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

And then, after describing how patiently the children had put up with the conditions in the bunker in which they were destined to die, she reports, ‘Last night the Führer took off his gold badge and pinned it on me. I am proud and happy.’

Goebbels, too, in the farewell letter to his stepson, goes on about the Führer’s gold badge and how it has been given to Harald’s mother.

Both these letters were spirited out of encircled Berlin by Hanna Reitsch. If he had sent the letter a day later, after Hitler had signed his testament listing the appointments in his new government, Goebbels could have told Harald about his culminating moment of destiny. Everything was jumbled together in that underground complex: genuine despair and posturing, fanaticism, hypocrisy and death.

Goebbels was sometimes called the Führer’s faithful dog. Well, Hitler tried out the poisonous ampoule on his beloved sheepdog, Blondi. Similarly, he kept Goebbels and his family close to him to the last, until it was too late for them to do anything about their predicament. With each successive betrayal of the Führer by his accomplices, Goebbels moved a rung up the ladder towards his ultimate ambition of becoming the second in command in the Reich. At last, on the day after Hitler’s wedding, when Red Army soldiers were already in the Reichstag, Hitler awarded Goebbels the post of Reich Chancellor of a defunct empire. The pantomime continued. Goebbels accepted the top job, only a day later to follow Hitler to the grave.

Sergeant Major Tornow came one last time to chef Lange for food for the puppies. Having the day before informed the cook of the death of the Führer, he was back with a similar message. Lange told us,

He came to the Reich Chancellery kitchen at 8 or 9 on the evening of 1 May and informed me that Goebbels and his wife had killed themselves in the garden near the Führer’s bunker. Sergeant Major Tornow told me no further details… In the evening of 1 May Sergeant Major Tornow was about to leave the Reich Chancellery and try to break through the ring of encirclement of Red Army units. Whether he managed to do so, I do not know.

Those fleeing the underground complex made their way to Wilhelmplatz, and there walked along the metro track to Friedrichstrasse. From there they needed to break through in the wake of Mohnke’s combat group, but intensive artillery shelling made any mass breakthrough impossible. They broke through in groups.

Günsche:

Together with the Führer’s secretaries, Frau Christian and Frau Junge, the Führer’s dietitian, Fräulein Manziarly, and Bormann’s secretary, Fräulein Kruger, I was to break through to the north in Mohnke’s group. The breakthrough began at 22.00 hrs. Our group reached the area of Wedding railway station, where it encountered enemy resistance. After regrouping, towards noon on 2 May 45 we reached the Schultheis Brewery near the station. Among the soldiers who were there, rumours were circulating that Berlin had capitulated, and demoralization was evident among them.

The four women with us were now released by SS Brigadeführer Mohnke and immediately left the brewery. Where they went I do not know. I was taken prisoner at the Schultheis Brewery.

A group consisting of Bormann, Rattenhuber, Stumpfegger and Hitler’s driver, Kempka, made their way under cover of a tank but a grenade thrown from a window hit the left side of the tank where Bormann and Stumpfegger were walking and the explosion felled both of them, according to eyewitness testimony. ‘I was wounded,’ Rattenhuber writes, ‘and was taken prisoner by the Russians.’

Rumours that Hitler was dead leaked from the Führer’s bunker to the shelter under the Reich Chancellery, which was connected to it, but the circumstances of his death were kept secret. In an attempt to keep up the myth of the Führer’s greatness, his successor, Grand Admiral Dönitz, declared that Hitler had fallen, fighting at the head of the defenders of Berlin.

General Weidling, when he heard Hitler had committed suicide, considered such a demise unacceptable for a commander whose troops were still fighting. On the night of 1 May he sent representatives to parley. Early on the morning of 2 May, Weidling crossed the front line into Russian-held territory, from where he addressed an order to the Berlin garrison:

On 30 April the Führer committed suicide and thus left us, who had sworn allegiance to him, abandoned. The Führer ordered that we, the German troops, should continue to fight for Berlin, despite the fact that military supplies are exhausted and despite the general situation, which makes further resistance senseless. I order you to cease resistance immediately.

On 2 May Berlin capitulated.

When tyrants die, there is initial bewilderment: how is this possible? Can it really be that even they consist of mortal molecules? What comes next is that, if everything about the circumstances is not totally clear, their death becomes encrusted with legends. In the case of Hitler, there was plenty of opportunity for that to happen.

But it did not turn out the way Grand Admiral Dönitz had in mind. Hitler had bequeathed supreme authority to him, and he concocted what he knew to be a lie for a special announcement over the radio on 1 May 1945: Hitler had fallen in battle leading the defenders of Berlin, the capital city of the German Reich.

Neither was Hitler’s end as described in a sensational book, I Burned Hitler, by his driver, Erich Kempka, where the shot that rings out and the crimson flowers in a vase fuse into a single emblem.

Neither was it as summarized by the British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper in his serious study:

Whatever the explanation, Hitler achieved his last ambition. Like Alaric (who destroyed Rome in 410), buried secretly under the riverbed of Busento, the modern destroyer of mankind is now immune from discovery. [1] Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London: Macmillan, 1947, p. 207. https://archive.org/stream/TrevorRoperHughTheLastDaysOfHitler/Trevor-Roper%20Hugh%20-%20The%20last%20days%20of%20Hitler_djvu.txt Accessed 8 November 2017. Tr.

Life of a sort was going on above ground while we were still delving into the details of the last days of the Reich Chancellery. One day we stopped on the outskirts of Berlin, where several staff headquarters departments were located. Beside a house we had been instructed to occupy stood a cart laden with odds and ends and groceries, and with a red-white-green tricolour Italian flag on the front. A cow tethered to the cart waited patiently for its owners.

We went upstairs to an apartment from which music was coming. All the doors were wide open. In a large room Italians were sitting in tattered, dirty clothes, clutching big cardboard boxes on their knees and listening dreamily to the music. Their young, mop-headed musician was hammering the keys of a piano with gusto. A splendid doll, extracted from a box the same as all the others had, was sitting on the piano in front of him. On their way here, the Italians had passed a wholesale toy depot, and each had helped himself to a doll.

They noticed us and rose noisily from their seats. In reply to questions addressed to them in German, they obstinately shook their heads, not wanting to speak the language of the enemy. A cascade of gestures and exclamations washed over us. They were explaining something, putting their hands on their hearts. The musician seized the doll on the piano and presented it to me, and they all made a great noise and slapped him approvingly on the back.

They left, humming and taking with them the large boxes with the dolls. Their cart was waiting for them downstairs with their luggage and the cow which was to feed its new owners on their long journey back to Italy.