I was taken into the little room that had once been Fräulein Schroeder’s living room. Now it was a temporary study for Hitler. How gloomy and sober the room looked now. Once Linge had closed the door behind me Hitler came towards me without a word. He took both my hands and said, ‘Oh, child, I’m so sorry. Your husband was a splendid fellow.’ His voice was very soft and sad. I almost felt sorrier for Hitler than for myself, because it’s so difficult to express sympathy. ‘You must stay with me, and don’t worry, I’ll always be there to help you!’ Suddenly everyone wanted to help me, and I felt like running away.
Soon I was sharing mealtimes with Hitler again. He was feeling very unwell, he was silent, and looked old and tired. It was difficult to arouse his interest in a conversation. Even when Speer was talking Hitler sometimes didn’t listen. ‘I have so many anxieties… If you knew what decisions I have to take, all by myself, no one shares the responsibility with me.’ This was the kind of thing he said every time we asked him how he was feeling. The doctors went in and out of the bunker. The senior doctor from Berlin was always there, and Brandt was consulted too and examined Hitler’s painful arm and trembling hand. Finally Professor von Eicken[83] was summoned from Berlin. He had once carried out a successful operation on Hitler’s larynx, and had his full confidence. And Morell was ill himself; there was nothing for it, he had to go to bed and leave the care of Hitler to his deputy Weber. It was the worst blow in Morell’s ambitious life to find that Hitler was happy with his deputy. He suddenly realized that there were other doctors who could give injections as well as Morell. Hitler claimed it was positively a work of art to find a vein of his to inject, and it was rare for a doctor to be able to treat him well. Morell was wildly jealous and ambitious, but now he had to leave the field temporarily, just when Hitler needed him most. Dark clouds were gathering above his own fat head. Brandt and his colleague von Hasselbach had found out that the tablets Morell was giving Hitler contained a certain percentage of strychnine, which was bound to be deadly one day if Hitler went on taking such large doses.
No one checked up on the medicaments that Hitler took in the course of a day. Linge had a certain amount of supplies in his cupboard, and when Hitler wanted something Linge would take it to him without asking Morell first. Finally the two surgeons wrote a memo and handed it to Hitler. The result was an outbreak of fury on the Führer’s part and Brandt’s dismissal from his post as attendant doctor. He had lost Hitler’s confidence, although he had previously been quite friendly with Eva Braun. But it was a dangerous and almost hopeless undertaking to criticize Morell.
A few days later we were told, ‘The Führer sends apologies but he will eat alone.’ There was no tea-party either. And finally the Führer spent a day in bed. This was a great sensation. No one had ever seen Hitler in bed. Even his valet woke him through the closed door, and put the morning news down on a small table outside. Hitler had never even received any of his colleagues in his dressing-gown. Suddenly he was ill, and no one knew what the trouble was. Had the assassination attempt not left him uninjured after all? The doctors thought it might be the aftereffects of concussion only just showing. Anyway, we didn’t see Hitler for days. The adjutants were in despair. The Führer wouldn’t see anyone. Once Otto Günsche came to me and said, ‘The Führer is completely listless. We don’t know what to do. Even the situation in the East doesn’t interest him, although things are going very badly there.’
Speaking by phone from his sickbed, Morell gave his assistant instructions for treating Hitler. And lo and behold, suddenly Hitler’s spirits revived, he gave orders from his bed, had the situation at the fronts described to him, and after a few days he even began the nightly tea-parties again. I think it was the only time in his life that Hitler received guests in his bedroom, lying in bed. I must say it was very uncomfortable.
The little room in the bunker was very shabbily furnished, just like a soldier’s cubicle in a barracks. In addition Hitler had a huge wooden crate in the room, which was meant for Blondi and her family, so there was really very little room. I couldn’t help thinking of Eva Braun’s worries◦– she could never think what to give Hitler for his birthday or Christmas. He wore an ordinary grey flannel dressing-gown, no coloured ties, just ugly black socks and not even modern pyjamas. He lay in bed, well shaved and with his hair brushed, in the kind of plain white nightshirt that only the Wehrmacht could design. He hadn’t buttoned up the sleeves, because they chafed him, so we could see the white skin of his arms. Bright white! We could understand why he didn’t like wearing shorts! A small table had been pushed up to his bed, so we drew up a few chairs and with some difficulty formed a group round the bed. If one of the guests wanted to go out◦– and there weren’t many of us, just two secretaries, Adjutant Bormann and Hewel◦– we all had to stand up, and serving tea was difficult.
Hitler wasn’t talking much yet. He got us to tell him what we had been doing these last few days. There wasn’t much we could say. Our main activity had been typing out whole reams of reports of losses. It was wretched work, and seemed to us so pointless. Hitler hadn’t even looked at the reports over the last few days. It was a desperate feeling to see how the only man who could have ended all this misery with a single stroke of his pen lying almost apathetically in bed, staring into space with tired eyes, while all hell was let loose around him. It seemed to me as if his body had suddenly understood the pointlessness of all the efforts made by his mind and his strong will and had gone on strike. It had just lain down and said, ‘I don’t want any more.’ Hitler had never known such disobedience before, and he had been taken by surprise.
But it wasn’t long before he overcame this weakness. News that the Russians were about to invade East Prussia got him on his feet and cured him overnight. By now the new bunker was ready too. It was a positive fortress. Hitler moved in. This huge new concrete building contained a maze of passages, rooms and halls. A kitchen for Hitler’s diet food had been installed in the bunker too, and all his close colleagues had their own rooms there. He was expecting a well-targeted air raid on his headquarters any day, and when it came all the important people must be together. All the other bunkers were reinforced at the same time. It’s true that we had air-raid warnings every day now, but there was never more than a single aircraft circling over the forest, and no bombs were dropped. All the same, Hitler took the danger very seriously, and thought all these reconnaissance flights were in preparation for the big raid he was expecting.
The Russians were advancing with uncanny speed. Dreadful reports came from the villages that they had occupied. Hitler was no longer in a good temper. When we came for tea in the evening he looked gloomy and full of cares, and he had to make a great effort to forget, at least for a few hours, the pictures and reports coming in from the East. Raped women, murdered children and mistreated men, death, misery and despair rose up to accuse him.
He swore revenge and fanned the flames of hatred. ‘They’re not human beings any more, they’re animals from the steppes of Asia, and the war I am waging against them is a war for the dignity of European mankind. No price is too high for victory. We have to be hard and fight with all the means at our disposal.’
But it did not look as if victory was coming any closer. The enemy troops, on the contrary, were. In the West too the Allies were gradually approaching the borders of Germany. And we were still here in East Prussia. It couldn’t be long before the Russians drove us out. On many clear autumn days we heard the thunder of the guns. And Hitler was having buildings erected and fortified and made ready for defence. By now a huge apparatus had been constructed. There were barriers and new guard posts everywhere, mines, tangles of barbed wire, watchtowers. The paths along which I had walked my dog one day would suddenly be blocked the next, with a guard wanting to see my pass. If the enemy had known what chaos the air-raid warnings always set off in our camp they would surely have attacked.
83
Carl von Eicken,