Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II Read online

  Audisio found a seat on the mudguard as the car started off. His companions stood on the running boards with their weapons at the ready. The two young partisans who had guarded Mussolini during the night followed at a brisk trot, hurrying along behind the car as it headed along the mountain road toward the little village of Mezzegra and the lake beyond.

  The car hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when it stopped again at a bend in the road, out of sight from either direction. The driver pulled up at the gates of the Villa Belmonte. Mussolini and Clara were ordered out and told to stand against the wall. Clara threw her arms around her lover and stared in disbelief as Audisio mumbled a few words about a sentence of death and justice for the Italian people.

  “You can’t do that!” Clara protested. “You can’t shoot Mussolini!”

  “Get away from him!” Audisio replied. “Get away or you’ll die, too!”

  But Clara Petacci wasn’t listening. She refused to let go of Mussolini. She was still clinging to him, still protesting, when Audisio pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  WHILE MUSSOLINI WENT TO HIS DEATH, his wife Rachele was in hiding a few miles away, at the southern end of the lake. With nowhere else to go, she and their youngest two children had been taken to Cernobbio, just outside Como, where a friendly Blackshirt had given them shelter in his own home. The house wasn’t safe, but it was better than being on the streets, where Fascists and anyone else associated with Mussolini were being hunted down and killed without compunction.

  Rachele Mussolini was in despair as she listened to the gunfire all around. The imminent arrival of the American army had been the signal for a mass uprising against the remaining Fascists in the north of Italy. Mussolini himself had fled a few days earlier, with a vague idea of making a last stand in the Alps, only to find his supporters melting away as the Americans advanced. In panic, he had written to his wife, telling her to save herself and the children, and had joined a column of German soldiers heading back to Germany. He might have gotten away with it if an Italian partisan hadn’t recognized his face under a German helmet. Instead, he had been arrested and taken to the mountains to await his fate.

  His letter to Rachele had been written when he was still contemplating a last stand in the Alps:

  Dear Rachele,

  Here I am at the last stage of my life, the last page of my book. We two may never meet again, and that is why I am writing and sending you this letter. I ask your forgiveness for all the harm I have unwittingly done you. But you know that you are the only woman I have ever really loved. I swear it before God, I swear it before our Bruno, in this supreme moment. You know that we must make for the Valtellina. Take the children with you and try to get to the Swiss frontier. There you can build up a new life. I do not think they will refuse to let you in, for I have always been helpful to them and you have had nothing to do with politics. If they do refuse, surrender to the Allies who may be more generous than the Italians. Take care of Anna and Romano, especially Anna who needs it so badly. You know how I love them. Bruno in heaven will help you. My dearest love to you and the children.

  Your Benito.2

  Taking Mussolini at his word, Rachele had left for Switzerland in the middle of the night with fifteen-year-old Anna Maria and seventeen-year-old Romano in tow. The border was only three miles from Como, easily identified by the bright lights twinkling peacefully beyond Italy’s blackout. They had joined a queue of cars at the frontier, where an Italian officer sent by Mussolini was waiting to help them across. They had been within five yards of safety when the Swiss border guards, after a study of their papers and some discreet telephoning, had shaken their heads regretfully and told them they would not be allowed in. It was “absolutely impossible” for the Mussolinis to enter Switzerland.

  Rachele had been disappointed but not downhearted as they turned away from the frontier. In fact, she had felt rather relieved at the thought of not having to leave Italy. They had driven back to Como in the dark, along a road clogged with Germans and Italians fleeing in every direction. Antifascist partisans were already streaming back from Switzerland and pouring down from the mountains to seize control of the country. There had been outbreaks of shooting from time to time, although Como itself had been quiet when they returned.

