Read Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany Online
Authors: Emma Craigie,Jonathan Mayo
Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (6 page)
This evening Magda has written to her oldest son, Harald. When his plane was shot down over Italy in 1944, he was missing for several months. The Goebbels were delighted when they finally learned that he had been captured by the British, which they consider the safest possible outcome, though they don’t know where he is being held. He is in fact in the prisoner-of-war camp in Latimer House, Buckinghamshire, where he is very popular with the young RAF officers who interrogate him. Latimer House is a camp for high-ranking Germans and Harald, who is there because of his family connections rather than his rank, is much younger and more affable than most of his fellow prisoners.
Magda Goebbels tries to explain to Harald why she has brought his younger brother and sisters into the bunker:
‘The world which will succeed National Socialism is not worth living in and for this reason I have brought the children here too. They are too good for the life that will come after us and a gracious God will understand me if I myself give them release from it…
‘Be proud of us … Everyone must die one day and is it not better to live a fine, honourable, brave but short life than drag out a long life of humiliation?
‘My Beloved Son
‘Live for Germany!
‘Your Mother’
Joseph Goebbels has also written to his stepson. He tells him that he should be proud of his mother. He also warns him:
‘Do not let yourself be disconcerted by the worldwide clamour which will now begin. One day the lies will crumble away of themselves and the truth will triumph once more. That will be the moment when we shall tower over all, clean and spotless, as we have always striven to be and believed ourselves to be…
‘May you always be proud of having belonged to a family
which, even in misfortune, remained loyal to the very end to the Führer and his pure sacred cause.’
He signs off with the words, ‘All good things and my heart-felt greetings, Your Papa.’
Magda and Joseph entrust these letters to Hanna Reitsch, and Magda also gives her a diamond ring. Hitler’s parting gift to Reitsch is a cyanide capsule.
In his study, Hitler is talking to Heinz Linge, his valet.
‘I would like to let you return to your family.’
‘
Mein Führer
, I have been with you in good times, and I want to stay with you in the bad,’ Linge replies.
Thirty-two-year-old Linge was a bricklayer in Bremen when the glamour of the Waffen SS inspired him to join up. Having been sent to guard Hitler’s mountain residence, the Berghof, he was selected to be Hitler’s chief valet shortly after war broke out in 1939. Linge is a subdued, steadfast man with a large, round face and pale-blue eyes. He is devoted to the Führer, and tells people, ‘I couldn’t have a better master.’
Hitler looks at him calmly. ‘I did not expect anything else from you.’
He pauses and leans against his writing desk. ‘I have another personal job for you. What I must do now is what I have ordered every commander to do: hold out to the death. This order also applies to me, since I feel that I am here as the Commandant of Berlin…’
Linge’s head is swimming.
‘You should put two blankets in my bedroom and get hold of enough petrol for two cremations. I am going to shoot myself here together with Eva Braun. You will wrap our bodies in woollen blankets, carry them up to the garden, and there burn them.’
Linge is trembling. He stutters his reply: ‘
Jawohl
,
Mein Führer!
’ and leaves the room.
During these last weeks in the Führerbunker Hitler has spent most of his time in his study. It is a small room with an oppressively low ceiling. There’s a desk and a stiff upright sofa, more like a wooden bench, upholstered in blue and white linen. There is a small rectangular table where he eats his meals with the secretaries, and a side table with a radio. He has a portrait of Frederick the Great on the wall. The wall of the corridor outside is also hung with valuable paintings which have been brought down from the Reich Chancellery for safety. The concrete floor of the corridor is lined with a red carpet and there are comfortable armchairs in which Hitler’s generals often drink and sleep. The bunker’s diesel generator is across the corridor and fills the Führerbunker with the drone of its engine and the stench of its fuel
.
In London, thousands of people are sleeping on the platforms of the Underground. Over the last five years a real community spirit has flourished – there are bunk beds, toilets and even libraries. The menace of V1 (
Vergeltungswaffe-1
, Retaliation Weapon 1) flying bombs and V2 rockets is over. Churchill himself said so in the House of Commons on 26th April.
