For Seyss-Inquart and the War
On May 7, the day of Spider Sceurman’s fateful flight and the day the SS massacred Dutch civilians in Amsterdam’s Dam Square, Arthur Seyss-Inquart was in a German military staff car attempting to cross the Elbe River bridge in Hamburg, Germany. Two British soldiers from the Royal Welsh Fusiliers Regiment stepped out into his vehicle’s path, leveled their weapons and forced the car to a halt.
Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s appointed successor as Germany’s head of state, was holding daily cabinet meetings at his headquarters at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, close to the border with Denmark, which, like most of Holland, was still under German occupation. Doenitz was trying to keep up the pretense that Germany still had a working and workable government and was striving to keep the country from lurching into chaos now that Hitler was dead and Allied armies were advancing into the heart of the Nazi Reich from east, west and south. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, appointed Germany’s new foreign minister in Hitler’s will, had been summoned by Doenitz to Flensburg. Doenitz himself had only fled there from Plons, a little farther to the south, on the night of May 2–3.
Seyss-Inquart had come to Flensburg at night from IJmuiden in Holland by sea, aboard a speedy E-boat of the German navy. E-boat was the Allied name for these craft. Called the Schnellboot, or fast boat (S-boot for short) by the Germans, these 100-ton, triple-engine torpedo boats could race along at 43 knots, leaving Allied warships in their wake. In going to Flensburg, Seyss-Inquart had hoped to get Doenitz to confirm his action in ignoring Hitler’s scorched-earth policy and to perhaps appoint him to act as surrender negotiator with the western Allied powers in his capacity as Hitler’s appointee as the new foreign minister.
Doenitz not only failed to confirm Seyss-Inquart’s appointment as foreign minister in the new government, but he gave that role, among others, to his new chancellor, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, who had been finance minister under Hitler. And Doenitz sent the new head of the German navy, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, to negotiate surrender terms on his behalf, first on May 4 with Montgomery at his headquarters at Lüneburg Heath just to the south of Hamburg in Lower Saxony, and then with Eisenhower at Reims on May 7. Left with no role in Nazi Germany’s last regime, but with Doenitz’s agreement that the scorched-earth policy was not to be implemented, Seyss-Inquart had opted to return to Holland.
When later asked why he made this decision to return, he would say that he wanted to be with the German co-workers of his administration at the end and wanted to answer for that administration “in the hour of disaster.”1 He was also probably hoping for favorable treatment from Eisenhower if he was found in charge in Holland at war’s end, as opposed to being just one of many Nazi personages arrested with Doenitz. When a storm confined Seyss-Inquart’s E-boat to port, he abandoned his plan to return to Holland by sea and instead set off to make the journey by road. This brought Seyss-Inquart to the congested Elbe River bridge.
As the two British soldiers stopped his car, Seyss-Inquart protested that he had important work to do. “I’m going to Montgomery,” he declared, without disclosing his true identity. Whether he had genuinely intended to go to Montgomery is unclear. Perhaps this was a last-minute change of plan in the face of the British troops. Or perhaps it was merely a ploy to get him past the checkpoint and allow him to continue on his way to Holland. There was nothing he could achieve by going to Montgomery. But that was his claimed intent.
Go to Montgomery? One of the British soldiers smiled wryly. “You bloody-well are!” he declared.2
Seyss-Inquart, his driver and two aides were taken to the newly established British military headquarters at Hamburg’s once swish Atlantic Hotel. As they were being taken in the door for questioning, a Dutch captain passed them. Recognizing Seyss-Inquart, he alerted the British. The game was up for Six-and-a-Quarter. One of the two soldiers who had captured Seyss-Inquart had a very good personal reason to see the Reichskommissar clapped behind bars with the rest of the Nazi hierarchy and put on trial for war crimes. The soldier’s name was Norman Miller, but in 1939 it had been Norbert Mueller, and he had been a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy from Nuremberg who had arrived in England with a load of other Jewish children. They had escaped Nazi Germany as part of the Kindertransport program in which almost 10,000 Jewish youngsters were evacuated to Britain from throughout Europe. Their escape had been engineered through the efforts of the British Jewish community and their supporters.
