CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“FORTUNE IS NOT
ALWAYS JOY”

In the Lago di Braies Hotel high in the Italian Alps, Fey von Hassell was having difficulty adjusting to the idea of peace, and liberation had even darkened the shadow hanging over the fate of her children.

She was not the only one in the group who had been forcibly separated from her children. The hand of the SS had reached far and wide in retribution for the attempt on Hitler’s life. One of the key members of the plot had been Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, a member of the High Command in Paris, where the conspirators managed to arrest over a thousand SS men before the plot unraveled. He was imprisoned and his three youngest children were taken away by the SS to somewhere in Austria. Ilse-Lotte, their mother, had become one of Fey’s closest companions. “It was a tremendous relief,” wrote Fey, “to be with someone who could understand the constant torment that such separation caused.” Mika von Stauffenberg, Alex’s sister-in-law, had also lost her children to the SS, as had Irma, the daughter-in-law of the ill-fated former Mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler.

All of them besieged Sigismund Payne Best with queries about how they could start searching for their children, but the British intelligence office knew that communications with Germany were so bad that there was little hope of any quick results. “I did what I could to comfort them,” he recalled painfully, “but I was feeling so ill myself that I fear on occasion I gave way to impatience.” But Fey at least thought he rose to the challenge: he was “very superior” to anyone else she could think of, she later told him.¹

This was a short breathing space for Fey in which she could slowly adapt to normal life and take her first timid steps towards freedom. Yet it was hard to forget the traumas of the last few months. “Even though I knew it was all over,” she confessed, “I somehow found it hard to believe that there would be no more sharp knocks on the door, nor more orders to pack and be ready to leave at once.”²

God was also much on her mind. A couple of days before the group was finally evacuated from the hotel, she went alone with Alex to the chapel. Like the other Stauffenbergs, he was a Catholic. He sat down and began to play the church’s small organ. “Tears rose up in my eyes,” Fey wrote. “I felt profoundly touched by the beauty of the sacred music, the silence of the mountains, and the mystical atmosphere of the chapel.” They would soon be parting, returning to their separate families, friends and personal relationships. Alex had lost not just his wife, but his brothers. He seemed in many ways so helpless. The thought of leaving him made Fey immensely sad.³

Not too long ago she had written a passionate letter to her husband, Detalmo, while she was expecting Roberto:

You know if I shall die now or after the second baby, I would be immensely sad for leaving you, also because it would be so long before we could meet again. For the rest I would not be sad, for I have had so much happiness in these few years . . . I had a beautiful childhood . . . and I had two years of the most divine and exceptional womanhood. I got to know what real love between a man and a woman means.⁴

But it was hard now to know where her true feelings lay.

VE Day came and went, unremarked and irrelevant, but two days later a convoy of buses arrived to take them away. Fey clambered aboard with her usual traveling companions–Best, the Stauffenbergs and the Schuschniggs–and off they drove on a bumpy four-hour trip down the mountains to Verona and a comfortable room in the Colomba d’Oro Hotel, just off the Piazza Brà and the old Roman arena. As she walked through the lobby, a good-looking Italian in military uniform introduced himself. He was a friend of her sister-in-law Marina, and had seen Fey’s name on a list of the freed prisoners. He went out of his way to see she had everything she needed and even sent chocolates and cigarettes to her room. But it felt strange. It was the first time in several months she had had any contact with anyone remotely connected with her life in Italy.

The next morning, they set off in a convoy of jeeps and buses to the Verona airfield, where they boarded three US military planes. It was a clear day, and as they flew over the country Fey enjoyed excellent views. They even passed over Rome and then dipped low over the shell- and bomb-blasted ruins of the great Monte Cassino monastery and battlefield that had claimed so many lives just a year before. Finally, at eleven o’clock in the morning, they landed in Naples.

Here, a shock awaited Fey and the other Germans, who by now had almost forgotten their nationality. They were separated from the rest of the freed prisoners and for a long time no one paid them any notice. They had been used to having Payne Best with them all the time, a friendly and solicitous face, a man who liked Germans and was sympathetic to their individual fates, but as soon as they had arrived he was driven off in a staff car to allied headquarters in nearby Caserta.

Group by national group, the others gradually departed too. In the general confusion, no one bothered to say goodbye. They had been together for so long, and been driven around so much, they all assumed they would see each other again. But the Americans did not seem to know what to do with the Germans, and they hung around for hours. Fey did not even notice when the Hungarians left, even though she had especially enjoyed their company. “We were Germans, people of a defeated nation,” she suddenly realized, and their common suffering counted for nothing. In the end, they were bundled across the Bay of Naples to Capri and a small, optimistically named hotel in the village of Anacapri, the Paradiso Eden. The Americans, she learned, wanted to interrogate them. Until then, they could not leave the hotel. Their freedom had seemingly been brief.

