3. A metal medallion of elliptical shape on a fine chain of beads 18–20 cm long, on the reverse side of which is an engraved inscription: ‘May I be always by your side.’
4. German currency amounting to 600 marks in notes of 100 marks.
5. A metal tag of elliptical form [with the number] 31907
The bodies of the dogs and the items discovered at the place of discovery and recovery have been photographed and are stored at the Smersh counterintelligence department of the corps, as witness the present Declaration.
The dogs were readily identified. The sheepdog was ‘Hitler’s personal dog’, as was written in another declaration. It was ‘tall, with long ears’.[1]
It was light and windy. In the garden near the emergency exit of the bunker the soldiers stood in a circle: Churakov, Oleynik, Seroukh, Senior Lieutenant Panasov.
The wind was tugging at bits of burnt tin, wire, broken branches strewn around on the lawn.
On a grey blanket, contorted by fire, lay black, hideous human remains caked with lumps of mud.
I was there to witness that.
As dawn broke on 6 May, two bodies were heaved over the fence of the Reich Chancellery garden into a waiting truck and driven off.
That is the low cunning to which we were obliged to resort. The problem was that the 5th Assault Army, whose commander, General Berzarin, was the commandant of Berlin, was restoring order and clearing the Reich Chancellery and underground complex of all the people who had been flooding in. Sentries were posted at the entrance with orders to admit no one.
For us there was an added complication. For the intelligence services of the 5th Assault Army it remains to this day a source of enduring intolerable irritation that such a notable success was achieved on their patch not by them but by gatecrashers from our 3rd Shock Army. We were not about to leave our spoils in the hands of anybody else, abandoning the project before we had seen it through to a conclusion ourselves. So that was the ploy we resorted to: kidnapping the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun, wrapped in sheets and, behind the backs of the sentries, spiriting them over the fence to where a truck with two large crates was waiting.
So began the posthumous adventures of Hitler’s body. We had sifted through all the details of his last days to establish everything that had happened, and had confirmation and the evidence that Hitler and Eva Braun had been hastily concealed in a bomb crater.
Back then, in May 1945, we managed to codify a great deal, to compare and understand facts and get a sense of the atmosphere surrounding the events. Twenty years later, going through the Council of Ministers archival materials that preserved the details of the last days of the Third Reich, I had an opportunity again to scrutinize those events and form a more complete picture. To this day new materials and documents are coming my way. Ultimately, Hitler succeeded in concealing nothing: neither his plans, his personal degradation, nor his death.
Into Bormann’s diary, into his routine registering of meetings with the Führer, receptions, the removal of some from senior positions and their replacement by others, suppers with Eva Braun, his receipt of decorations, various domestic matters, there suddenly bursts, menacingly displacing everything else, information about Soviet army groups attacking from all sides. In January the tone is still relaxed: ‘In the morning the Bolsheviks went on the offensive,’ and just before that we read, ‘Went with my wife and children to Reichenhall to inspect the mushroom farm (champignons) of the gardener Vollmark.’
The next day:
Sunday, 14 January. Visit to Aunt Häsken…
Saturday, 20 January. Noon. Situation in the east becoming more and more threatening. We have left Warthegau Province. The enemy’s front tank units are at Katowice…
Saturday, 3 February. In the morning, severe air raid on Berlin. (Damage from the bombing included the new Reich Chancellery, the hallway of Hitler’s apartment, the dining room, winter garden and Party Chancellery.)
Fighting for the fords on the Oder.
The bombing has damaged the façade of the Party Chancellery.
The bombing of Dresden, the enemy advance on Weimar, an air raid on Berlin.
Second bombing of the Party Chancellery (severe).
The Russians at Köslin and Schlawe.
All this is still interspersed with the chronicling of social and political life. With every passing day, however, Bormann notes feverishly how the circle is closing in:
Deep breakthroughs in Pomerania. Tanks at Kolberg, Schlawe-Dramburg. Only one bridgehead remaining in the west.
The English have entered Cologne.
The Russians are in Altdamm!!!
First direct hit on the Ministry of Propaganda.
Tanks in Warburg-Giessen.
Guderian was dismissed, and Hitler removed Dr Dietrich from his post as Press Chief. Meanwhile,
In the afternoon tanks are at Beverungen. By night there are tanks at Herzfeld.
Russian tanks at Wiener Neustadt.
The Bolsheviks are at Vienna.
The Anglo-Americans are in the Thuringia region.
For three days in mid-April the same phrase explodes in Bormann’s diary:
Major battles on the Oder!
Major battles on the Oder!
Major battles on the Oder!!
In February the massive fortifications on the Oder had been considered impregnable. There remained just a little more than two months before the total collapse of the Third Reich. On 24 February, celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the Nazi Party, Hitler declared,
Twenty-five years ago I proclaimed the coming victory of the movement! Today, imbued with faith in our people, I predict the ultimate victory of the German Reich!
German military experts had four weeks previously come to the conclusion that all prospect of that had gone. The Führer’s predictions were buttressed, however, by Himmler’s decree establishing special field courts to combat signs of failing morale. Germans suspected of insufficiently firm faith in victory faced swift, merciless retribution.
By this time Hitler himself was thinking not of victory but of salvation, pinning his faith on a miracle and, more realistically, on a falling out between the Allies. In his diary Goebbels quotes the Führer’s view, expressed to him in confidence:
Our task at present is to stay standing no matter what happens. Although the crisis in the enemy camp is growing considerably, the question is whether the explosion will come while we are still at all capable of defending ourselves. That is the prerequisite for a successful conclusion of the war: the crisis must blow up the enemy camp before we are destroyed.
1
Report of the forensic medical examination, in the same folder (File 126, vol. 2), 7 May 1945. Report of the forensic medical examination of the body of the German Führer.