  They had driven straight to the Fascist headquarters, only to discover that no one there had any idea what to do with them. Seeing that they were wasting their time, Rachele and her children had left again, Anna Maria sitting disconsolately on the steps outside as they wondered where to go and what to do next. It wasn’t until dawn that help had arrived in the form of a Mussolini supporter who had taken pity on them, as Rachele gratefully recalled:

  One of our faithful Blackshirts insisted that it was too dangerous to hang about in the streets. We held a conference and he advised us to take refuge in a house some way away, where he lived. We made for it. Our arrival caused something of an upheaval in the small, poorly furnished cottage. They had no food to spare, and I ended up making breakfast for everyone with what remained of the provisions I had brought with me.

  The Blackshirts went off to find news of the Duce and when they came back said they were going to take us to join the column in which my husband was travelling. They also told me that our car had been stolen.

  The sound of shooting came nearer. We looked down the road through the tiny window and witnessed scenes of panic. Our hosts were terrified and I spent all my time encouraging them. Helping others made my own distress more bearable. A young boy, recognized to be a Fascist, was murdered before our eyes. A single denunciation was enough for immediate execution. Every now and then we listened to the radio broadcasting orders to hunt the Fascists down without mercy. From a nearby hospital badly wounded soldiers, wearing whatever they could find, came flying out to scatter all over the town. The whole world seemed to have turned into a living hell. The children were panic-stricken.3

  In the circumstances, it had proved impossible for Rachele and her children to rejoin Mussolini. And now it was too late, although they didn’t know it yet. They had been hiding in the Blackshirt’s house for the past two days, too scared to show their faces outside while civil war raged all around. Rachele knew, though, that they would have to leave soon, because they were putting the Blackshirt in grave danger by staying. He and his whole family might be dragged out and shot if they were caught with the Mussolinis under their roof. The decent thing to do was to hide somewhere else until the killing had stopped. But where? With chaos in the streets and everyone’s hand against them, Rachele Mussolini was uncomfortably aware that she and her children had nowhere else to go.

  * * *

  THE EXECUTION OF MUSSOLINI did not go as planned. The Sten gun jammed when Audisio fired. Cursing, he grabbed his revolver, only for that to jam as well. Seeing what was about to happen, Mussolini threw open his coat, according to one eyewitness, and faced Audisio squarely, defying him to do his worst.

  “Shoot me in the chest,” he said.

  One of Audisio’s men hurriedly gave him his own weapon. This time there was no mistake. Clara Petacci was hit first and died at once. Mussolini fell back against the wall next to her and slid to the ground, still alive. Walking over, Audisio shot him again, at close range. Mussolini jerked convulsively and then lay still, his body just touching Clara’s by the wall. Everyone else watched in horror, aghast at what they had just seen. It had happened so fast that they all remembered it differently when they talked about it afterward.

  Audisio needed a cigarette when it was all over. The driver had one, too, although he didn’t smoke. No one said anything as they stooped to pick up the spent cartridge cases. Behind the wall, the people at the villa had heard the gun shots but were waiting a while before coming to investigate. They didn’t want to get mixed up in anything that didn’t concern them.

  The time was still only a quarter past four. The rain that had been threatening all afternoon was beginning to fall as the partisans finished their c
igarettes. Leaving the two young men to guard the bodies in the drizzle, Audisio and the others got back in the car and set off for the town of Dongo, where they carried out a number of further executions, among them several of Mussolini’s ministers and Clara Petacci’s brother. Then they returned to the Villa Belmonte.

  The bodies of Clara and Mussolini were taken down to the main road and thrown into a moving van, on top of the others. The van was then driven through the night to Milan. The plan was to put the bodies on display next day in the Piazzale Loreto, where fifteen hostages had been shot by Fascists the previous August. It would be justice, of a sort, now that the war was coming to an end. Audisio’s only serious worry, as the van set off, was that American patrols might intercept them on the way and prevent them from reaching their destination.

