Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany (3 page)

After the shambles of the 1923 putsch, Hitler spent ten years building up the Nazi Party and, with the support of the former chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler, developed the SS as an effective military elite. The focus of his ambition turned from Bavarian politics to national leadership.

Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30th January 1933 was greeted by huge, orchestrated torchlight processions. The reality was that the Nazi Party had come to power with minority support following an election that failed to deliver a majority government. Germany was suffering catastrophic inflation and high unemployment, which Hitler tackled with a massive programme of road building, construction and military rearmament. The expansion was funded by huge borrowing, the seizure of assets and printing money.

At the same time Hitler introduced policies designed to destroy opposition. Trade unions and all other political parties were banned. Opponents were murdered or sent to newly created concentration camps. In pursuit of a notion of racial perfection, laws of ‘Racial Hygiene’ were brought in. Sex was forbidden between so-called Aryans and Jews or ‘gypsies, negroes or their bastard offspring’. A eugenics programme for the medical murder of people with disabilities was secretly established.

The changes were enforced by violence, delivered by the SS and the newly formed Gestapo, and by extravagant propaganda. A young journalist with a PhD in Romantic Literature, Joseph Goebbels, was put in charge of controlling the media. A young architect, Albert Speer, was brought in to design the visual impact of mass rallies and marches.

In 1939 Hitler reflected on the achievements of the first six years of his leadership in a speech to the German parliament, the Reichstag:

‘I have restored to the Reich the provinces grabbed from us in 1919; I have led millions of deeply unhappy Germans, who have been snatched away from us, back into the Fatherland; I have restored the thousand-year-old historical unity of German living space; and I have attempted to accomplish all that without shedding blood and without inflicting the sufferings of war on my people or any other. I have accomplished all this, as one who 21 years ago was still an unknown worker and soldier of my people, by my own efforts...’

By the end of 1938 the Rhineland, Austria and Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia had all been pulled into a greater Germany without any international opposition. But the invasion of Poland triggered the British and French declarations of war on Germany on 3rd September 1939. Undeterred, in April 1940, Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway, again without encountering significant opposition. Then in the spring of 1941 German troops were sent into the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa and the Middle East, and later into Iraq and Crete. The beginning of the end of this massive expansion came in June 1941 when, in contravention of a non-aggression pact of 1939, Hitler launched a massive attack on Soviet Russia. Six months later he declared war on the United States. By Christmas 1944 Germany was pincered between these two advancing superpowers.

On 15th January 1945, Hitler retreated from the hideous reality of defeat. He rushed back to Berlin, and buried himself in his Führerbunker, giving orders to Albert Speer that all German infrastructure and industry be destroyed. There would be no surrender. Victory or destruction were the only options.

There were two bunkers beneath the Reich Chancellery building in Berlin. The older one, the upper bunker, had been designed by Albert Speer as an air raid shelter in the early 1930s. It was built beneath the cellars of the old Reich Chancellery and was ready for use by 1936. A lower bunker, which became known as the Führerbunker, was constructed in 1944. It was located 8.5 metres below the garden and protected by a 3-metre-deep concrete roof.

During January 1945 Hitler slept in the Führerbunker but worked in the remaining rooms of the Reich Chancellery. In the early afternoon of 3rd February 1945, the US Air Force undertook a mass bombing attack on Berlin, creating a fireball which burned for five days and inflicting the worst damage that the capital had yet suffered. From this point Hitler stayed underground.

Most of the senior Nazis had sent their families to safety and had moved out of the capital. Only Joseph Goebbels remained in Berlin, sleeping in a luxurious bunker built beneath his family home. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had been living in a sanatorium in the beautiful resort of Hohenlychen since January, receiving treatments for stress and severe stomach pain. Himmler held a very inflated view of himself as a figure of international stature and had become convinced that he was the best person to negotiate the peace and lead Germany into the future. At the suggestion of his Swedish masseur, Felix Kersten, who took advantage of his relationship with the SS chief to try and get concentration camp prisoners released, Himmler had two secret meetings: one with Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, and one with Norbert Masur, the Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress. Ostensibly the purpose of both meetings was to discuss the release of prisoners, but Himmler’s motive was to open up a channel of communication with the
Western Allies. He hoped that Masur would put the issue of the Final Solution behind him.

On 11th March 1945 there was a service of remembrance for the war dead in the village of Markt Schellenberg, close to Hitler’s mountain retreat in Obersalzberg. At the end of his speech the local army commander called for a
Sieg Heil
to the Führer. There was a deadly silence. None of the civilians, Home Guard or soldiers responded. On this cold morning everyone kept their mouths shut and their right arms tightly by their sides. At hundreds of rallies held during the previous 12 years these people, and millions of others, had leapt, mesmerised, to their feet to “
Sieg Heil
” the close of Adolf Hitler’s rousing speeches. But the spell had been broken.

