May 4, 1944:
- May 2: "Berlin is occupied by Soviet forces.
- "German troops in Berlin surrender.
- "German armies in Italy surrender.
- "The SS guards at the Neustadt-Glowen, Germany, labor camp near Lübeck fail to report for morning roll call, giving freedom to Jewish women who have been brought from Ravensbrück and Breslau, Germany, to dig defensive trenches and anti-tank ditches.
- May 3: "Approximately 9,400 Jewish prisoners who had been evacuated from Neuengamme and marched to Lübeck, Germany, are loaded by their overseers onto two ships, the Thielbeck and the Cap Arcona, apparently for no other purpose but a Nazi hope that the Jews would die while on board.
British planes, unaware that the ships are not hostile, attack.
Both ships sink in the Lübeck harbor within 15 minutes.
Survivors who attempt to swim to shore are fired upon by waiting members of the Hitler Youth, Volkstrum, and the SS.
Of the 9,400 prisoners, only about 2,400 survive. - "With Germany near defeat, the Czech Resistance rises in revolt and battles the German Army in Prague. See May 9, 1945.
- May 4: "Salzburg, Austria, is occupied by Allied forces.
- "German forces surrender in the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark.
- "Red Army troops liberate the camp at Oranienburg, Germany, where 5,000 inmates remain alive.
- "The International Red Cross takes over the administration of the camp/ghetto at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia.
The last of the camp's SS men flee. - "The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division liberates the concentration camp at Wöbbelin, Germany."
"One of the first things the Allies did was assure that survivors got enough to eat. Here, a truckload of bread is distributed to survivors at Dachau. Tragically, many former prisoners, after months of malnourishment, overate to the point of death.
They had gone so long without food that the heavy eating overloaded their digestive systems and killed them."
"When Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945, an unknown number of American GIs lined 16 SS camp guards against a coalyard wall in the adjacent SS training camp and executed them.
Additional executions took place at Dachau's railyard; a guard tower; and at Würm creek.
In all, 37-39 personnel were dispatched that day.
These actions were 'unauthorized,' and did not reflect U.S. Army policy toward captured SS."
"A stark headline from the April 30, 1945, edition of the Chicago Herald, overlaid on an Allied photograph of a Dachau death train.
To Americans, who had been told little about the Holocaust by their leaders, such scenes and headlines were nearly incomprehensible"
"As Soviet troops closed in on Berlin, Eva Braun returned to the city to stand at the side of her Führer.
On April 29, in a simple civil ceremony in the bunker, they wed. Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann served as witnesses, and the ceremony was followed by a small celebration.
The next day the newlyweds committed suicide, Eva by cyanide and Hitler probably by cyanide and gun."
"This handwritten document, entitled Mein Testament (My Testament), spelled out Adolf Hitler's last wishes.
Hitler actually composed two documents.
One was a political testament naming Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor and dismissing 'traitors' such as Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring from the Party.
The other was a personal will, stipulating that mementos were to go to his loyal secretaries.
He verbally ordered that his and Eva's bodies were to be burned so that the Soviets would have no remains over which to gloat."
"Hitler's faithful subordinates, including his driver, Erich Kempka, and the commander of the SS guards, Hans Rattenhuber, followed the last order of the Führer:
They took his body and that of Eva Braun to the courtyard above the bunker, doused both with gasoline, and set them aflame.
Debate would swirl afterward over whether or not the remains the Soviets found and placed in this casket were in fact those of Adolf Hitler. "
"The charred remains of Joseph Goebbels testify to his fanatical devotion to Hitler.
Goebbels's wife, Magda, shared his fanaticism, declaring that their children were 'too good for the life that will come after us.'
On May 1, 1945, she requested an SS doctor to give fatal injections of morphine to her six children, Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedde, and Heide.
Goebbels and his wife then poisoned themselves with cyanide.
Subordinates later burned the couple's bodies."
- Charlotte Delbo
"Released from the Ravensbrück, Germany, concentration camp on April 23, 1945, Charlotte Delbo translated her experience into a literature of witness. "When the Germans invaded her native France, Delbo was far away, on tour with a theater company in Brazil.
When she returned to her homeland, she joined her husband, Georges Dudach, in the Resistance. Dudach was arrested in March 1942 and shot that May.
Delbo was sent to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.
While imprisoned at the former, Delbo wrote that she and the other women there were 'larvae' whose blankets were 'shrouds.' "After the war Delbo returned to France, giving powerful voice to the lives of those who had perished.
Of her day of freedom from Ravensbrück, she wrote: 'I know why the flowers, the sky, the sun were beautiful, and human voices deeply moving.
The earth was beautiful in having been found again.'
Yet for Delbo, the earth as she had known it could never be found again.
For her, it was impossible to return 'from a world beyond knowledge.' "