Hitler's Last Witness (2 page)

I did not like being a soldier; having a rank was not something that mattered to me. Throughout my service I was in the lower ranks (finally Oberscharführer).
[2]
The possibilities of promotion to higher rank for a member of the Führer's personal bodyguard were in any case limited. Because of that, five close friends volunteered for the front – and only two came back, one of them Otto Günsche, who then became Hitler's adjutant.

Well, for me the front was far away, marriage near, work in the bodyguard rich in variety and, in comparison to a soldier's lot, a relaxed life. As long as we made sure that the shifts were covered, we could change them as we liked. At the Berghof (Obersalzberg), which had its own telephonist, it was like being on holiday.

Obviously I am aware that I am not speaking of any old job and just any boss. It was clear to me then that I was in a special place among people in a genuine position of note. I know – today – what went on in Germany, and elsewhere in the name of Germany, while I was serving Leni Riefenstahl tea, and sitting with Erwin Rommel at the cloakroom table looking at his Afrika Korps photos, or hearing from Hitler's study the fine voice of the Jewish chamber singer Joseph Schmidt, whose gramophone records the boss loved so much. At that time I did not know.

I neither attended the military situation conferences nor was I a personal conversation partner of Hitler's, unlike the adjutants. So what can I describe? In my experience of the last few years it is young people who ask me, not to confirm long-known facts or find out about Hitler as ‘a person', but how did one get into his closest circle? How did one get to be his telephonist in the bunker? What was everyday life like in the power centre of Hitler's Germany for people such as I? What were my feelings about the course of the war and the defeat as perceived from where I stood? These are the questions of many young people, which I attempt to answer in this book.

It certainly remains a matter of interest what went on in the last days of Hitler's life; what the bunker looked like, and what details and facts I remember which belong to the world history of today. However, the things that have stuck in my memory, which at the time seemed important or an invaluable experience, inevitably do not always coincide with what was important historically. It is not easy to put myself back into the centre of my experiences.

For this biography I have separated out much that would interfere when reporting on things as I perceived them. The following account aims to be as free as possible of retrospective assessments, now that I know the extent of the horror. Like many others, I was not aware of this until long after the end of the war. Only then can I become again the Rochus Misch of his mid-twenties, a man who has not existed for more than sixty years.

This book is not a justification. I was given the post with Hitler because my company commander was certain that I would not cause trouble. I took the post because I was a soldier, and I kept it because my company commander was right.

I do not reproach myself today that I did my job under the circumstances that then existed, that I always did it in an orderly and conscientious manner even when I realised in 1943 that the war would be lost, even when it had long been lost, and even as Hitler's body burnt. No, I do not reproach the Rochus Misch of that time because he didn't make trouble.

All the same, because events at that time were so self-evident, they do make me reflective. I used to listen to my father-in-law talk about the old SPD times, hear enemy radio broadcasts with him – and then off I would go to work again at the Reich Chancellery. I managed to get Uncle Paul out of a concentration camp – and then I went back to Hitler. In July 1944, I paid no further heed to talk of Final Victory, but when, after the assassination attempt, the telephone connection to the living Hitler at FHQ Wolfsschanze was restored, I felt at that moment relief, if only because the nerve-tearing tension about the uncertain command situation was ended.

It was never necessary to compel myself to fulfil my duties unconditionally. I never struggled inwardly over them – never hesitated. Only at the very end, overwhelmed by worry about my wife and daughter, only then did I consider doing something contrary to my oath. But then I remained at my post in the bunker until the new Reich chancellor Joseph Goebbels released me officially as the last man. I was a soldier. I had my duty, my instructions, my place to be. And I had a good place to be, in contrast to my comrades in the field. I brought mountains of despatches to Hitler and relayed countless conversations, but I never saw the whole thing again nor looked for it. I did not bother. I asked no questions when it was best to ask none, but I also raised no questions when I could have done. I tell it as it is: the young Rochus had few queries.

As one of Hitler's bodyguards, I spent most of the time standing around; as his telephonist, I pressed buttons at the switchboard; and as a courier, I transported paper across the district. In the future that would be condemned by the Russian authorities as ‘support for the Nazi regime'. Who of my generation, however, did not make himself guilty in this sense?

When I am asked what my duties were for Hitler, I frequently answer: ‘Simply to be there.' I am very pleased about that today. Nothing else was required of me but to ‘simply be there'. And what if it had been different? How far would my sense of duty, obedience and the oath to Hitler have stretched? I am glad I escaped the test. Many comrades were not so fortunate.

I am also relating my story to young people so that they do not neglect to ask the right question at the right time. To put people on the right track as to why I and so many others failed to do this, where possible I report things as I saw them then.

I want to portray my path as it happened: from Silesia, via the Oberlausitz and the Black Forest, to Berlin into the Reich Chancellery; from Obersalzberg into the East Prussian FHQ Wolfsschanze; then direct from the Führerbunker into the torture chamber of the NKVD (Soviet secret service) at Moscow's Lubyanka prison; the various work camps at Karaganda (Kazakhstan), Borovichi (Oblast Novgorod), Sverdlovsk (Ukraine) and Stalingrad; and finally, after almost nine years as a prisoner of war (POW), back to Berlin again. My notes, which I wrote in February 1954 with the help of my wife after my return from the Soviet Union, support my memories, which I have repeated orally in extensive conversations and are now sketched in this book.

When my memoirs appeared in book form in Germany in 2008, I did not anticipate anything like the enormous interest they would generate in the public. I was simply content that I could now refer many enquirers to the book. Extracts from it appeared in the important magazine
Bild
in Germany, in a preview a week before publication. This was a five-part series expected to reach 40 million readers. Diverse reviews followed in the press and online, and very soon the book became a German-language bestseller. As a result of its great success, a reprint came out a year later as a paperback edition.

From the outset foreign interest in my memoirs was very great. Almost daily I continued to receive a large postbag from all over the world, and people rang me from abroad. Often the language barrier prevented me from talking and answering the questions they had about those past events.

In the summer of 2011, the ‘James Bond' director Roger Spottiswoode visited me from the United States with a plan to present my German memoirs in an international film using a team of authors and translators. Often my small living room was ‘bursting at the seams'. Special lighting effects would be set up, details recorded by camera. I continued to be asked by newspapers and television companies from all over the world for interviews. Because of my age, as I have said, it is ever more rarely possible for me to agree to these requests.

In 2006, I was visited in my Berlin home by the Überlingen agent Michael Stehle. After many meetings with him and his assistant Dirk Mosel, I decided in 2012 to allow their agency to handle all enquiries addressed to me. Shortly after taking this decision, I was extremely pleased when Michael Stehle informed me that work would soon be under way for an English-language translation of my book.

As the last surviving eyewitness to Hitler's demise in the bunker, it pleases me that the many English-language speakers with an interest in that historical period will now have the opportunity to read my memoirs. Although I was not present at the conferences in which Hitler's political decisions were taken, perhaps the lesser ‘historically relevant' details perceived by a man in his mid-twenties during his everyday duties may make things clearer. I asked no questions back then. But asking questions about that past may perhaps help us today, to ask the right questions at the right time.

Rochus Misch

1
The
SS-Verfügungstruppe
(VT) was the forerunner of the Waffen-SS: after the outbreak of war the Waffen-SS came into being by a merger of the VT with the
SS-Totenkopf
units.

2
The SS rank Oberscharführer was the equivalent of sergeant in the German army.

*
Rochus Misch contradicts himself concerning the exact date he started work with Hitler. In fact, both 1 and 2 May were holidays in 1940. According to Russian reports, he began on Monday 6 May 1940. (Translator's note – hereafter (TN)).

Introduction

WHEN THE NEWS BROKE,
in September 2013, of the death of Rochus Misch, it made headlines across the world. It was not Misch's vitally important role in the history of the Third Reich that sparked the interest – he hadn't really had one. Rather, it was the simple fact that he had been the last surviving witness to the grim denouement of Hitler's regime – the suicide of Adolf Hitler in the Führerbunker in Berlin, on 30 April 1945.

