Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

Anne Frank in 1941

But just as she is not sure of what she sees, so the Soviet soldiers are not sure of what they have stumbled upon: corpses everywhere, living skeletons, and the hollow faces of those who are being liberated but who are so close to death that it does not matter. “When I saw the people, it was skin and bones. They had no shoes, and it was freezing. They couldn’t even turn their heads, they stood like dead people,” the first Russian officer into the camp will later remember. “I told them, ‘The Russian army liberates you!’ They couldn’t understand. Some few who could touched our arms and said, ‘Is it true? Is it real?’”

The Soviet soldiers move from barracks to barracks, shocked at what they see.

“When I opened the barrack, I saw blood, dead people, and in between them, women still alive and naked,” Russian officer Anatoly Shapiro will remember. “It stank; you couldn’t stay a second. No one took the dead to a grave. It was unbelievable. The soldiers from my battalion asked me, ‘Let us go. We can’t stay. This is unbelievable.’”

Despite their brutal reputations, the Soviet soldiers are kind to the prisoners, who stare back at them “with gratitude in their eyes.” But the Russians have seen so much in this time of war that many are numb to the horrors before them. “I had seen towns being destroyed. I had seen the destruction of villages. I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed—there was not one village that had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings,” one Soviet soldier will note wearily.

And yet the Soviets see that Auschwitz is different. “We ran up to them,” Eva Mozes and her sister, Miriam, will later recall. “They gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human worth we were starving for. We were not only starved for worth, we were starved for human kindness, and the Soviet Army did provide some of that.”

Eva Mozes has kept the promise that she made to herself. Neither her corpse nor that of her sister will ever litter the filthy floor of a barracks lavatory.

* * *

As Otto Frank rises from his sickbed to celebrate his newfound freedom, his thoughts immediately turn to finding his family.

But he will never find them. Instead, in the weeks and months and years to come, he will discover threads of their travels, which will allow him to piece together the horrible ways in which they died.

Otto Frank’s beloved wife, Edith, died of starvation, right here at Auschwitz. His daughters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. Margot Frank died soon afterward.

Her sister, Anne, had just five weeks to live. She would die bald and covered with insect bites, her emaciated body finally done in by a typhoid outbreak that would kill seventeen thousand inmates at Bergen-Belsen.

She was just fifteen years old.11

* * *

“Judaism,” Adolf Hitler tells the German people on the twelfth anniversary of the day he became chancellor, “began systematically to undermine our nation from within.”

Hitler’s physical health has further deteriorated. His hands shake. His eyes water. He is now taking twice-a-day injections of methamphetamine so he can function. And yet he and Eva Braun carry on the charade that the war can still be won. But Hitler’s location inside the bombed-out ruins of Berlin tells the true story. It has been two weeks since his personal train slunk into the once-proud capital of Germany in the dead of night. The curtains were drawn as a precaution against Allied bombing—though that is really more a habit than anything else. The Luftwaffe has been destroyed. American and British bombers are free to attack Berlin in broad daylight—which they do most days by nine in the morning, as the city’s embattled residents hurry off to work.

There will be no stopping the Allies on the Western Front; of that, Hitler is certain. To the east, where the Russian superiority is eleven soldiers for every Wehrmacht fighter, the situation is even worse.

On this very day, January 30, 1945, Hitler’s minister of armaments, Albert Speer, has sent Hitler a memo informing the Führer that the war is lost. Germany does not have the industrial capacity to churn out the tanks, planes, submarines, and bombs necessary to defeat the Allies. Nor does it have the manpower.

Nevertheless, Hitler has no plans to surrender. Nazi scientists are currently working on a new type of weapon known as an atomic bomb.12 Once it is capable of being detonated, he can use it to wipe the Allied armies off the map. “On this day I do not want to leave any doubt about something else. Against an entire hostile world I once chose my road, according to my inner call, and strode it, as an unknown and nameless man, to final success; often they reported I was dead and always they wished I were, but in the end I remained victor in spite of all. My life today is with an equal exclusiveness determined by the duties incumbent on me.”

Hitler now makes his home in central Berlin, on the Wilhelmstrasse. He lives underground, in an elaborate bunker.13 The blond-haired, blue-eyed Eva Braun still tends to him, though she often spends time outside the bunker and does not sleep there most nights. She remains calm, believing that Hitler’s cruel genius can once again win the day. Living in an underground bunker is just one more precaution that is necessary in a time of war. Adding to the air of normalcy is that Hitler’s beloved German shepherd, Blondi, and her new puppies make their home in the bunker as well.

Even though he fears that a direct hit from an Allied bomb will kill him, Adolf Hitler ultimately believes he will be saved. “However grave the crisis may be at the moment, it will, despite everything, finally be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice and by our abilities. We shall overcome this calamity, too, and this fight, too, will not be won by central Asia but by Europe; and at its head will be the nation that has represented Europe against the East for 1,500 years and shall represent it for all times: our Greater German Reich, the German nation.”

Adolf Hitler has ninety days to live. He will never leave Berlin again.