Hitler's Last Witness (22 page)

The room containing the telephone exchange was open to the whole floor, therefore without door, curtain or other screening. Apart from the junction box, there was a telex machine, a scrambler and two Silenta typewriters, extra quiet and used by Hitler's secretaries. Additionally, on the stool in front of the distributor box, there was another place to sit. Once down here, this room was the only contact with the outside world. One could no longer see or hear what was happening above – no matter what.

As well as the telephone room, there were four others. The corridor to them could be closed by a door, but this mostly stood open. First, one came into an anteroom with a table and four chairs on the left-hand side. From this anteroom it was possible to access another room, occupied by Dr Morell, and later Goebbels. To the right the corridor went down to Linge's room and a rather larger surgery and dressing station, where the most important medical utensils, instruments and medication were kept.

One reached Hitler's rooms from the second floor. The first door on the left led immediately into a lobby. Linge held himself in readiness there for assignments; he also used it for writing and serving meals. From there, one went left into a room intended as Hitler's dressing room but which was taken by Eva Braun. The lobby led into Hitler's study and living rooms. Even these rooms were only 3.5 by 3.2 metres in size. In the living room, a sofa and three chairs were squashed together. The big furniture pieces made the room look more cramped than it actually was. From this part of the suite, one turned right into Hitler's bedroom, with the bed in the far corner. There was a bell above the night table to summon Linge whenever he was needed, and near the bed was an oxygen bottle.

The first time I was below with Gretz, I did not take a great deal of notice of Hitler's rooms. Everything looked very unreal to me. Later, after Hitler had moved in, I never went into his private rooms again.
*

On the other side of the lobby, one crossed a small floor with a narrow clothing compartment into a wetroom with toilet and shower, then reached Eva's room. Here, too, tortoiseshell lamps hung from the ceiling. The bright glare nipped in the bud any hint of snugness which the furniture introduced from the Führer-suite should have provided. It made everything look only more repulsive.

From the central corridor, the second door left led into the map room in which, in the final weeks, military situation conferences were held despite its tightness. The room was hardly larger than the others, maybe 4 by 3.6 metres. In the middle was a large table, and narrow benches were fitted along the walls. If the overall situation was being discussed, so many people entered that the participants had to stand to deliver their reports to Hitler, who would be seated. Often the table would be carried out into the central corridor, and the situation conference continued there.

After the first tour with Gretz, I was greatly relieved to step out into the garden through the emergency exit. Strewn around were all kinds of equipment, including shovels and spades stuck in the ground. The bunker was still being worked on – an observation tower at its centre. Then I looked up at the clouds. Fresh air, daylight. I began to sense what it meant to have to endure this over a long period of time, and I also realised that for me such a time was dawning.

Up and Down

At first, the bunker was uninhabited. Not even Hitler lived there. Until a direct hit by a heavy bomb made it impossible, he ate and slept in his flat on the first floor of the Old Chancellery. When the air-raid warning went off, Hitler would not go down into the deep bunker, but only to the air-raid shelter and even then he would leave the shelter as soon as they gave the ‘All-clear'. Often when there was a warning he would go to the upper rooms ‘for a better picture of the attack', as he would say. Once he even took my colleague Joseph ‘Joschi' Graf into the open air during an air raid. Poor Joschi was appalled and tried desperately to make Hitler seek shelter, ‘
Ach was
, nothing can happen to me', was his stock reply. Even in the heart of the inferno, always the same old reply. Joschi pointed to the rain of flak splinters falling over the Reich Chancellery, but it made no impression on Hitler.

We would wait in suspense for the incoming reports on the military situation, but increasingly without any great hope. On 11 March, Hitler made a surprise visit to Ninth Army HQ at Saarow, between Frankfurt on the Oder and Berlin. It was his last visit to the troops at the front.

