Hitler's Last Secretary (27 page)

The six children play in the corridors, happy and contented. They read their fairy-tales at the round table on a landing on the stairs, halfway down to the deepest part of the bunker. They don’t hear the explosions getting louder and louder, they feel safe with ‘Uncle Führer’. In the afternoon they drink chocolate with their ‘uncle’ and tell him what they have been doing at school. Helmut, the only boy, reads aloud the composition he wrote for Hitler’s birthday. You stole that from Daddy,’ says his sister Helga. And the adults laugh when the boy replies, ‘Or Daddy stole it from me.’ But in her handbag their mother is carrying the poison that means the end of six little lives.

I suddenly wonder where Professor Morell is. His room is being used by Goebbels and his wife now; the physician has left. Linge, who goes about his work in as calm and friendly a way as ever, tells me that after a dramatic scene with the Führer, Morell left Berlin by plane early in the morning. The previous evening Morell went to the Führer as usual to give him his daily injection before bed. And suddenly Hitler was overcome by a feeling of fear and distrust, suspecting betrayal and plots. ‘Morell, leave my room at once! You want to anaesthetize me so that they can take me out of Berlin by force. That’s what they all want, but I’m not going,’ he shouted. And when the trembling Morell almost had a heart attack with the shock of it, he ordered him to leave Berlin on the next plane. Never before had Hitler gone for so much as a day without the support of his physician, who had to accompany him on every flight and every drive. Now he was sending him away. He didn’t need a doctor any more, or medication or a special diet. Nothing mattered.

New faces suddenly appeared in the Führer bunker. There was Artur Axmann
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the Reich youth leader. One of the devoted believers, a blind idealist! He had only one arm, but eyes full of warlike zeal shone in his calm, composed face. He too had come to be with his Führer at the last. Then there was an inconspicuous little man, greying at the temples. He wore the field-grey SS uniform and was to be found anywhere you saw a couple of officers standing together discussing the situation. This was Obergruppenführer Müller,
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Kaltenbrunner’s deputy.

Suddenly Speer appeared again. Eva Braun went to meet him, hand outstretched. ‘I knew you’d come. You won’t leave the Führer on his own.’ But Speer smiled quietly. ‘I’m leaving Berlin again this evening,’ he replied after a pause. Then he went to see Hitler. We learned nothing of this long, serious conversation between them.

Another event was the subject of excited discussion: Göring’s ‘treachery’. Goebbels, Hewel, Voss, Axmann and Burgdorf were standing together in the corridor outside the conference room. Out in the anteroom I heard muted voices saying that Göring had betrayed the Führer, now, at the vital moment. What exactly had happened? On my way to the upper part of the bunker I met Frau Christian. She had heard about it from Colonel von Below, a colleague of her husband. Göring had sent a telegram to say that he was about to take over as Hitler’s successor, since he assumed that the Führer no longer had complete freedom of action, and if he received no reply from the Führer by 22.00 hours he would consider that his succession had come into effect.

This telegram fell into Bormann’s hands. He showed it to Hitler, putting his own interpretation on it. No wonder that Hitler saw treachery in Göring’s proposition, fell into a furious rage against the Reich Marshal and removed him from all his offices. Bormann may have smiled with self-satisfaction to think that now, at five minutes to midnight, he had succeeded yet again in strengthening his own power At his orders, Göring and his whole staff were arrested on the Obersalzberg.

Göring’s telegram is the sole subject of conversation in the bunker all day. We hardly notice that, after a long conversation with Hitler, Speer has disappeared again and has finally left Berlin. Hitler has withdrawn into his room and won’t see anyone. Meanwhile the officers are putting their heads together over the street map of Berlin in the conference room, discussing salvage operations. The Führer takes no further interest in that. But the general staff isn’t giving up yet. Some kind of army under General Wenck
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is supposed to be on its way to the West somewhere. So if Wenck is told to come back and storms Berlin, we could be saved! And Obergruppenführer Steiner
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is to lead an attack from the north in support of Wenck! I don’t understand the military details of this plan, but it does give me back a tiny spark of hope, and the officers take it to the Supreme Commander. They manage to get the Führer to look at the map table. Once more he rouses himself from his lethargy and gives the order for the attack! Wenck will change course and relieve Berlin.