However, within a couple of days, the officers in her group were taken away to a military prison in Germany. Among them was Colonel von Bonin, who had saved them from certain death at the hands of the SS by alerting von Vietinghoff to their presence in Villabassa. She was sorry to see him led away under armed guard. But she did not feel the same way about Prince Philipp of Hesse and had no regrets at seeing the back of him. He was a solid Nazi until he was sent to prison, and she could neither forget nor forgive his behavior towards her father.⁵ Once this group had left, the others were told they were free to move around. “Alex and I continued to spend much of our time together,” she recorded. “But somehow I sensed that he knew it was over, that I had returned to my adopted country, where all my energies would be devoted to rebuilding my shattered family.” Payne Best made a brief reappearance and tried to cheer them all up, urging patience and promising he would do all he could to speed up the reunion with their families. He made a special effort for Fey, whom he could tell was seriously distressed. “She was absolutely distracted about her two little boys,” he noted. So at breakfast he introduced her to the US Army major in charge. There was not much the American could do to help, but, remarked Payne Best, “it comforted her to talk about her troubles to someone who appeared to be in authority, and as she was an extremely pretty woman she was given a most sympathetic hearing.”⁶

But Fey also took the initiative herself. As soon as she could, she walked to the island’s post office and sent a telegram to Detalmo in Rome, giving him her address and asking him to come and take her home. She had no idea if he was still there, or even if he was alive, as they had heard nothing of each other for many months. To her utter joy and amazement, though, the very next day she received a reply saying he was coming to Capri to collect her. That morning, she could hardly contain herself, pacing up and down outside the hotel, anxiously looking for him. Then, suddenly, he was there and they embraced. The words tumbled over themselves as they tried to tell each other what had happened to them over the previous year and a half.

Detalmo was visibly shocked when he heard about the fate of his sons. He had not known they had been taken away so had expected to find them with Fey in the hotel. But he remained calm and tried to reassure her: the Red Cross or the Vatican would surely help find them. Nevertheless, “Though outwardly he seemed convinced about it,” she admitted, “I saw in his eyes the same torment that had plagued me for so many months.”

That night, after they had moved to a more comfortable hotel, they threw a dinner for Fey’s special friends in the group–the Stauffenbergs, the Hofackers and the Hammersteins. Unfortunately, many of them seemed to have little appetite. They were so used to expecting food to run out that they had already eaten at the hotel. However, the evening was a great success. Encouraged by copious amounts of wine, everyone made a speech, including Detalmo, which Fey thought was one of the best. He concluded by saying that, having met them, he was sorry from the bottom of his heart that he had not been imprisoned alongside them. The force of the comment would only hit home later, when the chasm of experience that now separated husband and wife sometimes became cruelly unbridgeable.

At the end of the dinner, Fey felt a terrible lump arise in her throat. Did she have to leave these people whom she had come to admire so much? Especially Alex. “How could he possibly face the hard life that now confronted him, without wife, family, or home?” she wondered. “The idea was painful for me, but I had to face my own future confidently and renew my life in Italy with Detalmo. I could only hope that Alex understood.”⁷

The next morning, Fey and Detalmo left to take the ferry back to the mainland. Alex did not come to say goodbye. But in her hand Fey was clutching a poem, the last of several he wrote for her.

The moon is shining from a brilliant sky

Into the pleasure gardens of the South

And touches my sad heart

As friends dine, the parting stabs and twists

Bitterly hidden from the cheerful crowd–the desert

wind blows strong

Trembling and staggering, two things keep me alive,

Are my dim light of hope this painful night.

Thirsty I drink deep

Your beating heart, deep into my breast

You are mine, I shout it to the winds,

The sea, as in blue foam, it overwhelms the rocks

You must hear my call this cruel summer night.

I now dream of a dark time

When unreal happiness possessed my heart,

When a nymph, in a Dolomite forest, with magic wand

Did touch me and give me hope.⁸

As the ferry pulled away from the quayside, she wrote, “I felt my heart breaking into a thousand pieces. My nerves were worn through. For too long I had kept my emotions in check.” Now, she finally let go and sobbed uncontrollably. Detalmo could do nothing to comfort her. Behind her lay friendships and love forged so deeply that older relationships paled by comparison. She had learned, as so many had during the hardships of this terrible war, that it was possible to love some people even more deeply than a parent, a husband, a child, a brother or a sister.