The daily situation conferences would now begin towards three in the afternoon. They were usually held in Hitler's study in the New Chancellery – the conference room in the Old Chancellery having been badly damaged in air raids. The first conference of the day would last two or three hours. Towards midnight or one, Hitler would hold a night situation conference.

Hitler was constantly preparing new strategies to turn the tide at the last hour. Nobody within the bodyguard believed in such a miracle any longer. It was just a question of ‘how' defeat would come about. What fate was in store for us the vanquished, and especially those of us in Hitler's closest circle?

Around mid-March, Eva Braun arrived at the Reich Chancellery. She stayed only a short while, but then resurfaced a second time to everybody's surprise a few days later. It appeared that nobody had been informed – Hitler included. He was anything but delighted when she turned up again, and he did everything he could to convince her to return to Munich. Everybody else prevailed upon to go did so, but all his efforts here were in vain. Eva Braun made it clear to him that her place was at his side, and nobody would make her change her mind. She seemed absolutely determined on the matter. My colleagues sighed, but I was really quite pleased she was there. Her almost perpetual cheerful mood would do much to brighten up the gloomy atmosphere. All the same, I did wonder about her decision. It had not been long, perhaps a month ago, when she had first arrived and I had been instructed to take her with all her baggage back to the station. ‘
Ach
, what would I do in Berlin anyway,' she had said. ‘There are only bomb craters here.'

Soon after her second appearance she came to me in the lobby and handed me her watch: ‘
Ach
, please, it doesn't work.'

‘I'll have it seen to,' I promised. She handed it to me, a small watch of white gold, the face enclosed by diamonds. I took it to a jeweller in the Friedrichs-Strasse and collected it the next afternoon. The jeweller Wiese was still going, and so now was Eva's watch. I had a servant take it to her, and I was happy to have been of small service to her.

On the night of 12 April 1945, after the late situation conference, I met press secretary Heinz Lorenz. He was very excited and brandished a telex in front of my nose. After he came back from seeing the Führer, he told me that Franklin Roosevelt was dead. Lorenz said that, upon receiving the news, Hitler had jumped up, but then commented soberly: ‘A half year too late.' Nevertheless, he mentioned having had a presentiment about it. Goebbels seemed to find new hope in Roosevelt's death. Once again, the talk was of ‘a turn' in events.

Of course, there was nothing at all in the days that followed which pointed to such a turn. I took ever less interest in my service instructions, which required me to eavesdrop telephone conversations infrequently to check the tone quality, and now I listened into everything. I was constantly on the watch for something new. It was all totally clear: the Western Allies were maintaining the military pressure relentlessly in order to obtain the unconditional surrender of Germany. Nothing suggested we might achieve a separate peace at the last minute. To the very end, Hitler could not understand why the British would not unite with him against Bolshevism.

Since February, my work hours could not have been considered normal. They were adapted to Hitler's rhythms, in which night became day, and day became night. The last situation conference seldom began before midnight and lasted into the early hours.

The cellar and bunker rooms were filling noticeably. It seemed to me that all members of the state and Party leadership were being given quarters here, in addition to their junior adjutants, who inhabited the catacombs in the New Reich Chancellery. The first rooms that one reached at the end of Kannenberg-Allee were those of Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below, Otto Günsche and General Wilhelm Burgdorf. In this stretch were also to be found the domains of Martin Bormann and his co-workers – the half-brothers Wilhelm Zander and Alwin-Broder Albrecht.

Much further on were the rooms of the female secretaries – Gerda Christian, Christa Schroeder, Traudl Junge and Johanna Wolf. These were adjacent to the offices of Himmler's liaison officer Hermann Fegelein, General Hans Krebs and Major Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven. Finally, rooms had been allotted to Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss, diplomat Walther Hewel and Hitler's pilots Hans Baur and Georg Betz. The remaining rooms were for the house staff. Right at the end of this cellar, behind the officers' mess and the garages, were the living quarters for the staff of the motor pool and the office of Hitler's driver Erich Kempka. In one of the large cellar rooms with access to Voss-Strasse, an emergency hospital had been set up. Many civilians sought treatment there – the dressing station was quickly filled to overflowing. I only came to this part of the catacombs once, and briefly.

