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

friend’s wife. Orwell decided to return to Europe, because, as he explained to a friend, ‘perhaps after a few weeks of bumping about in jeeps etc. I shall feel better.’ Orwell’s reports for the
Observer
are bleak, reflecting his grief and also the fact that he is ill with pneumonia; ill enough to have drawn up a document at the end of March entitled ‘Notes for My Literary Executor’ – a list of works he wanted republished and those he did not. Orwell sent it to his wife to sign, but by then she was already dead
.
    George Orwell is not yet known as a writer. His first book
Homage to Catalonia
sold only 700 copies, but he has great faith in a short ‘fairy tale’ that he’s just finished that he knows will be controversial
. Animal Farm
is a satire on the Russian Revolution and tyranny in general. Many publishers in the UK and the US have turned it down as the Soviet Union is a war ally, but Secker and Warburg have taken it on and plan to publish it when more paper, which is severely rationed, is available. They may also be waiting for Hitler to be defeated and for the end of the alliance with Stalin. The manuscript that Secker and Warburg are working with is crumpled and dirty – it is in Orwell’s words ‘blitzed’ after a V1 exploded near their London flat in June 1944 and brought the ceiling down
.
    Orwell has taken advantage of the delay, and even as late aslast month he’s been tinkering with the proofs, asking to change the scene in which the windmill blows up, so that ‘all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces’ becomes ‘all the animals except Napoleon’. Napoleon – ‘Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon’ – is a pig who rules Animal Farm and is based on Stalin. Orwell explained to his publisher that this change was to be fair to Stalin who had chosen to stay in Moscow during the German invasion rather than flee
.
    Orwell has with him in Stuttgart a Colt .32 pistol, lent by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. In Barcelona in 1937, Stalin’s agents almost had Orwell imprisoned. This has left him paranoid that they’ll attack him again.
7.15am/8.15am UK time
    On the BBC Forces Programme they are playing ‘Morning Star’ by Frank Sinatra.
    In Munich, 47-year-old teacher Anni Antonie Schmöger and her sister are at seven o’clock mass. They’ve decided to come to an early service in case there is an air raid later. On the way to church, Anni was disappointed to see that some of her neighbours had white flags hanging outside their houses. She can’t bear to think that Americans will soon be marching through her city.
    Suddenly air raid sirens sound and the congregation hear the sound of bombs exploding close by. Everyone runs for the door, including Anni and her sister. Then they change their mind and turn back - they haven’t yet had communion.
    Everywhere regimental staffs without regiments and division staffs without divisions are looking forpicturesque boltholes. They are unemployed now… sleeping late, breathing in the mountain air... destroying ambiguous documents, discussing the situation, coordinating future answers to awkward questions…
    Author Erich Kästner, April 1945
7.30am
    Twenty-year-old German Lieutenant Claus Sellier, wearing only his underwear, is looking out of the window of the Hotel Gasthaus Zum Brau in Lofer, Austria. He’s watching orderlies putting luggage in the back of jeeps parked in a row along the street. Standing nearby are a group of sombre-looking officers; they shake hands and one by one drive off. Sellier and his colleague and friend Fritz (writing in later life, Claus Sellier never mentions Fritz’s surname) are now the only guests left in the hotel.
    Both men are in the 79th Mountain Artillery Regiment and were recently promoted, along with all their fellow cadets, to mark Hitler’s birthday on the 20th April. That same day, Claus and Fritz were summoned to the office of a distraught-looking Colonel Rauch, who was in charge