Back in the bunker the atmosphere lightened appreciably now that the master and his chief minion were gone for good. Most of the remaining inhabitants gave little thought to the destruction going on above their heads or even to the macabre barbecue in the Chancellery garden. In the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the first serious student of Hitler’s last days, “a great cloud seemed to have lifted from their spirits. The nightmare of ideological repression was over, and if the prospect before them remained dark and dubious, at least they were now free to consider it in a businesslike manner.” They were also free to indulge in previously forbidden pleasures, such as smoking and listening to jazz. It is safe to say that the Führerbunker was the only place in Berlin at that moment where people were listening to jazz.
Red Army soldier posing with Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag, May 2, 1945
The moment of relief did not last long, however, for on the night of May 1 most of the remaining residents decided to abandon the bunker complex and make a desperate flight through the burning streets of Berlin in hopes of escaping the city. All were killed or captured in the break-out attempt, or run to ground shortly thereafter. For a time it was thought that Martin Bormann might have made it to safety, but he too died in the confines of the capital. Some thirty years later, a skull was found that was identified by pathologists as Bormann’s.
On May 2 General Karl Weidling, the city commandant of Berlin, sought out Marshal Zhukov to formally surrender the German capital. To Zhukov’s query regarding the whereabouts of Hitler, Weidling told him about the final fate of the Führer and Goebbels. “In my opinion,” Weidling then said to Zhukov, “it would be senseless and criminal if [the fighting in Berlin] claimed any more victims.” As the orders to end all the firing went out, Russian soldiers climbed to the roof of the ruined Reichstag and hoisted the Soviet flag. There is a famous photograph of this moment, and it might be taken as a fitting pictorial bookend to the photographs of Hitler’s SA marching through the Brandenburg Gate on January 30, 1933.
It was also on May 2 that Soviet soldiers, acting on advice from captured German officers, discovered two corpses in the Chancellery garden that were tentatively identified as Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda. This was an important find, but the Soviets’ primary quarry was Hitler, dead or alive. Two days later, a Russian private, rooting around in the same garden, noticed a pair of legs protruding from a crater. A little digging revealed the charred bodies of a man and a woman. The colonel in charge, having been told by the Germans that Hitler’s body was somewhere in the Chancellery building, did not believe that these were the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun, so he had them reburied. On May 5, still unable to find the Nazi leader’s remains, the Russians returned to the garden and dug up the bodies that they had reburied the previous day.
These bodies, along with the putative Goebbels corpses and the suspected remains of General Krebs, who had also killed himself in the bunker, were taken to the headquarters of Soviet Counter Intelligence at Buch, a Berlin suburb. On May 8 autopsies were performed on all the bodies, which indicated that they were indeed those of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Hans Krebs, Hitler, and Eva Braun. As far as Hitler was concerned, the telling evidence was some bridgework that was identified as his by a dental nurse who had once worked on his teeth.
At first the Soviets kept their discovery and identification of Hitler’s body a secret, apparently holding this information in reserve in case somebody claiming to be the Führer showed up and tried to seize power. On June 6, however, they suddenly announced that they had identified Hitler’s corpse, adding that he had died exclusively from poisoning (which was more “cowardly” than shooting). Three days later they retracted this story and suggested instead that he might have escaped from Berlin and gone into hiding.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (right) and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedenburg at the German surrender, Karlshorst, May 9, 1945
Why the reversal? It seems that a “live” Hitler was of more use to Moscow than a dead one, for the threat of a Nazi rebirth would allow the Soviets to push for larger reparations from Germany and a stronger role for Russia in Eastern Europe and Berlin. Moscow’s duplicity indeed fueled all kinds of rumors regarding Hitler’s fate. Many people preferred to believe that the Führer had gotten out of Berlin alive, and Hitler-sightings began cropping up all over the globe. He was seen on an island in the Baltic, a monastery in Spain, a temple in Tibet, a sheep ranch in Patagonia, a Volkswagen repair shop in Buenos Aires, a bandit hideout in Albania, even at an explorer’s camp in Antarctica. The sightings continued for decades and with a frequency that rivaled those of the Virgin Mary and Elvis Presley. In November 1989 the Weekly World News, an American tabloid, announced that Hitler, now one hundred years old, had been found in the mountains of Chile, where he cared for sick Indian children and enjoyed the status of a “Living God.”
In the early hours of May 7, the day before Hitler was autopsied and conclusively identified as the former Führer of the Third Reich, representatives of the rump Nazi regime signed a surrender document at General Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims. The Germans had delayed taking this step for several days in order to allow as many German soldiers as possible to withdraw westward and evade capture by the Russians. The Soviets saw the surrender at Reims as a tactic to deny them their rightful share in the victory. They insisted on a second, and far more elaborate, surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8. Thus it was that representatives from the Western powers flew to Tempelhof airport and participated along with the Russians in the final surrender of the German forces at the Soviet headquarters in Karlshorst, in the northeastern part of the city. It was appropriate that this momentous event should take place in the demolished Nazi capital, but the recrimination surrounding the German surrender presaged rifts within the Allied camp that would soon result in the division of Germany and Berlin.
An American soldier poses on a flak gun in front of the destroyed Reichstag, 1945
7
COMING INTO THE COLD
The leaders of the United States are not such idiots as to fight over Berlin.
—Nikita Khrushchev, 1959
AN AIRPLANE CIRCLES over a smashed city in preparation for landing. On board is an American congressional delegation. Looking down on the devastation, a Texas congressman drawls: “Looks like rats been gnawing at a hunk of old Roquefort cheese.” The chewed-up mess in question is Berlin, the congressman a character in Billy Wilder’s black comedy, A Foreign Affair (1948), whose background shots were filmed in the former Nazi capital. The movie features the ex-Berliner Marlene Dietrich in the role of a former mistress of Nazi bigwigs who is now reduced to singing in sleazy bars and sleeping with GIs for her livelihood. In one of her songs, “Black Market,” she croons: