Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

4 Last Days: Berlin, May 1945

‘Deutschland liegt im Herzen Europas.’ Germany lies at the heart of Europe. So we had been informed with admirable accuracy yet, at the same time, poetically, by our school textbook.

Beyond Birnbaum there was a checkpoint with a large, hastily knockedtogether archway and a sign reading, ‘This was the German border.’ Everyone passing along the highway to Berlin at that time read also a second inscription, scrawled in tar in huge, uneven letters by a soldier on the nearest ruined house: ‘Take a good look: this is fucking Germany!’

That soldier had been marching towards this place for four years. Fires, ruins: the war had come back to haunt the land from which it had sallied forth. The wind ruffled sheets and towels on fences and trees, the white flags of surrender. Somewhere far beyond the uncultivated fields peaceful windmills rose like a mirage.

An old, small, half-ruined town. The war had moved on and here, muffled, barely audible, life was pulsating. At the crossroads, opposite the grey house of the Dachdeckermeister (roofer), a lad in a sheepskin jacket bawled from a large poster, ‘Fire into the lair of the beast!’

Boys wearing white armbands were climbing over a wrecked Opel on the pavement, which had lost its wheels. They were evidently playing at war. There were many townspeople, burdened with bundles, pushing laden prams, and one and all, adults and children, were wearing white armbands on their left sleeves. It was completely unexpected for me that the whole country had put on white armbands to indicate surrender, and I do not recall reading about it anywhere else.

Beside the road on the outskirts of the town an elderly man was digging his garden. We stopped and went into his house. His wife, evidently accustomed by now to such guests, offered to warm coffee for us.

In this small house, perched by the roadside of war, the kitchen was cosy and dazzlingly clean. On the shelves there was a dauntless parade of beer mugs. The porcelain skirts of an artful-looking lady crouching on the sideboard billowed upwards. This merry little trinket was a wedding present given to our hostess thirty-two years before. Two terrible wars had raged, but the porcelain coquette had survived in one piece, along with the inscription on her apron: ‘Kaffee und Bier, das lob’ ich mir.’ Coffee and beer, I hold them dear.

We left the house. Our hostess’s husband was planting flowers in the ground he had dug, as he did every year, to sell. Armoured personnel carriers trundled by, their caterpillar tracks clanking.

In the sky a German spy plane hovered above us, a Focke-Wulf ‘frame’, and where the road forked, the Military Roads Commission had an information kiosk for anyone driving in Germany, severely warning that ‘Driving on the left will result in confiscation of the driver’s licence.’ The warning looked comically out of place, but also rather touching in the way that it hinted at a different way of life with sensible regulations, a different world without war.

People of many nationalities, newly liberated, streamed along the roads towards us: French, Russian, British, Polish, Italians, Belgians, Yugoslavs… Prisoners of war, captives from concentration camps and torture chambers, slaves dragged here from the USSR, from all over Europe, to forced labour, starvation and death.

A few were riding in German vans or on purloined bicycles. More commonly, they were on foot, in groups, under a homemade flag of their own country. Some were in military uniform, some in civilian clothing, some in the striped jacket of a prisoner. Their exclamations of greeting, radiant with warmth, lit by a smile, the frank, open expression of emotion were heart-warming, profoundly touching encounters I will never forget.

Past a cavalry regiment stationed in a village adjacent to the highway, past a tank brigade of the commander of the front’s reserve, past a roadside poster urging ‘Forward, Victory is Near!’, overtaking trucks heavy-laden with ammunition, we drove into Küstrin, a town on the Oder, deserted, ruined. ‘The key to the gates of Berlin’, the Germans called it.

The main square was now a graveyard of the buildings that had once looked on to it. They seemed to be advancing on it from all directions, reduced now to grim piles of rubble. Beams left suspended in mid-air groaned; stone dust poured down from the gaps in walls. In the middle of the square a monument with a bronze bird on top of it had miraculously survived. My God, how lonely this place felt, with that idiotic, vainglorious bird all on its own in a dreadful wasteland of stone.

Back on the highway. Again, fields and woodland, windmills looming on the horizon. Pigs, unfed, crazed, rushing around the fields.

The retreating enemy had blown up the bridges, the main roads had been wrecked and were littered with broken vehicles, but the trucks with their cargoes were getting through somehow, clocking up hundreds of kilometres on the difficult route into the heart of Germany. What hardships did these front-line drivers not endure, what trackless wastes did they not traverse with their loads, sinking down in river crossings, bogged down in swamps, dodging bombs and shells and mines in order to get here, in a truck riddled by bullets and shrapnel, to participate in the final battle!

Dusk fell, protecting us from attack by enemy aircraft, and the amount of traffic on the highway increased markedly. Tanks, trucks, self-propelled guns, armoured personnel carriers, amphibious tanks, horse carts. Infantry in Studebaker trucks and marching on foot. On rifle barrels, on tank turrets, on carts, everywhere you saw the slogan, ‘Berlin, here we come!’

When it was completely dark the traffic only grew heavier. The night was short and you had to get into position while you could. People drove slowly, not turning on their headlights, getting snarled up in traffic jams. Anti-aircraft guns were firing. From village byroads artillery, tanks, and infantry were all drawn to the highway. Vehicles drove several abreast, peeled off and drove through land to the sides of the road. Everywhere there was rasping and clanking, furious honking, horses being whipped, everybody trying to overtake those ahead of them.

The centre of Berlin was ablaze, and huge tongues of fire leapt skywards. The multistorey buildings they lit up seemed very close, but were in reality kilometres away. Great beams of light from searchlights swept the sky. The dull rumble of never-ending artillery fire reached our ears. Here the suburbs were still bristling with enemy anti-tank traps, but our tanks were already thundering towards the centre.

And this very night, in the catacombs beneath the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun. When later I learned this, I recalled the collapsing walls of burnt-out buildings, the acrid smell of charred ruins, the grim tank traps no longer capable of protecting anyone from anything, and in the darkness the inexorable thunder of tanks rushing towards the centre of Berlin, to the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery.

I sat on an abandoned empty oil drum in a suburban street outside a boarded-up shop window, under a signboard whose gold letters proclaimed it to be a patisserie, Franz Schulz Feinbäckerei, waiting to hear from headquarters where we were to go. That night the front line ran through the centre of Berlin. From time to time there were flashes of artillery fire.

I remembered our river crossings at Smolensk in 1943, when starved horses refused to pull the artillery pieces and exhausted people had finally to push the guns themselves, under a squall of shelling by the enemy. I recalled cameraman Ivan Sokolnikov, who risked his life to film there for the newsreels. In addition to providing footage for the next edition of the newsreel, Sokolnikov was charged with using a proportion of the film allocated to record for the so-called ‘historical film library’, which was to preserve for posterity the tragic face of war. And film he did: the crossing, the soldiers straining under the intolerable weight of the guns, dying in the bombing and under fire.

One sequence that lodged in my memory did not make it into the newsreel or the official historical record: that same spring, although somewhat earlier, when it was difficult but still possible to use sledges over the thawing snow, by the side of one such trail a transport soldier was sitting in his sledge. His horse had collapsed. The driver unharnessed her and, without looking at the horse, pushed the shaft to one side and hung a cooking pot on it filled with snow. He lit a small fire. There were strict orders to look after and protect the horses for as long as was conceivably possible. In this case, however, there seemed no likelihood the poor animal could be got back on its feet. The yellow water in the cooking pot came to the boil, but the doomed horse was still sorrowfully blinking. The driver waited grimly…

Did that soldier make it to Berlin? If only we could have brought to the place where we were all those who had endured the harshness of army life, who had suffered unbearably from hunger, from the bitter cold, from wounds and fear; if only we could have brought back to life those who had perished so that they could at least see what a formidable force their army was as it entered the lair of the beast.

For three days Berlin had been completely surrounded. In heavy fighting, breaking through the defence of one district of the city after another, the troops of the 3rd Shock Army of Colonel General Kuznetsov, the 5th Assault Army of Colonel General Berzarin, and the 8th Guards Army of Colonel General Chuikov advanced towards the city centre, towards the Tiergarten, towards Unter den Linden, towards the government district. The newly appointed Soviet commandant of Berlin, Colonel General Berzarin, had already issued an order dissolving the National Socialist Party and banning its activities.

The residents of Berlin cowered in basements beneath burning, collapsing buildings. The water situation was dire, and their meagre supplies of food were running low. On the surface there was non-stop gunfire, shells exploding, chunks of masonry flying through the air, the fumes and smoke from burning buildings, the air suffocating. The situation of the population was desperate.

In circumstances like these, when the outcome was so blindingly obvious, every hour this senseless fighting was prolonged was a crime. So what were the plans of the German side at this time? It was only later, when it was all over, that it was possible to dig down and answer that question.

Hitler’s adjutant, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, captured on 2 May in the Schultheis Brewery and interrogated at the main Smersh intelligence directorate of the general staff, gave the following written answer.[1] On 22 April, as artillery shells were falling in central Berlin, a meeting of the supreme command, chaired by Hitler, was held at 16.30 hrs.

The Führer had in mind for the Ninth Army to attack in a northwesterly direction, and for the army group of SS General Steiner to attack in a southerly direction. He was counting on driving back the breakthrough by Russian forces, which he believed to be weak, and for our main forces to reach Berlin and thereby create a new front. The front would then run approximately from Stettin up the River Oder to Frankfurt-on-Oder, then in a westerly direction through Fürstenwalde, Zossen and Treuenbrietzen to the River Elbe.

The preconditions for this were:

1. To hold the front line on the lower reaches of the Oder at all costs.

2. For the Americans to remain on the west bank of the Elbe.

3. For the left flank of the Ninth Army, stationed on the Oder, to hold at all costs.

After Chief of the Army General Staff General Krebs reported a major breakthrough by Russian forces of the front to the south of Stettin, it must have been clear to the Führer that it was impossible to create the aforementioned front, and he expressed the opinion that in this connection Mecklenburg would also be besieged within a few days by Russian forces. Despite this, however, the Ninth and Twelfth Armies and Steiner’s army group were ordered to mount an offensive towards Berlin.

Günsche wrote this six days after the surrender, hot on the heels of the events described, and with his memory still clear:

German soldiers were dying in the streets of Berlin. Their orders in these tragic days were to fight fanatically for the Third Reich and they would win! But the Reich already lay in ruins. It had been defeated. They were promised reinforcements, which did not in fact exist. If they were suspected of the least disloyalty or wavering, they were hanged or shot. But whether they were battle-hardened soldiers or ill-trained home guard Volksstürmer, they were mortal.

The German troops totally surrounded by the ring of encirclement continued to be thrown bales of Goebbels’ newspaper, Der Panzerbär (The Armoured Bear, the bear being the coat of arms of Berlin) and ‘newsletters’, deceitful and inflammatory, flattering and threatening.

Here is one of the last, dated 27 April: Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt (The Berlin Front Newssheet).

This little flysheet reached us on 29 April when we were already near Potsdamer Platz.

We were instructed to head for the area from which the troops of our 3rd Shock Army would attack in the direction of Potsdamer Platz. Early in the morning we proceeded in our adverse terrain vehicle over first one and then another barricade where they had been overturned and crushed by tanks, picking our way amidst mangled rails, timbers and guns. We passed over an anti-tank trench that had been filled in with shattered masonry and empty barrels. The buildings became more frequent, some docked by several storeys, others with only a charred wall remaining, as if it had forgotten to collapse. These were monuments to the fighting that had taken place two days earlier. In places, tanks had ploughed their way through the rubble, and vehicles, of which there were increasing numbers, were diverting on to the trails blazed by the tanks’ caterpillar tracks.

The traffic in the streets of Berlin was being directed by lasses from Smolensk, Kalinin and Ryazan in well-fitting tunics that must surely have been altered by Mrs Buzinska in Poznań. The car came to a stop when the road ahead was impassable. We saw advancing towards us small groups of Frenchmen with their luggage trolleys with the French flag on the side, picking their way through the accumulations of crushed brick, scrap metal and rubble. We waved to each other.

The closer we came to the centre, the more unbreathable the air became. Anyone who was in Berlin in those days will remember that air, acrid and opaque from the fumes and stone dust, and the grittiness of sand in their teeth.

We made our way behind the walls of the ruined buildings. No one was trying to put the fires out. The walls were still smoking, and decorative creepers continued to cling to them with burned paws.

‘Unsere Mauern brachen, unsere Herzen nicht!’ Our walls have broken, but not our hearts, declared a poster above a door that had survived but now led only to darkness and devastation.

Diving out of one basement into another, we encountered German families. They all asked us the same thing: ‘How soon will this nightmare end?’ Hitler declared, ‘If the war should be lost, the German nation must disappear.’ But people, in defiance of the Führer’s will, had no wish to disappear. White sheets and pillowcases were hung from windows.

‘In any house hanging out a white flag, all the men are to be shot.’ Such was Himmler’s order.

It was very difficult to find your way through the city by map reading. We had run out of Russian signs and the German ones had mostly disappeared along with the walls. We resorted to asking directions from people we met in the streets, who were hauling their possessions somewhere.

The signallers could be glimpsed, pulling their cables along behind them. Hay was being transported on a cart, and a moustachioed driver from a Guards regiment was chewing a dry straw. Other straw was being lightly sprinkled over the cratered Berlin roadway. A group of soldiers with submachine guns marched by, one with a bandaged head taking care not to fall behind or become detached from the column.

The coat of a bareheaded elderly woman crossing the road displayed a white armband prominently. She was leading two young children by the hand, a boy and a girl. Both of them, with their hair neatly brushed, had white armbands sewn to their sleeves above the elbow. As she passed us she said loudly, not bothered whether we understood or not, ‘These are orphans. Our house has been bombed. I am taking them to another place. These are orphans… Our house has been bombed…’

A man in a black hat came out of a gateway. He stopped when he saw us and held out a small package wrapped in greaseproof paper. He unwrapped it to reveal a yellowed box, which he opened. ‘L’Origan Coty, Fräulein Offizier. I swap for a packet of tobacco.’ He stood for a moment, then tucked his package away in the pocket of his long overcoat and wandered off.

After that the streets were completely deserted. I remember a pillar covered with posters, chiffon curtains reaching like outstretched white hands from a window, a bus with an advert on its roof, an enormous papier mâché shoe, which had crashed into a building. And Goebbels’ categorical assurances on the walls that the Russians would never enter Berlin.

Now, increasingly, it was dead districts containing nothing but ruins. It became even harder to breathe. Dust and smoke obscured the way forward. At every step we were risking a bullet. A fierce battle was by now raging in the government district. The latest order from the Nazi leadership demanded that the capital should be defended to the last man. ‘Men, women and boys stand side by side with the battle-tempered and stubbornly resisting Wehrmacht, which has been fighting the Bolshevik hordes for years and knows that this is a matter not of negotiations, but of life and death.’

Barricades, ditches, rubble, blocks and traps were to stop the advance of tanks. Concrete structures and major buildings had been turned into ramparts, their windows into gun embrasures. Damaged tanks that still had a functioning gun, and often undamaged tanks too, were dug into the ground, turning them into powerful firing points.

Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt listed the directions of the main attacks that had been mounted to repel ‘the Soviets’ in the preceding twenty-four hours: between Grunewald and Siemensstadt, in the Tempelhof–Neukölln district and streets to the south of the Wedding railway station.

‘Attack! On to complete and final victory, army comrades!’ exclaimed the appeal of our military soviet of the 1st Byelorussian Front.

A huge, unfamiliar city. The smoke from burning buildings shrouded its outlines, whole districts of ruins gave it the appearance of fantasy. Just under six years before, an invasion of Europe, criminal and unprecedented in its brutality, was launched from here, and now to here it had returned.

How many times, in the darkest days of the war, our soldiers had repeated, ‘We’ll reach Berlin yet, we’ll find out what that River Spree amounts to.’ And now they had. The meandering, high-banked River Spree, like Berlin’s other rivers, canals and lakes, complicated the advance of the attacking units. The haze from gunfire, smoke and dust hovered over the river like a dense pall, fancifully reflecting the light of burning buildings. Beyond the Spree was the government district, ‘the 9th Special Defence District’, where heavy fighting was in train.

On panels indicating the direction of traffic, on tanks, on shells being loaded into artillery, and on the barrels of rifles you saw the slogan, ‘To the Reichstag!’ It was on everyone’s mind in those days in Berlin. On 29 April troops of our army arrived at Königsplatz, on to which the six-pillared façade of the Reichstag’s grey hulk faced.

It was considered that once we took the Reichstag, once we raised the red flag above its cupola, the world would know that Hitler and fascism had been vanquished. The storming of the Reichstag riveted the attention of every journalist, whether newly arrived from Moscow or already with the front-line press. The honour of actually taking the building fell to our 3rd Shock Army under Colonel General Kuznetsov.

In 1933, after the ominous ‘false flag’ arson attack on the Reichstag, Hitler was able to force the aged President Hindenburg ‘temporarily’ to suspend civil liberties. They were never restored. This allowed Hitler to carry out a clampdown, with mass arrests of Communists and Social Democrats, giving the Nazis an absolute majority in the Reichstag. The burned-out building was not repaired and, under the Nazi regime, parliament ceased to be important. Its subsequent infrequent sessions were held elsewhere.

The principal building under the new regime was a new Reich Chancellery, built specially for Reich Chancellor Hitler by his favourite architect, Albert Speer (later Minister of Armaments and War Production). It was 500 metres from the Reichstag.

