To exclude these speculations definitively, one after another, took time. The search was being conducted at a furious pace: it was easy to race off on the wrong track and come to false conclusions. Complications, sometimes ridiculous, hampered the search. In Berlin, in those first days of May 1945, under very difficult conditions, it was essential to coordinate the efforts of the intelligence agents and sort through everything methodically and swiftly, to block off all the false trails and target the searching. That task was entrusted to Colonel Vasiliy Gorbushin.[1]
Again and again, metre by metre, we painstakingly examined the empty underground complex beneath the Reich Chancellery. There were overturned tables, broken typewriters, glass and paper underfoot; box-rooms and more substantial rooms, long corridors and crossings. There was damage to the concrete walls and, here and there in the corridors, pools of water. Damp, dank air. The ventilators had not worked well even when Hitler was there and now were not working at all. It was difficult to breathe and it was murky… Round every corner something seemed to be rustling or moving, or there was a silence you felt might at any moment be broken by gunfire from some desperate Nazi officer.
The crunching of boots on broken glass, echoing gasps from soldiers who had stormed the Reich Chancellery and now, prowling through the last residence of the German government, were coming upon crates of expensive liqueurs. They were calling out to each other as if finding their way through a forest, their torches lighting up the theatrical setting of the last hours of the Third Reich. Sometimes we heard the click of safety catches and a menacing ‘Khende khokh’, ‘Hände hoch!’ in a heavy Russian accent, directed into the darkness where the sound of our footsteps was coming from.
It was a difficult, unpredictable situation. Above us, on the surface of Berlin, the war was over, but down here, underground, the search continued in the chaos. Our searching was tireless; we were completely focused, conscious of a tremendous responsibility, the culmination of four years of warfare. We had to find our bearings in what was, at first, the thoroughly confusing topography of the underground complex, to discover hiding places and check them. The hunt was on to find Hitler.
General Krebs had already been found, lying in the courtyard in a greygreen tunic with the epaulettes torn off. He had poisoned himself too. But as to the whereabouts of Hitler, we still had ‘nothing for sure’. If we proceeded from the testimony of Vice Admiral Voss, who had been told about Hitler’s death by Goebbels (to whom Hitler had bequeathed the authority of Reich Chancellor); if we accepted the hypothesis of Schneider, the garage mechanic, as to what his petrol had been needed for; the missing link in the chain was someone who had actually taken part in burning the bodies, or had seen how and where it happened, or had at least heard about it in detail.
The garden of the Reich Chancellery, which subsequently was found to have been the setting for this drama, was so churned up that it was hardly going to be possible to determine where the cremation had taken place. Meanwhile, rumours abounded. Somebody had been told by somebody else that Hitler had been reduced to ashes and that Axmann, the Reichsführer of the Hitler Youth, who had participated in the Mohnke group’s attempt to break out, had made off with the ashes. Axmann, at that time, had given us the slip.
If Hitler had been totally incinerated, that would confirm what doghandler Tornow had told Lange the chef: ‘The Führer is dead and nothing remains of his body.’ If that was so, if there were no remains or they were never going to be found, we would never be able to show the world irrefutable evidence he was dead. Hitler’s disappearance would remain a mystery and provide fertile soil for all manner of myths, something in which only his adherents could have an interest.
The information we had was now collated. We were looking for people who could clarify what had happened. Meanwhile, more and more people came trampling through the Chancellery, soldiers and commanders, staff officers and people who had flown in from Moscow, and journalists we needed to steer well clear of. They wandered through the apartments in the Reich Chancellery, came down into the underground complex looking for Hitler’s rooms. As a token of their encounter with history, they carried off with them this and that as a souvenir. Everybody wanted to be here, everybody had a right to be here. Really, though, this was no time for tourists.
We were searching: in the complex, in the garden, in the building above ground, and in nearby stretches of the street. On the morning of 4 May, I had a quiet, domesticated and completely civilian man sitting in front of me, a little stoker nobody in the Reich Chancellery had noticed. As a technician, he had been sent to the Führer’s bunker to mend the malfunctioning ventilator.
He had already told us that, while he was in the corridor, he had seen the bodies of the Führer and Eva Braun being taken out of Hitler’s rooms, wrapped in grey blankets. She was wearing a black dress. He was not trying to persuade us of anything, just telling what he had seen. In a chorus of louder, more assertive voices the ring of truth was somehow missing. The stoker himself was so unassuming, so humble, that it was difficult to believe he could have any role to play in events of this magnitude. Vice Admiral Voss seemed far better suited to the role, only he had no direct evidence to give.
The stoker was the first German from whom I heard about Hitler’s wedding. At the time, in a Berlin where the fighting and the fires had barely died down, it struck me as ridiculous beyond belief. I looked again at the humble, ordinary man who was matter-of-factly thinking through the bizarre scenes he had witnessed in the last three or four days, as if they were something from an infinitely remote past. The truth was that we had moved not just from one day to the next, but out of one epoch and into another.
I have forgotten the stoker’s name. He juts out of the tome of history, an anonymous bookmark pointing us to the right page. Incredulous, inattentive, we had not taken the time to read it carefully.
Helmut Kunz, the doctor of the medical department of the SS in Berlin, was feverishly agitated. He could not get over what he had experienced. He had ended up in the Reich Chancellery almost by accident and was traumatized by his complicity in the murdering of children. The first day, everything he said revolved only around that fact. On 4 May, however, he sighed, gave a start and, mixing up the dates, began chaotically recalling the details of the last few days.
He confirmed that Hitler and Eva Braun had married by remembering he had been present when Braun told Professor Haase, the director of the Chancellery hospital, that Goebbels’ children addressed her that day, as they always did, as ‘Tante Braun’, Auntie Braun, and she had corrected them to ‘Auntie Hitler’.
Then he remembered he had been sitting in the evening in the casino above the Führer’s bunker in the company of Professor Haase, Frau Junge and Frau Christian, two of Hitler’s secretaries. Eva Braun had come in and the four of them went to one of the rooms in the casino where they were served coffee. Eva told them the Führer had written a will, which had been sent out of Berlin, that he was waiting for confirmation that it had been delivered to its destination, and only then would he die. She said, ‘Everybody has betrayed us, even Göring and Himmler.’ She added, ‘Dying will not be so difficult, because we have already tested the poison on the dog.’ Dr Kunz was adamant that this conversation in the casino had taken place on the evening of 30 April, whereas, according to other sources, Hitler was already dead by then.