Free Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II by Nicholas Best Page B

writer after the war was over.
    Heller had been given the choice of returning to America by land or sea. He had plumped unequivocally for the sea, preferring to sail from Naples and risk being torpedoed, rather than take a flight he didn’t have to. Back in the States, he had immediately asked to be taken off flying status, even though it meant a considerable cut in pay. While the rest of the 488th remained in Corsica, Heller had seen out the war as an air force public relations officer in Texas. He was in San Angelo when the Italian campaign ended, promising himself that for as long as he lived he would never fly in an airplane again.

6
    HIMMLER LOOKS TO THE STARS
    BACK IN GERMANY, Heinrich Himmler was about to have his fortune told in the dimly lit police barracks at Lübeck. He had arrived just after midnight to keep his appointment with SS Brigadeführer Schellenberg and the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff.
    The two men shot to their feet as Himmler burst through the door. It was obvious at once that he had been drinking. The smell of alcohol followed him across the room as he ordered the men to resume their seats and took his own place at the head of the table.
    If Himmler was surprised to see that Schellenberg had brought an astrologer with him, he gave little sign of it. The meeting began with Schellenberg’s report on Count Bernadotte’s failure to negotiate a surrender to the Western Allies. Schellenberg had been terrified earlier in the evening, fearful of imminent execution, but it seemed to Wulff that he recovered his confidence as he began to speak, explaining in detail the reasoning behind the Allies’ refusal to negotiate. Himmler listened carefully to every word, chewing on a cigar that he kept picking up and putting down again with a hand that trembled almost uncontrollably.
    Himmler was sweating, too, his body quivering with barely suppressed emotion as he fought back tears. He had been badly shaken by the Reuters report of his treachery in approaching the Allies. He knew that it could have disastrous consequences for him if Hitler were still alive and got to hear of it. Himmler was convinced that he was about to be arrested at the very least, if not shot out of hand. As soon as Schellenberg finished speaking, Himmler turned to Wulff and asked him what the stars had to say about his future.
    Wulff had brought his astrological charts with him and a stellar chronometer. Spreading the charts out on the table, he divined from them that Himmler might still just survive if he sent Schellenberg to Sweden at once to conduct a fresh round of talks with Count Bernadotte and the Swedish foreign minister. Wulff happened to know that Schellenberg was most eager to visit Sweden in the near future, with no intention of coming back. Once safely on neutral territory, he could arrange for Himmler to follow, slipping across the Baltic to Stockholm before anyone in Germany realized he was gone. It was a better idea than Himmler’s disguising himself as a farm worker and hiding on an estate in Oldenburg, as one of his subordinates had suggested.
    But the SS leader was not impressed. “Is that all?” he demanded, when Wulff had completed his forecast. He had been hoping for some encouragement from the stars, not just an admission that all was lost and it was time to run.
    Yet there was nothing for him in the heavens. Himmler was doomed, if the sky were to be believed. He seemed to lose all control as he yelled at Wulff: “What’s going to happen? It’s all over, nothing can be saved now. I’ll have to kill myself! Take my own life! Or what else do you think I can do?”
    Wulff did not reply. After a spell in a Nazi jail, at the mercy of the Gestapo, he had little sympathy for Himmler now that the tables had been turned.
    “Why don’t you tell me?” Himmler begged. “Tell me. What am I supposed to do?”
    “Flee the country,” Wulff advised him, with a shrug. “I presume you have the necessary documents?”
    Himmler