At that time we still had no firm intelligence to confirm that Hitler and his staff headquarters were in the shelter beneath the Reich Chancellery. Such information as the intelligence services had was scanty, inconsistent, unreliable and contradictory. Captured German soldiers had little to tell us. Some believed Hitler had flown to Bavaria or elsewhere, others were totally indifferent to everything, including the matter of where he might be. They were overwhelmed and burned out by what they had been through.

A squealer was captured, a boy of fifteen or so in the uniform of the Hitler Youth, his eyes reddened, his lips cracked. He had been shooting furiously but now just sat there, looking around puzzled but with evident curiosity, like any other young kid. These instant transformations in the war always amazed me. He told us that their division, commanded by Reichsjugendführer Artur Axmann, the national leader of the Hitler Youth, was protecting Hitler. He had heard that from their commanders. They had kept repeating it, and saying it was essential to hold out until General Wenck’s army came to the rescue.

All day I had to interpret at the interrogation of prisoners in the basement of a house not far from Potsdamer Platz. It was occupied by a tailor’s family, also by a woman and her son, and a girl in a ski outfit. The ceaseless thunder of battle was muffled in the basement. Sometimes we experienced what felt like earthquake tremors.

The tailor, an elderly man, hardly ever got up from his chair. He often took out his pocket watch and inspected it at length. Everyone involuntarily watched him doing so. His grown-up son was a cripple who had contracted polio as a child; he sat at the tailor’s feet with his head on his father’s lap. The elder daughter was either asleep or rushed round looking anxious. Her husband was in the Volkssturm and was outside somewhere in the streets of Berlin. Of all these bewildered, worn-out people, only the tailor’s wife was busy with something all the time; her duties as a mother took priority over war or her fear of death. At the appropriate time, she would spread a napkin on her knees and lay out tiny pieces of bread and jam.

The young woman with the thin, serious boy and the girl in the ski suit, were ‘refugees’ from another basement. They tried to take up as little space as possible. The woman periodically talked loudly about herself: she was married to a firefighter who had been mobilized and sent to the front. She had been waiting two years for her husband to come home on leave, and had made a list of things he needed to do in the apartment: change a door handle, fix the window fastenings, etc., but now their house had burned down. The boy scowled, evidently tired of listening yet again to his mother’s stories. The girl was wearing rough boots and had a pack on her back that she could not bring herself to take off. She was ugly and gawky and nobody asked her who she was or where she came from.

Prisoners waiting to be called for interrogation sat in there also. A not particularly young German lieutenant told me quietly, ‘I’ve spent half the day sitting among civilians,’ by which he meant the occupants of the basement. ‘I’m not sure if you’re aware of that.’ ‘What can we do?’ ‘No, by all means, if they are decent people I don’t mind.’

We were interested in just one thing: where was Hitler? He did not have the answer to that, but wanted to speak his mind, and started in a roundabout way. He stood up and straightened himself before beginning. ‘Our enemy No. 1 was England. Enemy No. 2 was Russia. In order to defeat England, we had first to finish off Russia… Oh God!’ he said and covered his face with his hands.

A miner from Alsace who had surrendered asked darkly to be trusted with a rifle so he could fight against the Germans. ‘Even at this last minute,’ he said, ‘for everything!’ He turned up his sleeve to show the tattoo of a cross, which confirmed he came from Alsace.

Scant though the intelligence was that we obtained, putting everything together, getting an insight into the structure of the German defences around the Reich Chancellery, we felt able to conclude that, most likely, that is where Hitler was.

On the evening of 29 April a nurse was detained who had run through the line of fire to look for her mother. As she talked to us, she pulled a white headscarf from her coat pocket, either without thinking or seeking the protection of the red cross on its white background. Throughout the war that sign had afforded our wounded no protection. At first sight of it the Germans mercilessly targeted their bombing there.

The day before, the nurse had been accompanying the wounded from Vossstrasse to the only nearby place of safety, the bomb shelter of the Reich Chancellery. There she had heard from the soldiers and the staff of the building that Hitler was in the underground bunker.

Dawn. Streets after fighting. A dead German soldier. Shop windows ripped apart by shells, holes in walls leading deep into the interior of a deserted house. The wind sweeping rubbish and crushed stone over a cobbled street. By a building, on the pavement, are our soldiers. One is sleeping on his side, his knees drawn up, using a piece of a door as a headrest. Another is rewinding his foot wrappings. The last long minutes before another day of assault…

Everywhere there are barricades, anti-tank barriers, ditches and piles of rubble. Labyrinthine streets. Chaotic ruins. Burning, collapsing buildings, and buildings from whose windows the enemy is firing. Our soldiers rose to face death with unforgettable courage and selflessness in those testing years when death was not rewarded with victory; but there is a particular grief when a soldier dies with only a few hours left before victory. The Russian soldiers who entered Berlin had been through everything: pain and hatred, the bitterness of defeat and self-sacrifice, the hopelessness of encirclement, the despair of captivity, the rage of attacking, and the surge of enthusiasm in victorious battles from the Volga to the Spree – only for many of them to be cut down at the last minute in the streets of Berlin.

The battle raged day and night, ever fiercer. The Berlin garrison, the SS regiments, the troops retreating from the Oder and Küstrin or redeployed from the Elbe, all those troops that managed to get through to Berlin before the ring of encirclement closed around the city, were concentrated here in the government district.

On 30 April at 11.30 hrs the order was given to the attacking troops: fire with all weaponry! The bombardment began, from heavy artillery, the selfpropelled guns, tanks, fire from machine guns and submachine guns. Guns that had come all the way from the Volga fired for all the wrongs that had been done, for all the people who had been harmed. When the artillery fell silent, the soldiers attacked.

On the evening of that day, 30 April 1945, the red flag fluttered over the Reichstag. Fighting within the building itself continued throughout 1 May.

The Reichstag, a mighty building with a great dome visible from far and wide, was to go down in history as a symbol of victory. It was the heart of the 9th Special Defence District, and when it fell the Reich Chancellery could hold out no longer.

Berlin. The night before May Day 1945. A night of apocalypse. Blazing buildings grotesquely lighting up a crippled city sunk in darkness, the crash of collapsing masonry, the gunfire, the choking fumes of battle and conflagration. Searchlight beams probe the darkness of the night sky: not a single German aircraft is to cross the firmament over the ring encircling Berlin. No one and nothing can fly in, or escape from here by air.

In the centre of the German capital, in the government district, the German troops were trapped, surrounded. This was their hour of tragedy, of desperate persistence and self-immolation. Gunfire raked the dark street separating the enemies when suddenly (this came about in the sector of our neighbouring 8th Guards Army under General Chuikov) someone appeared from the enemy side. A flare picked him out from the chaos of war, waving a white flag. The first envoy in Berlin to parley about a truce, the first sign of recognition that the enemy’s situation was hopeless. The firing ceased immediately.

The envoy walked, clinging to masonry and shattered concrete, crushing glass and rubble underfoot. As the soldiers watched him approach step by step, behind him a historic epoch was receding, drawing to a close.

The episode is described in his memoirs by Lieutenant General Illarion Tolkonyuk, chief of the operational department of Chuikov’s headquarters. For the first time both sides stopped shooting at each other on a Berlin street. The envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Seifert, hastily reached the now silent Russian firing point in a grey corner building. Along the telephone wire the news of the envoy ran through the appropriate channels to Army Commander Chuikov. The envoy delivered a bilingual document in Russian and German, signed by Martin Bormann, to the effect that Lieutenant Colonel Seifert was authorized to negotiate with the Russian command. The purpose of the negotiation was to agree the matter of the crossing of the front line by the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Hans Krebs, in view of the particular importance of the message he would bring.

Seifert returned across the street separating us from the enemy, and about an hour and a half later, as agreed, the Germans appeared in the same place, emerging from the fresh ruins. It was 3.00 a.m. Moscow time and, on the other side of the street, for the Germans, it was 1.00 a.m. Berlin time.

There was a fair amount of light, and the soldiers of the opposing sides watched tensely as General Krebs and his party, an orderly carrying his briefcase, an officer (Colonel Theodor von Dufving), and a soldier with a white flag, came forward in the early hours of a fateful new day.

Krebs was conveyed through the divisional headquarters to Chuikov’s command post. It was 3.30 a.m. Moscow time. At 3.30 p.m. the previous day Hitler had committed suicide. Krebs brought with him this news from Bormann and Goebbels and told General Chuikov, whom he mistook for Marshal Zhukov, that he was the first non-German to be notified of this fact.

He brought with him a letter from Goebbels to ‘the Leader of the Soviet people’. Marshal Zhukov gives the text of the letter in his book. The letter announced that, ‘The Führer has today voluntarily passed away. On the basis of his lawful right, the Führer has, in the will he has left, transferred all power to Dönitz, myself and Bormann. I have authorized Bormann to establish contact with the Leader of the Soviet people. This contact is essential for peace negotiations between the powers that have suffered the greatest losses. Goebbels.’

The letter had appended to it a list of the members of the new government in accordance with Hitler’s will. In this ephemeral government of the collapsed Third Reich, Goebbels was designated Reich Chancellor and Krebs Minister of War. A new post of Minister of the Party was invented for Bormann. Grand Admiral Dönitz was appointed Reich President and Commander of the Armed Forces.

Krebs was instructed to request a truce in Berlin so that the new government could reunite (Dönitz was at Flensburg) and, legally constituted, proceed to negotiations with the Soviet command. This was an obvious last effort to break out of encircled Berlin.

The substance of the discussions between Generals Chuikov and Sokolovsky and General Krebs is now public knowledge. At the time we heard only rumours about the arrival of Krebs, and the discussions immediately became secret.

Krebs was one of the victims of the last appointments and meteoric career promotions in the doomed Third Reich. He was elevated to the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Army only in late March or even in April 1945, to replace Guderian, whom Hitler had dismissed. Very upright, cleanshaven, with a pistol on his greatcoat belt, he maintained a military bearing. That is how he looks in a photograph taken at the conclusion of the failed negotiations. Krebs had served for a long time in Moscow as the military attaché of the German embassy. He spoke Russian, and understood the hard-line remarks Chuikov and his officers were exchanging: ‘We’ll have to finish them off!’ and, into the telephone when talking to Marshal Zhukov: ‘I wouldn’t ponce around. Unconditional surrender and basta!’

The toughest, most implacable character present at the talks was, however, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a former officer in the tsarist Life Guards, now wearing the epaulettes of a colonel, a famous Soviet writer who appeared in Berlin right at the end of the war.

Vishnevsky shrieked in fear and indignation, ‘Take the pistol off that bandit!’ They had some difficulty calming him down, owing to his inability to differentiate between an envoy and a prisoner. Another outburst came when he saw that, when Krebs handed the documents over to Chuikov, he kept some pages himself, and demanded that they be taken off him by force. This writer and socialist humanitarian was restrained with difficulty by soldiers who had been fighting throughout the war years and become toughened and embittered towards the enemy, but who nevertheless retained respect for military ethics and a sense of personal dignity.

For the German side, the negotiations were doomed to fail. Marshal Zhukov, to whom Chuikov was reporting by phone, emphasized that negotiations could be conducted only with the agreement of all the allies, who expected scrupulous observance of mutual obligations.

The documents presented by Krebs were delivered to Zhukov at the command point of front headquarters. It was obvious that the reply could only be a demand for unconditional surrender to all the Allies. Ultimately, however, it was for Stalin to decide, and he was asleep at his dacha, as Zhukov was informed over the telephone by the general on duty. This would delay the negotiations, and Zhukov was concerned that this might give the Allies grounds to blame the Soviet command for engaging in separate negotiations. He decided. ‘I must ask you to wake him. The matter is urgent and cannot be left until morning.’

In a conversation I had with him years later, Georgiy Zhukov praised his memory as ‘remarkable’, but even people who did not have that distinction had no difficulty in retaining firmly in their minds the words they heard Stalin utter. We can rest assured that Zhukov’s recollection of Stalin’s reply was accurate. I quoted them when I wrote about my meeting with Zhukov, and I will repeat them here, with some additional comments.

Awakened by Zhukov’s call, Stalin, perhaps still half asleep, reacted to the news of Hitler’s suicide in less than his usual phlegmatic manner, and even with a degree of spontaneity:

‘The game’s up for the scum!’ (as if he were talking about a partner in crime who had ratted on him. Hitler was, after all, the only person the mistrustful Stalin had ever trusted, only to be perfidiously fooled by him). ‘Pity we couldn’t have taken him alive. Where’s Hitler’s body?’

‘As reported by General Krebs, Hitler’s body was cremated on a bonfire.’

‘Tell Sokolovsky,’ the Supreme Commander said, ‘to conduct no negotiations except on unconditional surrender, neither with Krebs nor with other Hitlerites. If nothing out of the ordinary happens, do not call until morning. I want to rest a bit before the [May Day] parade.’ Stalin thus terminated his conversation with Zhukov on the most sensitive topic of the time.

Stalin was not given to trusting people, but gave no orders then or subsequently to confirm the veracity of the message about Hitler. ‘Cremated on a bonfire.’ One way or another, he had disappeared. This left room for speculation that Hitler was still alive and in hiding. Hitler was no longer an emblem of the war: he became an emblem of the kind of peace that was to follow.

Zhukov, with his forthrightness, which Stalin had probably valued in the war, was quite unsuitable for joining in the imminent political games and, if he personally verified Hitler’s death, could even be dangerous. So he was abruptly sidelined and, we can imagine, must have been aware of it. Stalin never once asked him whether the search for Hitler’s remains was continuing.

Our newspapers, from 2 May onwards, alarmed their readers with TASS reports that Hitler had managed to escape. Pravda declared on 2 May:

Yesterday evening, German radio was broadcasting an announcement by the so-called ‘Führer’s General Headquarters’ to the effect that Hitler died on the afternoon of 1 May [sic]. The announcement continues that on 30 April Hitler appointed Admiral Dönitz as his successor… These German radio announcements are evidently a new Nazi trick. By spreading the claim that Hitler is dead, the German Fascists are clearly hoping to enable him to leave the stage and go underground.

So Hitler was alive and hiding somewhere? The question of whether he was alive or had committed suicide, and even more, the question of whether he had been found, moved from being an army matter into the sphere of international politics, so Zhukov may have deliberately moved aside on the grounds that this was not his province. A new day had dawned, with complex new problems and concerns, and the toppled dictator was demoted to yesterday’s news.

In my talk with Marshal Zhukov I mentioned that at that time we had the feeling that the front command was taking little interest in the search. Zhukov did not deny it. For some reason he had not insisted on receiving reports with all the details. He had ignored the issue. Why? Was it solely because of Stalin’s disinterest? I can come up with no convincing answer.

As for Stalin, he was not interested in seeing a search conducted, Hitler’s dead body discovered and the matter closed. That much is clear from how events were to develop.

The negotiations, which were now being conducted by Colonel General Sokolovsky, ended. The request for a truce was categorically rejected. Krebs was told that, as agreed with the three other Allies, only unconditional surrender could be discussed. Krebs was not authorized to accept that, and the talks ended with his return to the Reich Chancellery with that uncomfortable news. Colonel von Dufving was sent to Goebbels with a demand that he should surrender in order to avoid senseless bloodshed on both sides. Our command decided at the same time to set up a direct telephone line to Goebbels.

The signaller ordered to follow in Colonel von Dufving’s footsteps reached his destination safely, unwinding cable all the way and, with the assistance of German signallers, connected himself to their wire, plugged in his telephone equipment and let our side know that he was at the bottom of a crater, sheltering from any gunfire that might come from our side, in the amicable company of Fritzes, and having a smoke.

For the first time a direct telephone line connected the command posts of the opposing sides, but this entirely operational line was never used. The German side, which was expected to respond to the Soviet conditions, did not negotiate. While waiting for their decision, combat operations on our side were halted. Only at 18.00 hrs did an SS lieutenant colonel sent by Goebbels deliver, across the front line, the Germans’ written refusal to accept our conditions.

For Goebbels and Bormann personally, surrender had little to commend it. For them, capitulating to the Soviet side was tantamount to something worse than death. Saving the lives of German soldiers and of the German population was evidently not a priority. At 18.30 the Red Army, on the orders of Marshal Zhukov, resumed the assault. The unused hotline connecting the opposing sides was destroyed.

I often wondered what had happened to our signaller on the other side of the front line, lying in that crater with his German colleagues, alone in the enemy camp as the Red Army resumed its furious assault. Did the Nazi soldiers take their desperation and anger out on him in their darkest hour?

It was only in 1985, after being forgotten for so many years, that the heroic signaller resurfaced. I was so delighted to learn from a newspaper report that a Kazakh film about him had won an award at an international festival of documentary short films. All these years he had been living in Alma-Ata in obscurity.

Late in the evening of 1 May, the Hamburg radio station broadcast an announcement ‘from the Führer’s Headquarters’ that, ‘This afternoon, continuing the fight against Bolshevism to his last breath, our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fell in the battle for Germany at his command post in the Reich Chancellery.’ The announcement was broadcast a second time, accompanied by Wagnerian music. The circumstances had changed, but our task remained the same: to find Hitler, dead or alive.