Rochus Misch was born in 1917 in the German eastern province of Upper Silesia. An orphan, he joined the SS in 1937, and – mainly due to his height (he was more than 1.8 metres tall) – found himself in Hitler's bodyguard regiment –
SS-Leibstandarte
. After being severely wounded in the Polish campaign of 1939, he was appointed to Hitler's household staff, initially as a ‘man-Friday' and later as a telephonist. It was in this capacity, serving his master to the very last days of the Third Reich, that Misch would make his modest mark on history.

Misch never sought publicity or even intended to write his biography. As he explains in his introduction – specially written for this volume only months before his death in 2013 – he wrote this book in 2008 to meet the growing interest that the world had in him, as well as to correct what he perceived as a few popular misconceptions. After returning from Soviet internment in 1953, he had settled into an ordinary and unremarkable life – one that history only caught up with after 2000, when he emerged as one of the few remaining survivors of Hitler's bunker. In time, he became the only survivor.

But, for all that serendipity, Rochus Misch had a story to tell. As a member of Hitler's SS Escort, he would accompany the Führer wherever he went. Whether in the Chancellery in Berlin, on the Obersalzberg, or in the Wolfsschanze HQ in East Prussia, he would always be close to Hitler; one of the small group of guards who had to be within sight or sound of the dictator at all times. This naturally afforded him a tremendous opportunity to observe life at the pinnacle of the Third Reich, including the personalities and characters involved – not least Hitler himself, who knew Misch by name.

This memoir is the product of that proximity. Misch saw Hitler's household close up, in action; he noticed the difference between the public and private faces, and got to peek behind the curtain. Sometimes the experience could be alarming, as when he blundered into a guest room in Hitler's private suite one morning, only to find Eva Braun in her nightdress: ‘She said nothing,' he writes, ‘but merely raised her right forefinger to her closed lips.' Clearly, Misch had the sort of ‘access' that historians (and gossips) would have killed for.

On one level, then, Misch certainly delivers. His memoir is full of details, asides and digressions, which allow the reader a rare and fascinating insight into the Third Reich's inner sanctum. Hitler, he says, was just ‘the Boss', a ‘normal, simple man' who was ‘neither a monster nor a superman'. Eva Braun, meanwhile, was ‘gay and carefree, almost childlike', with a ‘zest for living'. Goebbels was popular with the staff, while Bormann was not. Misch overheard conversations, watched the comings and goings and was a keen observer of events. He was present, for example, when Hitler received news of Hess's flight to Britain in May 1941; he listened in when Hitler spoke on the telephone with Major Remer in the aftermath of the 20 July bomb plot, inspiring the latter to lead the crushing of the Stauffenberg coup in Berlin. He was as close to being a ‘fly on the wall' as one could get.

Yet, for all that, Misch's view of events is a curiously myopic one. For one thing, the rarefied, claustrophobic atmosphere of the Führer's headquarters was clearly not the ideal location from which to gain a rounded perspective. Misch barely
saw
the world outside, much less was able to make sense of it. The eye of the storm, one could surmise, is rarely the best place from which to view the resulting carnage.

Another inhibiting factor was Misch's own nature. He was, in essence, a simple provincial lad – someone who joined the SS because he saw it as a short cut to a secure career in the service of the state, and was given the job in Hitler's household as he was considered someone who would ‘give no trouble'. Misch, certainly, was that man. He kept his head down, did his job, didn't gossip, didn't ask questions and didn't speak out of turn. He was essentially apolitical – naïve even. As this memoir demonstrates, he was clearly no fanatic, and was no militarist – naturally preferring the soft leather boots and tailored uniforms of headquarters to the mud and blood of the front. He was not even a member of the Nazi Party, and claimed that joining the NSDAP (National Socialist Party) ‘never even occurred to [him]'.