None of us can sleep. We wander round the rooms like shadows, waiting. Sometimes we slip upstairs, wait for a pause in the artillery fire, and are horrified to see the devastation spreading further and further. We are surrounded by ruins and the remains of buildings. A dead horse lies in the middle of the white paving of the Wilhelmsplatz. But my feelings are deadened, I feel quite hollow. There is nothing real or natural left about us. We are indifferent and composed, we laugh because we can’t cry, and we talk in order to silence the frightened voices of our despairing hearts, voices reminding us of home, our mothers, our families. Sometimes I think fleetingly of people living by a Bavarian lake, people who are waiting for me, who love me and are worried about me. People who don’t have to make decisions. Where women don’t have to fear the occupying power. Where life goes on. But the tense, oppressive atmosphere of the bunker has me in its grip. The Führer, now a broken old man, still holds the invisible strings. His presence is enough to stifle any real emotion, any natural feeling.

We women usually stick together. Eva Braun joins us too. We play with the children and the dogs. All the rooms are open to us, no work is officially being done any more. When a report comes in, when a dusty, perspiring officer arrives from the nearby front to announce that the Russian tanks are coming closer, Hitler receives the news in silence, with little interest. The Reich Chancellery has a defence commander now: Grup-penführer Mohnke.
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I feel really faint and desperate to think of us still sitting here in a trap when the Russians begin storming the Reich Chancellery building. But the watchword is ‘Chin up, while there’s life there’s hope’, and we live by it, dulled and rigid as puppets. We don’t know what the date is any more. Sometimes we snatch an hour of sleep, but our nervousness soon wakes us again. We want to be there when news that General Wenck is attacking arrives. We keep venturing out into the hell above us and listening, hoping to hear the thunder of German guns at last.

There is fighting right inside the city now. The heavy Russian tanks are taking street after street. What’s the use of the Hitler Youth boys defending all the bridges and blowing them up? They get decorated by the Führer in person, a few Russian tanks are shot down, hundreds more replace them. And not a trace of Wenck. No news of Steiner’s attack.
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The reconnaissance patrols that set out from the Reich Chancellery come back without anything to report. […
Manuscript illegible …]
Hanna Reitsch
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lands in a Fieseler Storch on the East-West axis just outside the Brandenburg Gate, bringing General Greim,
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an excellent Luftwaffe officer. Today is the first time I’ve seen either of them. Hanna Reitsch is a small, delicate, very feminine person, you’d never have thought she had such masculine courage. She wears the Iron Cross on her smooth black rollneck sweater. Greim limps into the bunker on one leg, leaning on her shoulder. He was wounded on their adventurous flight here, shot in the leg by Russian fighter pilots. Now he has come to succeed Göring and take over command of the Luftwaffe. But first he disappears into the operating theatre to be treated by Dr Stumpfegger, the silent, pale, reserved doctor. Hanna Reitsch hurries to see the Führer. She must have been one of those women who adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations. Today that seems to me amazing, because she was the only woman who knew Hitler not just privately, as a man, but as a soldier and a military commander too. She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals. […]

In the evening she put the Goebbels children to bed. Eva Braun kept her company. Their mother hardly had the strength to face her children with composure now. Every meeting with them made her feel so terrible that she burst into tears afterwards. She and her husband were nothing but shadows, already doomed to die.

When I passed the door of the children’s room I heard their six clear childish voices singing. I went in. They were sitting in three bunk beds, with their hands over their ears so as not to spoil the three-part round they were singing. Then they wished each other good night cheerfully, and finally fell asleep. Only the oldest, Helga, sometimes had a sad, knowing expression in her big brown eyes. She was the quietest, and sometimes I think, with horror, that in her heart that child saw through the pretence of the grown-ups.

I left the children’s room wondering how anyone could allow these innocent creatures to die for him. Frau Goebbels talked to me about it. There were no differences of class or rank any more, we were all bound together by fate. Frau Goebbels was in greater torment than any of us. She was facing six deaths, while the rest of us had only to face one. ‘I would rather have my children die than live in disgrace, jeered at. Our children have no place in Germany as it will be after the war.’

