On that single occasion I got to know Carl von Eicken in far greater depth than is possible under normal circumstances, because the circumstances in which we met were far from normal. It was as if we were at the same time having a private conversation.
‘Are you the director of the ear, nose and throat clinic?’ ‘Quite so.’ Why had he not left, not fled, not saved himself? There had, after all, been such insistent invitations. Are you not afraid to be meeting us? Yes, of course, there was his duty as a doctor, as the head of a clinic, but in the person sitting opposite me, in the eyes watching me through his spectacles, there was something else. But what? Oh, there is no mystery. I naturally follow tradition because I am German. He could have brushed it off as easily as that, but there was something more to our conversation. Yes, he had treated Hitler. A throat problem. An occupational hazard for a politician. He had treated Trotsky, too, when he arrived in 1923 and settled near Berlin.
But what tradition was this venerable old gentleman referring to in our private conversation? It was an inviolable tradition. Not that drill, that damnably alien tradition of obedience without choice. Here I was confronted by a personal, moral choice based on the genuine traditions of German culture. He had taken on the running of the clinic in 1922, and was to direct it for another five years after our meeting, until 1950. He lived ten years after that in peaceful retirement and died at the age of eightyseven. So back then, in May 1945, he was already seventy-two. ‘Er war sehr berühmt.’ He had a great reputation, his staff reminisced.
Eicken sent for someone from the dentistry department and a student arrived. He knew the name of Hitler’s dentist, Dr Hugo Blaschke, and volunteered to take us to him. The student wore a light black coat, no hat, and had dark, wavy hair above a round, soft face. He was friendly and sociable, got into the car and showed us the way. We learned he was a Bulgarian, had studied in Berlin but, as the result of events in Bulgaria, had not been allowed to return there.
Soviet vehicles, flying red flags in honour of the victory, were driving through the streets in the city centre, which had just about been cleared. Germans were riding bicycles, of which there were a lot, with large baskets. A child might be sitting in the basket, or it might be stacked with belongings. The war in Berlin had been over for a week, and the sense of relief the Germans had felt for the first few days had given way to pressing concerns that now affected everyone. The number of pedestrians in the city had also increased noticeably, and they walked along the pavements with children and bundles, pushing prams and wheelbarrows laden with baggage.
We drove into the Kurfürstendamm, one of Berlin’s most fashionable streets. It was in the same calamitous state as the others, but No. 213, or at least the wing of it where Dr Blaschke’s private surgery was located, had survived, as if specifically to serve the needs of history. How otherwise would we have managed to find our essential witness?
At the entrance we met a man with a red ribbon in the buttonhole of his dark jacket, signal of good feelings, of welcome and solidarity with the Russians. This was unusual – at this time it was far more usual to see white, the colour of surrender. The man introduced himself as Dr Bruck.
Hearing that we were looking for Dr Blaschke, he replied that Blaschke had flown from Berlin to Berchtesgaden together with Hitler’s adjutant. We went with Dr Bruck to the mezzanine and he took us into Blaschke’s dental surgery. Realizing that Bruck was not going to be able to help us, Colonel Gorbushin asked if he knew of any of Blaschke’s employees. ‘Of course I do!’ Dr Bruck exclaimed. ‘You mean Käthchen? Käthe Heusermann? She is at home in her apartment right on our doorstep.’ The student volunteered to go and fetch her. ‘No. 39–40 Pariserstrasse, Apartment 1,’ Bruck told him.
He seated us in soft armchairs in which the Nazi leaders had sat before us, as patients of Dr Blaschke. Since 1932 Blaschke had been Hitler’s personal dentist. Bruck also settled himself in one of the armchairs. We learned from him that he was a dentist, used to live and work in the provinces, and that Käthe Heusermann, Dr Blaschke’s assistant, had been his student and later his own assistant. That was before the Nazis seized power. Later she and her sister helped Bruck to disappear, because he was a Jew and needed to live under a false name.
A slim, tall, attractive woman in a dark blue flared coat came in. She had on a headscarf over luxuriant blonde hair. ‘Käthchen,’ Bruck said familiarly, ‘these people are Russians. They seem to need you for something.’ Even before he had finished she burst into tears. She had already suffered from encountering Russian soldiers. ‘Käthchen!’ Dr Bruck said in embarrassment, ‘Käthchen, these people are our friends.’ Bruck was considerably less tall than Käthe, but he took her hand as if she were a small child and stroked the sleeve of her coat. They had found themselves at opposite ends of the Nazi regime. She, as a member of the staff serving Hitler, was in a privileged position, while he, persecuted and living outside the law, was given support by her family, for which she might have paid a terrible price.
Looking around, Käthe saw me sitting on the sidelines. She came straight over and sat down next to me. Without a moment’s hesitation we began talking to each other. Käthe Heusermann was thirty-five. She told me her fiancé was a teacher and now, as a non-commissioned officer, was somewhere in Norway and she had heard nothing from him for a long time. Dr Blaschke had invited her to be evacuated with him to Berchtesgaden, but she refused. She had been working for Blaschke since 1937, and last saw Hitler in mid-April in the Reich Chancellery when she was receiving a ration of cigarettes. With the permission of Magda Goebbels she had left the Reich Chancellery, but continued to go there for rations, which she shared with Dr Bruck.
On 2 May she had heard from strangers in Pariserstrasse that Hitler was dead and that he had been cremated. Later she told me a few details about him and the Goebbels family. It was from her I heard that Magda Goebbels had not been happily married; she complained about her husband’s infidelities and had wanted to leave him, only the Führer insisted on her keeping together their exemplary German family. She quite liked Magda, or at least sympathized with her.
Back then, though, in Dr Blaschke’s surgery, Colonel Gorbushin asked me to ask her whether they had Hitler’s dental records. Heusermann said they had, and immediately took out a box with record cards. We watched with bated breath as she flicked through them. We glimpsed the cards of Himmler, Ley, the press chief Dietrich, Goebbels, his wife, all their children…
The silence was so heavy that we clearly heard in Dr Bruck’s sigh, although he did not know what had brought us there, how anxious he was that everything should turn out well. The student, who by now evidently had a fair idea of what was going on, found our tense anticipation contagious and stood motionless, his head tilted a little to one side.
At last Hitler’s medical card was found, and that was a start, but there were no X–rays. Heusermann suggested they might be in Blaschke’s other surgery – in the Reich Chancellery itself. We said goodbye to Dr Bruck and the student and rushed back there with Käthe Heusermann.
From that day I heard no more about the Bulgarian student until, almost twenty years later, when interest was again stirred up in the question of whether Hitler was dead or alive, because the issue of statutory limitation of criminal responsibility was being debated. At that time, it was set at twenty years. I saw a portrait of this man in Stern. His hair was still wavy and his features soft, although naturally after so much time he had changed. I read that he was Mihail Arnaudov, who lived in Kiel, and I read his interview, which reverberated around the globe, in which he tells truthfully, if in his own way, about our visit, but then adds a fictitious account of his participation in the identification of Hitler.