Christa Schroeder - He Was My Chief - The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Secretary

I am very annoyed with Albrecht. [138] Alwin-Broder Albrecht (b. 18.9.1903 St Peter/Freisland). 27.6.1938◦– 30.6.1939 as Korvettenkapitän deputised for Jesko von Puttkamer as Hitler’s liaison officer to the German navy; 30.6.1939 following an altercation between Raeder and Hitler discharged from Wehrmacht service but retained the right to wear naval uniform; 1.7.1939 appointed personal adjutant to Hitler in rank of NSKK Oberführer, where he had responsibility amongst other things for building work at the Reich Chancellery; 1.5.1945 disappeared without trace. Eva is right in disliking him. As soon as I do not see to everything myself, nothing gets done. I expressly ordered that the new winding entrances to the bunker in Voss-Strasse should have iron underpinning. I asked Albrecht if it had been done. He said yes. Now I have just seen that the entrances have only been given a concrete foundation, which is senseless. I really cannot rely on anybody any more. It makes me ill. If I did not have Morell I would not be able to look after everything myself, and then I would be in a complete mess. And those idiots Brandt and Hasselbach wanted to get rid of Morell! What would have become of them the gentlemen failed to ask themselves. If anything happens to me Germany is lost, for I have no successor!

This talk of no successor was not new. After Hess went to Britain in 1941, Göring was the official successor, but Hitler did not think he was capable. I once argued with him when he said there was nobody who could be his successor. He replied that Hess had gone mad, Göring had lost the sympathy of the people, and the Party did not want Himmler. When I told him that Himmler was the name being mentioned by many people, he began to get annoyed. Himmler was a person with absolutely no feeling for music. To my objection that that was not so important nowadays, for the arts could supply competent people, he retorted that it was not so simple to do that or he would already have done it. From that I deduced that in Hitler’s opinion none of the proposed candidates would be considered as his successor. At the suggestion of Himmler he became angry and asked what had possessed me to say such a thing. It hurt his vanity that those of us who knew Himmler and himself should place Himmler on a par with him. He left offended, saying: ‘Keep on racking your brains for who should be my successor.’ On the subject of Morell, Hitler also stated that ‘without Morell he would be all out of joint and lost’, but towards the end of the war he did eventually become suspicious of Morell, and feared being poisoned by him. On 22 April 1945, Dr Morell was expelled from Berlin.

During my internment at Ludwigsburg Camp Dr Brandt arranged a brief meeting with me. He told me that the Americans had put him into a cell with Morell. He had told Morell: ‘You swine!’ which signified that he held Morell responsible for having ruined Hitler’s health. This would certainly not have been done on purpose. What was Morell to do when, as time went by, medicaments lost their potency on Hitler, who then demanded that Morell kept him able to work? Ultimately there was probably nothing else he could do but give in to Hitler’s wishes. Whether Morell took into account the possible side-effects is not known…

Albert Bormann, Martin Bormann’s brother, had meanwhile arrived at Obersalzberg from Berlin and was living in the Berchtesgadener Hof with his very pregnant wife. On the morning of 23 April 1945 he was summoned to Göring’s property above the Berghof. Afterwards Albert Bormann dictated to me the content of this conversation. Göring had asked him where the records of the situation conferences were kept. ‘They must be destroyed immediately’, he said, ‘or the German people will discover that for the last two years they have been led by a madman!’ Albert Bormann told me to type a string of dots in place of this sentence. He believed that Göring was intent on being Hitler’s successor.

That same evening the Berghof was suddenly surrounded by armed SS. Nobody was permitted to leave the house. My first thought was that Himmler had staged a coup. The men of the SS-Begleitkommando stood at the inner doors of the Berghof vestibule with machineguns at the ready and magazine pouches on their belts. Amongst them, with Stoic calm, was Konteradmiral von Puttkamer, a thick cigar clamped between his teeth. Nobody could explain why the Berghof had been surrounded. Some hours later after many unsuccessful telephone enquiries, an orderly managed to discover from the SS barracks higher up that Göring had been arrested. Radio communication to Berlin was no longer possible.

Wednesday 25 April 1945 was a sunny spring day with a cloudless sky. There were still some patches of snow lying around, but it was not cold. I had booked an appointment for 1000 with Bernhardt hairdressers in the Platterhof hotel. There was an acute danger of air attack but I decided to ignore it and stay in bed. In recent days aircraft had overflown the Berghof but not bombed. Towards 0930 the early warning alarm sounded. Straight away the sirens howled and at once American bombers [139] The planes were actually from the RAF, 617 Squadron. (TN) appeared over the Hohe Göll mountain and dropped bombs. One exploded nearby. I grabbed my handbag and coat and ran into Johanna Wolf ’s room, telling her to get to cover quickly. Without waiting I ran down the steps of the old building, or rather I flew down under the air pressure, to the bunker entrance only a few metres across the courtyard where sixty steps led down into the refuge. The second bomb fell at the side of the old house where our rooms were located and destroyed the stairway. Probably nobody had seriously considered that the Berghof would ever be attacked, and thus all were taken by surprise and many tumbled into the bunker only half dressed.

A half hour later the second wave arrived. The major attack on the Berghof began. The bombs rained down, many directly on the bunker. The explosions echoed eerily against the rocky mountainside. At each hit I ducked involuntarily. The technical installations of the bunker, so highly praised as secure, stopped working. The lighting and ventilation failed, and water began to enter the bunker by way of the steps. We feared that Frau Fegelein, who was within a week or so of giving birth, would miscarry. The chaos and fear were indescribable.

We left the bunker eventually at about 1430, slowly plodding up the sixty steps into the daylight. A picture of appalling destruction greeted us. The Berghof had been badly damaged. The walls still stood (only one side had been burst open) but the metal roof hung in ribbons. Doors and windows had disappeared. Inside the house the floor was thickly covered with debris and much of the furniture had been demolished. All the ancillary buildings had been destroyed, the paths scrambled to rubble, trees felled at the root. Nothing green remained, the scene was a crater landscape. [140] The first wave of bombers which came in over the Hohe Göll took out the flak and smoke batteries, the second wave dropped no less than 1,232 tons of bombs. The bunkers and underground galleries, up to a hundred metres down, were largely undamaged, and of the 3,500 potential victims in the area at the time, only six were killed. Seidler and Zeigert, Die Führerhauptquartiere , Herbig, p.270.

Since there was nothing habitable, Greta Fegelein and Herta Schneider moved into Eva Braun’s bunker, Johanna Wolf and I into Hitler’s. A few days later Herta and Greta, after spending the intervening period packing, left by lorry and car from Hitler’s ready-vehicle park on the Berg for Garmisch, where Herta lived. They had filled many trunks with Eva Braun’s clothing and left them at Schloss Fischhorn near Zell am See where there was an SS post. A short while before, Eva Braun had written to her sister: ‘We await hourly the end. We do not intend to fall alive into the hands of the enemy,’ and she concluded with the hope that Greta ‘should have no worries, she would see her husband again.’ Here Eva was either mistaken, or she wished to put her sister’s mind at rest.