Günsche:
Together with the Führer’s secretaries, Frau Christian and Frau Junge, the Führer’s dietitian, Fräulein Manziarly, and Bormann’s secretary, Fräulein Kruger, I was to break through to the north in Mohnke’s group. The breakthrough began at 22.00 hrs. Our group reached the area of Wedding railway station, where it encountered enemy resistance. After regrouping, towards noon on 2 May 45 we reached the Schultheis Brewery near the station. Among the soldiers who were there, rumours were circulating that Berlin had capitulated, and demoralization was evident among them.
The four women with us were now released by SS Brigadeführer Mohnke and immediately left the brewery. Where they went I do not know. I was taken prisoner at the Schultheis Brewery.
A group consisting of Bormann, Rattenhuber, Stumpfegger and Hitler’s driver, Kempka, made their way under cover of a tank but a grenade thrown from a window hit the left side of the tank where Bormann and Stumpfegger were walking and the explosion felled both of them, according to eyewitness testimony. ‘I was wounded,’ Rattenhuber writes, ‘and was taken prisoner by the Russians.’
Rumours that Hitler was dead leaked from the Führer’s bunker to the shelter under the Reich Chancellery, which was connected to it, but the circumstances of his death were kept secret. In an attempt to keep up the myth of the Führer’s greatness, his successor, Grand Admiral Dönitz, declared that Hitler had fallen, fighting at the head of the defenders of Berlin.
General Weidling, when he heard Hitler had committed suicide, considered such a demise unacceptable for a commander whose troops were still fighting. On the night of 1 May he sent representatives to parley. Early on the morning of 2 May, Weidling crossed the front line into Russian-held territory, from where he addressed an order to the Berlin garrison:
On 30 April the Führer committed suicide and thus left us, who had sworn allegiance to him, abandoned. The Führer ordered that we, the German troops, should continue to fight for Berlin, despite the fact that military supplies are exhausted and despite the general situation, which makes further resistance senseless. I order you to cease resistance immediately.
On 2 May Berlin capitulated.
When tyrants die, there is initial bewilderment: how is this possible? Can it really be that even they consist of mortal molecules? What comes next is that, if everything about the circumstances is not totally clear, their death becomes encrusted with legends. In the case of Hitler, there was plenty of opportunity for that to happen.
But it did not turn out the way Grand Admiral Dönitz had in mind. Hitler had bequeathed supreme authority to him, and he concocted what he knew to be a lie for a special announcement over the radio on 1 May 1945: Hitler had fallen in battle leading the defenders of Berlin, the capital city of the German Reich.
Neither was Hitler’s end as described in a sensational book, I Burned Hitler, by his driver, Erich Kempka, where the shot that rings out and the crimson flowers in a vase fuse into a single emblem.
Neither was it as summarized by the British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper in his serious study:
Whatever the explanation, Hitler achieved his last ambition. Like Alaric (who destroyed Rome in 410), buried secretly under the riverbed of Busento, the modern destroyer of mankind is now immune from discovery.[1]
Life of a sort was going on above ground while we were still delving into the details of the last days of the Reich Chancellery. One day we stopped on the outskirts of Berlin, where several staff headquarters departments were located. Beside a house we had been instructed to occupy stood a cart laden with odds and ends and groceries, and with a red-white-green tricolour Italian flag on the front. A cow tethered to the cart waited patiently for its owners.
We went upstairs to an apartment from which music was coming. All the doors were wide open. In a large room Italians were sitting in tattered, dirty clothes, clutching big cardboard boxes on their knees and listening dreamily to the music. Their young, mop-headed musician was hammering the keys of a piano with gusto. A splendid doll, extracted from a box the same as all the others had, was sitting on the piano in front of him. On their way here, the Italians had passed a wholesale toy depot, and each had helped himself to a doll.
They noticed us and rose noisily from their seats. In reply to questions addressed to them in German, they obstinately shook their heads, not wanting to speak the language of the enemy. A cascade of gestures and exclamations washed over us. They were explaining something, putting their hands on their hearts. The musician seized the doll on the piano and presented it to me, and they all made a great noise and slapped him approvingly on the back.
They left, humming and taking with them the large boxes with the dolls. Their cart was waiting for them downstairs with their luggage and the cow which was to feed its new owners on their long journey back to Italy.
‘Hitler kaput!’ they said to us by way of a farewell greeting.
He certainly was. No two ways about that.
The newspapers of the Allied occupation troops had already come out with a resounding headline: ‘Russians Find Hitler’s Body’.
Among our troops something ridiculous was going on. People were suddenly being urged to ‘Hunt for Hitler’. This was a deceitful charade, a weird attempt to disguise the fact that his body had been found, a pretend search.
A declaration signed by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had stated that the Allies undertook to seek out the Nazi leaders wherever they might be hiding and make them face an international court. And here the senior Nazi leader of the lot of them was, right here in Berlin, no distance at all from the Allied Control Council. So why not show them his body? Bring to it eyewitnesses of Hitler’s death, both from our and their sides, and identify it? Make a joint statement and close the matter?
On 8 May, however, just as a forensic medical examination of Hitler’s remains was taking place in Buch, on the northeastern outskirts of Berlin, another report appeared in the Moscow newspapers claiming that he might have landed in Argentina, or was possibly hiding with Franco in Spain. The evidence was being concealed and when, eventually, people would want to dig down and get the real facts, it would be too late: the witnesses would have dispersed or died, and even the testimony of those still alive would be unconvincing after so much time had elapsed.
Our view was that, if not at the present time, then at some point in an unclear future this conspiracy of silence would come to an end. It was bound to, so facts needed to be established now that would be unchallengeable even then. Already some of our superiors, detecting currents coming down from ‘above’, were looking askance at our zeal, keeping us at a distance because of their instinct of self-preservation (and perhaps something of the sort was true of Zhukov).
Quite a few people had been involved in the search and the first stage of the investigation. Now, as the secretiveness increased, almost all of them were taken out of the loop, and by the second stage, actual identification of the remains, Colonel Gorbushin’s group had dwindled to just three people, including me as the interpreter.
The people doing their best to establish the truth about Hitler went about their business with a sense of heavy responsibility. They believed that the least lack of clarity about what had happened would be dangerous: it would breed legends that could only contribute to a rebirth of Nazism. Giving an unambiguous answer to the question of whether or not Hitler was alive was important also for the future of Germany.
1
Hugh Trevor-Roper,