Traudl Junge - Hitler's Last Secretary - A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler [aka Until the Final Hour]

Although he said he felt ‘uninjured’, Hitler did summon an ear specialist from Berlin, because his hearing was giving him trouble and he was suffering from headaches. Dr Giesing [80] Erwin Giesing, b Oberhausen, Rhineland 7 December 1907, d Krefeld 22 May 1977; studies medicine in Marburg, Düsseldorf and Cologne; 1936 qualifies as specialist in ear, nose and throat medicine; 1932 joins the NSDAP; until 1929 a specialist at the Virchow Hospital in Berlin. Summoned to the Führer headquarters on 20 July 1944 to treat Hitler’s ear injury, dismissed in September over disputes with Theodor Morell; 1945 interned by the American Army; 1947 released. found out that one eardrum was burst and the other damaged. Professor Brandt, who hadn’t been present when the assassination attempt took place, did not come. We wondered why not. There was nothing Professor Morell, a specialist in internal medicine, could do with his injections. After his treatment the badly injured men in hospital in Rastenburg recovered only with difficulty. There was no saving General Schmundt. He died of his injuries a few weeks later, although Morell had tried out his newest sulphonamides on him.

Gruppenführer Fegelein had been detailed to investigate the assassination attempt and track down the guilty men. He was personally indignant to think of anyone wanting to blow up such a splendid fellow as himself. I think he thought that was more criminal than any plan to get rid of Hitler, and he flung himself into the investigation with the zeal of his desire for revenge. Finally it became obvious even to Hitler that the resistance movement had spread more widely in the army than he had supposed. Distinguished names of men holding high rank were mentioned. He raged and shouted and said a great deal about traitors and scoundrels.

Hitler did not look well, and was leading an unhealthier life than ever. He hardly went out into the fresh air at all now, he ate little and had no appetite, and his left hand was beginning to tremble slightly. He remarked, ‘I had this trembling in my right leg before the assassination attempt, and now it’s moved to my left hand. I’m glad I don’t have it in my head. I wouldn’t like it at all if my head kept wagging.’

There was a new subject of conversation for the evening tea-parties: Blondi was to have a family. Hitler was looking for a suitable mate for her. His choice fell on Frau Professor Troost’s German shepherd, a dog he had once given her as a present. So one day Gerdy Troost, the only woman visitor to Führer headquarters, turned up with her dog Harras. Blondi, whom we expected to be pleased by a male companion, took no notice at all of the visitor, and when he first tried getting closer bared her teeth furiously at him. Hitler was disappointed, but he didn’t give up hope that after a while the two animals would learn to value and love each other, and then he could bring up a puppy one day.

We were sitting over tea with Frau Troost in the evening. She told Hitler he ought to go for more walks. ‘This is no kind of life, my Führer. You might just as well have the landscape painted on these concrete walls and never leave the bunker at all!’ He laughed and said he found the Prussian climate so unpleasant in summer that it was much healthier for him to stay indoors in the cool. However, when Frau Troost said he ought at least to have massages, they would do his arm good too, he was very firmly against it. He hated to be touched. He had dislocated his shoulder in the November putsch in Munich in 1923, and it had been massaged by a sergeant who did him more harm than good, and whose treatment was still a painful memory to him.

Frau Professor Troost left again, leaving her dog behind. Rudely rejected by Blondi, he now took a lively interest in my tiny fox terrier bitch, who was in heat for the first time. I was rather alarmed when a big grey shape leaped through my window in the hut one night, but I soon realized that this was a visitor for my little dog.

Harras was getting obviously thinner as a result of the constant excitement. Finally Blondi became friendlier and more forthcoming, and at last Hitler told us one day, beaming, that the two of them had mated! Harras stayed a few weeks longer to eat his fill from the fleshpots at headquarters.

While life flowed by at a regular pace for us at headquarters, and Hitler was always friendly, confident, amusing and charming, there was fierce fighting on all the fronts. In the East, the only victories won were defensive, and the front was contracting while the Russians kept advancing and coming closer. And in the West the invasion had spread out, forcing the German troops into defensive manoeuvres. My husband’s division had seen bloody battles in the East, and had then been transferred to France to wait for more tanks and reinforcements. Hans Junge was sent to the Führer headquarters as a courier just as I was about to go to Munich to help my family, who had been bombed out. We spent a few days together in the ruined, bleak city of Berlin, and then parted. I went to Bavaria, he returned to his unit.

I found Munich a picture of destruction too. The building where we had lived was completely flattened. Nothing could be saved. People were desperate and hopeless. I met few who still believed in victory. When I repeated what Hitler said I lacked his own conviction and sense of security, and my heart was full of doubts and conflict. On going back to headquarters after three weeks, at the end of August, I asked the officers, the adjutants and every one who ought to know, ‘Tell me, how is the war going? Do you really believe we shall win?’ And I always got the same answer. ‘It looks bad, but not hopeless. We must hold on and wait for our new weapons to come into play.’

Once again we sat with Hitler in the evenings. Now that most of the German cities were rubble and ashes, he was devoting himself with passionate intensity to plans for rebuilding them. When Giesler was there, he discussed the reconstruction of Germany in minute detail. The rebuilding of Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Linz and many other cities had taken firm shape, not just in Hitler’s head but as complete architectural plans on paper. Hitler tended these plans lovingly, the way a gardener tends his roses. Sometimes we listened, uncomprehendingly, as his descriptions brought the finest cities in the world into existence before our eyes, the broadest streets, the tallest towers on earth. Everything was to be much better than it had ever been before, and he lavished superlatives on it all. Did he believe in his own words? I never stopped to wonder about that at the time. […]

I didn’t want any monumental buildings, I wanted peace and quiet. I certainly had a better life than most other people in wartime, I didn’t have to sit in a boring office and I had hardly been in any air raids. But I felt like a prisoner in a golden cage, and I wished I could finally get away from here and go back to other people where I belonged. After all, I’d been married for over a year, and I hardly noticed. Hitler still treated me like the baby of a family. He particularly liked joking with me. I would be asked to imitate a comic Viennese film actor, or speak in Saxon dialect and reply to his jokes. Frau Christian was the object of Hitler’s gallant attentions. It sometimes looked like a little flirtation, but almost every day the conversation would come round to Eva Braun, and then I could see Hitler’s eyes take on a deep, warm glow, while his voice grew soft and gentle.

But when he called an officers’ meeting again around the middle of August, and addressed the top military leaders at headquarters, there was no tolerance and softness about him now. I wasn’t at the meeting, but I saw the grand uniforms locked in violent and agitated discussion in the mess afterwards. There seemed to have been angry words. Hitler had given full expression to his indignation over the treachery of 20 July, and he imposed the ‘German greeting’ on the whole German Wehrmacht. At the same time he called on the loyalty and conscience of the officers and their unreserved obedience. Later, by chance, I saw the minutes of this meeting. I had no right to read them, but I did cast a quick glance at some of the pages. They said: ‘…and I thought that at my last hour, my officers would gather around me in unshakeable loyalty, their daggers drawn…’ Here General Manstein [81] Erich von Manstein, b Berlin 24 November 1887, d Irschenhausen, Upper Bavaria after 10 June 1973, real name Fritz-Erich von Lewinski; 1896 adopted by Georg von Manstein, entered the Plön cadet corps; 1907 promoted to second lieutenant; 1914–1918 first lieutenant and captain in the First World War; 1921–1927 company commander in Angermünde; 1923–1927 trains as general staff officer; 1927 major; 1933 colonel; 1934 chief of staff of Wehrkreis Command III in Berlin; 1936 adjutant to chief of general staff Ludwig Beck; 1939 chief of general staff to supreme command in the East; 1940 infantry general and chief of the XXXVIII Army Corps; 1941 commander of the 11 th Army; 1942 promoted to colonel general; 31 March 1944 Manstein falls out of favour with Hitler and is sacked from his command; 1945 interned by the British Army; 1946 found not guilty at the Nuremberg trials; 1949 condemned to eighteen years’ imprisonment for war crimes by the British military tribunal in Hamburg, released early in 1953; 1953 to 1960 official adviser to the Federal government on the reconstruction of the army. Holder of the 59 th award of swords to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with oakleaves. called out: ‘And so they will, my Führer.’ In brackets, after that, the minutes said: Loud applause.