Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

According to testimony from Hitler’s entourage, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area, Helmuth Weidling, asked Hitler to leave the city so it could cease fighting before it had been completely destroyed. Hitler was vanquished, crushed, dead – but even so he was determined to pull everyone else down with him. Let everything perish! ‘The Allies’, he declared, ‘will find in Germany nothing but ruins, rats, famine and death.’

No matter how the Nazi district leaders trembled before Bormann, growing despair is increasingly open in the reports preserved in his folder. The reports become more perfunctory, more poignant: the enemy shelling is intolerable, there are heavy losses, a shortage of weapons. It is impossible to withstand the onslaught of Russian troops. Nobody took any notice.

Here, in the bomb shelter, what Reitsch called ‘the Suicide Committee’ had already met, but Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt, dated 27 April, makes a sordid, blustering appeal to Berliners. ‘Bravo, Berliners! Berlin will remain German!’ It makes knowingly false promises of help to come:

Already armies are moving in to Berlin from all directions, ready to defend the capital, to inflict a conclusive defeat on the Bolsheviks and, at the last moment, change our city’s destiny. The reports coming in from the outside world testify to their progress. The fighting units advancing here know how eagerly Berlin is waiting for them. They will continue to fight fanatically to rescue us. The Führer himself stands at the head of the defence of Berlin.

Let us take a look in Bormann’s diary. The tone of the entry for that same day, 27 April, is completely different. It is quite unlike earlier entries, which usually consist of information and, the only evidence of emotion, exclamation marks.

Friday, 27 April

Himmler and Jodl are holding back on sending divisions to us.

We shall fight and die with our Führer – devoted to him to the grave.

Others are thinking of acting in the light of ‘higher considerations’, sacrificing their Führer. Phew – what swine! They have lost all sense of honour.

Our Reich Chancellery is being destroyed.

The world is now hanging by a thread.

The Allies are demanding unconditional surrender from us – that would be a betrayal of the Fatherland!

Fegelein is going to pieces; he tried to escape from Berlin dressed in civilian clothes.

People gave assurances to the Führer that they would follow him to the grave, and even made entries to that effect in their diaries, but had no intention of dying. As can be seen from Bormann’s telegram to his adjutant, Hummel, he had arranged a bolthole for himself far from Germany. In short, they were preparing to act to save their own skins, but being held back by Hitler.

A foreign radio station broadcast a detailed Reuters report about Himmler’s proposal of a separate peace to the British and American governments. Typed up by Gertraud Junge (enormous letters) it was handed to Hitler. His Majesty’s Government emphasized once again that it could talk only about an unconditional surrender offered to all three Great Powers, between which there was the closest unanimity. This response indirectly struck a blow at his own plan.

On 29 April, following the departure of Greim, the information finally reached the Reich Chancellery that Wenck’s army had been routed. Rattenhuber writes:

At that, all our hopes of rescue foundered. Our troops’ attempt to break through to Berlin had proved unsuccessful. The theatricality of the situation was heightened by the fact that Hitler was receiving all these reports to the accompaniment of Russian heavy artillery shells exploding on the territory of the Reich Chancellery. That day it was terrible to look at Hitler.

Günsche, the Führer’s SS adjutant, writes in his testimony,

After the breakthrough of Russian motorized units in the area of Anhalt Station and Königsplatz, the Führer became anxious to lose no time before committing suicide. It could be only a matter of a few hours before Russian tanks would suddenly appear in front of the concrete bunker.

On the night of 28 April, Hitler arranged his wedding ceremony. He had had a relationship with Eva Braun for over ten years. She had been working at the photographic studio in Munich of Heinrich Hoffman, who later became rich by having a monopoly on photographing the Führer. Together with Hoffmann, Eva accompanied Hitler, who greatly enjoyed being photographed, on propaganda trips before he seized power. Hitler installed her in his Berchtesgaden castle, and there she ruled the roost. In Berlin he lived alone: Nazi propaganda celebrated the Führer’s asceticism.

Pilot Hanna Reitsch, who at that time was devoted to Hitler, observing Eva Braun in the underground complex was shocked when she saw the intimacy her Führer shared with a woman of ‘such negligible mental faculties’. According to Reitsch, she was totally absorbed in grooming herself, and constantly repeated that it was essential to kill all those ‘ungrateful swine’ who had left the bunker because they were ‘incapable of committing suicide’. In Hitler’s presence she was obliging and said little. ‘She did everything she could to ensure his comfort.’

Until then, the existence of Eva Braun had not been public knowledge. She was neither a wife nor an acknowledged mistress and always stayed in the shadows, at a distance. In the middle of April, however, she resolutely and unexpectedly threw caution to the winds and demonstratively appeared in the underground complex. The surmise is that this was not only in order to share a grim period with him, but finally to attain the unattainable, the thing she so agonizingly aspired to: to become truly the wife of the Führer.

Until Hitler took the decision to commit suicide, though, there was no mention of matrimony. It was only after he took that decision irrevocably that a marriage ceremony and reception were hastily arranged. This may have been Eva Braun’s condition for agreeing to die with him. She paid with her life to achieve the goal of becoming the Führer’s wife.

Hitler, although a Catholic by birth, persecuted the Church to prevent God from becoming a nuisance and stopping Adolf Hitler from rising to equal prominence. He will hardly have felt any obligation to atone for having ‘lived in sin’. More likely he wanted to look better in the eyes of history, since his meticulously concealed relations had become obvious. This comes through in his ‘personal will’. Hitler begins by explaining that he had believed he should not take on such a serious responsibility as marriage, but had now decided before dying to marry the woman who was to share his destiny. Behind these words we detect a compensation to Eva Braun for her willingness to die at his side. It would, after all, be less frightening if there were two of them, and no doubt this highly strung mystic and neuropath would also find it easier to bite the ampoule in a state of exaltation after a marriage ceremony.

When Hanna Reitsch, who had left the shelter a few hours previously, was told about the wedding she could not believe her ears. She said, ‘Conditions in the bunker in those last days would have made the ceremony comical.’ But take place it did: Hitler’s last ‘historic act’.

Outside the walls of the Reich Chancellery, German soldiers were fighting. Nearby, at Potsdamerplatz and in the underground stations, the wounded were in a state of collapse, without food or water. Hitler had thrown his last reserve into battle at the Pichelsdorf Bridge: adolescents from the Hitler Youth. German boys were sent to defend the Reich Chancellery. It was one of the most shameful acts of villainy of those days. ‘The children’s friend’, as the propaganda represented the Führer, praised them and sent them into a senseless battle, achieving nothing more than depriving the nation of future citizens. But then Hitler did not foresee a future for Germany. He declared, ‘In the event of defeat, the Germans will not deserve to live.’