secretaries made their final farewells. Magda Goebbels, evidently in a disturbed state, remained in the bunker room, which she had taken over from Dr Morell. Hitler wore his usual attire of ‘black trousers and a grey-green military jacket’, with a white shirt and tie, which distinguished him from other Nazi Party leaders. Eva Hitler wore a dark dress with ‘pink flowers on the front’. Hitler shook hands with his closest associates in a distant manner, then left them.
The lower bunker was then cleared, but instead of sepulchral silence, a loud noise of partying came from upstairs in the Reich Chancellery canteen. Rochus Misch, the SS telephonist, was ordered to ring to stop this levity, but nobody answered. Another guard was sent up to stop the festivities. Gunsche and two other SS officers stood in the corridor with instructions to preserve the Fuhrer’s final privacy, but again it was broken, this time by Madga Goebbels begging to see him. She pushed past Gunsche as the door was opened, but Hitler sent her away. She returned to her room sobbing.
Nobody seems to have heard the shot that Hitler fired into his own head. Not long after 3.15 p.m., his valet, Heinz Linge, followed by Gunsche, Goebbels, Bormann and the recently arrived Axmann, entered Hitler’s sitting room. Others peered over their shoulders before the door was shut in their faces. Gunsche and Linge carried Hitler’s corpse, wrapped in a Wehrmacht blanket, out into the corridor and then up the stairs to the Reich Chancellery garden. At some point, Linge managed to take his master’s watch, although it did him little good because he had to get rid of it before Soviet troops took him prisoner. Eva Hitler’s body — her lips were apparently puckered from the poison — was then carried up and laid next to Hitler’s, not far from the bunker exit. The two corpses were then drenched in petrol from the jerry cans. Goebbels, Bormann, Krebs and Burgdorf followed to pay their last respects. They raised their arms in the Hitler salute as a burning torch of paper or rag was dropped on to the two corpses. One of the SS guards, who had been drinking with the party in the canteen, watched from a side door. He hurried down the steps to the bunker. ‘The chief’s on fire,’ he called to Rochus Misch. ‘Do you want to come and have a look?’
The 3rd Shock Army’s SMERSH detachment had received instructions the day before to start making its way towards the government district. They soon discovered that their eventual destination was Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. ‘The information which the intelligence people had was scarce and self-contradictory and unreliable,’ wrote Yelena Rzhevskaya, the SMERSH group interpreter. A reconnaissance company had been allotted the task of taking Hitler alive, but they still did not know for certain whether he was in Berlin. The SMERSH group interrogated a ‘tongue’, but he was just a fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth ‘with bloodshot eyes and cracked lips’. He had been shooting at them, noted Rzhevskaya, ‘now he is sitting here looking around but not understanding anything. Just a boy.’ They had more luck on that evening of 29 April. A nurse was caught trying to get through the lines to her mother. She had pulled off her uniform cap. The day before she had been with the wounded in the Reich Chancellery bunker. She had heard there that Hitler was ‘in the basement’.
Rzhevskaya describes how their American jeep took them through barricades, which had been blasted open, and over tank ditches, partly filled with rubble and empty fuel barrels dropped by advancing tanks. ‘The air thickened as we approached the centre. Anyone who was in Berlin in those days will remember that acrid, fume- laden air, dark with smoke and brick dust, and the constant feeling of grittiness on one’s teeth.’
They soon had to abandon their vehicle because of the shelling and the streets blocked with rubble. Their map of the city proved of little help. Street signs had been destroyed in the shelling, so they had to ask Germans the way. Along their route they encountered signallers crawling through holes in walls, unrolling land-line cables, a hay cart bringing up forage and wounded soldiers being taken to the rear. Above them, sheets and pillowcases hung from windows in a sign of surrender. During heavy shelling, they made their way underground from cellar to cellar. ‘When will this nightmare end?’ German women asked her. In the street, she came across ‘an elderly woman, hatless and with a prominent white armband, taking a little boy and girl across the road. Both of them, their hair neatly combed, were also wearing white armbands. As she passed us, the woman cried out regardless of whether or not she was understood, “They are orphans. Our house has been bombed. I am taking them somewhere else. They are orphans.” ’
The six Goebbels children did not face the risk of becoming orphans. Their parents intended to take them with them, or, more precisely, send them on ahead.
The Goebbels children seem to have quite enjoyed the novelty of life in the bunker. The boy, Helmuth, used to pronounce on every explosion that shook the place, as if it were all a great game. ‘Uncle Adolf had spoiled them with sandwiches and cakes, all served on a tea-table with a starched, monogrammed cloth. They were even permitted to use his private bath, the only one in the bunker. But their parents had already decided on their future. On the evening of 27 April, Magda Goebbels had intercepted the recently arrived SS doctor, Helmuth Kunz, in the bunker corridor. ‘She said that she needed to speak to me about something terribly important,’ Kunz told his Soviet interrogators shortly after the event. ‘She immediately added that the situation was such that it was most likely that she and I would have to kill her children. I agreed.’
The children were not told what had happened on that afternoon of 30 April, but they must have imagined afterwards from the overwrought state of their mother that something terrible had taken place. Amid the portentous events, nobody had thought to give them any lunch until Traudl Junge suddenly remembered them.
While the bodies still smouldered in the ruined garden upstairs, the mood of most of those in the bunker had lightened. Many began to drink heavily. Bormann’s mind, however, was preoccupied with the succession and the next Nazi government. He sent a signal to Grand Admiral Donitz at his headquarters at Plon near Kiel on the Baltic coast. This simply informed Donitz of his appointment as the Fuhrer’s successor instead of Reichsmarschall Goring. ‘Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires.’ He avoided telling Donitz that the Fuhrer was dead, presumably because he had no real power base without Hitler. Worst of all, Himmler was at Plon with Donitz, and Donitz had not arrested him for treason. If Bormann was to stand a chance of joining the new Nazi government and dealing with Himmler, then he needed to get out of Berlin, yet Goebbels, Krebs and Burgdorf all intended to stay and commit suicide.
Among those determined not to die were the remnants of Busse’s Ninth Army, trying to break through the forests south of Berlin. Some 25,000 soldiers and several thousand civilians had breached or slipped through Marshal Konev’s stop-lines. Like hunted animals, they forced themselves on even though exhausted.
Some groups had already made the rendezvous of Kummersdorf, while others still tried to reach it. The day before, another attempt, with a spearhead of several tanks and civilians lined up ready behind, was broken by a sudden Soviet artillery bombardment just as they were about to attack the barrier ahead. The Soviet 530th Anti- Tank Artillery Regiment, which had been given the task of holding a road junction near Kummersdorf without infantry support, found itself almost overwhelmed by German soldiers trying to break through. ‘The gun crews often had to grab their sub-machine guns and hand grenades in order to fight off attacking infantry,’ the report stated. It then went on to make the exaggerated claim that the enemy ‘left about 1,800 dead in front of their fire positions, nine burnt-out tanks and seven half-tracks’.
A corporal from the
Another sign of disintegration was the way that men strained to their limits could explode in suspicion. That evening an argument broke out about the direction they should be taking. One man grabbed another who disagreed with him and forced him back against a tree, screaming in his face, ‘You traitor, you want to lead us right into the arms of the Russians. You’re from the Free Germany lot!’ And before the others could stop him, he drew his pistol and shot the man he had accused through the head.