Hitler’s headquarters was located in a bomb shelter under the Reich Chancellery. It had more than fifty rooms (most of them no bigger than a boxroom). It also housed a powerful communications centre, had food supplies and a kitchen. An underground garage was connected to it. There were two ways into the underground complex: from the internal garden of the Reich Chancellery, and from the Chancellery’s vestibule, from which a fairly broad and gentle staircase led downwards. Descending the stairs, you immediately came to a long corridor with numerous doors opening off it. The route to Hitler’s bunker was rather long and complicated. An entrance from the enclosed garden led directly to the Führerbunker, as those inhabiting this underworld called it.

The two-storey Führerbunker was much deeper down than the bomb shelter under the Reich Chancellery and its reinforced concrete ceiling much thicker. The head of Hitler’s bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber, in his memoirs, Hitler, I Knew Him,[1] describes it: ‘Hitler’s new bomb shelter was the most solid of any built in Germany. The reinforced concrete ceiling of the bunker was eight metres thick.’

There was a concrete mixer near the garden entrance to the bunker: work had recently been carried out to strengthen the concrete roof, probably after it suffered a direct hit from artillery shells.

Russian assault detachments broke through the final defensive ring and burst into the Reich Chancellery on the morning of 2 May.

There was a firefight in the vestibule with the remnants of the guard, most of whom, however, had fled. Next came the descent. Military and civilian staff began coming out of the corridors, the boxrooms and the rest of the complex with their hands up. The wounded were sitting or lying on the floor. There was groaning. In the underground complex and in the storeys of the Reich Chancellery shooting broke out repeatedly.

We needed to get our bearings immediately, to locate all the exits and block them, get the lie of the land and start searching. In the very mixed collection of people occupying the complex it was no simple matter to identify those who could be helpful, people who would know more than others about Hitler’s fate and could guide us through the labyrinthine complex. We conducted a first sketchy enquiry.

Down there we found a portly forty-year old, Karl Schneider, one of the Chancellery’s garage mechanics. He testified that on 28 or 29 April, he could not remember which exactly, the telephone operator on duty in Hitler’s secretariat gave him an order to deliver all the petrol he had to the Führer’s bunker. Schneider sent eight cans, each containing twenty litres of petrol. Later the same day, he received a further order from the operator to send firelighters. He had eight and sent them all.

Schneider had not himself seen Hitler and did not know whether he was in Berlin, but on 1 May he was told by the head of the garage and by Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, that the Führer was dead. Rumours were circulating among the security soldiers that he had committed suicide and that his body had been burnt. Putting these rumours together with the orders he had received, Schneider concluded that the petrol he had sent had been used to burn the Führer’s body.

Then, on the evening of 1 May, he had another call from the duty telephonist, again demanding that all available petrol should be sent to the Führer’s bunker. Schneider siphoned petrol from the fuel tanks of the cars and sent another four cans.

What had that call been about? Who had the petrol been meant for this time? Together with Karl Schneider and Wilhelm Lange (a cook), Major Bystrov, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko[1] and Major Khazin went out into the garden. The ground had been churned up by shells, the trees mutilated, and their charred branches were strewn underfoot. The lawns were blackened by fire and soot, and there was broken glass and piles of bricks everywhere. How were they to determine where the bodies had been burned?

They began an inspection of the garden and, three metres from the garden exit of the Führerbunker, found the half-burnt bodies of Goebbels and his wife. So that was what the second supply of petrol had been for. ‘The German found them first,’ Ivan Klimenko wrote to me in a letter dated 9 February 1965, referring to Schneider. If it had been any later, the torrent of Red Army soldiers pouring into the Reich Chancellery would have trampled the bodies to pieces without even noticing what was under their feet.

The sky over Berlin had not yet ceased to glow; the Reich Chancellery was still smoking. It was dark in the underground complex, and with the ventilation not working it was stuffy, dank and gloomy. In those days, down in the Chancellery’s shelter, I had to sort through a vast number of papers and documents by the light of humble oil lamps. There were on-thespot accounts of street fighting in Bormann’s files, reports from the Berlin Nazi Party leadership about the hopelessness of the situation, their lack of ammunition, the demoralized state of the soldiers. There was Bormann’s correspondence, and Hitler’s personal papers.

My priority in searching through these papers was to find anything that would shed some light at least on what had been happening there in the last few days, that would add a brush stroke or give a clue as to how everything had ended.

Here was Bormann sending telegram after telegram to his adjutant, Hummel, in Obersalzberg, all bearing the red stamp ‘Geheim’, Secret! From the nature of his instructions it was clear they were preparing to move Hitler’s headquarters to Berchtesgaden. They had been planning to get out of Berlin.

Here was a folder containing information from their enemy’s sources, radio intercepts from the last days of April: Reuters news agency reports from Allied headquarters, broadcasts from Moscow about combat operations on the fronts, telegrams about events in the rest of the world, from London, Rome, San Francisco, Washington and Zurich. These sources were used at Hitler’s headquarters to gain a sense of what was happening on other sectors of the front, and in Berlin itself, in the last days of April. By this time, direct contact with the troops had been finally lost.

All the papers in the folder were typewritten in huge letters. I had never before come across such a strange font: it was as if you were reading through a magnifying glass. What was that for? Later I learned that Hitler’s secretary, Gertraud Junge, retyped all the papers on a special typewriter. For reasons of image, Hitler did not want to wear spectacles.

Here was a report from a foreign radio station about the execution of Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci. With a blue pencil, Hitler had underlined the words ‘Mussolini’ and ‘hung upside down’. This discovery seemed to me to be significant: the news of Mussolini’s fate made it clear to Hitler that he needed to avoid discovery of his body after his death. That was my conclusion at the time, and I later found it confirmed in the Council of Ministers Archive, in the memoirs of Rattenhuber, and in the conclusions of the Control Commission for Germany (British element) of 1 November 1945. We searched for documents and, having familiarized myself with them, I annotated them. They were then forwarded, as already mentioned, to front headquarters, as were our own papers, interrogation reports and all other documentation.

One of our major finds at the time was Goebbels’ diary. It was found in the underground complex where Goebbels lived with his family, in one of two suitcases of documents. There were ten or so thick notebooks from different years, covered in closely written, heavy handwriting in straight lines. The letters had a barely noticeable slant to the left and were tightly squeezed together. The first books of the diary dated from 1932, before the Nazis came to power, and the last ended on 8 July 1941. We discovered later that this was only the date on which the handwritten diary ends. From the following day, 9 July 1941, and almost to the end, he dictated his entries each day to two shorthand typists.

I greatly regretted not being able to sit down and study this diary, which it was not easy to decipher. It would have needed many days of diligent work, and we were having to count the minutes. Our immediate task was to establish what had happened to Hitler and where we could find him. I had no option but to forward the diaries to front headquarters. With the war at an end, such documents were of purely historical interest and considered to be of no value. They suffered a major devaluation.

In the years that followed, when I recalled Goebbels’ diary I feared the notebooks had been lost along with a host of other documents, but a time came when I had the opportunity to read very carefully a part of this diary, to whose discovery I had contributed and which had been preserved in the archive. It was the last handwritten notebook dating from May, June and early July 1941. Realizing that this diary was a tremendously valuable historical document, I quoted abundantly from it in my book (translated, naturally, into Russian). I thus presided over the first publication from this body of handwritten diaries, revealing their whereabouts to the world. Nobody, of course, had any intention of making the original of the diary available for a foreign edition, and accordingly this chapter is all but missing in the [East] German edition of my book that was edited in the USSR.[1]

However, the mere mention of the existence of this notebook and the exact date on which it ended, 8 July 1941, proved to be enough. [West] German historians already had Goebbels’ typewritten diaries at their disposal, which began from the following day, 9 July 1941, and now they knew that the manuscript diary was extant and preserved in an archive in Moscow. They began seeking access to it, and in 1969 microfilm copies were conveyed to the German side. In 1987 all the surviving pages of the manuscript diary were published.

The last notebook of that diary is uniquely interesting historical testimony, reflecting as it does the facts and atmosphere of preparations for the attack on the USSR. It discloses the nature of the provocations and the methods of disinformation undertaken at the time by Nazi Germany.

Goebbels’ diary introduces us to the routine day-to-day activities of the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda. In May–June 1941, these activities are preparing for the attack on the USSR which, for us, marked the beginning of the war. The first references to the impending attack appear in the diary on 24 May. Goebbels sent his representative to Alfred Rosenberg, who was to become minister for the occupied eastern territories, to coordinate their activities in the impending operation. ‘R. must be broken down into component parts… the existence of such a colossal state in the east cannot be tolerated.’

Goebbels was busy with active disinformation, spreading false rumours about a supposedly imminent invasion of Britain in order to mask Germany’s true intentions. ‘The rumours we have sown about the invasion are working. There is a climate of exceptional nervousness in England.’

Goebbels received a programme for the territorial partitioning of Russia from Hitler:

Goebbels put his back into preparing for the new war. He tightened the screws wherever he could, forbidding the showing of foreign films in the Cabaret of Comedians where ‘all the gripers go’ to watch them; he ‘prepared new measures against the Berlin Jews’. He castigated those sections of the press that failed sufficiently to extol the achievements of German arms, calling them the ‘petty-bourgeois press’. He intervened in matters of ensuring military secrecy in all the Berlin ministries. ‘We will even have to call on the services of the Gestapo.’

He kept Robert Ley of the Nazis’ German Labour Front from promising new post-war social programmes, so as not to awaken an appetite for peace among the population. At the same time, he cancelled the existing ban on dances. ‘That is necessary in order as far as possible to conceal our next operation. The people must believe that we are now “replete with victories” and no longer interested in anything beyond recreation and dancing’ (10 June). Goebbels decided to go easy on anti-tobacco propaganda in order not to offend soldiers who smoked or introduce ‘inflammable matter’ among the populace. ‘War already conceals within itself quite enough natural incendiary matter. Accordingly, I am ordering a toning down of excessively harsh anti-clerical propaganda. There will be time enough for that after the war’ (17 June).

He rhapsodizes about his box of disinformation tricks:

The article was written, approved by the Führer, and ‘is being sent with due ceremony to the Völkischer Beobachter. The issue will be confiscated during the night.’

The point of the trick is that the article, examining the operation to capture Crete, contained a clear hint that experience gained there contained lessons for the supposedly impending invasion of Britain. Having the issue confiscated would serve to show that Goebbels had inadvertently blurted out Germany’s ‘true’ intentions.

There are other entries under the same date:

Further:

Goebbels also viewed the war as a source of abundant material for German newsreels: ‘Inevitably, during such a relatively peaceful time it [the newsreel] cannot be as good as when there is fighting.’

Goebbels did not overlook his own self-interest: in Berlin, construction of a highly secure bomb shelter was commenced on Göringstrasse where he lived. It was going to be ‘a colossal structure,’ he noted with satisfaction.

In Schwanenwerder near Berlin, adding to the country houses he already possessed, construction of Goebbels’ castle was coming to a conclusion. He thought the building itself was ‘magnificent’, and also the way his wife had furnished it. Here, in comfortable remoteness, against the backdrop of an idyllic landscape, Dr Goebbels was intending to operate even more productively to ‘create general mayhem’, not omitting, in the process, to help himself to some prize treasures: ‘I bought a marvellous painting by Goya privately in France.’

Paintings from all over were being funnelled to the Ministry of Propaganda.

He intended to manage it on an international scale.

On Goebbels’ instructions a plan was being developed to establish a Berlin Academy of Fashion under the direction of Benno von Arent, Führer at that time of Germany’s artists. Here are the instructions Goebbels gave his subordinate as he sent him off to allied Italy as the representative of German cinematography.

The only kind of art Goebbels had mastered to perfection was the art of blackmail, deception and conspiracy.

15 June had been the last Sunday before a terrible war was unleashed in the east. As usual, Goebbels described the previous day’s events in his diary. There had been a secret meeting of the conspirators.

And the Germans on this last Sunday ‘stroll carefree in the rain’, with no inkling of the catastrophe into which they are to be plunged in a few days’ time by those whom they so recklessly entrusted with their destiny.

As for the freezing of German deposits in the United States, Goebbels noted,

‘Rumours are our daily bread,’ Goebbels writes.

Apart from special ‘spreaders’, the world is flooded with rumours by the press of Germany’s allies, notably the Italians. ‘They blabber about everything they know and even about what they do not know. Their press is terribly frivolous,’ Goebbels writes, quoting the opinions Hitler expressed in conversation with him.

The entries during these days end in sighs:

22 June. The day German troops crossed the border and attacked the USSR. Irrepressibly methodical, Goebbels first describes the day that has passed.

Even though, as he is writing, the world has been shaken by news of the invasion of Russia and new information is coming in from the Eastern Front, he rattles on at length in the diary about this and that: listening to new fanfares; a chat with an actress invited to appear in a new war film; a breakfast in honour of the Italian minister of popular culture, Alessandro Pavolini; a reception he arranged for the Italians in his castle at Schwanenwerder – before moving on to the main topic of the day.

Goebbels entered the war, trusting in his belief that ‘for the German soldier nothing is impossible,’ and in the instinct of the Führer (‘Once again the Führer’s instinct has proved correct’).

‘I am holding back on large-scale maps of Russia,’ he writes the following day. ‘The vast expanses will only frighten our people.’

In Germany, the food situation is very bad, Goebbels notes immediately before the attack on the USSR, and a further reduction in the meat ration is imminent. Italy presents ‘a dismal spectacle’.

Everywhere there is a lack of organization and system. They have no system of ration cards, no decent food, and at the same time they have a great appetite for conquests. They want us, as far as possible, to fight the war, and themselves to reap the rewards. Fascism has not yet overcome its internal crisis. It is sick in body and soul. Too much corroded by corruption.

The war is to stifle all the inner contradictions. Military success is their only god. Goebbels himself, and with the Führer’s assistance, bans Christian publications for soldiers in the Wehrmacht. ‘Right now the soldiers have better things to do than read these wretched tracts… This cissy, spineless doctrine could have a very damaging effect on the soldiers.’

The notion of a ‘crusade’ against the USSR, at least for external consumption, is greatly promoted.

At the same time:

This was an idea that, as we will see below, obsessed Hitler to the last.

Everybody was busy deciding when victory would be achieved. If Hitler said four months, voices from all directions were now predicting a victorious conclusion of the war within weeks or even days.

In the diary there is anticipation of imminent triumph. Goebbels’ main concern is that that the triumph should not be overshadowed by unrealistic prophesying.

Goebbels instructs the poets to compose a song about the Russian campaign as a matter of urgency, but nothing satisfactory is forthcoming, to his annoyance and indignation. Finally, ‘A new song about Russia is ready. The joint work of Anacker, Tieszler and Kolbe. I am now editing and reworking it. After that, it will be unrecognizable,’ he writes with his usual complacency. ‘A magnificent song.’

‘Magnificent’, now his standard category, he applies to the newsreel, to which he devotes a lot of attention.

No matter how Goebbels enthuses about the results of the surprise attack, we detect a new and unexpected tone in his notes. At first he sounds merely puzzled: ‘The enemy is fighting well,’ he records as early as 24 June (writing, as always, about the previous day).

He ponders how this new circumstance can be turned to advantage.

The tone becomes increasingly uneasy: the Southern Front ‘is resisting desperately and has a good command. The situation is not dangerous, but we have our hands full.’

The German doctrinaire insistence on the weakness of the Red Army has suffered a setback, and so does Goebbels’ psychological state. Like a gambler he grows more arrogant with every win, and wilts and lapses into depression when he loses or encounters adversity. These are only the first days of the war in the east: the notebook ends with 8 July. The Nazi army has yet to experience its first defeats… and yet the spectre of failure is clearly haunting these entries:

He tries to find an explanation for this ‘anomaly’: ‘For now their ally is still Slavic persistence, but that will one day disappear!’

He is buffeted from one conclusion to another, exactly opposite: ‘In a single day we again destroy 235 Russian aircraft. If the Russians lose their air force, they are doomed. God willing!’ (2 July).

But immediately afterwards:

Soviet propaganda, however, is causing him grave concern: up till now, German soldiers have never been on the receiving end of enemy propaganda: ‘The Bolsheviks are not the English. Moscow has more powerful radio stations.’ (27 June)

Goebbels is having a lot of trouble in Germany itself, trying strictly to suppress listening-in to foreign broadcasts. With the help of the Führer, he attempts to impose a ban on all Russian writers and composers.

There is no peace among the Nazi leaders themselves. ‘Rosenberg is intending to set up his very own little propaganda stall… Everyone wants to play at propaganda, and the less they understand it, the more they want to.’ Thus ends his temporary alliance with Rosenberg. The more customary atmosphere of intrigue, poisonous jealousy and denunciation resumes.

The war with Russia has not resolved some burning issues, has not brought the expected relief: in the Balkans ‘there is a real famine. Especially in Greece. Serious discontent is expressed in Italy. Mussolini is not acting energetically enough. In Romania, support for us has decreased noticeably. Worries wherever you look… In France and Belgium there is almost famine. That determines the mood there.’

Worries, wars, and hardships of the German people notwithstanding, nothing gets in the way of his personal wellbeing and enrichment. In addition to the newly built castle in Schwanenwerder, where Goebbels now often resides, a complex of houses at Krumme Lanke, which he also frequents from Berlin, and other country properties, he is also at this time building ‘a new Norwegian cabin. It will be in the most idyllic location… Inspected our new blockhouse, which is very pretty. It is located in the forest and adapted for peacetime, which will, of course, come.’

