD TO THE HOTEL Pragser Wildsee. Spitting snow, spinning on patches of black ice, it finally rolled to a stop by the emerald lake. A crewcut lieutenant jumped out and identified himself as an advance man for General Leonard T. Gerow, Commander of the US Fifteenth Army. The German soldiers came down the ridgelines and turned in their weapons.45
General Gerow arrived with several companies of troops. He had earned the third star on his helmet as the first corps commander ashore at Normandy, and the German soldiers showed him “an almost religious deference,” Müller recalled. Gerow congratulated the prisoners. Then he told them he could not grant their wishes to go home. He had orders to debrief and “clear” them in Naples.46
Gerow’s troops drove them south. On 7 May, they stayed in a barracks at Verona. The next day, Müller boarded a Beechcraft C-45 transport and flew the remaining four hundred miles to Naples. As the plane crossed Rome he saw, far below, the green badge of the pope’s gardens, and the united lines of St. Peter’s, shaped like a key.47