Among the last to successfully flee the Nazis under this program, Miller had been one of forty children who had escaped by sea from IJmuiden in Holland on May 14, 1940, the day the Netherlands fell to the invading German army. Norman Miller’s family had not been so lucky. Remaining behind in Germany, Norman’s entire family had perished at the Jungfernhof concentration camp at Riga in Latvia. Now Arthur Seyss-Inquart and other leading Nazis would be brought to account for the concentration camps, the death camps and the other horrors of the Nazi regime.
On May 8, Seyss-Inquart was flown from Hamburg to Hengelo in the Netherlands, northwest of Arnhem and not far from the German border, then driven to nearby Delden and the HQ of the 1st Canadian Army, to be kept under guard by the Canadians as he awaited planned war trials of senior Nazis. His escort was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Ball from Edmonton, who had joined the Canadian army at war’s commencement as a corporal with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
That same day, May 8, the members of the 8th Air Force, now stood down from European operations, partied to celebrate the end of the war in Europe. Grif Mumford and his good friend Ellis Scripture were in London that day. Come nightfall, Grif and Scrip saw the British capital’s street lights turned on for the first time since the start of the war in 1939 as the entire city came out into the streets to celebrate VE day. Back at Mumford and Ellis’s 3rd Air Division headquarters at Elveden Hall, radio technician Ted Lucey from the 95th BG’s 336th Squadron joined other HQ staff for what Lucey was to describe as “the party to end all parties.” Held in the stable yard and garden at the stately mansion, the party inevitably included a baseball game.3
Canadian Farley Mowat spent VE Day at his latest headquarters—the new HQ of the 1st Canadian Corps, which was located at the former German 25th Army HQ at Hilversum, where Mowat had dined on horse with General Reichelt only days before.
Not long after the liberation of Holland, Audrey Hepburn’s half-brother Alex emerged from hiding; he spent VE Day back with his family. Weeks later, the family was rejoined by Audrey’s other half-brother Ian, who had walked all the way from the factory in Berlin where the Nazis had forced him to work for three years. With her family back together again, and with their wartime home in Arnhem destroyed, Baroness Ella van Heemstra decided to move to Amsterdam to give daughter Audrey every opportunity to pursue a career as a dancer. To Amsterdam they moved, and from there, first as a dancer, then as a model and later as an actor, Audrey Hepburn would blossom into the star she became.
Physically and mentally affected by the experience of near starvation, Audrey would observe a birdlike diet for the rest of her days. Apart from several pregnancies, her weight would never exceed 103 pounds.4 Audrey’s body, and her career, were shaped by the Hunger Winter of 1944–45. Legendary French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy came to know Audrey Hepburn at the very beginning of her acting career and went on to make all her clothes, for her film roles and for her personally—including the famed “little black dress” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Her wafer-thin body was a perfect clothes horse for Givenchy’s elegant creations. “How proud and happy I am to have been able to work with and embellish my dear Audrey,” Givenchy would say.5
When casting for the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank was under way, Audrey was offered a leading role and was given a copy of Anne Frank’s diary to read. Annelies “Anne” Frank was a Jewish girl whose family and Jewish friends had hidden in an attic in Amsterdam for two years, beginning in 1942, before being betrayed to Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s administration and arrested in August 1944. Anne and her family were transported by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Anne and her sister Margot were later transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany’s Lower Saxony where, in March 1945, both died during a typhus epidemic—just weeks before British troops reached and liberated the camp. Audrey turned down the film role. She had found Anne Frank’s diary too distressing, both because of the heartbreaking story it told and the memories it evoked of her own harrowing experiences during the German occupation of Holland.6