People gave assurances to the Führer that they would follow him to the grave, and even made entries to that effect in their diaries, but had no intention of dying. As can be seen from Bormann’s telegram to his adjutant, Hummel, he had arranged a bolthole for himself far from Germany. In short, they were preparing to act to save their own skins, but being held back by Hitler.
A foreign radio station broadcast a detailed Reuters report about Himmler’s proposal of a separate peace to the British and American governments. Typed up by Gertraud Junge (enormous letters) it was handed to Hitler. His Majesty’s Government emphasized once again that it could talk only about an unconditional surrender offered to all three Great Powers, between which there was the closest unanimity. This response indirectly struck a blow at his own plan.
On 29 April, following the departure of Greim, the information finally reached the Reich Chancellery that Wenck’s army had been routed. Rattenhuber writes:
At that, all our hopes of rescue foundered. Our troops’ attempt to break through to Berlin had proved unsuccessful. The theatricality of the situation was heightened by the fact that Hitler was receiving all these reports to the accompaniment of Russian heavy artillery shells exploding on the territory of the Reich Chancellery. That day it was terrible to look at Hitler.
Günsche, the Führer’s SS adjutant, writes in his testimony,
After the breakthrough of Russian motorized units in the area of Anhalt Station and Königsplatz, the Führer became anxious to lose no time before committing suicide. It could be only a matter of a few hours before Russian tanks would suddenly appear in front of the concrete bunker.
On the night of 28 April, Hitler arranged his wedding ceremony. He had had a relationship with Eva Braun for over ten years. She had been working at the photographic studio in Munich of Heinrich Hoffman, who later became rich by having a monopoly on photographing the Führer. Together with Hoffmann, Eva accompanied Hitler, who greatly enjoyed being photographed, on propaganda trips before he seized power. Hitler installed her in his Berchtesgaden castle, and there she ruled the roost. In Berlin he lived alone: Nazi propaganda celebrated the Führer’s asceticism.
Pilot Hanna Reitsch, who at that time was devoted to Hitler, observing Eva Braun in the underground complex was shocked when she saw the intimacy her Führer shared with a woman of ‘such negligible mental faculties’. According to Reitsch, she was totally absorbed in grooming herself, and constantly repeated that it was essential to kill all those ‘ungrateful swine’ who had left the bunker because they were ‘incapable of committing suicide’. In Hitler’s presence she was obliging and said little. ‘She did everything she could to ensure his comfort.’
Until then, the existence of Eva Braun had not been public knowledge. She was neither a wife nor an acknowledged mistress and always stayed in the shadows, at a distance. In the middle of April, however, she resolutely and unexpectedly threw caution to the winds and demonstratively appeared in the underground complex. The surmise is that this was not only in order to share a grim period with him, but finally to attain the unattainable, the thing she so agonizingly aspired to: to become truly the wife of the Führer.
Until Hitler took the decision to commit suicide, though, there was no mention of matrimony. It was only after he took that decision irrevocably that a marriage ceremony and reception were hastily arranged. This may have been Eva Braun’s condition for agreeing to die with him. She paid with her life to achieve the goal of becoming the Führer’s wife.
Hitler, although a Catholic by birth, persecuted the Church to prevent God from becoming a nuisance and stopping Adolf Hitler from rising to equal prominence. He will hardly have felt any obligation to atone for having ‘lived in sin’. More likely he wanted to look better in the eyes of history, since his meticulously concealed relations had become obvious. This comes through in his ‘personal will’. Hitler begins by explaining that he had believed he should not take on such a serious responsibility as marriage, but had now decided before dying to marry the woman who was to share his destiny. Behind these words we detect a compensation to Eva Braun for her willingness to die at his side. It would, after all, be less frightening if there were two of them, and no doubt this highly strung mystic and neuropath would also find it easier to bite the ampoule in a state of exaltation after a marriage ceremony.
When Hanna Reitsch, who had left the shelter a few hours previously, was told about the wedding she could not believe her ears. She said, ‘Conditions in the bunker in those last days would have made the ceremony comical.’ But take place it did: Hitler’s last ‘historic act’.
Outside the walls of the Reich Chancellery, German soldiers were fighting. Nearby, at Potsdamerplatz and in the underground stations, the wounded were in a state of collapse, without food or water. Hitler had thrown his last reserve into battle at the Pichelsdorf Bridge: adolescents from the Hitler Youth. German boys were sent to defend the Reich Chancellery. It was one of the most shameful acts of villainy of those days. ‘The children’s friend’, as the propaganda represented the Führer, praised them and sent them into a senseless battle, achieving nothing more than depriving the nation of future citizens. But then Hitler did not foresee a future for Germany. He declared, ‘In the event of defeat, the Germans will not deserve to live.’
‘The lads are tired and no longer have the strength to take part in battles,’ I read in a report addressed to Bormann on 22 April. On the same day, in another report, Reichsführer of the Hitler Youth Artur Axmann and his closest colleagues state they are planning to move to 63–64 Wilhelmstrasse, near the Reich Chancellery. He intends to deploy 40–50 members of the Hitler Youth and requests Reichsleiter Bormann’s consent, which is duly forthcoming.
A report from the District of Charlottenburg-Spandau on 26 April reports the retreat of soldiers under the onslaught of Soviet units, adding: ‘A Hitler Youth detachment was to hold the bridge, but proved unable to do so.’ Goebbels in his Berliner Frontblatt on 27 April exhorts the young:
Reichsjugendführer Axmann was yesterday awarded the Golden Cross… Last night, the Führer in his principal apartment presented this mark of distinction to Axmann with the words, ‘Without your young men, it would be impossible to continue the struggle not only here in Berlin [when we read these words of 27 April they provide circumstantial evidence that Hitler was in Berlin], but throughout the whole of Germany.’ To this Axmann replied, ‘They are your young men, my Führer!’
Perhaps the duped boys believed they really were defending Germany, and died while a wedding was taking place in the bunker. Or was it a wake? Certainly, death was a guest at the table, and the bride was wearing black.
The walls of the bunker were shaking from direct artillery hits. Down in the crypt it was totally macabre, Rattenhuber tell us of these hours in his manuscript:
Everyone was preoccupied with their anxieties, their search for their own way out. Some, in despair, had given up all hope of rescue and, cowering in a corner and not looking at anyone, waited for the end to come; others, instead, went to the buffet and drowned their sorrows with brandy and wine from the Führer’s cellars.
SS guards patrolled slowly round the Reich Chancellery. In the garden, it was impossible to breathe because of the smoke and fumes. Berlin was burning, houses collapsing, shells exploding. Rifle fire could already be heard. Wounded people were groaning in the corridors of the shelter; there was no other place in the vicinity for them to go to.
It was in these conditions that, on the evening of 28 April, Hitler and Eva Braun were married. The formalities established by the Hitler regime were relaxed for the occasion. The bride and groom did not present, as was normally required, documents certifying their Aryan antecedents, their marriageability, their lack of a criminal record, their political reliability and a report from the police on the behaviour of the two parties. The marriage certificate notes that they requested that account should be taken of the wartime situation and the abnormal circumstances under which they were marrying, and to take on trust their verbal declarations, as well as relaxing the period of notice normally required for the ceremony to be legally valid.