To try to help, Detalmo took her for lunch in a small restaurant on the Neapolitan waterfront. Normally, she would have found it charming, but not today. She hated every minute of it. Above all, she loathed the violinist and the way he sang with his “insincere sentimentalism made for tourists, and with false tears in his eyes.” The sun was sparkling on the water, the Mediterranean stretched serenely in front of her, and she was finally reunited with her husband. Yet it all felt horribly wrong. “Suffering is not always sadness, Fortune is not always Joy.” The words of Goethe, some of Alex’s favorite lines, echoed in her mind. Liberation meant she would feel awfully alone for a very long time.⁹

Millions of others across Europe were experiencing similar suffering. Family separation and destruction have always been threads in the cruel tapestry of war, but under the Nazis they were more pronounced than ever before.

In Feldafing, Francesca Wilson was helping pick up the pieces of shattered families and putting them back together. When she succeeded, it felt like a sudden ray of light flashing across a dark landscape of the broken and the lost. She was a firm believer in democracy–not just within the UNRRA organization, where the staff met frequently to discuss issues and hammer out solutions–but with respect to the people they were helping. They should be consulted at every turn, she believed. “Lady Bountiful” attitudes, she wrote with scorn, were long outdated. The cooperation of the refugees themselves should be sought from the start. “Otherwise,” she thought, “they will degenerate rapidly into paupers.”¹⁰

One day, a young Polish Jew in the camp named Joseph came to her office and asked for help. His sister and cousin had been living in Budapest, he explained, and he had long thought them dead, but word had reached him that they were alive and living in a camp at an aerodrome near Landsberg, a Bavarian town about fifty miles away. By this time, Francesca had managed to requisition a car from some Germans. “I said I would take him to Landsberg,” she wrote. “There was a huge camp there, and I wanted to get a list of its inmates to put up in Feldafing.”

They searched the aerodrome for an hour with no luck, then met an American sergeant. “Those two Jewish dames?” he asked. “Why, they left yesterday. They live with peasants in the village. You’d better hunt them up there.”

In a stable attached to a farmhouse, Francesca and Joseph found an old couple milking cows. “Is my sister Judith here?” asked Joseph. The old man stopped milking. “Judith, your sister?” he said. “Then”–and he grasped Joseph’s hand with spontaneous warmth–“you must be Joseph. She thinks you are dead.” Now his wife chimed in: “But only yesterday they left us. They have gone to the dreadful Landsberg barracks because they thought they might get repatriated quicker from there.”

The Landsberg barracks consisted of three enormous buildings packed with five thousand people of twenty different nationalities. It was guarded by American sentries, and only a few of the inmates were allowed out at any one time. Francesca could find no trace of the young women on any list, but they went in and searched for them anyway. The task seemed hopeless, “But Joseph was not to be put off,” recorded Francesca, “and suddenly we opened a door and there they were, and in a trice brother and sister were in each other’s arms.”

If Robert Reid had viewed the wanderings of the deportees across Europe in biblical terms, Francesca felt she was experiencing something medieval:

There was something in the scene, which made it belong to the ancient world, or at least to an era before letters, telegrams, trains, all the communications of our modern world existed. And because this ordinary scene–a brother meeting a sister–was so miraculous, making one feel that the lights of the world had gone up again, it seemed to me that it was a measure of the extent to which Europe in our day had gone back into the Dark Ages.

Judith and her cousin, Polly, had been deported from Budapest and spent several months in Dachau. After they were liberated, they lived and worked happily with the two Bavarian peasants on the farm before heading for Landsberg. There was still no sign of repatriations to Hungary starting, so after persuading the two women to return to the farm for the time being, and with a promise that Joseph would join them as soon as he could, Francesca drove them back. “Neither Joseph nor the girls thought it strange that fate had guided them to kindly Germans,” she noted. Many Dachau victims, she realized, talked of some German or other who had been good to them. Often, their bitterest feelings were directed against people of their own nationality who had betrayed them. “Of all sins,” thought Francesca, “treachery is the hardest to forgive.” It was not the first time since landing in Europe that she had come to that conclusion.¹¹

The reuniting of Joseph and Judith was a bright interlude in an otherwise dark and difficult May. Good progress was made on many fronts: most of the Western Europeans were rapidly repatriated to Belgium, France or Holland; Francesca’s doctor colleague soon had the typhus problem under control, was improving the camp’s sanitation and was taking care of the special nutritional needs of the children; and Zina was hard at work with the Russians. But Francesca found much of the work frustrating. The fact of the matter, she quickly realized, was that UNRRA had little independent power. Everything important was still controlled by the military. This was the case everywhere across Europe and had been part of the original arrangement that created the agency in the first place. It was obvious that for the first few months of the peace the army alone would have the means of transport and the equipment to deal with the problems. The humanitarian teams were there to help, not to act as independent units.

At Feldafing, Lieutenant Smith had control of all food and equipment, enjoyed a virtual monopoly on transport, and had at his beck and call a huge staff quite separate from Francesca and her team. In these circumstances she found that some of her training had been little more than pie in the sky. For example, she had been taught how to set up an information bureau. But what, she complained, was the use of that when she had no information to dispense? Every day someone wanted to know how to get a visa for America, Palestine or Australia, or to find their mother, father, sister or brother. She spent hours writing down endless names and details of family members last seen or heard of at Theresienstadt, Auschwitz or some other dreadful place. But as yet, no centralized tracing bureau existed, so the best she could do was circulate her lists among other DP camps in the area.

One of the most heart-rending and unexpected aspects of her work was coming across inmates who did not want to go home. No one had trained her for that. One day she asked a Lithuanian Jew why he did not want to go home. He replied:

I lived in Vilna, and I lived in a little street where we were all Jews together, but they took my brothers and sisters and my parents away, and they were all taken to the gas chambers. I have no relatives left. I don’t think I should find any of my friends in that street. I couldn’t bear to go back to a place like that with such terrible memories. I want to shake off the dust of Europe and begin a new life somewhere else.12

On the last day of May, Francesca sat down at her typewriter and vented her frustrations in her diary. It was a drenching wet day, which added to her profound sense of discouragement. Oddly enough, Lieutenant Smith’s dynamism and energy had become part of the problem. He was so organized and determined that there seemed little room for Francesca and the others. That she herself was a strong-willed person made it even worse. “It is difficult to worm one’s way in to such a set up, though there are plenty of things to do,” she complained. “I have never in my life worked before without having access to one’s own stores . . . But there appear to be a whole hierarchy of personnel who control these things and I have no pleasure in going hat in hand to them.” She found it especially frustrating that she could not even get a sewing workshop up and running. “It’s a queer life,” she concluded, “and I have an increasing feeling that Smith does not want us to be there . . .”¹³

There was one hopeful piece of news, though. That day, Captain Paisley drove in from Tutzing with an army friend, another captain, who was in charge of German prisoners of war. So far, the prisoners had been kept behind barbed wire but now, explained the two Americans, many were going to be released so that they could work on the land. The occupying armies were beginning to worry about the food situation in Germany over the coming winter and needed as many hands to put to the harvest as possible. It was a small and hopeful sign of a return to normality.

A few miles away, however, the last act of what had become a terrible normality under the Nazis had just been played out.

Kaufbeuren is a small and picturesque Bavarian city of some forty thousand inhabitants, with a turreted city wall dating back to the twelfth century. One of its best-known historic festivals is the Tanzelfest, a spectacle performed by over fifteen hundred children celebrating a visit to the city by the Emperor Maximilian in 1497. Yet like so many outwardly idyllic places in Hitler’s Europe, it concealed a dreadful secret. By some grotesque irony, this also featured children. For its mental institution was one of dozens across Germany where mentally and physically handicapped children, as well as adults, were systematically murdered.

Obsessed with notions of racial purity and physical perfection, the Nazis began killing the handicapped–or “Life Unworthy of Life,” as the phrase had it–in the late 1930s. Eventually, the news leaked out and in August 1941 the Catholic Bishop of Münster delivered a blistering sermon denouncing the murders. A public outcry followed, and Hitler stopped the program. But this merely applied to the particular method of killing, which was by gas. The specialists involved simply moved their lethal expertise on to the extermination camps and other centers, such as the Risiera San Sabba in Trieste.

The asylums and hospitals reverted instead to murdering the handicapped through lethal medication and deliberate starvation, and the killing of children went on throughout the war. The director at Kaufbeuren, Dr. Valentin Falthammer, was an especially keen and energetic supporter of the program, and proudly introduced a carefully crafted fat-free diet that guaranteed death to his patients and conveniently economized on pharmaceuticals. The death rate rose so high that the asylum authorities forbade the ringing of church bells at burials, so as not to alert the local population.¹⁴

Kaufbeuren had a maximum capacity of three thousand people. Its victims, all of them Germans, came from throughout Hitler’s Reich. The US Army arrived in the town just six days after Hitler’s death and arrested Falthammer, but as there were “Typhus!” warning signs posted, they did not venture inside the facility, and left it strictly alone. Inside, the doctors continued with the euthanasia program, as if VE Day and the German surrender had never happened. On Tuesday 29 May 1945, the head nurse of the children’s ward, Sister Worle, approached the bed of a four-year-old boy and killed him by lethal injection. The time of death was recorded as 13:10. The nurse knew what she was doing, as she had already injected more than two hundred children the same way. The boy, whose name was Richard Jenne, had been classified several months before as a “feebleminded idiot,” and then deliberately starved to the point of death so as to be ripe for the needle when it came. The cause of death on the certificate was given as typhus. Three weeks after the end of the war waged to destroy Nazism, he was probably the last person to be put to death by the Nazi extermination machine. The hospital lay less than half a mile from the US military government headquarters in the town.

Even more remarkable than the fact that the Nazis went on killing people after the end of the war was that this was not discovered until early July, when American medical personnel finally entered the hospital. “What met their eyes was beyond belief,” writes one historian. “Some 1,500 disease-riddled patients confined to the most squalid conditions . . . and a stifling morgue filled with bodies that had not been buried and that could not be disposed of quickly, as the shining new crematorium, finished in November 1944, had been closed down.”¹⁵

“Will anything happen to me?” asked the chief nurse, appearing surprised that anyone could think anything was wrong. By this time, however, the world’s press was tired of stories about Nazi atrocities. The Times, for example, gave the post-war killings at Kaufbeuren a lurid enough headline–“German Death Camp Found. Murders Still Going On”–but devoted a mere three hundred words to paraphrasing a Reuters report on the story. The mortuary, it noted, contained bodies of men and women who had died between twelve and thirty-six hours beforehand and weighed as little as sixty pounds. Among the children still alive was a ten-year-old boy weighing just twenty-two pounds, with calves only two and a half inches in diameter.¹⁶

In Germany at the end of the war, there were some twelve million displaced persons to be cared for. Across the rest of Europe, millions more people were malnourished, homeless and searching desperately for lost family members. As Francesca Wilson was learning at Feldafing, and as Fey von Hassell knew from agonizing personal experience, a high proportion of the war’s victims were children. Across the continent, feral packs of them scrounged for food, attached themselves to soldiers for handouts, hung around refugee and concentration camps, roamed the countryside and waited to be reunited with their parents. Everywhere, notes one historian, “children who had been hidden for years, sworn to silence and subterfuge, emerged to deal with a strange world. Many who had been sent from occupied countries at a very young age to foster families in the Reich for ‘Germanization’ would stay hidden until ferreted out, and some would never find out who they really were.”¹⁷

Many of those most directly involved in the euthanasia murders decided to kill themselves rather than face allied justice. At Kaufbeuren, the chief doctor was captured, but his assistant hanged himself the night before the Americans finally entered the asylum. Odilo Globocnik was another case in point. On the last day of May he was captured by British forces in a hut overlooking the Weissensee in Carinthia. Later that same day, he managed to poison himself with a cyanide pill his captors had failed to find.¹⁸ In this, he was following the example of his SS master, Heinrich Himmler.

After he left Doenitz’s office at Flensburg, Himmler headed south in the direction of Bavaria. With him were some of his top SS associates, including Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s one-time medical adviser, Otto Ohlendorf, head of the Einsatzgruppe killer squads in Russia, and Himmler’s own medical adviser, Dr. Karl Gebhardt. In all, the group numbered fifteen. Their false documents identified them as discharged NCOs of the Secret Military Police. Himmler’s identity card named him as ex-Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger of a special armored company attached to the Secret Field Police, demobbed on 3 May 1945.¹⁹

When they reached the Elbe, they abandoned their cars, paid a ferryman to row them across the river, then carried on by foot. They melded well into the general confusion. Thousands of disarmed German troops were milling around and camping out in the open, so no one took any notice of another group of men in shabby uniforms. And no one seemed to recognize Himmler without his glasses and moustache but sporting his newly acquired eye patch.

Eventually, on Friday 18 May, they reached the small town of Bremervoede, where they lodged for the next four days in a farmhouse. There was a British Army checkpoint on a bridge over the river they needed to cross, and two of the party decided to try to get through. It was a bad place to choose, for the checkpoint was also an intelligence screening point set up by Field Security, which was searching for people named on wanted lists of leading Nazis and war criminals. The group had also made another fatal choice with respect to their fake IDs. The Secret Military Police had come under the control of the Reich Main Security Office Reichssicherheitsdienst, or RSHA, part of the SS in 1944, and for this reason had been placed on the allied wanted list. Even lowly NCOs fell into the category of those to be immediately arrested when caught.

So when the two men showed their papers, they were taken to a field security post in a nearby flour mill for interrogation by trained intelligence officers. The SS men revealed that others of their group were close by, and allegedly sick. Deliberately lulled into feeling that all was still well, they were sent back to fetch them with an escort and two army trucks. When they returned, they were segregated, separately interrogated, and arrested. That night, they were shipped off to a civil internment camp just south of Lüneberg for further questioning. At this stage, their true identities were still unknown. However, before they left, some of them revealed that three of their number had been left behind in the farmhouse. A search party returned to the site but failed to find them, so Field Security issued a warning to local troops to keep a lookout for them.

One of the three was Himmler. Why he did not board the trucks to cross the river with the others remains a mystery, but perhaps his well-honed security instincts led him to smell a trap. In any case, after lying low for another twenty-four hours, he and his last two escorts set off again on their journey south. By this time, Himmler had changed into civilian clothes and he was wearing a blue raincoat.

It proved to be a short stroll. As they walked down the main street of Bremervoede, a roving army patrol spotted them, picked them up and took them to the mill. When the field security linguist entered the room, he saw the man in the blue raincoat sitting disconsolately on the floor. “He has a bad stomach,” declared one of the others. So, in true British Army style, he was brought a cup of tea. That night, the three men slept on the floor of the mill before being trucked to join the others at the civil internment camp.

So far, Himmler had escaped identification, but as he was brought into the internment camp he was recognized by another top Nazi, Karl Kaufmann, the ex-Gauleiter of Hamburg. Himmler now knew the game was up and demanded to see the commandant. When he was ushered into his office, he removed the eye patch, put on his spectacles, and in a quiet voice said simply, “Heinrich Himmler.”

Within thirty minutes, a British intelligence staff officer arrived to confirm his identity. Three hours after that, he was bundled into the back of a car and driven the seven miles to Lüneberg and a special house reserved for such top-priority prisoners. He had already been stripped and bodily searched twice. Two small brass cases were found. One contained a glass vial, which was removed; the other was empty. It was suspected that the missing vial might be hidden in his mouth, so it was arranged that an experienced doctor should search him once again when he arrived. In the same building just a few days before another top SS official, Obergruppenführer Hans Prutzmann, head of the Werewolf organization, had committed suicide by swallowing poison hidden in a cigarette lighter.

At 10:45 p.m. on Wednesday 23 May, Himmler was escorted before the army doctor. “I was polite and gentle,” recorded the medical officer in his diary, “he was quiet and cooperative.” He searched all the bodily orifices and found nothing. Then he casually asked Himmler to open his mouth. Peering in, he immediately spotted “a small blue tit-like object” in the prisoner’s cheek. Quickly, he slipped in his finger to sweep it out. But as he did so, Himmler clamped down on the finger, wrenched the doctor’s hand away, and swung his head to one side. Then, with a disdainful smile, he crushed the vial between his teeth and took a deep breath. His face immediately contorted, his eyes turned glassy and he crashed to the ground.

Frantic efforts were made to revive him. “We immediately upended the old bastard,” recorded the British officer in charge, “and got his mouth into the bowl of water which was there to wash the poison out. There were terrible groans and grunts coming from the swine.” The doctor also tried artificial respiration and called urgently for cardiac stimulants. But it was useless. Heinrich Himmler died at 11:14 p.m., just fifteen minutes after crushing the deadly vial.

No one higher up seemed unduly disturbed, and Brigadier Edgar Williams, Montgomery’s chief intelligence officer, merely had a drink when he heard the news. This reaction echoed sentiments at the very top. Just three weeks before, when Himmler tried to open negotiations, Churchill had privately declared that they might consider doing that and then “bump him off later”–a view consistent with his firmly held, long-term belief that all the top Nazis should be shot without trial. Himmler had simply saved the British the bother.²⁰

The question now was how to get rid of the body. The last thing anyone wanted was for Nazi fanatics to dig it up, for at this stage no one knew if Nazism was truly dead and buried or not. “Put the body under the earth in the morning,” ordered Colonel Michael Murphy, chief intelligence officer of the British Second Army. As few people as possible, he instructed, were to know the location.

So, with the body autopsied and extensively photographed, the British commandant and his sergeant wrapped it in a couple of blankets, put two army camouflage nets around it, and trussed up the bundle with telephone wires. Then, “Took the body out in a truck for its last ride,” noted the officer laconically in his diary. “Hell of a job to find a lonely spot. Anyhow we did find one and threw the old basket into the hole which we had dug.”

That was the end of Heinrich Himmler, tossed casually into an unmarked grave like countless millions of his victims. The building where he killed himself was later converted into an old people’s home. Its name was Lebensabend–“Life’s Evening.”

The world first heard of his death via the BBC on the evening of Thursday 24 May. Appropriately enough, it was the last operational broadcast over the service’s high-powered wartime transmitter, MCN (“Mike, Charlie, Nan”), which had been established near Brussels in September 1944 to carry war correspondents’ messages to the outside world. Since then, it had transmitted thousands of live reports from British, American, Canadian, Australian, French and Belgian reporters, including the story of the Germans’ surrender to Montgomery. “MCN is closing down,” announced the renowned BBC reporter Chester Wilmot in its final broadcast the next day. “The war in Europe is finished and its job is done.”²¹

But for twenty-three-year-old Leonard Linton, the war was far from finished. Gavin’s Eighty-second Airborne Division stayed at Ludwigslust until mid-June, and here the young American continued to help soften the rougher edges of daily relations with the Red Army.

