For Goebbels and Bormann personally, surrender had little to commend it. For them, capitulating to the Soviet side was tantamount to something worse than death. Saving the lives of German soldiers and of the German population was evidently not a priority. At 18.30 the Red Army, on the orders of Marshal Zhukov, resumed the assault. The unused hotline connecting the opposing sides was destroyed.
I often wondered what had happened to our signaller on the other side of the front line, lying in that crater with his German colleagues, alone in the enemy camp as the Red Army resumed its furious assault. Did the Nazi soldiers take their desperation and anger out on him in their darkest hour?
It was only in 1985, after being forgotten for so many years, that the heroic signaller resurfaced. I was so delighted to learn from a newspaper report that a Kazakh film about him had won an award at an international festival of documentary short films. All these years he had been living in Alma-Ata in obscurity.
Late in the evening of 1 May, the Hamburg radio station broadcast an announcement ‘from the Führer’s Headquarters’ that, ‘This afternoon, continuing the fight against Bolshevism to his last breath, our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fell in the battle for Germany at his command post in the Reich Chancellery.’ The announcement was broadcast a second time, accompanied by Wagnerian music. The circumstances had changed, but our task remained the same: to find Hitler, dead or alive.
Hitler’s headquarters was located in a bomb shelter under the Reich Chancellery. It had more than fifty rooms (most of them no bigger than a boxroom). It also housed a powerful communications centre, had food supplies and a kitchen. An underground garage was connected to it. There were two ways into the underground complex: from the internal garden of the Reich Chancellery, and from the Chancellery’s vestibule, from which a fairly broad and gentle staircase led downwards. Descending the stairs, you immediately came to a long corridor with numerous doors opening off it. The route to Hitler’s bunker was rather long and complicated. An entrance from the enclosed garden led directly to the Führerbunker, as those inhabiting this underworld called it.
The two-storey Führerbunker was much deeper down than the bomb shelter under the Reich Chancellery and its reinforced concrete ceiling much thicker. The head of Hitler’s bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber, in his memoirs, Hitler, I Knew Him,[1] describes it: ‘Hitler’s new bomb shelter was the most solid of any built in Germany. The reinforced concrete ceiling of the bunker was eight metres thick.’
There was a concrete mixer near the garden entrance to the bunker: work had recently been carried out to strengthen the concrete roof, probably after it suffered a direct hit from artillery shells.
Russian assault detachments broke through the final defensive ring and burst into the Reich Chancellery on the morning of 2 May.
There was a firefight in the vestibule with the remnants of the guard, most of whom, however, had fled. Next came the descent. Military and civilian staff began coming out of the corridors, the boxrooms and the rest of the complex with their hands up. The wounded were sitting or lying on the floor. There was groaning. In the underground complex and in the storeys of the Reich Chancellery shooting broke out repeatedly.
We needed to get our bearings immediately, to locate all the exits and block them, get the lie of the land and start searching. In the very mixed collection of people occupying the complex it was no simple matter to identify those who could be helpful, people who would know more than others about Hitler’s fate and could guide us through the labyrinthine complex. We conducted a first sketchy enquiry.
Down there we found a portly forty-year old, Karl Schneider, one of the Chancellery’s garage mechanics. He testified that on 28 or 29 April, he could not remember which exactly, the telephone operator on duty in Hitler’s secretariat gave him an order to deliver all the petrol he had to the Führer’s bunker. Schneider sent eight cans, each containing twenty litres of petrol. Later the same day, he received a further order from the operator to send firelighters. He had eight and sent them all.
Schneider had not himself seen Hitler and did not know whether he was in Berlin, but on 1 May he was told by the head of the garage and by Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, that the Führer was dead. Rumours were circulating among the security soldiers that he had committed suicide and that his body had been burnt. Putting these rumours together with the orders he had received, Schneider concluded that the petrol he had sent had been used to burn the Führer’s body.
Then, on the evening of 1 May, he had another call from the duty telephonist, again demanding that all available petrol should be sent to the Führer’s bunker. Schneider siphoned petrol from the fuel tanks of the cars and sent another four cans.
What had that call been about? Who had the petrol been meant for this time? Together with Karl Schneider and Wilhelm Lange (a cook), Major Bystrov, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko[1] and Major Khazin went out into the garden. The ground had been churned up by shells, the trees mutilated, and their charred branches were strewn underfoot. The lawns were blackened by fire and soot, and there was broken glass and piles of bricks everywhere. How were they to determine where the bodies had been burned?
They began an inspection of the garden and, three metres from the garden exit of the Führerbunker, found the half-burnt bodies of Goebbels and his wife. So that was what the second supply of petrol had been for. ‘The German found them first,’ Ivan Klimenko wrote to me in a letter dated 9 February 1965, referring to Schneider. If it had been any later, the torrent of Red Army soldiers pouring into the Reich Chancellery would have trampled the bodies to pieces without even noticing what was under their feet.
The sky over Berlin had not yet ceased to glow; the Reich Chancellery was still smoking. It was dark in the underground complex, and with the ventilation not working it was stuffy, dank and gloomy. In those days, down in the Chancellery’s shelter, I had to sort through a vast number of papers and documents by the light of humble oil lamps. There were on-thespot accounts of street fighting in Bormann’s files, reports from the Berlin Nazi Party leadership about the hopelessness of the situation, their lack of ammunition, the demoralized state of the soldiers. There was Bormann’s correspondence, and Hitler’s personal papers.
My priority in searching through these papers was to find anything that would shed some light at least on what had been happening there in the last few days, that would add a brush stroke or give a clue as to how everything had ended.
Here was Bormann sending telegram after telegram to his adjutant, Hummel, in Obersalzberg, all bearing the red stamp ‘Geheim’, Secret! From the nature of his instructions it was clear they were preparing to move Hitler’s headquarters to Berchtesgaden. They had been planning to get out of Berlin.
Here was a folder containing information from their enemy’s sources, radio intercepts from the last days of Apriclass="underline" Reuters news agency reports from Allied headquarters, broadcasts from Moscow about combat operations on the fronts, telegrams about events in the rest of the world, from London, Rome, San Francisco, Washington and Zurich. These sources were used at Hitler’s headquarters to gain a sense of what was happening on other sectors of the front, and in Berlin itself, in the last days of April. By this time, direct contact with the troops had been finally lost.
All the papers in the folder were typewritten in huge letters. I had never before come across such a strange font: it was as if you were reading through a magnifying glass. What was that for? Later I learned that Hitler’s secretary, Gertraud Junge, retyped all the papers on a special typewriter. For reasons of image, Hitler did not want to wear spectacles.
1
There are two typescript texts translated into Russian in the archive: Testimony of Hans Rattenhuber (file 132, pp. 63–91, titled ‘The Truth about the Death of Hitler’; also more detailed memoirs titled ‘Hitler As I Knew Him’ (file 131).
1
Ivan Klimenko was head of the Smersh counterintelligence department of the 79th Infantry Corps, 3rd Shock Army, 1st Byelorussian Front. Vadim J. Birstein, SMERSH: