Hitler's Last Secretary (18 page)

Once again there’s a large section missing from the film of my memory. All that time in 1943 when I spent every day and every night living, talking and eating with Hitler is like a single long day. In that time bombs were dropped, the front lines changed, we flew air raids on England and tried to storm our way to victory. Christmas came, but hardly anyone took any notice, and Hitler ignored it entirely. Not an evergreen branch, not a candle marked the festival of peace and love. My husband had come back on leave; we stayed in our hut together. He was completely different; it was a stranger who had come back to me, leaving the man I’d married there at the front. He couldn’t stand being back behind the lines any more; he was in despair when a conversation with Hitler showed him that the Führer no longer had a clear view of the real situation. Soon after the festive season he flew back to the army. At some time in the spring of 1944, German POWs in Russia had been induced to make confessions by injections of some kind. For reasons of secrecy Hitler immediately had everyone who had been in his immediate entourage withdrawn from the Eastern Front. That included my husband. He was transferred to the West.

Hitler spoke more and more often of the possibility of a massive air raid on Führer headquarters. ‘They know exactly where we are, and some time they’re going to destroy everything here with carefully aimed bombs. I expect them to attack any day,’ he said, meaning the American bombers. We often heard the air-raid warning now, but it was never more than single aircraft circling above us. Our anti-aircraft guns weren’t used. The planes were presumably only on reconnaissance flights, and we didn’t want to attract their attention with incautious gunfire.

In spring we went to the Berghof again. Meanwhile, the headquarters in East Prussia were to be further reinforced. Hitler wanted to have several very stable, bombproof bunkers built. Colossal structures consisting of eleven metres of concrete were to be put up, and I hated the thought that we would have to live like moles, never seeing daylight.

But for the time being our drone-like existence on the Obersalzberg began again. Eva Braun was there once more, cheerful and sprightly with her inexhaustible wardrobe, the guests rolled up, and as far as they were concerned the war was far away.

Marlene von Exner hadn’t come with us. She had stayed behind at the Wolf’s Lair to pack her cases, wind up her affairs, and go back to Vienna. Hers was a tragi-comic fate. She had lost her heart to the young SS adjutant Fritz Darges, even though she couldn’t stand Prussians and hated the SS. But it had happened, and there were two consequences. First, Gretl Braun was in love with Fritz Darges too, but a love affair with her was a little too dangerous and not private enough for young Fritz, so he hadn’t been able to make up his mind. Second, there was something the matter with Marlene’s family. She had mentioned when she first began working for Hitler that her mother’s papers weren’t in order. Her grandmother had been a foundling, and her origins couldn’t be established. In view of the good Nazi attitude of the whole family, Hitler thought nothing much of this, until suddenly the able and industrious SD
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found out that there really was Jewish blood in her maternal line. Marlene was horrified, not so much because she might lose her job with Hitler as because now she couldn’t possibly become the wife of an SS man. Hitler had a conversation with Frau von Exner in which he said, ‘I’m really extremely sorry for you, but you will understand that I have no alternative to dismissing you from my service. I can’t possibly make an exception for myself personally and break my own laws just because it would be to my advantage. But when you are back in Vienna I will have your whole family Aryanized, and pay you your salary for the next six months. I would also like to invite you to be my guest at the Berghof again before you leave me.’

So Marlene said goodbye. Reichsleiter Bormann was asked, in my presence, to see about the Aryanization of the Exner family. It was a task that Bormann undertook only reluctantly, since when he himself made advances to the charming Viennese he had not had any luck, and he could never forgive her for that.

And he took his revenge, because a few weeks later I received a very unhappy letter from Vienna, saying that all the members of the family had had their Party books taken away, and they were in great distress. When I asked Bormann what was going on he said he would deal with it. But long weeks went by again, and finally I had shattering news: life for the Exners was now very hard. Marlene had to leave the University Hospital, her sister couldn’t study medicine, her elder brother had to give up practising as a doctor, and the youngest brother couldn’t now have a career as a military officer.