On his second day in the town, he was driving past the palace when he saw a Red Army armored car. Beside it stood a mustached Russian officer, looking lost. Linton drove up and offered him directions in Russian. The officer was surprised and asked him where and how he had learned the language. Linton told him. The Soviet officer recoiled as though he had the plague. “So,” he replied aggressively, “they are White Guard traitors.”

“They” were Linton’s parents. Both were refugees and exiles from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. His mother came from Saratov, on the Volga River; his father from near Odessa. They met in Yokohama, Japan, and Linton was born there on New Year’s Day in 1922. Shortly thereafter the family moved to Berlin. His mother was Orthodox Christian, his father Jewish, and after the Nazis came to power they swiftly left for Paris. Five years later, in the late summer of 1938, just before the Munich Crisis, they moved on again. Traveling on “Nansen” passports–documents designed by the Norwegian explorer-turned-humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtjof Nansen for stateless refugees after the First World War–they sailed on the French liner Ile de France from Le Havre, arrived in New York, and settled in Manhattan. There they took the name “Linton.” It sounded such an “Anglo” name, plain and simple to just about anyone.

So, if Leonard Linton had a “foreign” language, it was English. In school before 1938 he had learned Oxford English, and he found it tricky to pick up New Yorkese. However, he was quick at languages and was soon at ease. After a spell at New York University, he transferred to Columbia and majored in physics. He was still technically stateless when he was drafted and sent to Camp Wheeler in Macon, Georgia, for basic training. It was only in October 1943, in the US District Court at Macon, that he became a naturalized American citizen. Such was the typically immigrant pedigree of the young and newly minted American now facing off with a Red Army officer in the grounds of Ludwigslust Palace.

Linton was rarely lost for words, but the Red Army officer’s hostile response took the breath out of him. So he quickly shifted gear and explained he was in a military government unit. At this, the Soviet officer became a little more civil and explained he had come to fix the demarcation line between the American and Red Army forces. He took a map out of a leather case slung over his shoulder, pulled out a pencil stub from behind his ear, and drew a straight line on the paper. “Let us agree on this demarcation line,” he said, “and let each of us step back one kilometre from this line.” Linton was shocked. The line ignored basic topographical features such as roads and canals, as well as all administrative boundaries. After a testy discussion, the Soviet officer clambered back into his vehicle, slammed down the cover, and drove off.

It was not a good beginning, and in the end, the issue was settled only after Gavin and his staff invited their opposite numbers over to the palace for talks, champagne and brandy. Then Gavin drove over to the local Soviet command post at Grabow, about five miles away. “It was an experience,” recorded the commander in his diary that day.

I understand why the Germans did not want to surrender to them. They kicked in store windows, looted, [and] rolled a big keg of wine into the city square, where anybody who came by with a bucket could have a fill. Drunks swarmed about the streets, flagging down vehicles . . . They were very enthusiastic and very rough on the Germans.

He also noted the remarkable quantity of American military equipment the Russians possessed–the results of generous US wartime loans.²²

Linton had already witnessed the boisterous and alcoholic behavior of Soviet troops himself. The day before, he had almost collided in his jeep with two drunken Russians riding in a newly liberated German military Volkswagen. Going back with them to Grabow, he saw Red Army soldiers and officers staggering in the streets and firing wildly into the air. But not all of them were out of control or inebriated. The next day, when he returned for more discussions about the demarcation line, he saw how everyone smartened up promptly when a neatly uniformed captain wearing green piping in his cap and epaulettes appeared on the scene. This was the NKVD, or secret police, officer. One or more of them were attached to every Red Army unit. “I could see literally how scared the other officers were of the captain,” Linton wrote.²³

With his fluent Russian, Linton found himself dealing as much with the Red Army as with German civilian matters. Mostly it was a case of Soviet soldiers dropping in on social visits. Linton found them intensely curious about life in America. “How do American workers really live?” they would ask. “How much do they earn?” Sometimes they arrived with cameras to take shots of themselves with the Americans to send home. There was always plenty of vodka, bonhomie and smiles. There was also, Linton noted, what Nazi-era German comedians in Berlin had come to call “der Deutsche Blick” (the German glance). This was a fearful look over the shoulder for the Gestapo. Whenever the green pips appeared, the ordinary Red soldier simply clammed up.

Linton found it useful himself on occasion to flex muscle. “Linton, there’s no juice at divisional headquarters,” announced his commanding officer one day after taking an urgent telephone call. “Get it turned on.”