  2

  IN BERLIN

  WHILE MUSSOLINI WAS MEETING HIS END, Adolf Hitler sat shaking in Berlin, so debilitated in mind and body that he could barely understand what was happening anymore as the ceiling reverberated above his head. The bunker at the Chancellery was solidly constructed, concrete piled on concrete to withstand the heaviest bombardment, but Berlin was built on sand, and the walls rattled whenever a Russian shell came close, dislodging lumps of plaster that fell in dusty showers all over the floor. The shelling had begun several days ago and was drawing nearer all the time as the Russian army closed in. It was obvious to everyone in the bunker, even Adolf Hitler, that it would be only another day or two at most before the Russians were knocking on the door.

  Hitler had a map on the table in front of him as the shelling continued, an ordinary civilian map showing the approach roads to the city. He was using it to plot the advance of General Walther Wenck, who had been ordered to relieve Berlin with his troops. Hitler had no idea how far Wenck had gotten, or how many soldiers he had left, or even where the Russians were anymore. But the Führer was going through the motions anyway, constantly arranging and rearranging a set of buttons across the map, moving them here and there with quivering fingers as if disposing his forces in a game of chess. Every now and again he shouted orders as well, barking out commands to no one in particular. In his mind, if nowhere else, Hitler was still winning this war against the Bolsheviks.

  The Russian army had completed the encirclement of Berlin three days ago. Its troops could already see the Reichstag through their field glasses, the big-domed Parliament building that stood at the very heart of the city. Elsewhere in Germany, the Russians had linked up with the Americans on the Elbe, and the British were pushing toward the Danish border, encountering increasingly feeble resistance as they went. In another few days, no matter what happened in Berlin, the war would be over and Germany would be defeated for the second time in a generation.

  The defeat had always been inevitable. Hitler’s generals had always warned him that it would come to this, right from before the war, when they had examined the British, French, and Russian armies in their war games and concluded that however they fought it, Germany was bound to lose in the end. The economists had agreed, pointing out that Germany’s soil was thin, reminding Hitler that the country lacked the mineral resources to fight a sustained campaign. Hitler had accepted their view initially, arguing in Mein Kampf that fighting the British was a mistake to be avoided, that a war on two fronts was never a good idea. But he had ignored his own assessment in the summer of 1939, and now the whole country was paying for his folly.

  Yet there was still hope—in Hitler’s mind at least. He had long since lost confidence in his other generals, but he still had some faith in General Wenck. If anybody could get to Berlin, Wenck could. Once he was there, pushing the Russians back, a corridor could be opened out of the city, a lifeline to the American army in the west. The Americans were the key now. Hitler had persuaded himself that they would never allow a cultured country like Germany to fall into Bolshevik hands if they could prevent it. The Americans would come to Germany’s aid first, if that was what they had to do to keep the Communists out of Europe.

  But Hitler couldn’t do it without Wenck. His troops were said to be near Potsdam somewhere, still struggling toward the capital. Until they arrived, there was nothing for Hitler to do except sit and wait, obsessively pushing buttons around the map while shells rained down and the bunker continued to reverberate. From time to time he dictated increasingly frantic telegrams to his staff—Where is Wenck? What is happening to the Ninth Army? When will Wenck and the Ninth Army join?1—but answers came there none. Nobody in the bunker had any real idea of what was happening in Germany anymore.

  * * *

  UP ABOVE, on the streets of Berlin, the fighting was fast and furious as the Russians advanced toward the city center. Every available German was struggling to hold them back. The outskirts had already fallen, and most of the suburbs, but the Germans were still clinging to the central area around the Tiergarten and the Brandenburg Gate, stubbornly refusing to capitulate. Hitler had promised them that help was on the way, the tanks and guns of Wenck’s army hurrying to save them from the Red Menace. The Germans in the center were hanging on by their fingertips, desperate not to give in before Wenck arrived.

  They were fighting like men possessed, even the ones who no longer believed a word Hitler said. They fought because they had no realistic alternative. They knew only too well what would happen if they surrendered to the Russians. The men would be taken for slave labor, transported to the Soviet Union for the rest of their natural lives. The women would be mass-raped, as they already had been wherever the Russians had found them. There was nothing for the Germans in surrender. Even if they wanted to give up, their own side wouldn’t let them. Fanatics from the SS and the Hitler Youth were hanging men from lampposts or shooting them on the spot if they showed any sign of wavering. The Germans in Berlin were trapped between a rock and a very hard place.

