Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

the exploding shells. As the flames consumed the bodies in a suitably infernal setting, the end of the leader whose presence had a mere few years earlier electrified millions was witnessed by not a single one even of his closest followers.¹

Neither Linge nor Gunsche, the two men entrusted by Hitler with the disposal of the bodies, returned to ensure that the task was complete. One of the guards in the Chancellery garden, Hermann Karnau, later testified (though, like a number of the witnesses in the bunker, he gave contradictory versions at different times) that, when he revisited the cremation site, the bodies had been reduced to little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them with his foot.² Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6p.m. Karnau had shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable bodies (‘zwei verkohlte, zusammensgeschrumpfte Leichen, die nicht mehr zu identifizieren waren’).³ Gunsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Fuhrer Escort Squad (Fuhrer-begleitkommando), Hauptsturmfuhrer Ewald Lindloff and Obersturmfuhrer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already thoroughly burnt (‘schon verkohlt’) and were in a ‘shocking state (scheu?lichem Zustand)’, torn open — Gunsche presumed — in the heavy bombardment of the garden. Reisser’s involvement was not needed. Gunsche told him, an hour and a half after giving him the order, that Lindloff had already carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30p.m. on 30 April.⁴

There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery garden.⁵

When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke, since 1938, a cigar-box containing part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the other as Eva Braun’s. The lower jaw-bone, too, was Hitler’s. It was almost certainly all that they were able to identify of the former Dictator of Germany. The earthly remains of Adolf Hitler, it appears, were contained in a cigar-box.

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The bunker inmates were now finally free to think of their own survival. Even while the bodies still burned in the Chancellery garden above, they had forgotten their views of self-immolation alongside their leader and were agreeing to do what he had always and explicitly ruled out: seek a last-minute arrangement with the Soviet Union. An emissary was sent out under a white flag to try to engineer a meeting of General Krebs (who, as a former military attache in Moscow, had the advantage of speaking fluent Russian) with Marshal Zhukov. At 10p.m. that evening, Krebs went over the Soviet lines bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann.

It was an anxious night for those incarcerated in the bunker. And when Krebs returned around 6a.m. next morning it was only to report that the Soviet side insisted upon unconditional surrender and demanded a declaration to that effect by 4p.m. that afternoon, 1 May.⁶

This was the end. It was time for final preparations — on the sole remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53a.m., a telegram for Donitz arrived in Plon: ‘Testament in force. I’ll come to you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from publication. Bormann.’⁷ Earlier that morning, more than nine hours after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker.⁸ Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in a further telegram — the last to leave the bunker — dictated by Goebbels and arriving at Plon at 3.18p.m. that afternoon.⁹ Neither the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler’s death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a broadcast at 10.26p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon — it was the previous day — and that his death had taken place in combat ‘at his post in the Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism’. In his proclamation to the Wehrmacht, Donitz spoke of the Fuhrer’s ‘heroic death’. The Wehrmacht’s report stated that he had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital’.¹⁰ The delay in informing Donitz had plainly been to allow Bormann and Goebbels the final opportunity of a negotiated surrender to the Red Army without consulting the new head of state. The untruth relayed by Donitz to the Wehrmacht and German people was to prevent a predictable response by the troops, had they been aware of Hitler’s suicide, that the Fuhrer had deserted them at the last.¹¹ This was, in fact, precisely the message which General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander in Berlin, conveyed to his troops when ordering them, in the early hours of 2 May, to cease fighting. ‘On 30.4.45 the Fuhrer took his own life and thereby abandoned those who had sworn him loyalty,’ ran the order. ‘At the Fuhrer’s command you believe that you must still fight for Berlin, although the lack of heavy weaponry and munitions, and the overall situation shows the struggle to be pointless… In agreement with the High Command of the Soviet troops, I therefore demand you end the fighting immediately.’¹²

By then, the drama in the bunker was finally over. Most of those still entombed below the Reich Chancellery had spent the afternoon and evening of 1 May planning their break-out. Goebbels was not among them. Along with his wife, Magda, he was now making arrangements for their own suicides — and for taking the lives of their six children. In the early evening, Magda summoned Helmut Gustav Kunz, adjutant to the head doctor in the SS medical administration (Sanitatsverwaltung) in the Reich Chancellery, and asked him to give each of the children — Helga, Hilde, Hellmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide, aged between twelve and four — a shot of morphine. It was about 8.40p.m. when Kunz carried out the request. Once they had fallen into a drugged sleep, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s own physician at the end, crushed a phial of prussic acid in the mouth of each of the children.

Later that evening, as Wilhelm Mohnke, commandant of the ‘Citadel’, gave orders for the mass break-out from the bunker, Goebbels instructed his adjutant, Gunther Schwagermann, to take care of the burning of his and Magda’s bodies. He gave him the silver-framed signed photograph of Hitler that for so many years had stood on his desk as a memento. Then he and his wife, after saying their brief farewells, climbed the stairs to the Chancellery garden, and bit on the prussic acid capsules. An SS orderly fired two shots into the bodies to make sure.¹³ Far less petrol was available for the unceremonious cremation than had been saved for burning the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops had little difficulty in identifying the corpses when they entered the Chancellery garden next day.¹⁴

Krebs, Burgdorf, and Franz Schadle, head of Hitler’s escort squad, also chose to end their lives in the bunker before the Russians arrived. The rest of the company sought their luck late that evening in the mass escape, undertaken in groups. The underground railway tunnel brought them to Friedrichstra?e station, a few hundred yards to the north of the ruined Reich Chancellery. But once on the surface, in the burning hell of Berlin, with shells falling all around, confusion took over. The groups found themselves split up in the chaos. Individuals took what chances they could. A few, including the secretaries Gerda Christian, Traudl Junge, and Else Kruger, managed, remarkably, to make their way through to the west. Most, among them Otto Gunsche and Heinz Linge, fell into Soviet hands and years of misery and maltreatment in Moscow prisons. Most of the others were killed seeking a route to safety, or took the last decision left to them. Prominent among the latter were Hitler’s constant right hand during the war years, Martin Bormann, and his doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger. Both had given up their hopes of escape and, rather than fall into Soviet hands, had swallowed poison in the early hours of 2 May 1945 in Berlin’s Invalidenstra?e.¹⁵

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