Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (29 page)

“Kill! Kill!” the leaflet reads. “Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the spirit of Germanic women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red Army.”

While some wealthy Berliners are secretly making plans to flee the city and perhaps find sanctuary in Switzerland, most citizens are stuck. They cannot run. So they remain through the bombings, going about their business as best they can.

The turning point of the war between the Russians and Germans took place in the city of Stalingrad. The fierce battle lasted for five and a half months, and saw the death of 1.2 million Russian soldiers and civilians and 850,000 German dead or wounded. The fighting was often in close quarters, within the houses and buildings of the city itself. The Germans were ruthless in their treatment of the Russian populace, murdering and raping with impunity.

Eventually, the German Sixth Army was cut off from supplies. German general Friedrich von Paulus implored Hitler to let his army withdraw. The Führer refused. This resulted in ninety-one thousand Germans being taken prisoner when the battle came to an end on February 2, 1943. Of that number, only six thousand survived the cruelty of their Russian captors and returned home alive after the war. From then on, the Soviet army steadily advanced westward, vowing to avenge the atrocities that the Germany army had inflicted upon the people of Russia.

The residents of Berlin will bear the brunt of this vengeance. They can only pray that the stories of rape and murder are mere rumors.

But those prayers will go unanswered.

*   *   *

On March 16, in a special ceremony, Hitler awarded Joachim Peiper and Otto Skorzeny the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. But his two favorite soldiers are soon to fight no more. In Vienna, Peiper and his SS Panzer division have been defeated and disgraced in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Russian advance. Furious, Hitler has ordered that Peiper and his men remove from their uniforms the armbands bearing his name. Shortly after that, Peiper flees west and is captured by the Americans.

Skorzeny, a native of Vienna, hears that the Russians are about to enter the city and races there on April 10 with a team of commandos. He finds Vienna in flames, but otherwise dark. Instantly recognizing that the city will fall by morning, he and his commandos retreat. Their war is over. Skorzeny orders his men to hide themselves, while he escapes into the Alps, where he vacillates between committing suicide and fleeing Germany while he can still get out alive.

Like Adolf Hitler, Skorzeny is planning a way to end the war on his terms. In time, he will surrender to the Allies.

*   *   *

In the pale artificial light of the bunker, Adolf Hitler continues to stare, hour after hour, at his map table, waiting for some sign of hope that all will soon be well. “Think of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans,” he tells his personal secretary, the despicable Martin Bormann. “It does not suit us to let ourselves be slaughtered like sheep. They may exterminate us, but they will not be able to lead us to the slaughter.”

Thus the Führer has begun a scorched-earth policy designed to deprive Germany’s approaching conquerors of a form of sustenance. His “Nero Command” of March 19 states, “All military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.”

This is all Hitler can do: prepare for the end.

Hitler passes the time in the bunker, sleeping most days and then staying up until dawn most nights to scrutinize plans for battles that will never be fought. His palsied tremors make it impossible for him to turn the pages of a book, so he commands that his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, read aloud to him from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century Prussian warrior king who has always been an inspiration to the Führer.

Hitler specifically chooses Carlyle’s book because it was the eminent Scottish historian who set forth the “Great Man” theory of history, which states that “the history of the world is but a biography of great men.”

Leonidas was a great man.

Frederick was a great man.

Hitler considers himself a great man.

Reclining on the bed in his personal quarters as Goebbels sits in a nearby chair, Hitler is calmed by words that make a vivid comparison between Frederick’s times and his own situation. It is a passage describing the winter of 1761/62, when all seemed lost during the Seven Years’ War. Frederick had few allies at the time, and was also facing a multinational force that threatened to annihilate his Prussian troops.
²
Hitler is now himself facing Armageddon. Russian troops are poised to enter his capital city.

“The great king did not see any way out, and did not know what to do. All his generals and ministers were convinced that he was finished. The enemy already looked upon Prussia as vanquished,” Goebbels reads. “If there was no change by February 15, he would give up and take poison.”

Goebbels pauses. Hitler is utterly silent.

Then comes the advice Hitler is hoping for, delivered down through the ages from Frederick, through Carlyle. “Brave king, wait but a little while. The days of your suffering will be over. Behind the clouds the sun of your good fortune is already rising and soon will show itself to you.”

Goebbels closes the book. He need read no further. Adolf Hitler, a man who believes in signs, knows that the universe is telling him not to give in.

The Führer begins to weep.

*   *   *

Just days later, Adolf Hitler receives yet another sign that Germany can still win the war. He summons all his top generals and ministers to the bunker to show them the news. “Here, you never wanted to believe it,” he crows, distributing the report that he has just received.

The bunker erupts in cheers.

The news could not be more shocking: Hitler has prevailed over one of his biggest opponents.

American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dead.

18

T
HE
L
ITTLE
W
HITE
H
OUSE

W
ARM
S
PRINGS,
G
EORGIA

A
PRIL
12, 1945

1:00
P.M.

The president of the United States looks defeated. Sitting placidly near the French doors of his small vacation cottage, Franklin Roosevelt is trying to appear authoritative for the artist painting his portrait. He is failing.

Elizabeth Shoumatoff’s paintbrush moves back and forth from palette to canvas, trying to capture the sixty-three-year-old president’s image for posterity. But the task is difficult, as the president looks far older than his age.