  For Helmut Altner, it was the fear of capture that kept him fighting. Still only seventeen, he did not want to spend the rest of his life in a Soviet prison camp. He had been conscripted at the end of March and given only four days’ training before being sent to the front. A girl had offered to hide him as he advanced, but he had been too scared to accept. Instead, he had gone into battle with his comrades, most of whom had long since been killed. Altner was a veteran now, after the hard fighting of the past two weeks.

  It seemed an age ago, but was actually only a few days, that he had heard the battalion commander promising his troops victory within twenty-four hours. The man had come forward to address them at a position just behind the line:

  Hitler has issued an order: “Hold on another twenty four hours and the great change in the war will come! Reinforcements are rolling forward. Wonder weapons are coming. Guns and tanks are being unloaded in their thousands. Hold on another twenty four hours, comrades! Peace with the British. Peace with the Americans. The guns are silent on the West Front. The Western Army is marching to the support of you brave East Front warriors. Thousands of British and Americans are volunteering to join our ranks to drive out the Bolsheviks. Hundreds of British and American aircraft stand ready to take part in the battle for Europe. Hold on another twenty four hours, my comrades. Churchill is in Berlin negotiating with me.”2

  It was wishful thinking. Winston Churchill wasn’t in Berlin, and no one was coming to their rescue. Hitler might not be in Berlin, either, for all Altner knew. The only reality for him was the constant shelling from the Russians in the western suburbs, the rattle of machine guns that had begun before dawn that day as the Russians advanced across the Reichssportfeld toward the barracks at Ruhleben. Altner had woken in the dark to the sound of incoming fire and had gone into action at once, grabbing his rifle and a few belts of ammunition and rushing outside to find out what was happening. It had been impossible to say for sure in the dark. The only certainty was that they were being attacked from several different directions at once and that chaos reigned all around.

  The Germans had managed to halt the Russians after a while, although not
before they had captured the Reichssportfeld. The fighting had died down toward dawn as both sides consolidated their positions. A Russian tank had appeared shortly after first light, filling Altner with dread as it rumbled to a halt in front of his trench. He had failed to spot the white flag it was carrying and thought his last moment had come. Instead, a head had emerged and a Russian with a loud hailer had exhorted the Germans to surrender: “You will be well treated, and you will be able to go home as soon as hostilities are over. Soldiers, there is no point any more. Do you really want to lose your lives in the last hours of a war already lost?”3

  Several Germans had taken the Russians at their word, quietly making a break for the enemy lines as soon as they thought no one was looking. Ordered to shoot them down from behind, Altner had fired over their heads instead. He had no quarrel with anyone who wanted to desert. He would have deserted, too, if he hadn’t been so terrified of capture.

  Fighting had resumed later as hundreds of Hitler Youth arrived from their homes in a desperate attempt to recapture the sports complex and the Olympic stadium. By midafternoon they had succeeded in pushing the Russians back, but only at a dreadful cost in killed and wounded. Altner found himself now with a handful of unfamiliar soldiers, ordered down to the subway station to try to reach the city center along one of the U-Bahn tunnels and then attack the Russians from the rear. With much of the line already in enemy hands, it seemed like a suicide mission to Altner as he followed the rest of his squad into the tunnel:

  Our uniforms are grey and so are our forebodings about a future that gives us not a glimmer of hope. I just want to sleep, sleep and suddenly wake up to discover that it was all nothing but a bad dream, that there was no war, that there are no ruins, no dead and ripped apart bodies, but that there is peace and that the sun shines and life pulses without the threat of coming to an end at any moment. But this is only wishful thinking. We are condemned to death and do not know why, nor do we know why we are not allowed to live!4