God Almighty, is this happening to me? Is this me standing here at the moment Germany surrenders, with a box in my hands containing the indisputable remnants of Adolf Hitler?!
Many years were to pass before I stood in that place again. I wandered excitedly along the street, looking out for the house with a steep staircase where I had stood with that box in my hands and heard the news that the war was over, and where in those hours my life so freakishly intersected with the course of German history.
What is victory? You can sculpt it as Victoria, drawn by a quadriga above a triumphal arch. It can be embodied in architecture as the Propylaeum, the Brandenburg Gate… But what does it mean just for a person? For someone back in their own suffering homeland? For someone who has followed it here to Berlin? How can that state be articulated, that jubilant ‘Aaah!’ as if you are on a swing at its highest point, and everything about you is awhirl – at last, this is the end, and you are alive, and your heart sings with indescribable joy; it seems you really will get to wander once again through the streets of your home cities, to stare up at the sky, to look about you, to do so many things – now that the war is over, now that war is no more. And you are close to tears at the afflictions of the past and from bewilderment over the future you now face.
The uplifting spirit of victory, but exalted within it, and perhaps above all else, the mourning. How are you to hold on to that? How are you to reconcile the victory with all the effort it has cost, the merciless demand for self-sacrifice along the way?
Early on 9 May everything was buzzing in the village of Berlin-Buch. In anticipation of something extraordinary, some indescribable festivity and celebration to honour this long-awaited Victory Day, soldiers were already dancing, somewhere there was singing. Soldiers were walking down the village street their arms flung around each other. Girls in the army were frenziedly laundering their tunics.
The forensic medical report had noted, ‘The fundamental anatomical discovery that can be used to identify this individual are the teeth, with a large number of artificial bridges, teeth, crowns and fillings.’
However, the task now facing us, of locating Hitler’s dentists in the chaos of devastated Berlin, would have daunted anyone not fired up by the prospect of impudently confronting the conspiracy of silence, and buoyed up on the crest of the wave of victory. It was on 9 May, this first morning when the war was over, that we sallied forth on our quest.
A tractor was pulling an artillery piece, and on its barrel, as on the side of a truck we met, there still glowed the words, ‘Berlin, here we come!’ The Red Army soldiers, the guns, the cars: everything was in its place, nothing had changed, and yet, at the same time, suddenly, everything had changed.
The cannon would no longer fire, the soldiers no longer go into the attack. A long-awaited peace had descended upon the Earth and already it was not only those far-off battles on the banks of the Volga, but also those battles very near this present place, in days of an incomparable upsurge of morale, when our soldiers could not wait to get at Berlin, that today had suddenly become history.
The day before Victory Day had been warm, summer-like, even, but now the sky was overcast and the day was grey and sunless. In the Berlin suburbs, though, the gardens were flowering, the smell of lilac was in the air, and by the roadside, in grass lit up by yellow dandelions, sat two Germans – a boy and a girl, and on their young, lively faces you could read that the war was over, the nightmare and the dying was at an end, and that to be living in this world was an unbelievable blessing.
From the intact outskirts we drove back into the ruins of Berlin. In places smoke was still rising, the city’s air still filled with the fumes of battle. Through the breach in a wall you would glimpse a sooty piece of red cloth, a home-made banner, one of those that the soldiers had readied on the approaches to Berlin and kept close to their hearts to be planted in the German capital.
The barricades, crushed by tank tracks, had yet to be dismantled. In places ruins not yet cool still smoked. There was rubble everywhere. The city was full of refugees from the eastern lands, but everyone who could had fled Berlin before the assault, getting away from the bombing and the impending siege. Who could we approach?
Somehow, though, the gods were with us: there is no other explanation. How else was it possible that in this tortured, vanquished city of three million souls, we found the assistant of Professor Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist?
This is a subplot in its own right, but perhaps not a subplot because those develop at least to some extent in accordance with the laws of logic. This developed against all logic, an enigmatic succession of strokes of luck smoothing the path of people bent on affirming the truth.
That captured Ford 8 saloon, with our driver Sergey at the wheel, drove for many hours through the streets of Berlin that day. Here I have him, in a photo I have kept, Sergey from Siberia, a big lad who said little, lounging against the car he pulled out of a ditch. He had painted it himself, black, with its mounds and clearings on the bodywork, and now it bumped its way down barely passable streets strewn with masonry from collapsed houses, sometimes braking, sometimes roaring away and racing along highways cleared of debris.
We stopped beside a functioning hospital and asked the doctor in charge – who had looked after Hitler’s teeth? He did not know. Of those who treated Hitler, the doctor could give the name only of the internationally renowned laryngologist Carl von Eicken, who headed the Charité clinic. ‘Is he in Berlin?’ That the doctor could not say.
The road signs attached to lamp posts had been flattened along with the lamp posts. It was impossible to navigate using our map of the city. More than once that day, pedestrians told us how to get to this or that street. The Berlin youngsters who willingly clambered into the car to show us the way had no idea of the historic adventure in which they were bit players.
Finally, our quest led us to the Charité university clinic. Its buildings had quaint, coloured stripes painted on them as camouflage against air attack. We drove to the ear, nose and throat department. Here the hospital had mainly civilian patients. It was located in a basement, where dim lamps flickered under low vaulted ceilings. Nurses in grey, with white headscarves bearing a red cross in the middle, looked exhausted as, sternly and silently, they went about their duties. Wounded patients were being carried on stretchers.
Because the wounded in this gloomy, cramped basement were nonmilitary, the brutality of the war that had come to an end yesterday was starkly in evidence. And it was here that we found Professor von Eicken, tall, old and thin. Working in dreadful conditions, he did not leave his post in the days of danger and tragedy, did not flee from Berlin before the surrender, no matter how forcefully he was urged to, and, taking their cue from him, all the other staff stayed too. He conducted us to his clinic, also painted in camouflage colours and still empty, and there in his office we had an unhurried conversation.
Yes, he had had occasion to provide medical care to Reich Chancellor Hitler when he had a throat ailment back in 1935. After the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, Eicken had again treated him because his eardrums were damaged when the bomb exploded and he had significant hearing loss. His hearing gradually returned and there had been no need to operate.
Of Hitler’s personal physicians, Eicken was able to name Professor Theodor Morell. He, we knew, had been sent to Berchtesgaden, where the Führer was intending to go himself before the worsening situation obliged him to abandon the plan. The dentist in the Reich Chancellery was, Eicken believed, also Hitler’s personal physician, but he did not know the man’s name. That was our man.