He drove to the town’s aging power plant and found one or two frowning German technicians poring over a pile of circuit drawings. There had been plenty of stoppages before but they had always been fixed. This one was more serious and tricky, they said. “Who can fix it?” asked Linton.

They shrugged. “Only the chief,” came the answer.

The chief lived in Grabow and did not have a pass to cross the demarcation line. Linton sped over to the Soviet command post and asked for the man to be given a permit. He met with a blank refusal. No such passes could be given to civilians, he was told. Permission could come only from higher up.

Frustrated, Linton returned to the power plant and looked again at the circuits. One of those still working, he noticed, fed Grabow. So he ordered it switched off. He waited for a while, then drove back to the Soviet command post, where he found the officer sitting at his desk with a candle burning. Ten minutes later, he got verbal permission to drive the plant chief back to Ludwigslust and the problem was soon solved.

From this early encounter with the Soviets, Linton drew a crucial lesson. “I could not see why anyone had difficulties dealing with the Red Army,” he wrote, “unless they failed to propose a worthwhile deal and above all keep the key in their hand; then it [worked].”²⁴

But dealing with the Red Army was not all tough bargaining. Occasionally, there were moments of almost surreal exuberance. One day, Linton received yet another urgent phone call. This one told him to get over to the railroad station as soon as possible. A military police patrol had just reported seeing a locomotive under steam and a group of Red Army men terrorizing several German women. Convinced he was about to find a rape and looting session, he slapped on his sidearm and hotfooted it over. But what greeted his eyes was an astonishing and far different scene. In front of a large house with a lawn and big trees stood a steam locomotive bearing a large Russian serial number. The engine was painted a gleaming black and had little red flags on the front. The polished metal of its wheels sparkled brightly in the sunlight. Behind it was a caboose. On the lawn, several Red Army officers were sitting peacefully at a table enjoying food that was being brought to them by women in relays from the house. To one side, Linton could also see a large tub of water where other women were washing Red Army uniforms. It resembled an idyllic scene from a Russian pastoral painting.

Parking his jeep for a quick getaway, Linton warily approached the officers. To his surprise, beaming and laughing, they shook his hand and embraced him. Did they know, he asked politely when the greetings were finally finished, that they were well inside US Army territory? Of course they did, came the laughing reply, but they had just come over to take a look, and found it nice, so they would stay a few days and then go back. Besides, they added, no one would miss them, as they only belonged to a rail transport battalion.

Linton could see no sign of any molestation of the women. On the contrary, he noticed that some of them seemed to be looking at the Russian officers with an appreciative eye. Relaxing, he was invited to share their food. So far, he had spoken in German, but when he accepted the invitation in Russian, pandemonium broke out and they poured him a huge glass of vodka. “Drink to the bottom!” they urged, so he did. What happened after that became hazy. There were more toasts–to Eisenhower, to Zhukov, to Truman, to Stalin–bottles of wine began to appear from the caboose, the women brought out more and more plates of potatoes and sausages, and somehow he forgot to ask when exactly they planned to leave. Afterwards, all he could remember was getting into his jeep, bumping back across the railway tracks, and then waking up many hours later, still fully dressed, with a splitting headache.

Not long after, a rumor began spreading among the higher-ranking German officials he had to deal with that the Eighty-second Airborne was going to leave the area and hand it over to the Red Army. At first he ignored it, but then he was asked the question directly by a police lieutenant with whom he was working closely. Everyone knew that Linton was the main American contact with the Russians on administrative affairs. He had heard nothing of the sort from any of his Red Army contacts, nor had his own brass hats hinted at anything similar, so he replied firmly that there was no substance to the story.

Nevertheless, the rumor continued to grow, fueled not least by the close contacts that Linton himself maintained with his Red Army opposite numbers on many practical issues. One of the most frequent concerned travel permits for German civilians. As conditions normalized, he found himself handing out more and more of these passes. “We heard the most ingenious and unusual reasons,” he noted, “for Germans wanting to go somewhere. One day a very pretty girl came with some very sad family story requiring several people to travel and she started crying. I told her nicely to calm down, that we were now giving permits almost automatically; her crying stopped at once and she was all smiles, a great potential actress I thought.”²⁵

After a few more weeks of increasing normality, Linton was told that the Americans were to be relieved as occupiers by British troops and sent back to their base in France. He and his military government unit stayed on for a couple of days after the main body of Gavin’s paratroopers left to hand over control to the British, who annoyingly arrived a couple of days late. Then they lined up in a small convoy, improved by the addition of a looted Mercedes saloon, and headed west. “I left with a heavy heart and concern,” he wrote, “how all the people–the good ones, the young girl I had met, and even the bad ones–would fare without our protection and care.”

Back at the Eighty-second’s European base in France, many of those with sufficient points began to make their way home to the States. Linton wondered when he would be joining them.