I was so angry and indignant that I sat down at the typewriter with the outsize characters, typed the letter out on it word for word, and took it to the Führer. He went red in the face with fury and called for Bormann at once. The Reichsleiter was red in the face too when he came out of Hitler’s room, and he gave me a furious glance. All the same, in March I received the cheering news that everything was all right again, the whole Exner family was extremely grateful to me, and their Aryanization had finally gone through. But four weeks later the Allies were in Vienna, and their Party books were probably condemned and burnt.
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[…] Life was more irregular than ever [in the early spring of 1944: M.M.]. The conferences went on and on, meals were eaten at the most impossible times. Hitler went to bed later than ever before. The cheerfulness and light banter, and the coming and going of all the guests, couldn’t hide the uneasiness in all our hearts. Hitler’s entourage knew about his anxieties and the difficult situation, while those still in the dark believed his assurances of victory and so quelled their own bitter experiences and dark forebodings.

Eva Braun sought my company. She asked: ‘How is the Führer, Frau Junge? I don’t want to ask Morell, I don’t trust him. I hate him. I was alarmed when I saw the Führer. He looks old and very grave. Do you know what he’s worried about? He doesn’t discuss these things with me, but I don’t think the situation is good.’ ‘Fräulein Braun, I know less than you. You know the Führer better than I do, you can guess at what he doesn’t say. But the Wehrmacht report alone is enough to make the man responsible for it anxious.’

In the tea-house, Eva told the Führer he shouldn’t stoop like that. ‘It comes of having such heavy keys in my trouser pocket,’ he said. ‘And I’m carrying a whole sackful of cares around with me.’ But then he couldn’t help making a joke of it. ‘If I stoop I match you better. You wear high heels to make yourself taller, I stoop a little, so we go well together.’ ‘I’m not short!’ she protested. ‘I’m 1.63 metres, like Napoleon!’ No one knew how tall Napoleon was, not even Hitler. ‘What do you mean, Napoleon was 1.63 metres tall? How do you know?’ ‘Why, every educated person knows that,’ she replied, and that evening, when we were in the living room together after dinner, she went to the bookcase and looked in the encyclopaedia. But it didn’t say anything about Napoleon’s height.

It snowed without stopping during these weeks. Walls of snow towered up on the terrace, huge quantities of it had to be shovelled away every day to make a narrow path to the tea-house and leave the entrances free. Eva would have loved to go skiing, but Hitler wouldn’t let her. ‘You could break a foot, it’s too dangerous,’ he said. So she made do with long walks and often wasn’t in for lunch.

It was still snowing in April. At a thousand metres above sea level, the snow was nine metres deep. Then at last spring came, and with the spring enemy aircraft appeared above the Berch-tesgadener Land. The Allies had captured so many bases to the south that large squadrons could keep taking off from them, flying over Austria and on to Bavaria. And they all flew over our area. The sirens always wailed just as we were dropping off to sleep in the early hours of the morning. Then the smoke mortars were set off in the valley and on the slopes of the Führer’s grounds, and the whole area was hidden by thick clouds of artificial mist.
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Hitler was expecting an attack on the Berghof and his headquarters, and men had been working on a huge complex of shelters in and around the Berghof for months. The rock had been hollowed out in many places, machinery was eating its way into the mountain, threading a whole network of tunnels through it. But only the Berghof bunker was ready. A large gate led deep into the rock opposite the back door beside the living room. You had to climb down sixty-five steps, and then you reached an air-raid shelter which contained everything useful and necessary to sustain life for the Führer and a large number of other people. I only saw the two shelter rooms themselves, not the storerooms and archives accommodated there. Almost every day the sleepy guests assembled in the cave under the mountain with their cases. But no raid ever came.

We were only on the bombers’ flight path, and the raids were usually aiming for Vienna, targets in Hungary or cities in Bavaria. When the clouds of mist had dispersed we often saw the red reflection of fires in the sky over Munich. It was hard to restrain Eva then. She begged for permission to drive to Munich and see if her little house was all right. Usually Hitler wouldn’t let her. Then she would be on the phone, giving instructions, getting detailed information from everyone she knew. And when one of her best friends, the Munich actor Heini Hand-schuhmacher, died in an air raid there was no holding her. She went to the funeral with her friend Herta Schneider and her sister Gretl and came back badly shaken, with terrible accounts of the misery of the people who had suffered in the bombing. Hitler listened to her description with a gloomy expression. Then he vowed revenge and retaliation, and swore that the new inventions of the German Luftwaffe would pay the enemy back for this a hundred times over.

