Hitler's Last Witness (13 page)

The adjutants finally found their tongues and admitted to Hess that they had opened the letter prematurely. They therefore knew that their boss was planning something that made it urgent for them to inform Hitler of the fact once Hess had flown off. At first, Hess was silent. Sepp tried to clarify the situation and give his superior the opportunity to decide on how to proceed. As they drove through a stretch of woodland, Sepp therefore suggested that Hess might like to take a walk since he liked walking through woods so much. ‘Platzer thinks I should take a little walk. Good, I'll walk!'

Hess told Rudi to stop the car, and he spent half an hour walking round. Back in the limousine, he then addressed his adjutants. They now knew something that they had to keep secret under all circumstances. The events to which they had just been witness had never taken place. Everybody held firm to that.

In February 1941, Hess made another attempt, but abandoned it without having taken off this time. It would be May before the third attempt was made, and this time he went.

Amerika

In the spring of 1941, Hitler made many trips. I did not always accompany him. It was the time of the Balkans campaign.

In the Reich Chancellery there were often very important visitors. Above all, the Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka was received with special honours.
[26]
The Japanese always brought the strangest gifts with them. I remember a very old sea chart according to which one could walk to Great Britain from the European continent without ever getting one's feet wet.

If there was a state banquet, then Herr Lange, the kitchen chef of the Führer-suite, did not cook; instead, the chief chef of the Kaiserhof hotel was used. He was called Weigert or Weigelt – I do not remember exactly. Even the waiters came from the Kaiserhof. They were men of long service who had once been employed by Kaiser Wilhelm, all imposing figures, tall and well turned out, not Nazis but German Nationalists.
[27]
These waiters had wardrobes in the cellar of the Reich Chancellery in which their extremely elegant work attire was hung, including strap shoes. Before festivities, they changed there. These waiters were also employed at Schloss Klessheim.

At the beginning of April, I accompanied Hitler for the first time in his special train, named
Amerika
. Later, from 1 February 1943, it was renamed
Brandenburg
, but none of us could get used to the change and we continued to refer to it as
Amerika
among ourselves. The special train was a fully functioning Führer-HQ on wheels. It was kept at the ready at the Berlin Anhalter station, in a shed near Bautzener-Strasse and Yorck-Strasse, and was taken from there to the best-positioned railway station for where Hitler wanted to travel in it. Later, it stood at FHQ Wolfsschanze in East Prussia.

The special train was drawn by two locomotives and consisted of a flak wagon, luggage wagon, work coach and domestic coach for Hitler; then came our coach with the bodyguard and a dining car mostly used as an officers' mess. Coupled up behind these was the Wehrmacht coach as well as others for the female secretaries, which I never entered. The windows were, for the most part, darkened. The refurbished train was luxurious throughout – the individual coaches having washrooms with hot and cold water and a telephone connection between coaches.

I had a compartment to myself alone. Situation conferences were held in the conference coach, which had a large wooden table in the centre. The Führer-coach, which incidentally I never visited, was used occasionally for small-scale conferences. Once, when I was leaning casually at a window, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned round – it was Hitler, who wanted to get by. In such situations, it was not necessary to say anything.

The train was a very sociable place. Now and again, Hitler would sit diagonally facing me in the officers' mess coach drinking his Holzkirchner beer. The firm Mitropa ran the dining car. Mitropa offered the most carefully selected culinary specialities, a land of milk and honey. It was here on the train that I saw Hitler eat meat for the only time in the five years I was with him.