We still kept Hitler company at mealtimes. Only Eva Braun, Frau Christian, Fräulein Manziarly and me. There was no subject of conversation interesting enough for us to discuss it now. I heard my own voice like a stranger’s. ‘My Führer, do you think National Socialism will be revived?’ I asked. ‘No. National Socialism is dead. Perhaps a similar idea will arise in a hundred years’ time, with the force of a religion sweeping through the whole world. But Germany is lost. It was probably never mature and strong enough for the task I intended it to perform,’ said the Führer, as if talking to himself. I didn’t understand him any more.

Everything was in hopeless confusion in the rooms of the New Reich Chancellery bunker. The officers there were von Below, Fegelein, Burgdorf, Krebs, Hewel, Captain Baur the pilot and Oberführer Rattenhuber, who were both homesick for Bavaria. Apart from me these two were the only ones who came from Munich. Then there was Admiral Voss, with several staff officers I didn’t know, and Heinz Lorenz from the press office. Bormann and his colleague had their quarters somewhere too. Exhausted Volkssturm and Wehrmacht soldiers haunted the long corridor. A field kitchen was supplying them with hot drinks and soup. Sleeping figures lay on the floor everywhere, with women running around to render aid – refugees, girls, nurses, employees of the Reich Chancellery, all lending a hand where necessary. An emergency operating theatre had been set up in one of the big rooms. Chief Surgeon Haase,
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who had been bombed out of the Charité hospital, was working day and night, amputating, operating, applying dressings, doing whatever he could. There were no longer enough of the beds that had been put up wherever possible. Soon there were no more shirts or underclothes for the wounded.

The long corridor running underground from this part of the Reich Chancellery and over to the Führer bunker had already taken hits in many places, and its thin ceiling had fallen in. Hitler wanted Frau Christian and me to be near him by night too. A couple of mattresses were put on the floor of the little conference room, where we slept in our clothes for an hour or so, and outside the door, which was left ajar, lay the officers Krebs, Burgdorf, Bormann, etc., in armchairs, snoring and waiting for Wenck’s army! Instead, all hell was let loose above us. The firing reached its height on 25 and 26 April. Shots crashed out without a pause, and each one seemed to be aimed directly at our bunker. Suddenly a guard ran in and told us, ‘The Russians have turned their machine-gun fire on the entrance.’ In panic he hurried through the rooms, but the listless people waiting there did not react. Finally it turned out that there had been a mistake. Only a single artillery shot had landed quite close. Another reprieve! I don’t know now how I spent those hours. We smoked a great deal, everywhere, whether the Führer was with us or not. The thick cigarette smoke no longer bothered him, and Eva Braun stopped concealing her ‘vice’. Sometimes a man who had made his way back from the front arrived with a report. The main fighting line was getting closer and closer to Anhalt Station. Now it was the cries of the women and children of Berlin that we thought we heard when we climbed up and looked out at the flames and smoke. We heard that German women were being used as human shields by Russian tanks, and once again we saw death as the only way of escape.

When I remember how we all talked, in depressing detail, of nothing but the best way to die, I can’t understand how it is that I’m still alive. Hitler had heard of Mussolini’s shameful death.
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I think someone had even shown him the photos of the naked bodies hanging head downwards in the main square of Milan. ‘I will not fall into the enemy’s hands either dead or alive. When I’m dead, my body is to be burned so that no one can ever find it,’ Hitler decreed. And as we mechanically took our meals without noticing what we were eating we discussed ways to make sure of dying. ‘The best way is to shoot yourself in the mouth. Your skull is shattered and you don’t notice anything. Death is instantaneous,’ Hitler told us. But we women were horrified at the idea. ‘I want to be a beautiful corpse,’ said Eva Braun, ‘I shall take poison.’ And she took a little brass capsule containing a phial of cyanide from the pocket of her elegant dress. ‘I wonder if it hurts very much? I’m so frightened of suffering for a long time,’ she confessed. ‘I’m ready to die heroically, but at least I want it to be painless.’ Hitler told us that death by this poison was completely painless. Your nervous and respiratory systems were paralysed, and you died within a few seconds. And this ‘comforting’ thought made Frau Christian and me ask the Führer for poison capsules too. Himmler had given him ten, and when we left him after the meal he personally gave each of us one, saying, ‘I am very sorry that I can’t give you a better farewell present.’