Unfortunately these threats never came to anything. Swarms of Allied planes kept flying over the Reich, and although V1 and V2 bombers flew in the opposite direction to London, what good did that do the German cities? Hitler was full of enthusiasm for the V1s and V2s. ‘Panic will break out in England. The effect of these weapons will wear their nerves down so badly that they won’t be able to hold out for long. I’ll pay the barbarians back for shooting women and children and destroying German culture.’ But the reports he received of the Luftwaffe defence measures were devastating. I remember one daylight raid on Munich. Hitler wanted to know exactly what forces were being used in defence, and Colonel von Below was on the phone all the time, getting news. Finally he had to report: ‘My Führer, it was planned for six German fighters to take off, but three never got off the ground, two had to turn back because of engine trouble, and the last plane felt so isolated it didn’t attack.’ Hitler was furious. Although his guests were with him he couldn’t help ranting and raging at the German Luftwaffe.

So we went on being routed out of bed almost daily and having to climb down into the underground dungeon. But after we had played this game dozens of times and no bomb had fallen anywhere near us, our willingness to leave our beds gradually faded. Hitler himself never climbed down the sixty-five steps until the anti-aircraft guns were firing or we were sure there was a genuine raid on nearby targets. But he stood close to the entrance keeping watch, like Cerberus, to make sure that no one left the bunker until the all clear went. He was particularly strict with Eva Braun about that.

One day, when the sirens were wailing again, and I was already up and had eaten breakfast, I went down to the tunnels to see if the Berghof party had assembled down there. There wasn’t a soul in sight. But when I reached the top steps and my head was already coming up to surface level I saw the Führer standing outside the entrance. He was talking to Adjutant Bormann and the liaison officer Hewel. When he saw me he wagged his finger and said, ‘Now don’t be so reckless, young woman, just go back down again, they haven’t sounded the all clear yet.’ Since I didn’t want to say that neither Eva nor the other guests had even got out of bed, let alone gone down to the bunker, I obediently withdrew. I tried to escape again twice, but each time I was turned back, and not until the siren sounded the all clear could I leave the dungeon.

At table Hitler delivered a lecture, saying it was absolutely essential to go down into the bunker when there was an air-raid warning. ‘It’s stupid, not brave, for people not to get into safety. The duty of my staff is to go into the bunkers – some of you are irreplaceable. It’s idiotic to imagine you show courage by running the risk of being hit by a bomb.’ He didn’t mean me so much as many of the men in his entourage, and the officers who didn’t believe an attack on headquarters was likely, and didn’t feel like spending hours of their time doing nothing down underground.

During our stay at the Berghof in the spring of 1944, Hitler assembled the army commanders, staff officers and the leaders of all divisions of the troops at the Platterhof and made inspiring speeches to them. Industrialists and political leaders were summoned too and given Hitler’s instructions. Although he made long speeches he didn’t dictate the text to me. On such occasions, when he was addressing an internal audience, he didn’t need notes. His speech wasn’t for the general public, and he much preferred speaking off the cuff. The top brass included Field Marshal Dietl, commander of the mountain troops in Norway.
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He had come straight from the front, and was awarded the brilliants to the Knight’s Cross on this occasion.
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Hitler thought very highly of him, and they talked for a long time. Of course Dietl wanted to seize the chance of seeing his wife. Hitler advised him not to take off in a plane until next morning, since weather conditions around Salzburg were usually very bad for take-off in the evening. But Dietl couldn’t wait. He set off very early in the morning, in spite of the fog, and Hitler was woken with the news that his outstanding commander had died in a crash, brilliants and all. Hitler was very upset. I can’t imagine he was just pretending. We all liked Dietl and were very sorry about his sudden death. But at the same time Hitler was furious that Dietl had been so reckless as to put himself in danger, flying in poor weather conditions. He repeated yet again that it was the duty of his irreplaceable colleagues to avoid danger.