The Mitropa also provided other riches – those to make the heart of a lady beat faster: perfume, stockings, handkerchiefs from Paris and other such things. Once, directly after a night shift, I had to take a train from Berlin to Berchtesgaden. On the way I fell into conversation with a young lady who lent me a book called
Gedanken nach zwei Uhr nachts
(Thoughts after Two in the Morning), by Aribert Wäscher, for the long journey. When she was preparing to alight I attempted to return the book to her, but she told me to hold onto it until I had finished it. I insisted that, at least, she give me an address to where I could send the book. She fished out a scrap of paper and wrote her name and address on it. I did not look at it until she had left the train – and was irritated to find that both the name and address were almost illegible. I thought that might have been because of the motion of the train. Ursula Lüben, Rüben, Roben? Well, I thought, my RSD colleagues could help out here, and I gave them the task of ‘finding the lady', which they did, as well as where she lived. This turned out to be at Lübben in Brandenburg, just where she had got out. I bought her a gift from Mitropa and also sent a telegram worded: ‘Thoughts after two in the morning to follow'. The man in the telegraph office smirked when he read this ambiguous greeting.

In April 1941, the special train brought us to near Vienna, in a more or less improvised Führer-HQ train christened
Frühlingssturm
(Spring storm). It was stationed at a tunnel entrance near Mönichkirchen. If there was an aircraft alarm, the train pulled back into the tunnel. Train travel was not the quickest way of moving around the country. In order not to interfere with the regular Reichsbahn timetables and to avoid being noticed, the journey would be interrupted frequently. The Reichbahn had priority. We often went down lesser-used tracks. Sometimes, we would be stuck for ages in some siding, such as on the way to Mönichkirchen, when we had a very long wait near Hof. On 20 April 1941, Hitler celebrated his fifty-second birthday in FHQ Frühlingssturm. As it happened, I had taken the plane back to Berlin shortly before this. Hitler did not then arrive back in the Reich capital until the end of April.

A Mad Flight and its Consequences

After Hitler had addressed the Reichstag at the beginning of May 1941, he returned to the Berghof. At that time there now occurred the ‘flight to Britain' by Hess, for which he had been preparing for so long.
[28]

On the evening of 10 May 1941, his plane left the runway at the Messerschmitt Works, Augsburg. This time everything aboard the Me 110 was in order, and he had probably worked up the necessary courage. The twenty minutes' deadline, during which period he had told his adjutants to stand by and wait before they did anything else, passed without any sign of his returning. Karl-Heinz Pintsch – as arranged – presented himself at the Berghof next morning to hand the prepared letter to Hitler. Hitler was outraged.
*
‘Hess?! Hess?! Hess of all people did that? Hess of all people? Why did he do that to me?' Hitler did not tire of repeating himself.

For the next three days, 11–13 May, Hitler absented himself from the military situation conferences, and confined himself to his room on the first floor. The generals came to the situation conferences and withdrew without being able to report anything. Even Goebbels was only received upstairs in Hitler's room, when he arrived on 12 May.

The official line later was that Hess had acted as the result of mental derangement. A communiqué to that effect was worked on with Dietrich. Hess wanted to see the Duke of Hamilton in order to conduct his own private peace talks with the British. The duke was apparently close to Churchill. We of the SS bodyguard got quickly to the crux of the matter. Had Hess really acted off his own bat? We were agreed that Hitler would have needed to be a good actor to fake the indignation and upset he had displayed when reading Hess's letter. At any rate, after what I saw in November 1940, there must have been complete accord between Hess and Hitler at least with regard to the aim of his undertaking. We were well aware, of course, that one of Hitler's utopian ideas was of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the highly esteemed British against Bolshevism.

The Party leadership had to be passed to somebody else, and Hitler then appointed Martin Bormann as chief of the Party chancellery.
[29]
In this, Hitler chose the wrong man, in our opinion. ‘Goebbels in, Bormann out,' we said. We might have admitted that Martin Bormann's contacts with us were conciliatory to some extent, but nobody had a soft spot for him. Even his own brother did not exist for him, after Albert Bormann had married a woman completely unacceptable in Martin's eyes. Goebbels we liked. He was usually cheerful and was man enough to contradict Hitler even if only to turn down a dinner invitation. That impressed us. Meanwhile Bormann always fawned on Hitler. Certainly almost everyone did, but Bormann was the champion at it. He was always scheming how to improve his position. Most of the time he was involved in intrigues and power play. This won him no friends. Only Hitler's old Party comrades would dare to say something about it openly, particularly August Körber. Later, Körber even tried to describe to Hitler the true situation at the front after he had been there himself. Hitler did not take his criticisms the wrong way, but they didn't count for anything with him: ‘That may seem to be the case for you . . .' What his old comrade had told him was worth no more than that.

