There was no curtain on the window, and through it I could see pink sky, lit by the glow of the subsiding fires. After all the days of incessant fighting, the stillness was a blessing, but so unwonted it chilled your heart. Through the strain of those days, the thought that we were in Berlin kept breaking through and banishing sleep.
It was fairly light. A deer’s antlers protruded from the wall opposite. There were freshly cut flowers in a vase on the table. Using a pocket torch, I read a framed saying on the walclass="underline" ‘Der Himmel bewahre uns vor Regen und Wind, und vor Kameraden, die keine sind.’ May heaven protect us from wind and from rain, and from friends who are false and bring nothing but pain.
The wall was covered with photographs of a boy: here he was clambering onto a rocking horse, here lying on the beach, his head resting on the outstretched legs of a girl in a striped bathing costume. Here he was, already a soldier, standing in a new, well fitting uniform and holding a heavy combat helmet. Here he was in the group photo of a cheery bunch of soldiers. In the centre of the photo was a bottle. Someone had put a helmet on his bayonet. The caption was, ‘Prosit!’ Your health!
And on the desk, under the glass top, was the sad announcement that Kurt Bremer was missing without trace on the Eastern Front.
In search of water, I wandered into the kitchen. Our hostess was sitting by the window. On her knees she had a bag of socks she had begun to darn in Hitler’s Germany, and now, making do with the faint light of the dawning day, she was getting on with a job she was used to. Beer mugs lined the kitchen shelf, and at the head of the parade was a familiar porcelain lady holding out a gilded slipper and inviting someone to drink out of it.
I asked the mistress of the house whose shop it was downstairs – we had noticed it in the night as we were climbing up to the apartment – and whether it had been boarded up for a long time. She replied that it was a dry-salter’s shop that she and her husband owned, and that they had closed it two months ago. ‘We made a success of it by honest toil. It wasn’t at all easy for us. And now, you see…’ She sighed quietly. ‘Das Geschäft macht keinen Spaß mehr.’ Business is no fun any more.
In the morning the owner of the apartment asked me whether I thought he would be able to go to a particular street today to see his dentist. I assured him I thought he would. War was one thing, but a toothache was not to be neglected. He told me that actually he did not have a toothache, but two weeks ago had made an appointment for a check-up today. Although he was not in pain, the fall of the capital of the Third Reich could hardly justify missing a dentist’s appointment. He had an indomitable sense of the need to maintain equilibrium and good order, no matter what the rest of the world might get up to.
Through the window we could see the traffic at the crossroads being directed by a girl we knew. Wielding her flags, she allowed cars to pass, while simultaneously finding the time for a quick salute; she stopped service personnel who had helped themselves to Berliners’ bicycles for getting around and took them off them. The commander of the front had given orders that bicycles were not to be confiscated from the townspeople. A whole mountain of misappropriated bicycles had accumulated near her on the pavement.
A soldier pushed a paint tin out of the front door opposite. He dipped a thick brush with a short handle in it, squatted down on his heels, and obliterated the enormous letters of one of Goebbels’ injunctions painted in the roadway: ‘Berlin bleibt deutsch.’ Berlin will remain German.
It is early morning on 4 July 1945 and a rosy mist is rising over Alexanderplatz. It is chilly. In the middle of the square is what looks like a gypsy encampment: the remnants of the defeated Berlin garrison. They are sleeping in the roadway, swathed in army blankets. The wounded are sleeping on stretchers. One or two are already sitting up, huddled with a blanket covering their heads. Nurses wearing dark jackets and white headscarves are making the rounds of the wounded.
Captive soldiers are also sleeping in Unter den Linden, the street used for parades. The buildings on either side of the street are in ruins. There are yawning gaps in walls from which masonry is still falling. A cart laden with bundles of possessions clatters over the cobbles, doggedly pushed along by two women who must have come back to Berlin from the countryside. The racket invades the stupefaction of ruins and debris.
We are back in the Reich Chancellery. Who were the last people to see Hitler? Who saw him here at all, alive in the underground complex? What is known about what has happened to him?
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Schneider, the garage mechanic who told us yesterday about sending petrol to Hitler’s bunker, testifies: ‘Whether Hitler was in Berlin at all until 1 May I have no idea. Personally, I did not see him here.’ On 1 May, however, in the Chancellery garage he heard from Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, and from the person in charge of the garage that Hitler had committed suicide. ‘The news went round by word of mouth. Everyone was repeating it but no one really knew for sure.’
A fifty-year old man introduces himself officially as Wilhelm Lange, chef of the Führer’s domestic commissariat in the Reich Chancellery and a specialist pastry cook. He tells us, ‘I last saw Hitler at the beginning of April 1945 in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where he was taking a walk with his German sheepdog which answered to the name of Blondi.’
What do you know about the fate of Hitler?
Nothing for sure. In the evening of 30 April, Hitler’s dog handler, Sergeant Major Tornow, came to me in the kitchen for food for the puppies. He was upset about something and told me, ‘The Führer is dead and nothing remains of his body.’ There were rumours among the Reich Chancellery staff that Hitler had poisoned or shot himself and that his body had been burnt. I do not know whether or not that was true.
The technical administrator of the Reich Chancellery, Wilhelm Ziehm, tells us,
The last time I saw Hitler was at 12 noon on 29 April. I was summoned to the Führer’s bunker to fix a malfunctioning ventilator. While doing the job I saw Hitler through the open door of his office.
What do you know about the fate of Hitler?
On 30 April 30 at 6 o’clock Wernicke, a plumber, and Gunner, an electrician, told us when they returned from work at the Führer’s bunker that they had heard Hitler was dead. They gave no more details.
Vice Admiral Hans-Erich Voss attended meetings in the bomb shelter at which Hitler was present. He learned of Hitler’s death from Goebbels. That is all we had found out by the morning of 4 May.
‘Nothing for sure,’ as Lange the chef had said, and even this information had to be extricated from an accumulation of other contradictory, sensational misinformation. The things that were being said! That Hitler had been flown out on a plane piloted by Hanna Reitsch three days before Berlin fell; that his ‘death’ had been staged, and the broadcast announcement about it was a ruse; that Hitler had been spirited away from Berlin through underground passages and was hiding in his ‘impregnable’ stronghold in South Tyrol.
People who were in possession of more modest, but crucial, information were so traumatized by everything they had experienced that they muddled up dates and facts, even though what they were recollecting had happened only two or three days previously. First here, then there alternative stories bubbled up and burst, each more sensational than the last. Rumours circulated that Hitler had had doubles.