Free Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany by Emma Craigie, Jonathan Mayo

August. The sisters were buried in a mass grave with 10,000 others just a few days before the British arrived
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    One of the first correspondents to visit Belsen was the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby. His colleague Wynford Vaughan-Thomas met him driving away from the camp. He looked like a changed man
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    ‘You must go and see it, but you’ll never wash the smell of it off your hands, never get the filth of it out of your mind. I’ve just made a decision… I must tell the exact truth, every detail of it, even if people don’t believe me. This is an outrage… an outrage.’
    A few hours later, Dimbleby recorded a 14-minute report describing the horrors of the camp
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    Since July 1944 the BBC had been broadcasting details of what had been happening to Jews in camps such as Auschwitz thanks to reports smuggled out by the Polish resistance. Dimbleby’s report was the first radio eyewitness account of the barbarism of the camps
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    ‘I found a girl, she was a living skeleton… stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was: “English, English, medicine, medicine” and she was trying to cry but didn’t have enough strength.’
    One of Richard Dimbleby’s last broadcasts from Germany will be from Hitler’s study – sitting in his chair. Dimbleby came away with knives, forks and spoons with the initials A.H., which he would provide at dinner parties for people he didn’t like
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4.00am
    In the Führerbunker Traudl Junge finally finishes typing Hitler’s testaments. The copies are taken through to the conference room for the witnesses to sign. Goebbels, Bormann and the generals Burgdorf and Krebs sign the three copies of the political testament as witnesses and Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below signs the will. Junge thinks how the bunker light makes everyone look grey and exhausted as she returns to the desk in the common room to put the papers in order.
    Von Below has been with Hitler throughout the war, representing the Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Göring. He is honoured to be asked to sign Hitler’s will. The last few days have been particularly tense as he has had to manoeuvre carefully to distance himself from his disgraced boss. Von Below is longing to find a way to leave the bunker. Only three weeks ago he travelled to the Baltic coast to say goodbye to his pregnant wife and three children. He had travelled back to Berlin in beautiful sunshine with great reluctance. He believes it unlikely that he will leave the capital alive.
‘On behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would unreservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital…’
About 4.15am
    Joseph Goebbels bursts in on Traudl Junge as she makes final corrections. He is weeping and shaking. He chokes out hiswords: ‘The Führer wants me to leave Berlin, Frau Junge! He has ordered me to take a leading post in the new government. But I can’t. I can’t leave Berlin. I can’t leave the Führer’s side! I am
Gauleiter
of Berlin. My place is here. I can’t see the point of carrying on living if the Führer is dead…’
    Traudl Junge has never seen him so upset.
    ‘He said to me, “Goebbels, I didn’t expect YOU to disobey my last order as well!” I can’t understand. The Führer has made so many decisions too late – why must he make this last decision too soon?’
    Goebbels then asks her to take down his testament. She puts aside the documents she’s been working on and picks up her shorthand pad and pencil. He starts dictating:
    ‘For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Führer. My wife and children join me in this refusal. Otherwise – quite apart from the fact that feelings of humanity and loyalty forbid us to abandon the Führer in his hour of greatest need – I should appear for the rest of my life as a dishonourable traitor and common scoundrel, and should lose