At Bormann's insistence, everybody who had had knowledge of Hess's flight to Britain was arrested and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This included Hess's two adjutants, the mechanic Neumaier and also my friend Sepp Platzer. Afterwards, Sepp served at the front and, as previously described, was made a POW by the Soviets.

After the uproar caused by Hess, towards the end of May another piece of bad news was received at the Berghof. The
Bismarck
, the most powerful battleship in the world, had been sunk by British naval forces while aiming to reach the occupied port of Saint-Nazaire.
[30]
This was the first major loss on the German side. We still had no suspicion that the invasion of the Soviet Union was now imminent.

1
In the 1930s, Tempelhof airport had more European passenger traffic than Paris, Amsterdam and London airports.

2
Hitler had flown first to Munich. See Nicolaus von Below,
At Hitler's Side,
London 2004.

3
Adolf Hitler lived from 1899 with his family at Leonding near Linz, and from 1905 to 1908 in Linz.

4
The owner and occupant was given the choice of compulsory purchase or concentration camp. Bormann had whole houses bulldozed down to provide an unobstructed view.

5
Hermann Göring (1893–1946, suicide elected by him as an alternative to execution), Reichsmarschall, was C-in-C Luftwaffe.

6
Rudolf Hess (1894–1987) was until 1941 Hitler's deputy as Party leader.

7
Admiral Nikolaus von Horthy von Nagybanya (1869–1957) was Hungarian regent 1920–44.

8
On 18 March 1944, there was an altercation between Hitler and Horthy, in the course of which Horthy attempted to leave precipitately. Hitler prevented this by making him believe that there was an air-raid alarm. See Ian Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–1945
, Stuttgart 2000, p. 830. Misch does not remember this circumstance.

9
Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957) was Hitler's personal photographer.

10
Hermann Esser (1900–1981) was State Secretary in the Reich Propaganda  Ministry.

11
The Retina was a very popular Kodak camera.

12
According to Per Uwe Bahnsen and James P. O'Donnell,
Die Katakombe – Das Ende in der Reichskanzlei
(Stuttgart 1975, p. 480), the local Berchtesgaden priest stated that the only people in Hitler's closer circle at the Berghof who attended mass regularly were Sepp Dietrich, Eva Braun and Rochus Misch.

13
Gerhardine ‘Gerdy' Troost (1904–2003).

14
In her memoir
Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary,
London 2003, p. 111, Traudl Junge stated: ‘Hitler found this gift by a statesman unworthy. He hastened to make Frau von Exner a gift of a dog . . . the best, noblest and most expensive fox terrier.' Misch does not recall this.

15
It is thought there are files that indicate that Hitler did order this film.

16
The house in the Bogenhausen district, at Wasserburger-Strasse 12, today Delp-Strasse, had been bought for Eva Braun by Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann in 1936 at Hitler's instigation.

17
The meeting was held on 23 October 1940 at the railway station at Hendaye, a French Basque town on the border with Spain.

18
Herta Schneider, née Ostermeyer, was a friend from Eva Braun's youth.

19
Marianne ‘Marion' Schönmann, née Petzl, was a friend of Hoffmann and Eva Braun. Hitler attended her wedding in 1937.

20
On 24 October 1940, the day following the talk with Franco, Hitler met the French head of state Marshal Pétain and his deputy Pierre Laval at Montoire, and on 28 October, Mussolini in Florence. These meetings were all arranged at short notice. Nicolaus von Below,
At Hitler's Side
, London 2004, pp. 75–6. Von Below accompanied Hitler throughout the period.