The last fatality as a result of Hitler’s vengeance weapons was on 27th March. Thirty-four-year-old Ivy Millichamp of 88 Kynaston Road, Orpington (the town had suffered disproportionately as the Germans had been fooled into setting the wrong coordinates in order to hit central London) had gone into the kitchen to boil a
kettle when a V2 landed on the street. Seventy people were injured. Ivy Millichamp’s husband, asleep in the front room, survived. Ivy was killed outright
.
Despite Churchill’s announcement that the threat is over, thousands are choosing to stay underground at night. Mass Observation – an organisation set up to gauge public opinion explained the appeal: ‘Some come from solitary bed-sitting rooms with a gas-ring, and find they can spend evenings in light and gaiety, surrounded by company.’
In Berlin Robert Ritter von Greim and Hanna Reitsch climb out of the armoured vehicle which has brought them to the Brandenburg Gate, where a light aircraft is waiting. They squash into the small two-seater plane. Reitsch is at the controls with von Greim behind her, his crutches jammed down by his feet. They set off down the makeshift Tiergarten runway. The plane picks up speed and soars into the night sky. It’s immediately illuminated by Russian searchlights and comes under fire – but they make it into the clouds. Reitsch looks down at the cloud bank, shining in the silver moonlight, ‘still, serene, idyllic’, and thinks that it looks like a giant quilt wrapped over the flaming city. She heads for Rechlin airfield, where von Greim will issue his first instructions for the Luftwaffe.
Hanna Reitsch is the only woman to be awarded the German Iron Cross (First Class). She won it for her bravery as a test pilot. Before and after the war she set more than 40 gliding and altitude records. In February 1944 she suggested to Hitler that the Luftwaffe develop a plan she called Operation Suicide, in which pilots sacrificed their lives for the Fatherland in the style of Japanese kamikaze pilots.
Hitler agreed to the plan but, to Reitsch’s disappointment, felt that it wasn’t the right ‘psychological’ moment to put it into operation
.
Following Hitler’s instructions, Heinz Linge puts through a call to Hitler’s driver, Erich Kempka, in the underground car park, to ask him to source some petrol.
‘Petrol?’
‘Yes, petrol. We need about 200 litres.’
‘A mere 200 litres?’ Kempka quips sarcastically. Petrol is desperately scarce. ‘Is this a joke? What are you going to do with 200 litres of petrol?’
‘Believe me, Erich, I cannot tell you on the phone, but this is not a joke. We need 200 litres of petrol delivered to the exit of the Führerbunker as soon as possible. Do whatever you need to do to get hold of it.’
Linge puts down the phone and pours himself a couple of glasses of schnapps to help him get over the shock of the implication of this order.
Kempka orders an assistant to syphon off whatever remnants of petrol he can find in the cars in the underground garages. The concrete roof has fallen in and most of the cars are covered in masonry.
1.00am
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler emerge from their rooms, her arm through his. She is in her black dress. It is a simple, elegant
dress, decorated around the neck with sequins. Black is the traditional colour of German wedding dresses, though white is now more fashionable. As a girl, dreaming of marriage, Eva was photographed dressing up in her grandmother’s black lace wedding dress. Hitler has not changed his clothes and is wearing his usual black trousers and grey military jacket. Walther Wagner, the civil magistrate, greets them nervously. The couple take their seats on one side of the empty map table, flanked by their witnesses; Wagner sits opposite.
Braun and Hitler met in October 1929 at the Hoffman photographic studio in Munich shortly after she had started working there as an assistant. Hitler was one of Hoffman’s main customers, commissioning endless propaganda portraits. She was 17 and he was 40. One day he came into the studio, wearing his beige belted Burberry raincoat just as she was climbing a ladder to reach some files from a top shelf. Braun was embarrassed because she had shortened her skirt that morning and she could tell that the man with the ‘funny moustache’ was looking at her legs. She was worried that he would notice that her hem was uneven
.
1929 was the year when Hitler became a household name in Germany and the Nazi Party’s popularity began to soar as German unemployment rose in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. Eva Braun was soon in love with this increasingly powerful man and did all she could to insinuate herself into his circle. From about 1931 Hitler started to invite Braun to cafés, to the opera, and eventually to stay
.
The first four years of their relationship were very difficult for Eva Braun. Hitler showed her very little interest or concern. She stayed in Munich, working at the photographic studio, living with her strict Catholic parents, while he worked in Berlin, surrounding himself with adoring fans. He rarely called. He frequently let her down. Twice she attempted suicide, and it was after the second
attempt in May 1935, when her sister Ilse found her in a coma, after she had taken an overdose of the sedative Vanodorm, that he decided to accept her as his official mistress
.
Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was always hidden from the public, but it was now made known to his staff and immediate circle. He bought her a house in Wasserstrasse in Munich and in the following months had a suite of rooms refurbished for her in the Berghof, his mountain home in Obersalzberg. She still had to hide away when there were official visitors, but privately she became mistress of the Berghof. Their relationship became steady, comfortable. She knew that her job was to keep him relaxed, and she was good at it. He loved her quality of ‘
Gemütlichkeit’,
cosiness. He used to say, ‘Eva gives me a rest. She keeps my mind off things I don’t want to think about.’ Always a passionate photographer and film maker who loved to star in her own home movies, Eva Braun dreamed of Hollywood. She would tell people, ‘When the Chief has won the war, I can play my own part in the film of our life story.’
Braun’s nickname for Hitler is Chief (German ‘
Chef
’); he calls her ‘
Tschapperl
’ which translates as ‘wench, bumpkin or idiot’
.
The two-page marriage certificate is laid out on the map table in the Führerbunker conference room. Wagner reads out the preliminary questions about the couple and fills in the information with a thick blue-ink pen. Hitler omits the names of his parents and gives his address as the Reich Chancellery. Braun, apparently flustered, gives two different street numbers – 8 and 12 – as her address on Wasserstrasse (12 is correct). Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann give their details as witnesses. The bride and groom are then asked to confirm that they are of ‘pure Aryan descent and free of any hereditary diseases that would exclude them from marriage’.
Hitler’s descent, and in particular the absence of any hereditary
diseases, was in fact very much in doubt. His paternal grandmother was unmarried at the time of his father’s birth and the identity of his paternal grandfather was never confirmed, but it was widely believed to be his foster father, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, whose surname he took. The change of spelling to Hitler was thanks to a phonetic transcription by the pastor of Döllersheim who kept the register of births and deaths. Johann Nepomuk Hiedler was also the grandfather of Hitler’s mother, Klara, so that Hitler’s parents seem to have been uncle and niece. The family was certainly beset with health issues. Adolf was one of only two of their six children to survive childhood. The other, his sister Paula, had a learning disability. Hitler himself is believed to have had two forms of genital abnormality: an undescended testicle and a rare condition called penile hypospadias in which the urethra opens on the underside of the penis or, in some cases, on the perineum. The popular British army marching song, sung to the tune of Colonel Bogey, that began, ‘Hitler has only got one ball/The other is in the Albert Hall’, may have been more accurate than the troops ever imagined
.
Having received satisfactory responses, Walther Wagner then reads out the marriage vows: ‘
Mein Führer
, Adolf Hitler, are you willing to take Fräulein Eva Braun as your wife? If you are, answer, “I do”.’
Adolf Hitler repeats, ‘I do.’
‘Fräulein Eva Braun, are you willing to take our Führer, Adolf Hitler, as your husband? If you are, answer, “I do”.’
Eva Braun repeats, ‘I do.’
Hitler places a gold ring on Eva’s finger, and she places one on his. The rings have been taken from the bodies of murdered Gestapo prisoners. The couple discover the rings (hastily obtained from the Gestapo treasury) are too big.
Wagner then declares ‘this marriage is legal before the law’. When he drew up the document Wagner expected the ceremony
would be completed before midnight and he dated it ‘28 April 1945’. He now handwrites ‘29’ on top of the ‘28’. Then he passes the pen to Hitler as the first named and the first to sign.
The two words ‘Adolf’ and ‘Hitler’, side by side and far apart, both slope steeply downward. ‘Adolf’ is diminished to three zigzag lines with a cross, representing the horizontal of the ‘f’, on the lowest line. ‘Hitler’ is more ornate, beginning with a complex loop, but the following letters are tightly compacted.