Hitler went outside for the last time on his 56th birthday, 20th April 1945. He dragged himself up the concrete steps from the Führerbunker to the Reich Chancellery garden to inspect a group of young boys, members of the Hitler Youth. The boys had been instructed to look straight ahead, so 16-year-old Armin Lehmann was shocked at the Führer’s decrepit appearance when it finally came to his turn and his leader was standing right in front of him. His hands were shaking as he grabbed Lehmann’s arm and clutched at his sleeve before enclosing the boy’s right hand in both of his. ‘I could not believe,’ Lehmann later wrote, ‘that this withered old man in front of me was the visionary who had led our nation to greatness.’

In the following days the Russian army encircled Berlin and entered the suburbs. An attempt by Göring to clarify his position as Hitler’s successor triggered one of the Führer’s ferocious outbursts and Göring’s dismissal as head of the air force. Hitler felt betrayed on all sides. He blamed the disaster of the war on the incompetence of his generals, and ultimately a failure of the German people. When he learned about Himmler’s attempts to negotiate with the West he turned purple with rage and ordered his arrest and execution.

That evening, 28th April 1945, Hitler started to get his personal affairs in order. He instructed Joseph Goebbels to find an official with the authority to conduct a civil wedding and to source some wedding rings. After a lifetime insisting, ‘for me marriage would have been a disaster… it’s better to have a mistress’, Hitler had decided to marry Eva Braun, the woman who had been his secret mistress for 14 years. He then asked his secretary Traudl Junge to take down his final testament and will. Adolf Hitler, who for the past 12 years had kept Germany under his spell, who had masterminded some of the most extraordinary battles in modern history, was preparing to end his life.

This book tells the story of Monday 30th April, the day Hitler commits suicide, and also the day before, when so many extraordinary things happen both inside the bunker
and across the world that help place that last day in context.

On D-Day, 6th June 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers wrote about the life and death events happening around them. Sometimes, as soon as they’d scrambled to the top of the beach, having dodged bullets and mortars, out would come a diary and pencil. These diaries provided perfect source material for the book
D-Day: Minute by Minute
. In contrast, we were expecting first-hand accounts of the end of April 1945 to be hard to come by – few people had any idea these two days would be so historic. And yet we found scores of diaries and memoirs. It’s as if, amongst the chaos, one way of coming to terms with the experience was to keep a diary – some updated theirs four or five times a day.

However, that chaos also meant that those involved had little sense of time. Armin Lehmann, describing his first visit to Hitler’s bunker, wrote, ‘I was in a daze, not knowing whether it was night or day. Time had come to be a meaningless concept.’ Sometimes we’ve had to estimate when events occurred or rely on statements such as ‘just before sunset’. When we’ve come across interesting events with little indication of when exactly they took place, we have indicated an approximation by adding the word ‘about’ before the time listed in the text. But very often we have been able to give precise timings to events because military personnel like to keep a record of such things – even in a prisoner-of-war camp.

For the events that occurred in Hitler’s bunker we have been able to draw on a large number of memoirs and interviews given by survivors. Some of these eyewitnesses are more reliable than others but by reading their different points of view and cross-checking for discrepancies we have pieced together the sequence of events. Unless indicated otherwise, times given are German local times.

Al Bowlly sang how hellish the world of 1941 was but what ‘a heaven it will be / When that man is dead and gone.’ That one man could be the cause of such suffering almost defies belief. As Hitler ended his life, hundreds of thousands of people across the world were trying to save theirs. The world, for all involved, was indeed hell. This is their story..

© Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744

Entrance to the Führerbunker from the Reich Chancellery garden, July 1947
.

Eva Braun is in her bedroom having her hair done by her maid, Liesl Ostertag. Braun keeps it lightly peroxided, cut in short waves, with her long fringe pinned up on the right side. Her face is carefully made up to look natural, as Adolf Hitler likes it. She has chosen her outfit: a long black silk taffeta dress which she is going to wear with her favourite diamond watch, a gold bracelet with pink tourmaline gems and a topaz necklace. She has decided on some black suede Ferragamo shoes, one of the scores of pairs she has bought from the exclusive Italian designer since her first visit to Italy in 1936. She wants to look her best. Tonight she is marrying the man she has loved since she was 17. They have been conducting a secret affair for the last 14 years.