FDR is exhausted from twelve years in office and the incredible burden of world war. Still, he soldiers on. His hands shake with a feeble palsy, forcing him to press his fountain pen firmly against the documents he is trying to sign as his portrait is being drawn.

Sitting in an alcove across the room, gazing adoringly at the president, is his longtime mistress, fifty-three-year-old Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Her husband, a prominent New York socialite nearly three decades her senior, has just died. But even while he was alive, Lucy and FDR carried on a thirty-year relationship. “He deserves a good time,” his cousin Alice Roosevelt once remarked of their affair, “he’s married to Eleanor.”

It was British prime minister William Gladstone who said that the Eleventh Commandment for politicians is “Thou shall not get caught.” The affair between Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and FDR adheres to that adage. Way back in 1918, Roosevelt promised his wife, Eleanor, that he would banish Lucy from his life—but that has not happened. Lucy is a tall, striking brunette with blue eyes and a flirtatious, fun-loving personality that is the polar opposite of Eleanor’s prudish and critical one. Lucy is often by FDR’s side when he travels outside Washington, and Secret Service agents clandestinely spirit her into the White House at the president’s order.

Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd

Roosevelt arrived here at his beloved vacation home almost two weeks ago. This marks the forty-first time he has come to Warm Springs since taking office. When he boarded the
Ferdinand Magellan
for the overnight train ride from Washington down to Georgia, he was shrunken from weight loss. His face was pale and gray from exhaustion. His heart condition has worsened since his inauguration three months ago—in fact, FDR’s health has declined so rapidly that Vice President Harry Truman is amazed that the president continues to take on so much work.

Suddenly, the artist Shoumatoff sees a crimson flush filling Roosevelt’s cheeks. She has been struggling all morning with ways to make the president appear more youthful and robust, and is amazed at this instant change in his skin tone. The Russian-born painter reaches for the proper shade of red to capture this new ruddy glow.

What she does not know is that the president of the United States is in the early stages of a cerebral hemorrhage. Chronic hypertension brought on by years of smoking and lack of physical exercise has burst an artery in his brain. The surrounding tissue in his skull is now drenched in blood. There is no way to stanch the bleeding.

Roosevelt lurches, waving his right hand in the air. His left hand, like that entire side of his body, is now paralyzed. His face looks almost childish, as if the most powerful man in the world were lost and needed help finding his way.

“I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” he moans.

The president’s eyes close. His head spills forward. FDR’s trademark, that chin that so many cartoonists have drawn at a jaunty, uplifted angle, now settles atop his chest.

Roosevelt is immediately carried into his small bedroom by a butler and FDR’s longtime valet, Arthur Prettyman. His blood pressure soars to 300 over 190. In a scene reminiscent of the death of Abraham Lincoln, a team of doctors soon arrives and begins to work feverishly to save him.

They fail.

At 2:15 p.m. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd knows she must leave. She motions to Elizabeth Shoumatoff. “We must pack up and go,” Lucy tells the painter. “The family will be arriving by plane, and the rooms must be vacant.” She packs quickly, says good-bye to FDR one last time, and is out the door by 2:30.

At 3:35 p.m. the doctors labor no more.

FDR is gone.

*   *   *

Ninety minutes later, in Washington, Harry Truman walks into Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn’s private office for a quiet glass of Old Grand Dad bourbon on the rocks. But Truman will have to hold off on that drink. An urgent message is waiting from White House press secretary Stephen Early, asking him to come to the White House as quickly as possible.

Truman leaves in such a hurry that he loses his Secret Service detail.
¹
Once at the White House, he is led upstairs to the presidential residence, then immediately into Eleanor Roosevelt’s study. Hundreds of framed photographs cover the walls of the enormous room. The First Lady sits on a chair, dressed in black, her face lit by the afternoon sun shining in through the two great windows. She was at a lunch, listening to a piano performance, when, like Truman, she received a call asking her to return to the White House.

She and her daughter, Anna, changed into black mourning dresses.
²
Eleanor then broke the news by cable to the Roosevelts’ four sons, who are off serving in the military. Now she must break the news to the vice president that the man to whom she has been happily, and unhappily, married for forty years is dead.

Truman has no idea why he has been summoned. At first Eleanor gives nothing away. She was raised never to display emotion publicly, and is outwardly calm as he steps into the room. Her black dress provides the only clue as to what she is about to say. The First Lady walks to the vice president and tenderly places a hand on his shoulder.

“Harry,” she informs him, “the president is dead.”

Truman is shocked. “I had been afraid for some weeks that something would happen to this great leader, but now that this had happened I was unprepared for it,” he will later recall.

Emotional as always, Truman fights back tears. The death of FDR is stunning, but not as much as the terrifying realization that he is now president of the United States.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Truman asks, remembering his manners.

Eleanor Roosevelt looks hard at Harry Truman. “Is there anything
we
can do for
you
?” she says. “For you are the one in trouble now.”
³

*   *   *

Three thousand miles to the east, George Patton is just finishing his daily journal entries. The hour is late, but today has been extraordinary, and he needs to put every last detail on paper before going to bed. Finally, he closes his journal and puts down the pen.