There was complete silence as the doctor went about his duties
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There was complete silence as the doctor went about his duties. He was polite and gentle; the prisoner was wary but co-operative. As a matter of routine, Wells had examined the prisoner's heart and chest, between his buttocks, his nostrils, ears, the webs of his small and sensitive hands and feet. For reasons to do with treating his patient with dignity, Capt Wells had refused to examine Himmler's rectum - a well-known place for hiding poison - and, extraordinarily, his commanding officer had not insisted.Staring defiantly from behind his granny glasses, Himmler followed Capt Wells's eyes and movements intently. When, for the second time, Wells began to probe his mouth, he realised that the game was up. The tiny blue cyanide capsule hidden in the fold of his cheek had been seen, and he clamped his teeth on the doctor's finger For a moment, they struggled. Then Himmler wrenched the doctor's hand from his mouth, swung his head away and, facing the doctor with almost deliberate disdain, crushed the glass capsule between his teeth and took a deep breath.The time was 11.14pm It was all over. Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Him-mler, chief of German police, minister of the interior, commander-in-chief of the home forces - the second most powerful man in the Nazi Reich - was dying.According to Wells, Himmler's face immediately became deep purple and contorted with pain.
His vena cava stood out, his eyes stared glassily, his head fell forward and he crashed to the ground. As he fell, his glasses came off his nose and skidded across the floor. Distraught at losing a life that had been put in his care Capt Wells exclaimed: "My God. He has done it on me."Company Sergeant Major Edwin Austin, the only other person in the room, picked up the glasses, placed them in his tunic pocket and triumphantly mouthed "souvenir" to the doctor. They were later retrieved and put back on Himmler's nose when he was propped up with a pillow for official photographs that were published in newspapers throughout the world. Who would have recognised Himmler without his glasses?In a previously unpublished account written for his wife, Vera, shortly after the event, Capt Wells described the catastrophic moment: "The dramatic rapidity of death I anticipated but slightly. There were a slowing series of stertorous breaths which may have continued for half a minute, and the pulse for another minute after that.
The stench coming from Himmler's mouth was unmistakably that of hydrocyanic, and the dose must have been enough to kill an elephant."There was a basin of water in the room, and Capt Wells, helped by Sgt Maj Austin, up-ended the body and mopped out Himmler's mouth with a sodden handkerchief. Then, as the patient's breathing faltered, he gave him a burst of artificial respiration. It was an automatic reflex which he knew was useless."I felt a vague surge of distinct anger. Not because I had been outwitted but oddly enough because of a feeling of contempt and disgust that a man in his position should choose this way out from the wreck and torture which he had had such a large hand in creating. I could not see a Churchill or Montgomery, or a thousand others, under any circumstances even contemplating such an action."I FIRST met Jimmie Wells in 1961, when I moved to Oxfordshire. I would go up to his house, drink hock with him and talk in his cosy, chintzy sitting-room; we became friends. And as I had been a correspondent in Berlin from 1942 to 1945 for the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tid-ende, I was, naturally, very interested to hear his first-hand account of Himmler's end.Dr Wells's role in Himmler's final drama had begun at 10pm that blisteringly cold May night - cold enough "to blow the varnish off the mantlepiece", he wrote - when a message blared out over the camp Tannoy, ordering Wells to report to Police Headquarters.