So, there we sat – like the German people – in cellars, and above us the land lay in ruins.

*
Misch must mean here ‘in Hitler's lifetime', since he went into the study – the death room – immediately after the suicide. (TN)

Chapter Thirteen

Bunker Life: The Last Fortnight of April 1945

SOMETIME IN MID-APRIL, ‘BUNKER
life' began. Hitler descended into the place where he would die. Eva never left his side, and lived from then on in his dressing room. All situation conferences were now held in the Führerbunker map room and the bunker telephone switchboard had to be manned around the clock. Our SS bodyguard commander Schädle came up to me. I already suspected what he was going to say: ‘Misch, you are going down there with them.'

Reluctantly, I made my way with my sleeping mat into the new subterranean kingdom. On the way down into the Führerbunker, every step reinforced my bad feelings about the move. I was never claustrophobic, but since those days down there I understand the fear of confined spaces. While most of the steel doors were open most of the time, the last door down into the Führerbunker itself was always kept shut. In front of this last door, one of the bodyguard, occasionally with an RSD colleague, would be seated at a small table. The RSD were principally responsible for guarding the second exit – the emergency way out.

As I unrolled my sleeping mat for the first time in my new workplace deep underground, it occurred to me that we were now finally buried alive. I had my telephone lines, however. Now in the truest sense of the word I was going to ‘be on the phone all day' – it was my only contact with life outside the bunker. I was surrounded by cold, damp, glaring-white artificial light. To know that Hitler had to live and suffer under the same conditions was of little comfort. Or should I say gave me no comfort? Now it was no longer the time to think of others, not even the Führer. One had one's own problems to attend to.

Whenever possible I would go up to my old service room to sleep; only when there was nothing else for it did I lay out the mat in the bunker. Usually, I would be too dog-tired to notice whether my ‘bed' was really comfortable or not.

In a cellar room, directly under the entrance for vehicles, a dining hall had been set up. The kitchen staff had a big field kitchen in which they cooked tasty dishes for all the Reich Chancellery staff and the military hospital. Hot food was available all day – one could fetch it at any time. Only occasionally did I join the female secretaries to eat at the long wooden table in the corridor of the ante-bunker. Every day I could have eaten there the meals prepared in the small corner-kitchen of Frau Manziarly, Frau von Exner's successor, but that kind of diet-food was not really my thing.

I had no scheduled meal time. When I wanted my lunch break I would call my deputy Retzbach at the New Reich Chancellery switchboard, who would then come down. He did not like to be my No. 2. No wonder. There was a gloomy, depressed mood everywhere to be sure, but in the deep bunker it was worse. One could see the same thoughts in the eyes of everybody who had to come down to this – this funeral vault.

In it, I lodged. Because of where my workplace was situated, I could see whoever entered or left the Führerbunker – all the comings and goings. From now on, everybody who wanted to see Hitler had to come past my telephone switchboard. Beyond the situation conferences there were only short audiences. None lasted more than twenty minutes. Everybody wanted to get out of the bunker as quickly as possible. Even Mohnke, my former company commander, who had driven me to the Reich Chancellery on my first day there five years ago, could not find the time to exchange a few words with me after seeing Hitler. Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, valet Heinz Linge, Professor Theodor Morell, maintenance technician Joahnnes Hentschel and I – we were the inhabitants of the Führerbunker.

20 April 1945

It was Hitler's last birthday, his fifty-sixth. To congratulate him, Reich Youth leader Arthur Axmann had some young, highly decorated SS soldiers and about twenty Hitler Youth parade in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. I heard about it, but saw nothing of it. I never went up the whole day. I sat at my switchboard and just could not get away from telephone calls bringing birthday wishes. Hentschel's diesel engine and my head throbbed in competition. The ventilation system ran incessantly.