All that needed was a small matter of defeating the Russians: ‘We must act quickly, and the operation on the Eastern Front must not go on too long. The Führer will take care of that.’

Goebbels writes, infuriated, at the end of this notebook,

It was the evening of 2 May 1945.

The war had come to Berlin. Capitulation was not a watchword but a lived reality, only not in the sense that Goebbels and Hitler had intended.

Several hours had passed since the Berlin garrison had given up resistance. The dumping of weapons, which had started at 3.00 p.m., was still going on. The square by the Town Hall was piled high with abandoned machine guns, assault and ordinary rifles. In the streets abandoned German artillery pieces had their barrels pointing at the ground. There was a drizzle.

Under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate, over which the red flag was flying, straggled German units that had been defeated at the Volga, the Dnieper, the Danube, the Vistula and the Oder. Many of the soldiers were wearing helmets that were now an absurdity. They walked by, exhausted, deceived, their faces blackened; some of them crushed and round-shouldered, some with obvious relief, but most in a state of abject depression and apathy.

The fires had not yet been extinguished. Berlin was on fire. A Russian horseman whipped up a horse and his steaming field kitchen bounced its way over the rubble. Our soldiers were resting on a German tank dug into the roadway, sitting on the turret, on its gun, singing, rolling cigarettes. Time for a smoke. In Berlin the battle was over.

Troops under the command of Marshal Zhukov had captured the capital of Germany.

Everything was a mixture in these streets: the happiness of people freed from captivity, the joy of our joining up with the Allies, amazing meetings. Grim-faced columns of German men leaving the city, stumbling off into captivity. The anguish of women watching them go.

The tragic fusion of victory and defeat, triumph and retribution, an end and a beginning.

In Bydgoszcz, long before that day in Berlin, Major Bystrov had confided to me on that memorable evening that he was setting himself the goal of capturing Goebbels. Goebbels and no one less. He spoke to me about it in confidence several times afterwards. I let it go in one ear and out the other. What nonsense! There we were in Poland, and where on Victory Day we, let alone Goebbels, would be was anyone’s guess. In the event, on Victory Day we were in Berlin, and found Goebbels in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

Goebbels had given instructions that after his death he, too, was to be burned to ashes. There was not enough petrol. After dousing Goebbels and his wife, who had also committed suicide, those charged with this duty fled before completing the task. A Gold Party Badge with a single-digit number that had fallen off her burnt dress lay near Magda Goebbels, as well as a gold cigarette case with a portrait of Hitler.

On 2 May, when the Berlin garrison ceased resistance, a surrender of weapons took place in the streets. German soldiers were formed into columns and marched off into captivity. In the Reich Chancellery, however, there was intermittent gunfire from SS soldiers who refused to surrender. It was in the evening of this day that Major Bystrov, along with two other officers, discovered Goebbels. It was almost beyond belief, like much that was to follow in this story.

Goebbels was carried out on the leaf of a door to Wilhelmstrasse in front of the Reich Chancellery. It somehow happened by itself that this became the apotheosis of that day. Berlin had fallen. Its Party regional leader, its commissar for the defence of Berlin, the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, Hitler’s right-hand man was dead. Goebbels was still recognizable, so let the victorious warriors and the people of Berlin take a look at him. In the absence that day of Hitler, the charred body of Goebbels symbolized the collapse of the Third Reich.

The street was smoke-filled, the acrid fumes of battle had not yet cleared, the fires were still raging, not yet burned out. The Reich Chancellery building, dented by shells, pitted by shrapnel, its windows gaps with jagged glass, had nevertheless survived mainly intact. The eagle with a swastika in its talons above the main entrance was also intact. Mangled enemy vehicles had crashed into the wall of the Reich Chancellery or were scattered over the ravine of the street.

Few Berliners could get in to see anything. There were small groups of officers and soldiers. There was filming for the newsreels, and Goebbels was surrounded by a few commanders keen to be in the picture.

I was standing to one side, and from a distance suddenly saw Major Bystrov, standing stock-still, his dark, haggard face almost unrecognizable. Leaning forward, he was staring, transfixed, at the body of Goebbels.

The whole scene, with the blackened body on its platform, in the ragged remnants of its Nazi uniform, with the yellow, noose-like tie which had somehow survived round the bare, black neck, its ends gnawed by fire and now stirring in the wind, seemed like an exhibit from history’s chamber of horrors. When I later read that passage in Goebbels’ diary where he gleefully records the Führer’s approval of his notion of introducing a yellow star to identify Jews, I wondered if there had not been something symbolic about that yellow noose round the neck of its inventor.

Before killing himself, Goebbels slaughtered his own children, closing the circle of murder with poison and fire, the means put to so much use in the concentration camps.

The bulletin read:

The Walther pistol found beside them had not been fired.

During the long years of the war we had passed through the ruined, burned lands of the Kalinin and Smolensk regions, of Byelorussia and Poland. We had seen Goebbels’ propaganda in action: the savage devastation of the land, the death camps, the trenches full of murdered people, the ‘new civilization’ in which a man was his brother’s executioner. The path of the war had brought us to the Reich Chancellery.

Now, many years later, I am sometimes asked, ‘Wasn’t it frightening to look at those dead bodies?’ But that was not what I felt. I shuddered, but I was not frightened, and not only because we had seen so many terrible things in four years of war, but rather because those charred remains did not seem human: they seemed satanic.

But the dead children: that was frightening. Six children: five girls and one boy, exterminated by their parents.

‘Whose children are these?’ Major Bystrov asked Vice Admiral Voss. Bystrov had just brought Voss here, to the underground complex. Voss had been entrusted with the mission of reaching Grand Admiral Dönitz in order to hand him the supreme authority Hitler had bequeathed him, and the order to continue the war at all costs. There was to be no question of capitulation!

Together with the remnants of General Mohnke’s group, which had been defending the Reich Chancellery, Voss tried to break through the encirclement in the region of Friedrichstrasse, but was captured. Bystrov drove Vice Admiral Voss through the streets of defeated Berlin. Voss represented the Navy at Hitler’s headquarters. Towards them as they drove wandered dejected columns of prisoners.

Voss stared stonily through the car window the whole time. Terrible, smoking ruins. A crowd of Berliners at a camp kitchen where a Russian cook was ladling out hot soup… Overturned barricades, over which the car drove before crawling on through narrow alleys carved through streets blocked by fallen masonry, rubble and rubbish.

‘Did you know these children?’ Major Bystrov asked. Voss nodded in the affirmative and, asking permission, sank wearily into a chair. ‘I saw them only yesterday. This one is Heidi,’ he said, pointing to the youngest girl. Before coming here he had identified Goebbels and his wife.

Goebbels, with his retinue of journalists, had come on board the cruiser Prinz Eugen, commanded by Voss, in the summer of 1942. Voss owed his advancement to Goebbels. Not so long ago, only back in February when the headquarters moved to Berlin, Goebbels, his wife and Voss were invited to a family dinner party by Grand Admiral Dönitz. The conversation was diverse, and concerned the organization of the defence of Berlin. ‘We talked about the need to build stronger street fortifications and to draw more young people from the Volkssturm group into defence duties. All these issues were touched on, however, only superficially; in passing, as it were.’ They did not allow the intrusion of alarming thoughts to spoil their pleasant evening.

Forced by events down into the underground complex together, they met as old friends, and yesterday, before Voss left with Mohnke’s group, Goebbels had said to him in parting, ’Everything is lost for us now.’ Magda Goebbels added, ‘We are tied here by the children. There is nowhere we can go with them now.’

Major Bystrov and Voss stood together in this dank, dreadful underground room in which the children were lying under their blankets. Voss was shocked, devastated, and sat there hunched. They were silent, each with his own thoughts. That same day Major Bystrov told me about what happened next. Voss, this seemingly completely broken man, suddenly leapt up and started running. Bystrov went after him along the corridor of the dark cellar, fearing he might disappear up a sidestreet and dive into some unknown hiding place. Bystrov caught him, however, and could see this had been an act of complete despair, pointless. Voss had never imagined he could get away.

The children were found in one of the underground rooms by Senior Lieutenant Leonid Ilyin on 3 May. They were lying in bunk beds, the girls in long nightgowns, the boy in pyjamas of light material, just as they had climbed into bed for the last time. Their faces were pink from the action of potassium cyanide. The children seemed alive and only sleeping.

Later, when Leonid Ilyin read these lines, he wrote to me,

In the hospital of the Reich Chancellery there was a doctor among the medical staff, Helmut Kunz, who had been involved in killing the children. He worked in the medical department of the SS in Berlin and on 23 April, when the medical unit was dissolved, was sent to the Reich Chancellery.

He was unshaven and had sunken eyes. He was in SS uniform and spoke jerkily, sighing a lot, clasping and unclasping his hands. He was, perhaps, the only person down there in the complex who had not lost his sensitivity, his jitteriness about everything he had witnessed. He said,

On 1 May he was summoned from the hospital to the Führerbunker by phone.

When I came into the bunker, I found in his study Goebbels himself, his wife and Naumann, the state secretary of the Ministry of Propaganda, talking about something.

I waited at the door of the office for about ten minutes. When Goebbels and Naumann came out, Goebbels’ wife invited me into the office and stated that a decision had been taken [to kill the children] because the Führer was dead and that at 8–9 o’clock that evening the units would try to get out of the encirclement, and ‘accordingly we must die. There is no other way out for us.’

During our conversation, I suggested to Goebbels’ wife that she should send the children to the hospital and transfer them to the care of the Red Cross, but she disagreed with that and said it would be better for them to die.

Some twenty minutes later, while we were talking, Goebbels came back to the study and addressed the following words to me: ‘Doctor, I shall be very grateful if you will help my wife put the children to death.’

I suggested to Goebbels, as I had to his wife, that he should send the children to the hospital and place them under the guardianship of the Red Cross, to which he replied: ‘It is impossible to do that. They are, after all, the children of Goebbels.’

After that, Goebbels left and I stayed with his wife, who spent about an hour playing patience.

Approximately one hour later, Goebbels again returned with Schach, the deputy Gauleiter of Berlin. Schach, as I understood from their conversation, was to leave with the German Army units attempting to break through. He said goodbye to Goebbels…

After Schach left, Goebbels’ wife stated, ‘Our people are leaving now. The Russians may arrive here at any moment and obstruct us so we need to hurry with resolving this matter.’ Goebbels came back to his study, and, together with his wife, I went to their apartment (in the bunker), where Goebbels’ wife took a syringe filled with morphine from a cupboard in the front room and handed it to me, after which we went to the children’s bedroom. At this time the children were already in bed, but not sleeping.

Goebbels’ wife announced to the children, ‘Children, do not be frightened. The doctor is going to give you a vaccination which is being given now to children and soldiers.’ With these words, she left the room, and I was left alone in the room and proceeded to give the morphine injections. After that I again went into the front room and told Frau Goebbels that we should wait about ten minutes for the children to fall asleep, and at that time I looked at the clock. It was 20.40.

Because Kunz told her that he doubted he had the mental strength to help administer poison to the sleeping children, Magda Goebbels asked him to find Hitler’s personal physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger, and send him to her.

When I returned with S. to that room next to the children’s bedroom where I had left Goebbels’ wife she was not there, and S. went straight to the bedroom. I stayed waiting in the next room. Four or five minutes later S. came out of the children’s bedroom with Goebbels’ wife and, without saying a word to me, left immediately. Goebbels’ wife also said nothing to me, only cried. I went with her down to the lower floor of the bunker to Goebbels’ study, where I found the latter in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down the office. Entering the office, his wife stated, ‘Everything is finished with the children, now we need to think about ourselves,’ to which Goebbels replied, ‘Quickly. We have little time.’

Goebbels’ wife told Kunz she had been given the morphine and the syringe by Stumpfegger. He did not know where she had obtained the ampoules of poison. She might have been given them by Hitler who, as we later learned, had been issuing them at the end of April.

‘Kunz returned to the hospital in a very depressed state,’ we were told by Werner Haase, the head of the hospital whom we interrogated after him.

He came into my room, sat on the bed and clutched his head in his hands. When I asked, ‘Are Goebbels and his family dead?’ he replied, ‘Yes.’ To my question as to whether he had been alone, Kunz replied, ‘I was helped by Dr Stumpfegger.’ I was not able to get anything more out of him.

Haase was asked what he knew about how Goebbels and his wife had committed suicide. He replied,

Vice Admiral Voss, Dr Kunz, Lange the cook, Schneider the garage mechanic, Wilhelm Eckold the head bodyguard of Goebbels, Wilhelm Ziehm, technical administrator of the building of the Reich Chancellery, and many others identified Goebbels.

Although the body was charred, it was readily recognizable by anyone who had met Goebbels or seen him from a distance. He could have been recognized even from the caricatures of him in our Soviet press. He had a very distinctive appearance, his head disproportionately large for his puny body and noticeably squashed at the sides. He had a slanting forehead and his face narrowed markedly to his chin. He limped on his right leg, which was shorter than the left one and intoed. The right leg had not been affected by the fire and retained an orthopaedic boot with a thickened sole and prosthesis.

‘On this charred body there are no visible signs of severe, fatal injuries or disease,’ a medical report noted some days later. ‘When examining the body, a forensic examination revealed the presence of the odour of bitter almonds and fragments of an ampoule were found in the mouth.’

When the chemical analysis results came back a conclusive verdict was given: ‘Chemical analysis of the internal organs and blood established the presence of cyanide compounds. The conclusion is thus unavoidable that the death of this unknown man occurred as a result of poisoning with cyanide compounds.’

The same conclusion was reached regarding the cause of death of Magda Goebbels.

Looking for somewhere to stay late in the evening of 3 May, we found ourselves in the Berlin outskirts. As we were walking down a dark, unfamiliar street, I suddenly heard a nightingale.

Now, when I write about it, I find it hard to explain why I found that so surprising. It had seemed that here in Berlin not only all living things, but even the stones of the city had been drawn into the war and were subject to its laws. But then, all of a sudden – a nightingale, in complete disregard of everything, was irrepressibly getting on with what nightingales get on with. After everything that had happened here, the call of the nightingale in this hushed Berlin street was an amazing reaffirmation that life goes on.

We went into a building and climbed dark stairs. We knocked and, feeling fairly awkward, went into the home of people who had just lived through the disaster of the capitulation of their city. It was a modest apartment. Its owners, an elderly couple in quilted dressing gowns, alarmed by our unexpected arrival, put two rooms at our disposal, but evidently had difficulty for a long time in getting back to sleep themselves: we heard their quiet footsteps in the corridor. I lay down on a divan, and was immersed in the stifling smell of mothballs and laurel leaves, which I had quite forgotten during the war. Four years… When the war began, I was studying literature at university.

There was no curtain on the window, and through it I could see pink sky, lit by the glow of the subsiding fires. After all the days of incessant fighting, the stillness was a blessing, but so unwonted it chilled your heart. Through the strain of those days, the thought that we were in Berlin kept breaking through and banishing sleep.

It was fairly light. A deer’s antlers protruded from the wall opposite. There were freshly cut flowers in a vase on the table. Using a pocket torch, I read a framed saying on the wall: ‘Der Himmel bewahre uns vor Regen und Wind, und vor Kameraden, die keine sind.’ May heaven protect us from wind and from rain, and from friends who are false and bring nothing but pain.

The wall was covered with photographs of a boy: here he was clambering onto a rocking horse, here lying on the beach, his head resting on the outstretched legs of a girl in a striped bathing costume. Here he was, already a soldier, standing in a new, well fitting uniform and holding a heavy combat helmet. Here he was in the group photo of a cheery bunch of soldiers. In the centre of the photo was a bottle. Someone had put a helmet on his bayonet. The caption was, ‘Prosit!’ Your health!

And on the desk, under the glass top, was the sad announcement that Kurt Bremer was missing without trace on the Eastern Front.

In search of water, I wandered into the kitchen. Our hostess was sitting by the window. On her knees she had a bag of socks she had begun to darn in Hitler’s Germany, and now, making do with the faint light of the dawning day, she was getting on with a job she was used to. Beer mugs lined the kitchen shelf, and at the head of the parade was a familiar porcelain lady holding out a gilded slipper and inviting someone to drink out of it.

I asked the mistress of the house whose shop it was downstairs – we had noticed it in the night as we were climbing up to the apartment – and whether it had been boarded up for a long time. She replied that it was a dry-salter’s shop that she and her husband owned, and that they had closed it two months ago. ‘We made a success of it by honest toil. It wasn’t at all easy for us. And now, you see…’ She sighed quietly. ‘Das Geschäft macht keinen Spaß mehr.’ Business is no fun any more.

In the morning the owner of the apartment asked me whether I thought he would be able to go to a particular street today to see his dentist. I assured him I thought he would. War was one thing, but a toothache was not to be neglected. He told me that actually he did not have a toothache, but two weeks ago had made an appointment for a check-up today. Although he was not in pain, the fall of the capital of the Third Reich could hardly justify missing a dentist’s appointment. He had an indomitable sense of the need to maintain equilibrium and good order, no matter what the rest of the world might get up to.

Through the window we could see the traffic at the crossroads being directed by a girl we knew. Wielding her flags, she allowed cars to pass, while simultaneously finding the time for a quick salute; she stopped service personnel who had helped themselves to Berliners’ bicycles for getting around and took them off them. The commander of the front had given orders that bicycles were not to be confiscated from the townspeople. A whole mountain of misappropriated bicycles had accumulated near her on the pavement.

A soldier pushed a paint tin out of the front door opposite. He dipped a thick brush with a short handle in it, squatted down on his heels, and obliterated the enormous letters of one of Goebbels’ injunctions painted in the roadway: ‘Berlin bleibt deutsch.’ Berlin will remain German.

It is early morning on 4 July 1945 and a rosy mist is rising over Alexanderplatz. It is chilly. In the middle of the square is what looks like a gypsy encampment: the remnants of the defeated Berlin garrison. They are sleeping in the roadway, swathed in army blankets. The wounded are sleeping on stretchers. One or two are already sitting up, huddled with a blanket covering their heads. Nurses wearing dark jackets and white headscarves are making the rounds of the wounded.

Captive soldiers are also sleeping in Unter den Linden, the street used for parades. The buildings on either side of the street are in ruins. There are yawning gaps in walls from which masonry is still falling. A cart laden with bundles of possessions clatters over the cobbles, doggedly pushed along by two women who must have come back to Berlin from the countryside. The racket invades the stupefaction of ruins and debris.

We are back in the Reich Chancellery. Who were the last people to see Hitler? Who saw him here at all, alive in the underground complex? What is known about what has happened to him?

Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Schneider, the garage mechanic who told us yesterday about sending petrol to Hitler’s bunker, testifies: ‘Whether Hitler was in Berlin at all until 1 May I have no idea. Personally, I did not see him here.’ On 1 May, however, in the Chancellery garage he heard from Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, and from the person in charge of the garage that Hitler had committed suicide. ‘The news went round by word of mouth. Everyone was repeating it but no one really knew for sure.’

A fifty-year old man introduces himself officially as Wilhelm Lange, chef of the Führer’s domestic commissariat in the Reich Chancellery and a specialist pastry cook. He tells us, ‘I last saw Hitler at the beginning of April 1945 in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where he was taking a walk with his German sheepdog which answered to the name of Blondi.’

The technical administrator of the Reich Chancellery, Wilhelm Ziehm, tells us,

Vice Admiral Hans-Erich Voss attended meetings in the bomb shelter at which Hitler was present. He learned of Hitler’s death from Goebbels. That is all we had found out by the morning of 4 May.

‘Nothing for sure,’ as Lange the chef had said, and even this information had to be extricated from an accumulation of other contradictory, sensational misinformation. The things that were being said! That Hitler had been flown out on a plane piloted by Hanna Reitsch three days before Berlin fell; that his ‘death’ had been staged, and the broadcast announcement about it was a ruse; that Hitler had been spirited away from Berlin through underground passages and was hiding in his ‘impregnable’ stronghold in South Tyrol.

People who were in possession of more modest, but crucial, information were so traumatized by everything they had experienced that they muddled up dates and facts, even though what they were recollecting had happened only two or three days previously. First here, then there alternative stories bubbled up and burst, each more sensational than the last. Rumours circulated that Hitler had had doubles.

To exclude these speculations definitively, one after another, took time. The search was being conducted at a furious pace: it was easy to race off on the wrong track and come to false conclusions. Complications, sometimes ridiculous, hampered the search. In Berlin, in those first days of May 1945, under very difficult conditions, it was essential to coordinate the efforts of the intelligence agents and sort through everything methodically and swiftly, to block off all the false trails and target the searching. That task was entrusted to Colonel Vasiliy Gorbushin.[1]

Again and again, metre by metre, we painstakingly examined the empty underground complex beneath the Reich Chancellery. There were overturned tables, broken typewriters, glass and paper underfoot; box-rooms and more substantial rooms, long corridors and crossings. There was damage to the concrete walls and, here and there in the corridors, pools of water. Damp, dank air. The ventilators had not worked well even when Hitler was there and now were not working at all. It was difficult to breathe and it was murky… Round every corner something seemed to be rustling or moving, or there was a silence you felt might at any moment be broken by gunfire from some desperate Nazi officer.

The crunching of boots on broken glass, echoing gasps from soldiers who had stormed the Reich Chancellery and now, prowling through the last residence of the German government, were coming upon crates of expensive liqueurs. They were calling out to each other as if finding their way through a forest, their torches lighting up the theatrical setting of the last hours of the Third Reich. Sometimes we heard the click of safety catches and a menacing ‘Khende khokh’, ‘Hände hoch!’ in a heavy Russian accent, directed into the darkness where the sound of our footsteps was coming from.

It was a difficult, unpredictable situation. Above us, on the surface of Berlin, the war was over, but down here, underground, the search continued in the chaos. Our searching was tireless; we were completely focused, conscious of a tremendous responsibility, the culmination of four years of warfare. We had to find our bearings in what was, at first, the thoroughly confusing topography of the underground complex, to discover hiding places and check them. The hunt was on to find Hitler.

General Krebs had already been found, lying in the courtyard in a greygreen tunic with the epaulettes torn off. He had poisoned himself too. But as to the whereabouts of Hitler, we still had ‘nothing for sure’. If we proceeded from the testimony of Vice Admiral Voss, who had been told about Hitler’s death by Goebbels (to whom Hitler had bequeathed the authority of Reich Chancellor); if we accepted the hypothesis of Schneider, the garage mechanic, as to what his petrol had been needed for; the missing link in the chain was someone who had actually taken part in burning the bodies, or had seen how and where it happened, or had at least heard about it in detail.

The garden of the Reich Chancellery, which subsequently was found to have been the setting for this drama, was so churned up that it was hardly going to be possible to determine where the cremation had taken place. Meanwhile, rumours abounded. Somebody had been told by somebody else that Hitler had been reduced to ashes and that Axmann, the Reichsführer of the Hitler Youth, who had participated in the Mohnke group’s attempt to break out, had made off with the ashes. Axmann, at that time, had given us the slip.

If Hitler had been totally incinerated, that would confirm what doghandler Tornow had told Lange the chef: ‘The Führer is dead and nothing remains of his body.’ If that was so, if there were no remains or they were never going to be found, we would never be able to show the world irrefutable evidence he was dead. Hitler’s disappearance would remain a mystery and provide fertile soil for all manner of myths, something in which only his adherents could have an interest.

The information we had was now collated. We were looking for people who could clarify what had happened. Meanwhile, more and more people came trampling through the Chancellery, soldiers and commanders, staff officers and people who had flown in from Moscow, and journalists we needed to steer well clear of. They wandered through the apartments in the Reich Chancellery, came down into the underground complex looking for Hitler’s rooms. As a token of their encounter with history, they carried off with them this and that as a souvenir. Everybody wanted to be here, everybody had a right to be here. Really, though, this was no time for tourists.

We were searching: in the complex, in the garden, in the building above ground, and in nearby stretches of the street. On the morning of 4 May, I had a quiet, domesticated and completely civilian man sitting in front of me, a little stoker nobody in the Reich Chancellery had noticed. As a technician, he had been sent to the Führer’s bunker to mend the malfunctioning ventilator.

He had already told us that, while he was in the corridor, he had seen the bodies of the Führer and Eva Braun being taken out of Hitler’s rooms, wrapped in grey blankets. She was wearing a black dress. He was not trying to persuade us of anything, just telling what he had seen. In a chorus of louder, more assertive voices the ring of truth was somehow missing. The stoker himself was so unassuming, so humble, that it was difficult to believe he could have any role to play in events of this magnitude. Vice Admiral Voss seemed far better suited to the role, only he had no direct evidence to give.

The stoker was the first German from whom I heard about Hitler’s wedding. At the time, in a Berlin where the fighting and the fires had barely died down, it struck me as ridiculous beyond belief. I looked again at the humble, ordinary man who was matter-of-factly thinking through the bizarre scenes he had witnessed in the last three or four days, as if they were something from an infinitely remote past. The truth was that we had moved not just from one day to the next, but out of one epoch and into another.

I have forgotten the stoker’s name. He juts out of the tome of history, an anonymous bookmark pointing us to the right page. Incredulous, inattentive, we had not taken the time to read it carefully.

Helmut Kunz, the doctor of the medical department of the SS in Berlin, was feverishly agitated. He could not get over what he had experienced. He had ended up in the Reich Chancellery almost by accident and was traumatized by his complicity in the murdering of children. The first day, everything he said revolved only around that fact. On 4 May, however, he sighed, gave a start and, mixing up the dates, began chaotically recalling the details of the last few days.

He confirmed that Hitler and Eva Braun had married by remembering he had been present when Braun told Professor Haase, the director of the Chancellery hospital, that Goebbels’ children addressed her that day, as they always did, as ‘Tante Braun’, Auntie Braun, and she had corrected them to ‘Auntie Hitler’.

Then he remembered he had been sitting in the evening in the casino above the Führer’s bunker in the company of Professor Haase, Frau Junge and Frau Christian, two of Hitler’s secretaries. Eva Braun had come in and the four of them went to one of the rooms in the casino where they were served coffee. Eva told them the Führer had written a will, which had been sent out of Berlin, that he was waiting for confirmation that it had been delivered to its destination, and only then would he die. She said, ‘Everybody has betrayed us, even Göring and Himmler.’ She added, ‘Dying will not be so difficult, because we have already tested the poison on the dog.’ Dr Kunz was adamant that this conversation in the casino had taken place on the evening of 30 April, whereas, according to other sources, Hitler was already dead by then.

We were encountering conflicting accounts every step of the way, but there was one almost casual remark Kunz made that we could not ignore. He said that Goebbels’ wife, telling him about Hitler’s suicide, did not add anything definite about how he had done it but, ‘There were rumours,’ Dr Kunz told us, ‘that his body was to be cremated in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.’

‘Who exactly did you hear that from?’ Colonel Gorbushin asked. ‘I heard it from Rattenhuber, the SS Obergruppenführer responsible for security at the Führer’s headquarters. He said, “The Führer has left us alone, and now we have to drag his body upstairs.”’

On that day, 4 May, we had no more authoritative testimony than this information from the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, communicated to us by Dr Kunz.

I am snowed under with documents. There are reports from locations where there is fighting, orders issued by the command post of Mohnke’s brigade, which was defending the Reich Chancellery, radio-telegrams.

In Goebbels’ rooms we find in two suitcases, besides his diaries, several screenplays sent to him by their authors; and a huge album, an anniversary gift from Nazi Party comrades for his fortieth birthday. It contains sheets of photographs, reproducing page after page of Goebbels’ manuscript The Little ABC of the National Socialist.

It was difficult to work in the underground complex itself, where the electricity supply failed periodically, and I spent many hours analysing documents in one of the halls of the Reich Chancellery. It was the reception hall where people waited for Hitler to appear, I think, or some other. I am not sure exactly. (I had trouble working out the layout of the Reich Chancellery.) Everything seemed to have been overturned. Perhaps this was where the SS security guards had made their last stand; also, the army had passed this way, and had no reason to respect the furnishings in the grand rooms of the headquarters of Nazism.

Tables had been knocked over, glass lampshades smashed, chairs had been overturned and their seats ripped open. Everywhere were shards of glass from the windows. I still remember the special floor of this room, entirely covered by a velvety grey velour, now trampled and torn by Red Army boots. The reconnaissance squads were bringing in sackfuls of documents and dumping them on that special flooring.

In Goebbels’ rooms we also found several files in a suitcase that contained Magda Goebbels’ personal papers. What did she bring with her when she moved to the underground complex on 22 April from her house on Göringstrasse? There were inventories of the furnishings in the country house in Lanke, and in the castle in Schwanenwerder, which had been built by the time of the war with the Soviet Union. Everything was listed: fittings, cabinets with silver, dinner services and figurines. Nothing was overlooked: every ashtray, every cushion in the innumerable rooms, every last handkerchief of Dr Goebbels and its place in the linen cupboard, every toilet paper holder. And so from one room to the next, in the main building and the outbuildings: bedrooms, offices, children’s and adjutants’ bedrooms, guest rooms, halls, vestibules, stairs, corridors, terraces, servants’ rooms, and cinemas. An inventory of Goebbels’ wardrobe. Eightyseven bottles of assorted wines.

There were bills detailing the cost of furnishing the castle, about which Goebbels writes enthusiastically in his diary, and sundry department store bills going back as far as 1939 and addressed to Magda Goebbels. Inventories of the children’s clothing, individually for each one of them. All their dresses, coats, hats, shoes, ski suits and underwear are listed. Items that are new, and items handed down from the eldest daughter to the second in seniority, from the second to the third, and so on. And items that, for the present, were being held in reserve. A certificate awarded to her as a participant in the Olympic Games, signed by the Führer.

There was also a paper, sent to Magda Goebbels, stamped with the seal of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and signed by one of the Party leaders of the Berlin district. It contained the forecasts of a fortuneteller. He predicted in April 1942 there would be a parachute landing of Allied forces on the coast of France in early June 1942 and that fierce battles would follow. These would be at their fiercest in August 1944. In mid-June of that year, the prophecy continued, the Germans would use a new aerial weapon which would cause untold destruction, especially in England. This would lead to domestic political difficulties in Britain that would hamper the further advance of the Allies.

Fierce fighting against the invading troops would last from August until November 1944, but in early November the Allies would suffer their greatest defeat in the entire war. In April 1945, Germany would be ready to redirect all its strike force to the Eastern Front, and after fifteen months Russia would finally be conquered by Germany. Communism would be eradicated, the Jews driven out, and Russia would break down into smaller states.

In summer 1946, German submarines would be equipped with a new and terrifying weapon with the aid of which, in the course of August 1946, the remnants of the British and American fleets would be destroyed.

On one of the folders Magda Goebbels had written ‘Harald als Gefangener’. Harald as a prisoner. This refers to her eldest son, from her first marriage. Four years before Goebbels had written in his diary, ‘Magda is extremely happy about the award for Harald, which can be considered a done deed’ (14 June 1941). The file contains everything relating to him since the moment he was captured. The first sheet relates the circumstances of his capture. They are being described by a non-commissioned officer reporting to his commander. The report was forwarded to Dr Goebbels. His stepson was last seen during fighting in an African village. Then there is a letter written by Harald from his American captivity. He writes that he is being well treated. There are photographs. Harald in front of flower beds. Greetings on ‘German Mothers’ Day’.

This all provided atmosphere, pictures of events, but no direct clues as to what had happened to Hitler.

The Bormann folder contained an important document, a radio-telegram Bormann had sent from the Reich Chancellery shelter to his adjutant.[1]

What did that mean?

Bormann was evidently preparing a hideaway for himself far beyond the borders of Germany. And here is how matters stood beyond the borders of his diary, which I also found was in the archive. If I had had Martin Bormann’s notebook-cum-diary in front of me then, I would have read the following in the last entries:

Next to their names Bormann had drawn an inverted runic cross, an emblem of death.

If we had been able to read that at the time, we would have had important confirmation that Hitler had died on 30 April, but we did not have sight of the diary. It was found in the street by reconnaissance agents of our neighbouring army and we did not get to see it. Admittedly, the peculiar circumstances in which the diary was found would probably not have allowed us then, at the preliminary stage of inspecting it, to trust it uncritically: it could have been a forgery, planted for us to find. Now, however, we can say with complete confidence that this is the genuine diary of Martin Bormann, which he dropped while trying to break through the ring of Soviet troops as a member of Mohnke’s group, probably when he was fatally injured.[1]

The diary, although recording events at quite a different level, is absurdly similar to the diaries of the very stupidest German front-line soldiers, which in turn are closely similar to each other. The similarity is no sign of democratic ways but of the monstrous uniformity of thinking that Hitler counted on and Nazism cultivated.

Although the Reich Chancellery was only 550 metres or so from the Reichstag, it was in the zone allocated to our neighbouring 5th Assault Army, which captured it. We were not allowed to cross that dividing line, but the fighting was over and everything was a muddle. Absolutely anybody who got the chance came rushing into our army’s zone, which contained the Reichstag, in order to record, ‘I was here,’ to sightsee, to write their name on the Reichstag, to go inside. That was true, first and foremost, of our neighbours in the 5th Army.

Certain officers in our army proved shrewder and decided to trespass on our neighbour’s territory, the Reich Chancellery. I was one of them. I left my name on the Reichstag only three days later.

I actually did manage to tear myself away from the documents for a short while, and walk round the city in the company of our driver, Sergey, and several officers. We stood at the Brandenburg Gate through which German troops had triumphantly marched when they returned from Warsaw, Brussels and Paris. Nearby, on a square piled with broken bricks, burnt metal and charred, overturned trees, the grey building of the Reichstag, not yet cool after the fire, was still smoking. Above it, above the skeleton of its dome, a red banner fluttered high in the overcast sky.

Skirting shell craters and piles of rubble, we reached the Reichstag. We climbed the pitted steps, inspected the soot-blackened pillars, stood for a while by the walls and looked at each other. A soldier was sitting asleep on the steps, leaning his bandaged head against a pillar and with a forage cap pulled over his face. A moustachioed guardsman with a bedroll over his shoulder was pensively rolling a cigarette. The large windows of the lower floor of the Reichstag were firmly boarded up with wooden panels, which were covered from top to bottom with graffiti. Sergey took out a pencil stub and, under someone’s sweeping inscription of ‘Where are you, dearest friend? We are in Berlin, visiting Hitler,’ scrawled in a shaky hand, ‘Hello to all Siberians!’ After him, too emotional to speak, I added my greetings to all Muscovites.

We went inside. Our soldiers were wandering around, battered folders of documents were strewn about and there was a smell of burning. The Reichstag’s documents were being used as cigarette paper.

Then we walked on through the city. The pavements were almost deserted. On pillars we saw the proclamation of the commander of the 1st Byelorussian Front to the civilian population of Berlin and the province of Brandenburg: ‘At the present time no government exists in Germany…’ In places, groups of residents were clearing the rubble, passing each other a brick at a time. Soldiers with red armbands on their sleeves were pasting up the order of the Soviet commandant of the city. A wooden arch was erected in honour of Victory in Berlin. It had a large red star set in the middle of it, and the flags of the Allies flanking it.

Vehicles were making their way through gaps where collapsed masonry had been cleared. The girls directing traffic, wearing white gloves specially issued to mark our arrival in the German capital, were energetically, tirelessly spinning round on their traffic police pedestals and enlivening Berlin’s crossroads.

Looking at them brought a lump to my throat. I remembered how very recently they had been standing in foot wrappings with rifles over their shoulders, carrying out their duties on roads at the front, chilled to the marrow, hoarse, insistent. (Just try ignoring the orders of such a girl: before you knew it she would be firing that rifle at your axles.)

The infantry marched by, holding up the traffic, the metal heel plates of their heavy boots clattering on the roadway. Their banner was being carried in its cover behind the unit’s commander.

Berliners stopped to read the commandant’s orders and note down the food ration.

We crossed a bridge over the Spree, skirting an upside-down German truck that had inscribed on its side, ‘All our wheels are turning for the war.’ A woman was sitting on the bridge, her head thrown back, her legs stretched out straight in front of her, laughing her head off. I greeted her. She looked at me with unfocused, transparent eyes, nodded back in greeting, as though recognizing me, and shouted out in a guttural, crazy, voice, ‘Alles kaput!’

On 3 May 1945, a highly detailed report was compiled titled Certificate of identification of the German Reich Minister Dr Josef Goebbels, the wife of Goebbels, and of six children. More than ten people were involved in drawing up this document and signing it. These were people involved in the discovery, from the army’s reconnaissance section, from Smersh, the political section of the corps, the medical service, and the Germans who identified the bodies. The discovery of the bodies of Goebbels and his family was made very public, which seemed only natural. On that day nobody in charge thought differently. Journalists, photographers and newsreel reporters were allowed to record everything.

In the first days of victory, people experienced what they believed was a dawning of freedom. They acted rationally and normally, but found they had been deluding themselves. They were immediately pulled up. Stalin was outraged that people had taken the initiative to make this event so public and somebody evidently got a flea in his ear. From the following day a screen of strict secrecy went up round the search for Hitler. There was to be no contact with the press or photographers, and all reports were to go directly to Stalin, bypassing the Army command.

In the first edition of my book Berlin, May 1945, my conscience prompted me to warn the reader that when it was described in writing, the search for Hitler would inevitably be presented as going more smoothly than it did in reality. The purposeful development of my narrative, moving from fact to fact, was bound to give the impression of a more rational, orderly and down-to-earth process than was warranted.

At that time I titled one chapter ‘Without Mystification’, but in fact there was no shortage of mystification, and it was very much of our own, Soviet, making. The German part of the plot was the situation surrounding the death of Hitler, while the Soviet part of the plot was woven from the customary insistence on keeping everyone and everything completely in the dark.

It was an exaggeration I was obliged to make to suggest that we were carrying out a mission we had been set. The reader would, however, have found the reality just too implausible, because in fact no mission was ever formulated. Although, actually, I was not deviating too far from the truth, because there was a mission, the final mission of the war, and it was there to be felt in the very air of Berlin. Those who were conscious of it, the ‘grassroots’, took the initiative themselves.

Then and there, in the first days of May 1945, in difficult conditions and with no halfway trustworthy information to go by, the mission of leading the search for Hitler was assumed in our 3rd Shock Army by Colonel Vasiliy Gorbushin. There was a need to unify the efforts of the intelligence personnel, quickly get to the bottom of everything, cut through all the nonsensical rumours and complete the task.

The search was completed in a very short period, three days of incredibly intense, dedicated effort. The electricity supply was cut, which meant there was no telling where anything was and, as if that were not enough, there was the labyrinthine geography of the shelter to cope with. Our task was to make sense of the documents found there: the official and personal papers of Hitler, Bormann and others.

We had plenty of luck, but complications, sometimes absurd, were never far away. Let me tell you about one of them. In the Reich Chancellery garden there was a dried up pond where ornamental fish used to swim but in which, during the battle for Berlin, the bodies were dumped of those killed in the bombing and shelling, or shot in the garden on Hitler’s orders.

On 3 May a group of generals from the 1st Byelorussian Front headquarters were passing through the Chancellery garden. One or other of them decided one of the bodies looked like Hitler. It was immediately pulled out of the pond and Germans were called to identify it. Their unanimous verdict was, ‘Not the Führer.’

It was resolved, however, to await the arrival of a former member of staff of the Soviet embassy in Berlin who had seen Hitler before the war several times and was due to fly in from Moscow. Accordingly, a gentleman with a little moustache and his hair falling to one side of his face and wearing a pair of darned socks duly reposed for a considerable time in the vestibule of the Reich Chancellery, then in the hall, until the diplomat finally arrived and confirmed: ‘Not Hitler.’ Newsreel and photojournalists had meanwhile been having a field day photographing and filming the body and, proudly labelling it ‘Hitler’, later depositing their handiwork in the archive and the historical film library. No member of the press was allowed anywhere near the actual remains and they were not photographed.

Unsurprisingly, the false Hitler was later blithely spliced into a Soviet documentary film but, under pressure from an agitated foreign press, he was disavowed and the film withdrawn. The posthumous adventures of this unknown man did not end there, however. He spawned a whole constellation of ‘doubles’ whereas, in reality, Hitler never had any. Neither was the screen life of the false Hitler over. Thirty years after the ill-fated film he was again resurrected from the archive by journalists and the photo was shown on television, masquerading as the body of Hitler.

The falsehood was immediately exposed, not wholly without my involvement. For a day I was receiving phone calls from newspapers and television stations of various countries asking what they should make of the incident. A French television company urgently interviewed me in time for the evening news. The makers of the television programme responsible for all this nonsense hit back, saying on television that they had been misled by the archivists. That is how it ended that time. No doubt there will be a next time.

From the very outset, the decision to classify the discovery of Hitler’s body laid the foundation for all manner of speculation that continues to this day. No attempt was made to combat it by the simple expedient of telling the truth.

Let us return to the Reich Chancellery while the search was in progress in May 1945, with that unidentified body reposing in the great hall. A unit of our army, 79th Corps, was leaving Berlin for a new deployment and a Smersh group who had already been involved in the search went with their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, purely out of curiosity, to take a last look at the Chancellery garden and the place where Goebbels had been found. As Klimenko later wrote to me, that was near the emergency exit from Hitler’s bunker.

Now chance took a hand. Private Ivan Churakov’s attention was drawn to a bomb crater three metres or so to the left of that door. The soil in it was loose and seemed to have been thrown in recently. The soldier jumped down into the crater and, from the ground which had settled under his weight, something became visible. They dug down and found the black, charred bodies of a man and a woman. They pulled them out of the crater and took a good look at them. They did not recognize the man as Hitler, and indeed he was completely unrecognizable. The analogy with the charred body of Goebbels did not occur to them, and they did not look more closely at their find. The main thing that threw them off the scent was that Klimenko had heard Hitler’s body had already been found and was lying in the Reich Chancellery. That dead German in the darned socks hoodwinked them. The men filled in the crater again and left.

So the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were in fact discovered on 4 May, but it was not realized what they were. ‘I did not report finding these bodies to anyone,’ Ivan Klimenko wrote to me in one of his letters (of 9 February 1965), responding later to my questions. That could have turned out to be a fatal mistake, but fortunately the information percolated through the same day. We already had enough facts to understand whom the soldiers had dug up. Colonel Gorbushin insisted that those who had made the discovery be brought back.

In that same letter, Klimenko tells me that when he returned to his Smersh unit, he himself ‘began to wonder whether those bodies we had reburied were the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun’. This seemed all the more likely because, before leaving the Reich Chancellery, he had gone to look at the other ‘Hitler’ and learned he had been identified as ‘not the Führer’.

Klimenko sent the soldiers back to the Reich Chancellery under the command of his deputy, Captain Deryabin. The names of those who found the bodies are immortalized in a document drawn up the following day.

The ground in the crater was dug over and two dead dogs found, a sheepdog and a puppy.

A further declaration was drawn up:

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:

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:

Guderian was dismissed, and Hitler removed Dr Dietrich from his post as Press Chief. Meanwhile,

For three days in mid-April the same phrase explodes in Bormann’s diary:

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,

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:

However, Soviet troops broke through the front in Pomerania. Hitler put the blame for this on the General Staff for failing to take account of his intuitive foresight. To suppress the ‘creeping disobedience’ of the generals, Hitler hastily established mobile field courts, charging them with investigating all cases immediately, passing sentence, and shooting generals found guilty.

On 11 March Hitler listened with satisfaction to Goebbels’ report that Colonel General Schörner, one of the few the Führer still trusted, had employed ‘radical methods’. ‘To raise the morale of the troops’, he had hanged a considerable number of German soldiers. ‘This is a good lesson that everyone will pay attention to,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary, delighted by the Führer’s approval. Hitler had just received a report that one of the new field courts had sentenced to death a general responsible for a bridge not being blown up, and that the general had been shot without delay.

‘That at least is a ray of light,’ Goebbels exclaims in his diary. ‘It is only by such measures that we can save the Reich.’

On the evening of 27 March, Hitler and Goebbels take a walk in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. In Goebbels’ words, ‘The garden of the Reich Chancellery looks desolate. There are piles and piles of debris. The Führer’s bunker is being reinforced.’ They regret having missed the moment when they could have dealt with the generals by directing the blow against them rather than against Röhm, if he had not been ‘a homosexual and anarchist’.

A second call-up to the Volkssturm militia was announced and sixteenyear-olds were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Women’s battalions were formed in Berlin. ‘We should place them in the second rank, then the men would lose their desire to retreat from the first rank,’ Goebbels muses in his diary on 5 March.

Trains with men on leave were combed for deserters. On 7 March an order was issued that soldiers taken captive without being wounded or in the absence of evidence that they fought to the last moment, would be executed and their relatives arrested.

Massive daily air raids on Berlin by Anglo-American aircraft. (Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, had assured Germans that no enemy aircraft would ever cross the border into Germany.) War from the air, with which Hitler had planned to subjugate London, Moscow and Leningrad, had come with all its mercilessness into the skies above Germany.

On 8 March 1945, Goebbels writes in his diary,

Transport was disrupted, the electricity supply was disrupted. Berlin was ablaze with fires. The postal service was no longer operating and delivery of coal was increasingly erratic. The supply of fuel had been reduced.

The food ration in Germany was catastrophically lowered, condemning the population to starvation. In mid-March, the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, considered the war lost because the German economy could only last another four weeks.

‘The problem of foreign workers is going to cause us major difficulties,’ we read in the diary of the commissioner for the defence of Berlin, Josef Goebbels.

Hitler had promised that the outcome of this war would be the enrichment of the people of Germany, unheard-of territorial gains and world domination, but monstrous crimes had not brought victory. Everything was in ruins. A defeat was imminent that would wipe Hitler and his criminal accomplices from the face of the earth, but before that happened, Hitler would turn with murderous hatred on the German people for disappointing his hopes.

On 19 March he ordered a scorched earth policy, this time on German soil: all military, industrial, transport and communications sites and facilities, and all Germany’s material resources were to be destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. The population was to be evacuated (but where to?). Cities taken by the enemy were to be devastated and destroyed. That the German people would thereby be deprived of their means of subsistence was of no consequence. Hitler formulated his attitude to this issue in an order he gave to Speer:

In 1941, after experiencing the nightmarish December retreat from the gates of Moscow, Hitler told Goebbels that,

Paradoxically, the Führer now found the dismal scenes of the German retreat from Moscow inspiring. They fed an illusion that a mortal threat would cause an upsurge of national fervour among the Germans and, at the critical moment, when German troops were defending the capital of the Third Reich, just as their enemy had when defending Moscow, they would bring about a turning point in the war.

Goebbels, instantly picking up on the direction in which the Führer’s thoughts and wishes were moving, was already describing the defence of Moscow as ‘an encouraging example’.

In his diary at this time we periodically find his traditional exaltation of the Führer. In part, this rhetoric is the autosuggestion Goebbels needs in order not to fall prey to doubts about Hitler’s ability to alter the course of events. ‘I am amazed how firmly the Führer is taking charge.’ But even the obsequious Goebbels allowed himself to criticize Hitler in his diary. At one time this is in connection with his orders: ‘We issue orders in Berlin which in reality do not go down the chain of command at all, quite apart from the question of whether they could possibly be carried out.’ Another time he complained that in this time of crisis Hitler cannot bring himself to make an appeal to the people on the radio. ‘The Führer has now a fear of the microphone I find completely incomprehensible.’ He goes on filling up the pages, one utterance cancelling out another, neutralizing it; one moment extolling Hitler, the next complaining about his lack of decisiveness.

Goebbels is dictating his diary, and has two full-time shorthand-typists employed at the Ministry of Propaganda for just that purpose. Every day he is dictating thirty, forty, fifty or more pathologically prolix pages.

Meanwhile, ‘Near Berlin the Soviets have begun what is admittedly only a local, but extremely powerful, offensive’ (23 March). The people are losing faith in the Führer and, more generally, losing hope. ‘The situation is intolerable.’ It has become known from a United Press report that the entire gold reserve of Germany and its art treasures (including the bust of Nefertiti) have fallen into the hands of the Americans in Thuringia. ‘If I were the Führer, I would know what needs to be done now… There is no strong hand…’ But what can be done? ‘I always insisted that the gold and the art treasures should not be evacuated from Berlin.’ On 8 April an unsuccessful attempt had been made to transfer them back from Thuringia to the capital, which Goebbels, the commissioner for the defence of Berlin, wholly irrationally supposed to be the most suitable safe place for them.

‘We live in such a lunatic time that human reason is completely unhinged,’ Goebbels dictates on 2 April. He, however, is the prime example of that, his reason long ago unhinged, completely subordinate to Hitler, atrophied, replaced by faith in the Führer.

‘Sometimes one wonders desperately where all this is going to lead.’ Goebbels, however, reassures himself: everything is in the hands of the Führer. ‘I trust he will master this situation’ (8 April).

In Goebbels’ mind the outcome of the war depends ultimately less on the actual situation than on whether the Führer will manage by an effort of will to overcome everything and, like a deus ex machina, manifest himself an instant before catastrophe strikes.

The situation is getting ever more trying.

In the concrete bunker under the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler was waiting for events to turn in his favour, Goebbels read to him and retold pages from the biography of Frederick the Great. Hitler had put considerable effort into encouraging his compatriots to see him as having a spiritual affinity with this successful king of Prussia. He had a portrait of Frederick hanging on the wall in his bunker. Now they had a further affinity through the military adversity the king had faced. At the point in the book where Frederick is facing defeat in the Seven Years War and has decided to end his life, the book’s author cries out to him, ‘Wait yet a little, and the days of your torments will be behind you. The sun of your good fortune is already there behind the clouds, and soon will shine upon you.’ The timely arrival of news of the death of his enemy, the Russian Empress Elizabeth, brings the king deliverance from humiliating defeat.

Hitler was greatly moved and decided he would like to consult his horoscopes, which Goebbels had been holding back for several days for just this eventuality. It is curious to go back and open Goebbels’ diary at the place where he is recording with exultant derision that all astrologers, mesmerists and anthroposophists have been arrested and an end put to their charlatan practices. ‘How amazing, not a single fortune-teller foresaw he was going to be arrested. Not much of an advertisement for the profession…’ (13 June 1941). Everything was being rationalized. Only the predictions of one person in the Reich, the Führer, were to be available to the people. In order to avoid inconsistencies, mistaken interpretations, duplication, unfavourable prophecies or, ultimately, competition, all other fortune-tellers were to be hounded mercilessly.

But that was then, on the threshold of a war with Russia which was predicted to be victorious. Now anything hinting at last-minute salvation was more than welcome.

‘I have been presented with voluminous material for astrological or spiritualist propaganda, including the so-called horoscope cast for the German Republic on 9 November 1918, as well as one for the Führer. Both horoscopes correspond remarkably to the truth,’ we now read in Goebbels’ diary on 30 March 1945.

Predictions offering hope were so prized that they were forwarded through Party channels to the wife of Reich Minister Goebbels, which suggests that his ‘anonymous and covert’ propaganda was taking off. Horoscopes were becoming convincing. In Goebbels’ Berlin apartment our agents found the horoscope of his little son, Helmut, and brought it to me.

But then, the two most important horoscopes, which until recently had been kept by Himmler under lock and key in the ‘scientific’ department of the Gestapo, the Führer’s horoscope and the horoscope of the German Republic which Hitler had called for, were brought to the bunker. With the assistance of his Reich Minister of Propaganda, Hitler was able to see for himself that both horoscopes promised military success in the second half of April 1945, after severe defeats early in the month.

A few days after this, late at night on 12 April, the news was received that President Roosevelt had died. How could that not be a portent, a historical analogy? How could it not be a turning point in Germany’s destiny? ‘At this moment in time, when destiny has removed from the Earth the worst war criminal of all time, the war will turn in our favour!’ Such was the exclamation with which Hitler concluded his orders to the troops. In it he spoke of the new offensive by the Red Army.

This order from Hitler, dated 16 April, began to arrive at the headquarters of the troops on the evening of 15 April, and was to be sent immediately all the way down to company level.

A day later the order was published in the Völkischer Beobachter and other newspapers.

From the bomb shelter Goebbels spoke on the radio:

On 16 April the Red Army began its offensive. The Oder defensive line was considered impregnable by the German high command. It was here, at the Oder, they firmly believed, that the advance of the Red Army would be repulsed.

Until quite recently Hitler had been intending to institute a reorganization of the army. The itch to reorganize gave Goebbels too no rest. In his ministry he was busying himself that April with projects to reform the press and radio departments (‘They need to become more flexible’), changing the staffing arrangements to ensure that the influential press chief, Dietrich, who, at Goebbels relentless insistence, had finally been sent off by Hitler ‘on leave’, would not be able to return to his old position for the simple reason that it would no longer be there; and thinking through harsh measures against Berlin’s arts elite and ‘superintellectuals’.

Career and status considerations continued to predominate among the top Nazi leaders. Sometimes this strikes even Goebbels as weird, especially if it concerns a rival.

Reich Minister Rosenberg is still opposing the dissolution of the Eastern Ministry. He is no longer calling it the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories, because that would be seen as grotesque, but the ‘Ministry of the East’. He wants to concentrate all our eastern policy in this ministry. I could with no less justification establish a western or southern ministry. It is complete nonsense, but Rosenberg is defending his status and refuses to accept that his ministry has long since failed.

The breakthrough of the fortifications on the Oder caused panic in Hitler’s headquarters. The Berlin bureaucracy fled: the Autobahn from Berlin to Munich was choked with their motor cars and nicknamed by the Berliners the ‘Reich Refugee Autobahn’. Nobody gave a second thought to the Berliners themselves.

The rumours were insistently repeated that a ‘new secret weapon’ would come into service on the Führer’s birthday. The mass psychosis of expecting a miracle spread to all sections of the population. Someone claimed to have seen vehicles shrouded with tarpaulins, concealing the secret weapon from prying eyes. People fantasized and tried to guess its destructive power.[1] Everyone was waiting for an announcement on the radio.

On 20 April, however, the Führer’s birthday, the radio was silent during the day, and silent at night, too, when shells were heard exploding as the long-range artillery of our 3rd Shock Army began firing on Berlin. The following day shells were exploding in the streets of the city. Berliners hiding in their basements could not understand why the radio had not warned them of the danger by sounding a siren.

There was neither a siren nor any announcement from the German high command when Red Army troops entered the outskirts of Berlin and the Battle of Berlin began.

After the breakthrough on the Oder, Hitler and his Headquarters prepared to move to his residence in Berchtesgaden (Obersalzberg). Orders were given to prepare to fly out.

Bormann notes in his diary:

In Bormann’s papers, which I was going through in the now deserted underground complex and which I was next to see in the Council of Ministers Archive, there are radio-telegrams to his adjutant, Helmut von Hummel, with instructions to prepare accommodation in Berchtesgaden. On 21 April Hummel responded with his plan for locating services and departments, already partly implemented, and a request to approve it. Certain services had been moved to Berchtesgaden, as had part of Hitler’s archive, one of his secretaries, and his personal doctor, Theodor Morell. (Hitler had long been unable to get by without strong stimulants and Morell was constantly by his side.)

Everything was ready for the final flight but, on 21 April, the day Soviet troops entered the outskirts of Berlin and artillery fire reached the city centre, Hitler ordered a counter-attack. On 22 April, at a regular meeting with the army, Hitler heard from the generals that his counter-attack, under the command of SS General Felix Steiner, had not taken place and that Berlin could not be expected to hold out for long. Accordingly, he should leave the capital in order to allow the troops to retreat. This was all the more necessary because it made no sense for Hitler, as the commander-inchief, to remain encircled in Berlin. It would no longer be possible for him to command the armies from there.

Hitler’s reaction was fury, hysterics, shrieking about treason and a threat to commit suicide. He halted the meeting and ordered that he should be put through on the telephone to Goebbels.

What happened then is described by Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche: ‘After a few minutes Goebbels hobbled in. He was extremely agitated.’ Goebbels was conducted to the Führer’s office, where they talked. When Goebbels left the office, the generals and Bormann rushed to him. He said the Führer was in a state of collapse. He had never seen him in such a condition. He added, ‘how frightened he was when the Führer, in a cracking voice, told him over the telephone that he should immediately move with his wife and children to the bunker with him because it was all over.’

Later, when Jodl was arrested by the Allies, he told them under interrogation,

On 22 April Goebbels asked me whether it was possible to prevent the fall of Berlin by military means. I replied that it was possible, but only if we took all our troops from the Elbe and threw them into defending Berlin. On the advice of Goebbels, I reported my views to the Führer, he agreed and instructed Keitel and me, together with headquarters, to leave Berlin and personally lead the counter-attack.

To leave the Western Front open and withdraw all forces from there to defend Berlin was now Hitler’s decision. General Wenck’s Twelfth Army was ordered to fight its way through to aid Berlin.

Throughout 22 April the airwaves were heavy with radio-telegrams from Bormann to Hummel. Initially there are feverish orders to prepare for the Führer’s arrival in Berchtesgaden. By the end of the day, however, everything is reduced to a request in a telegram that survives in Bormann’s file:

The evacuation by air never happened. Anglo-American troops had reached Munich, which was near Berchtesgaden. Hitler could not bring himself to flee from defeated Berlin only to become a played-out pawn in the hands of the Anglo-Americans.

On 21 April Hitler had withdrawn German troops from the Elbe, opening the road to Berlin to the Americans, but they were still far away. In order to set back the hour of his death, he gave orders to blow up the barriers on the canal and flood the underground railway, which assault detachments of the Red Army, rapidly advancing towards the government district, had entered. Hitler gave that appalling order in the full knowledge that thousands of his compatriots would die as the water poured in: the wounded, women and children who had taken refuge in the underground tunnels.

His intention to remain in Berlin was seen by the generals as confirming his inability to continue to command the army.

Berlin was abandoned by the High Command of the German Armed Forces: Grand Admiral Dönitz; Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of Staff of the High Command; Colonel General Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the High Command; and Air Force General Koller. They and their headquarters staffs departed in search of a more secure base and there was subsequently almost no contact with them.

The infantry and tank divisions of the Red Army rapidly surrounded Berlin. In heavy fighting they flattened one belt of the German defences after another and the troops rushed towards the city centre. Russian artillery shells were reaching the Reich Chancellery, and it was only the heavy concrete of his bunker that saved Hitler after a direct hit. The Chancellery’s radio mast collapsed and its underground cable was damaged.

A month after the fall of Berlin, Hitler’s secretary, Gertraud Junge, described those days: ‘Hitler was certain the Red Army knew where he was, and he was expecting Red Army units to storm his refuge at any moment.’

No reports from the army commanders on the course of the fighting were now being received. The radio link with Obersalzberg was unreliable. It was periodically lost completely, then briefly restored. News of the fate of German cities and the situation in Berlin came mainly from Allied journalists reporting over the radio from locations where there was fighting. Rumours, each more desperate than the last, seeped down from the streets into the underground complex.

In spring 1941, as Goebbels was hatching his conspiracy against humanity, he flooded the world with rumours to sow panic, fear and despair. With diabolical glee he wrote in his diary that he was doing it ‘in the name of havoc’. ‘Rumours are our daily bread,’ he had written then. Now the epicentre of the earthquake had moved, and was directly underneath the Reich Chancellery.

In the Berliner Frontblatt Goebbels urged soldiers and the Berliners not to listen to rumours. ‘Rumours are used by the enemy as a weapon to paralyse our resistance and undermine our confidence. That is why at times like this we must stick only to the facts.’

At this same time, Hitler’s own headquarters was reduced to extrapolating facts from the rumours on which the reports to Bormann from the local Nazi leaders were based. They found their way into his radio-telegram folder which I was analysing in the Reich Chancellery. Twenty years later, I copied detailed extracts from these reports in the archive,[1] which reflected the situation in Berlin in the days immediately before capitulation.

Other rumours:

The facts were even more dismaying than the rumours. They were contained in such communications as:

Or in messages which, more colourfully, were reporting the same thing, namely, districts that had fallen.

Soviet tanks. Fires. A barrage of enemy artillery fire. Captured streets. People killed and injured. A lack of armaments. A request for artillery support… The reports of the Nazi Party district leaders characterize the hopelessness of those fighting in the streets of Berlin and the disasters experienced by the Berliners.

The leader of another district reported that the enemy had advanced along Schönhauser Allee as far as Stargarderstrasse and that there was no possibility of offering resistance in that area. He asked:

Similar reports must have found their way to Goebbels as commissioner for the defence of Berlin and head of the Nazi Party in Berlin, but they fell on deaf ears. No notice was taken of them. In his diary there is not a shred of evidence, not a hint or word written there that would enable us to conclude that, in those days of calamity for the German people, the authors of all their misfortunes gave a moment’s thought to what their nation was now going through, or felt in the least bit answerable to them.

‘I and history’, ‘My historic mission’, ‘I have assumed responsibility for my people’: these were words the Germans heard constantly from Hitler. ‘The Führer is Germany,’ Nazi propaganda drummed into their heads, using every conceivable means to bamboozle the people as it created a cult of Hitler. They were insistently told: ‘The Führer does your thinking: yours is only to carry out his orders.’ On 23 April, while still in Poznań, I heard on Berlin radio, ‘The Führer is in the capital and calls on soldiers to defend themselves more steadfastly.’

That same day, this brief appeal appeared in the German newspapers: the last public statement by the Führer, signed on 22 April.

As the situation deteriorated, only these words, scorched by hatred, remained in Hitler’s vocabulary, calling for reprisals: ‘Traitor! ‘Shoot!’ ‘Hang!’ Instant, merciless retribution awaited any German suspected of being insufficiently fanatical and imbued with blind faith in the victory of the German Army.

Goebbels’ speech that day contained a summons to all soldiers, to the wounded, to the entire male population of Berlin immediately to join the ranks of the defenders of the city. He declared that anyone who failed to respond to this appeal and did not immediately go to the assembly point, at the Berlin Commissioner’s Office on Johannistrasse near the Friedrichstrasse station, was a despicable swine.

Here, next to the station, and in other busy places, Nazis carried out executions to intimidate the public. I myself was confronted by the sight of a hanged German soldier in Berlin when we had just entered the city.

The commander of the SS Adolf Hitler Lifeguard Regiment, Lieutenant General Mohnke, also called on ‘the men of Berlin’ to join the ‘Mohnke Volunteer Corps’, invoking their fanaticism, ‘indomitable will’ and fearlessness as ‘decent lads’. He, too, listed assembly points. Appeals, appeals… threats, executions, abuse, flattery. Assembly points… And all the while the scale of the disaster was escalating beyond all bounds. The city had been abandoned to its fate by the regime. No evacuation was organized. Not even the children were taken out of Berlin, which was left without bread or water.

Even at a time like this, the district leaders’ reports to Bormann contain the customary spats reflecting a struggle for influence within the Nazi Party. Here is an example. Kreisleiter Koch, reporting the rapid advance of the Russians, lists areas captured, and concludes this section, ‘In Friedrichsfelde the Ivans broke through to the south as far as Bielefeld.’ He then moves on to another matter:

Thousands of Germans were doomed to die senselessly: soldiers and members of the Volkssturm in street fighting that could have only one outcome; the people of Berlin from shells and bombs, buried under collapsing buildings. Hitler sat in his underground complex surrounded by his immediate entourage: Eva Braun; Constanze Manziarly, who cooked the Führer’s vegetarian meals; Josef Goebbels, who all his life put up with Hitler’s gripes and complaints; and Martin Bormann, whom Goebbels had described in his diary on 14 June 1941, as a ‘behind-the-scenes operator’ hated even by the Nazi Party elite. ‘Everyone who knew him found him disgusting,’ Rattenhuber writes. ‘He was an exceptionally brutal, sly, uncouth and selfish individual.’ Bormann sat in a corner, drinking brandy and recording Hitler’s every word ‘for history’. What is striking is how eager the whole lot of them were to barge their way into history by fair means or foul.

Just one phrase was recalled by absolutely everybody who saw Hitler in those last days: ‘What happened? What was the calibre?’ These were the words with which he invariably appeared in his office doorway after the latest explosion.

When generals made it to the shelter from places where there was fighting, they found Hitler at his desk, hovering over a map with buttons on it that supposedly represented German troops. He was placing arrows on the map to indicate counter-attacks. Reporting a defeat, or that an army that existed only in Hitler’s imagination had been destroyed, could cost the messenger his life. Hitler was unaware of the true state of affairs and did not want to know it. Every report of a defeat sent him into a frenzy, accusing the generals of treason and mercilessly sending them to be shot.

If the meeting went off more satisfactorily, a commander who had made his way there in the hope of getting advice or orders, was assured that a miracle was on its way and that Wenck’s army was hastening to Berlin. After being awarded a medal, he would be conducted upstairs and sent back into battle.

Learning that the 56th Tank Corps, commanded by General Helmuth Weidling, had suffered a defeat and retreated from Küstrin, an infuriated Hitler ordered Weidling to be shot. When, answering the summons, he appeared in the bunker, Hitler, not understanding who was in front of him, began explaining his defence plan to the general. A major role in this fantasy was to be played by Wenck’s army (which was impossible because it was surrounded by Soviet troops), and also by the corps of Weidling himself, of which there remained only a few bedraggled units no longer capable of combat. Weidling departed, expecting to be executed, but was called back and, on the whim of a tyrant, appointed commander of the defence of Berlin. In Weidling’s own words, this was, under the circumstances, tantamount to a death sentence. ‘It would have been better if he had shot me,’ Weidling remarked as he came out of the Führer’s office. He was only too aware of the hopelessness of the situation.

‘His contradictory and neurotic orders completed the disorientation of the already befuddled German High Command,’ Rattenhuber writes. Rattenhuber relates that in earlier years Hitler liked to produce a dramatic effect by suddenly turning up in an active service army. His presence was usually brief. After talking to the commanders, he would show himself to the troops and immediately return to base. Rattenhuber accompanied Hitler when he took Mussolini along on a longer trip to the Eastern Front in 1941, to Brest and Uman. In Brest Hitler strutted triumphantly through the ruined fortress. That, however, was before the first painful counterattacks.

A succession of defeats and failures on the Eastern Front, the collapse of his military and political plans, which was particularly obvious with the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, knocked Hitler sideways and he stopped going out among the troops.

After the attempt on his life on 20 July 1944 at his headquarters in East Prussia,

On 25 April the ring of encirclement closed around Berlin. That same day, Soviet and American infantrymen greeted each other at the River Elbe. Outside the walls of the Reich Chancellery people, deceived by Hitler, were being killed. In the underground complex, pinning their hopes on an imminent miracle, a couple of horoscopes and the Führer’s intuition, his entourage lived in an atmosphere of intrigues, upheavals and upsets, for which there was plenty of fuel.

The news of the treason of Göring, who had left Berlin and was attempting to negotiate a separate peace with the British and Americans, eclipsed everything else that was happening on the planet for those still in the complex. On 25 April, Göring sent Hitler a message stating that, in accordance with the Führer’s decree of 20 July 1941 appointing Göring his successor, and supposing that Hitler, surrounded in Berlin, lacked means of communication and was no longer able to act, he was assuming total authority in order to work ‘in the interests of Germany and the German people’. The letter concluded with assurances of unconditional loyalty.

Rattenhuber, who was present at this scene, recalls, [Hitler’s] whole face became contorted. He was totally dismayed, and only after taking himself in hand, literally shrieked, ‘Hermann Göring has betrayed me and the Fatherland… Against my instructions he has fled to Berchtesgaden and established contact with the enemy, presenting me with an insolent ultimatum that if by 9 hours 30 minutes I do not telegraph him a reply, he will take my decision to be positive.

Goebbels took up Hitler’s accusations: ‘Göring was always a traitor in his heart; he never understood anything, constantly did stupid things, and has ruined Germany.’ Hitler ordered Bormann to arrange for the traitor to be arrested. The order was radioed to the head of Göring’s bodyguard, who acted on it.

Hitler ordered his adjutant, Julius Schaub, to burn his personal papers that remained in Munich and Berchtesgaden. Schaub managed to leave in the second-last plane to take off from Gatow aerodrome.

Bormann wrote in his diary, ‘Wednesday 25 April. Göring has been expelled from the Party! First massive offensive against Obersalzberg. Berlin is surrounded!’

People were well aware of the kind of person Göring, the Reich’s ‘secondin-command’ and the only Reich marshal in German history, really was. Hans Rattenhuber, who combined the post of head of Hitler’s bodyguard with the post of chief of the security service, knew everything about Hitler’s comrades-in-arms that there was to know. ‘I have nothing more to achieve in life: my family is provided for,’ Rattenhuber quotes Göring as having said in autumn 1944. He writes of how greedily Göring enriched himself, using his power for outright theft, first in Germany itself, later in Italy, then in occupied countries. He was in charge of the project to force millions of people from the occupied territories to work as slave labourers in Germany.

Göring, the ‘economic dictator of Greater Germany’, often spent his time during the war in his Carinhall palace or his palace in Berchtesgaden, in the midst of treasures plundered and transported there from all over Europe. He would receive his visitors in a pink silk robe adorned with gold fastenings, and introduce them to his wife with a lion cub in her arms.

Göring continued to go out hunting as if nothing untoward was happening. What kind of hunting that was I heard in June 1945 from the head gamekeeper at Göring’s hunting castle. In a forested park, where trees were planted in rows and formed straight avenues with an unobstructed view, a feeding place for deer was set up and a deer trained to come there at a certain time. The perfectly groomed Göring, in red jacket and green boots, duly arrived for the hunting, settled himself in an open car and drove down the avenue, at the end of which his target, the tame deer, was already waiting for him. He left with his victim’s antlers as a hunting trophy.

Goebbels, possessed to his last moments by jealousy of his rivals in the Nazi hierarchy, kept a particularly close eye on the Führer’s successor. He noted in his diary on 28 February 1945, two months before final defeat:

Goebbels tried in vain to persuade the Führer to replace Göring. ‘Göring has now again gone off on two special trains to Obersalzberg to visit his wife’ (27 March). Another month was to pass before Göring was at last out on his ear.

Finding himself under arrest, Göring backed away from his pretensions. Hitler sent him a radio-telegram to say his life would be spared if he renounced all his ranks and positions. A telegram duly arrived in the Führerbunker, stating that Göring had suffered a heart attack and asking Hitler to accept his resignation. The Berliner Frontblatt reported to the public and the army:

The order appointing Greim could perfectly well have been telegraphed, but Hitler, who was accustomed to spectacles and parades and not accustomed to obstacles and restrictions, particularly in matters concerning his prestige, disregarding the current situation and all expediency, dooming German pilots, ordered that Greim should attend him in the bunker in encircled Berlin solely in order to be informed of his appointment.

Escorted by forty fighters, Greim flew from Rechlin and somehow managed to make it through to Gatow aerodrome, losing fighters one after another at a time when every plane and every pilot was desperately needed. Taking off in another aircraft, he left the airfield but, a few minutes later, when he was over the Brandenburg Gate, a shell ripped the bottom of the plane and Greim suffered a leg wound. His personal pilot, Hanna Reitsch, who was accompanying Greim, replaced him at the controls and landed the aircraft in the Tiergarten park.

About the sight that presented itself to them in Hitler’s bunker, Reitsch gave detailed testimony to the US military authorities a few months later, on 8 October 1945. Her evidence contains unique details about the last days in the Führerbunker. It largely coincides with Rattenhuber’s recollections and confirms their accuracy.

Immediately Greim and Reitsch arrived, the Führer, clutching Göring’s telegram in his hand, informed them of his treachery. ‘“He gave me an ultimatum!” There were tears in the Führer’s eyes. His head was lowered, his face deathly pale, his hands shaking… It was a familiar scene, “Et tu Brute!” full of reproaches and self-pity,’ recalled Hanna Reitsch.

He then announced to the wounded Greim that he had dismissed Göring from the post of commander-in-chief of the Air Force and was appointing him in his place.

Marooned, by the whim of the Führer, in the underground complex, the wounded Greim was entirely without the means to command what remained of the air force at whose head he had now been placed. Remaining at the wounded Greim’s bedside in the bomb shelter, Reitsch observed the behaviour of the leaders of the Reich over the following three days. She describes Hitler pacing around the bunker, ‘waving a road map that was almost falling apart because of the sweat from his hands, and planning Wenck’s campaign in front of anyone who happened to be listening to him… His behaviour and physical state sank lower and lower.’

The room Reitsch occupied was adjacent to Goebbels’ office, around which he hobbled neurotically, cursing Göring, blaming ‘that swine’ for all their present troubles, and delivering great tirades to himself. To Hanna Reitsch, obliged to observe and listen to all this because the door of his office remained open, it seemed that, ‘As always, he is behaving as if he is talking to legions of historians who are avidly catching and writing down his every word.’ Her existing ‘opinion of the affectedness of Goebbels, his superficiality and hackneyed rhetorical techniques was fully confirmed by these shenanigans’. ‘Are these really the people who have been ruling our country?’ she and Greim wondered in desperation.

That first evening, Hitler called Reitsch in and said, ‘Each of us has a poison ampoule like this. In case danger approaches.’ He handed her two ampoules, one for her and one for Greim. He added, ‘Each person is responsible for having their own body destroyed so there is nothing left to identify.’

Goebbels’ children, also stranded in the bunker, were told they were in a magic cave with their Uncle Führer and so they were quite safe, protected from bombs and anything nasty. Magda Goebbels, of whom Reitsch saw a lot, ‘was self-controlled most of the time, but sometimes wept bitterly. She thanked God frequently that she was alive and would be able to kill her children.’ She told the pilot, ‘They belong to the Third Reich and to the Führer, and if both cease to exist, there is nowhere left for the children either. But you must help me. What I am most afraid of is that, when the time comes, I will not be strong enough.’

‘From Hanna Reitsch’s remarks we can conclude with certainty’, the American investigator wrote, ‘that Frau Goebbels was just one of the most convinced listeners of the “highly scientific” speeches of her own husband, and the most pronounced example of the Nazis’ influence on German women.’

Hitler, in the presence of those occupying the bunker, presented Magda Goebbels with his own Gold Party Badge, in recognition of the fact that she ‘embodies the truly German woman’ in accordance with Nazi doctrine.

During the night of 26 April the Reich Chancellery was under severe artillery bombardment. ‘The explosion of heavy shells and the crack of collapsing buildings directly above the bomb shelter put everyone under such nervous strain that in certain places sobbing could be heard through the doors.’

On 27 April a friend of Bormann’s, SS Obergruppenführer Fegelein, who represented Himmler at Hitler’s headquarters and was married to Eva Braun’s sister, disappeared from the shelter. Hitler gave orders that he was to be found and arrested. He was captured in his Berlin apartment, wearing civilian clothing and preparing to flee. He asked his sister-in-law to intercede for him, but nothing helped. On Hitler’s orders he was shot by SS men in the Reich Chancellery garden on the evening of 28 April, a few hours before Hitler’s wedding.

On the night of 27 April shelling of the Reich Chancellery continued with even greater intensity. ‘The accuracy of the firing amazed those below,’ Reitsch said. ‘Each shell seemed to land in the same place as the previous one… At any moment the Russians might enter, and the Führer convened a second suicide council.’ There were oaths of loyalty, speeches, assurances that people would commit suicide. In conclusion, Reitsch said, ‘We were told that the SS would be instructed to ensure that no traces remained.’

On 28 April it became known in the bunker from foreign telegrams that Himmler, having assumed supreme authority, had communicated through Sweden to the British and American authorities that Germany was ready to capitulate to the Western Allies.

Heinrich Himmler, Führer of the SS, Protector of the Reich, ‘faithful Heinrich’, ‘Iron Heinrich’, was a traitor. ‘All the men and women were weeping and shouting in rage, fear and despair,’ Reitsch related. ‘Everything got mixed up in a convulsion of insanity.’

A wave of enraged hysteria swept over those present, whom Hitler had doomed to imminent death. According to Reitsch, Hitler ‘was raving like a lunatic. His face was red and unrecognizable. Then he lapsed into apathy.’ Shortly after that, the news arrived in the shelter that Soviet troops were advancing towards Potsdamerplatz and preparing their positions for storming the Reich Chancellery.

Hitler ordered the wounded Greim and Reitsch to return to Rechlin and immediately send all remaining aircraft to Berlin to destroy the Russians’ positions. ‘With air support Wenck will get through,’ he again repeated. Greim’s second mission was to find and arrest Himmler; to ensure he did not live to succeed the Führer. Vengefulness was still capable of galvanizing Hitler.

No matter how Greim and Reitsch tried to explain the hopelessness of this mission, Hitler dug his heels in. At the Brandenburg Gate one last Arado trainer monoplane was concealed in a shelter. In it they managed to complete a fraught journey, only to see for themselves the complete collapse of the German armed forces. A few months later an American investigator took down Hanna Reitsch’s description of the flight.

Reitsch circled to a height of 20,000 feet, from which Berlin looked like a sea of fire beneath them. The extent of the destruction was immense and unbelievable. After fifty minutes they reached Rechlin, where they again landed under fire from Russian fighter planes.

‘Greim gave orders to send all available planes to Berlin’s assistance.’ Having accomplished the first part of his mission, he had now to carry out the second: to find and arrest Himmler. To that end, they flew to Plön [in Schleswig-Holstein], where Dönitz was at that moment, to discover Himmler’s whereabouts. Dönitz had no information. Then they rushed to Keitel and from him learned that Berlin could not count on Wenck: his army was surrounded by Soviet troops. Keitel had sent a message to Hitler to that effect.

Shortly afterwards they heard the news of Hitler’s death and that he had appointed Dönitz as his successor. They then returned to Plön for a meeting called by the new head of the government.

Appointed commander-in-chief of the Air Force by the Führer, Greim was at the meeting when Himmler appeared in the vestibule where Reitsch was sitting. ‘He had an almost playful look about him.’ She stopped him and called him a traitor. There was a dialogue:

A sudden air raid interrupted the conversation.

This verbal skirmish was all that eventuated. A new Reich President was already in office, with whom Himmler initially hoped to make common cause by offering his cooperation.

At Dönitz’s meeting everyone was in agreement that within a few more days further resistance would be impossible. Nevertheless, Greim flew to Field Marshal Schörner, who was in command of troops in Silesia and Czechoslovakia, to urge him to hold out, even if there was an order to surrender, to allow the German population to move west.

On the morning of 9 May, Greim and Reitsch surrendered to American forces. Two weeks later, Greim took the poison Hitler had given him. Pravda reported:

When researchers are examining the last days in the Reich Chancellery, they often quite rightly note the degeneration and moral monstrousness that then became so evident in Hitler, but they allow the scenes of hysteria and farce to overshadow his final plan of action.

Under the relentless pressure of the advancing armies, the feverish intentions of taking refuge in Berchtesgaden or Schleswig-Holstein, or in the South Tyrol fortress (much advocated by Goebbels), were abandoned. When the Gauleiter of Tyrol suggested an evacuation to the mountain fortress, Hitler, according to Hans Rattenhuber,

Hitler’s hope that the Allied coalition would collapse had proved vain. At the Gatow airfield Hitler’s last plane still stood at the ready, and when it was destroyed, hasty preparations began to construct a runway near the Reich Chancellery. A squadron allocated for use by Hitler was set ablaze by Soviet artillery but his personal pilot remained with him.

Greim, the new commander-in-chief of the Air Force, did send planes, but not a single one made it through to Berlin. Greim had accurate information that no aircraft crossed the line of encirclement to get out of Berlin either. There was, in any case, nowhere left to evacuate to: armies were advancing from every direction.

To flee from defeated Berlin, to fall like a spent pawn into the hands of the Anglo-Americans, Hitler considered out of the question. He came up with a different plan: he would enter negotiations, from Berlin, with the British and Americans, who, he believed, should be interested in preventing the Russians from capturing the capital of Germany, and obtain some tolerable conditions for himself. He believed, however, that such negotiations would only be possible if the military situation in Berlin improved.

It was an unrealistic plan with no prospect of being implemented, but it obsessed Hitler, and if we want a full picture for history of the last days of the Third Reich, it should not be overlooked. Hitler must surely have realized that even a temporary improvement in Berlin’s situation would have no major impact in the context of the catastrophic military situation of Germany. He calculated, however, that it was a political prerequisite for the negotiations on which he was pinning his last deluded hopes. That is why he kept talking so frenziedly about Wenck’s army. There is no doubt that he was completely incapable of coordinating the defence of Berlin: we are talking here only about his plans.

I read in Rattenhuber’s testimony, written shortly after he was captured in Berlin, that Hitler was profoundly shocked by the treachery of Göring and Himmler, not because they began negotiating with the Allies, but because they did so behind his back. Göring and Himmler betrayed Hitler and finally took the feet from him when they bypassed him.

Going through the materials in the Council of Ministers Archive, I found a letter signed by Bormann and Krebs and addressed to General Wenck. It is dated 29 April. Lost in our archive and lacking its explanatory note, it seems to me an important document that reveals Hitler’s last intentions. I found it in Folder 128, in which miscellaneous documents judged to be of little interest were placed without careful scrutiny. As I have mentioned, in the preceding twenty years the archive had not been adequately sorted and systematized, but that had the fortunate side effect of allowing a degree of serendipity in the course of my researches.

And here, in this file, under the category ‘Documents and items found in May in Hitler’s bunker and at Goebbels’ apartment in Berlin’, a long list that extended from ‘Certificate of Award to Goebbels, Magda, of an Olympic Badge’ to ‘Horoscope for Helmut Goebbels’ (what future would that be promising the Reich Minister’s small son?) to the uniforms of Hitler and Voss (note of identification by Rattenhuber of two caps and two tunics attached), I discovered an orphaned, unlisted sheet of paper.

In the last days of Hitler we see clearly the vicious falsity of his entire life, inspired by the desire to wield power over other people, and with the real aim of personal aggrandizement, primarily through the agency of the German people.

For as long as he had breath, he continued to kill. The courtyard of the Reich Chancellery became a place of execution, of firing squads. Hitler made his threats, but the treason spread.

According to testimony from Hitler’s entourage, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area, Helmuth Weidling, asked Hitler to leave the city so it could cease fighting before it had been completely destroyed. Hitler was vanquished, crushed, dead – but even so he was determined to pull everyone else down with him. Let everything perish! ‘The Allies’, he declared, ‘will find in Germany nothing but ruins, rats, famine and death.’

No matter how the Nazi district leaders trembled before Bormann, growing despair is increasingly open in the reports preserved in his folder. The reports become more perfunctory, more poignant: the enemy shelling is intolerable, there are heavy losses, a shortage of weapons. It is impossible to withstand the onslaught of Russian troops. Nobody took any notice.

Here, in the bomb shelter, what Reitsch called ‘the Suicide Committee’ had already met, but Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt, dated 27 April, makes a sordid, blustering appeal to Berliners. ‘Bravo, Berliners! Berlin will remain German!’ It makes knowingly false promises of help to come:

Let us take a look in Bormann’s diary. The tone of the entry for that same day, 27 April, is completely different. It is quite unlike earlier entries, which usually consist of information and, the only evidence of emotion, exclamation marks.

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:

Günsche, the Führer’s SS adjutant, writes in his testimony,

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:

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:

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.

The official whom Goebbels had summoned to solemnize the marriage wrote that their request was granted, and invited them only to confirm by their signatures that they were members of the Master Race and not suffering from congenital diseases.

This was followed by a wedding breakfast with champagne, attended by an intimate circle of acquaintances. Magda Goebbels, wife of the Reich Minister, was also present at the funereal wedding, Hitler having been the proxy father at her own wedding. Among the papers of Frau Goebbels there are records of a conversation with the Führer. She had been about to leave Goebbels for being unfaithful to her (this apostle of Nazi rectitude had been popularly nicknamed ‘the Bullock of Babelsberg’ because of his predilection for film actresses), but the Führer urged her to keep the family together. He told her that she, too, as a member of the Party, a Parteigenossin, had a mission in life.

The Führer presented himself to the people as an exemplary ascetic who disdained earthly joys the better to serve the nation. Magda Goebbels and her unfaithful husband similarly exemplified the ideal Nazi family of many children.

Now one piece of hypocrisy was being replaced by another. The stench of mysticism and vulgarity emanating from this wedding would have choked all but the undead. After it, Hitler dictated his will. By 4.00 a.m. it was ready. The witnesses – Goebbels, Bormann, and Generals Burgdorf and Krebs – appended their signatures.

Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Günsche, testified during interrogation on 14 May 1945:

A few days before the attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler was outlining the victorious course he anticipated the war would take and told Goebbels, who noted it in his diary, ‘When we are the victors, who will question our methods?’ (15 June 1941)

But it was defeat that came to Berlin and, evading responsibility, Hitler began his ‘political testament’ with the usual professions of love for the German people, declaring that he was without blame for the war that broke out.

At this last hour, his reflex was to blame the Jews. We have, however, only to leaf through Mein Kampf, a book permeated by justification of war and vengeful passion, to be persuaded that war lay at the very foundations of the doctrine of National Socialism. Its practice confirmed that unambiguously. Hitler himself goes on to give the lie to his cheap preamble in his farewell letter to the chief of staff of the Wehrmacht High Command, Field Marshal Keitel. Having brought ruin upon Germany and a catastrophic defeat upon the army, Hitler in concluding his missive insists that the goal remains unaltered: conquest for the German people of lands in the east. He enjoins the commanders of the Army, Navy and Air Force to use every means to rouse the spirit of resistance and National Socialist faith in the soldiers and to fight to the death.

In the testament he expels Göring and Himmler from the Party and appoints Admiral Dönitz president. The crowning absurdity is Hitler’s formation in the testament of a government headed by Goebbels, whom he appoints Reich chancellor. For Bormann he invents the new portfolio of minister of the Party. He charges the new government and its leader, Goebbels (who, as Hitler knew perfectly well, was never going to get out of Berlin), to continue the war, to adhere to the race laws to the end, and to combat world Jewry.

Everything is just as it was when Hitler started out: the Master Race, the conquest of territorial living space, Lebensraum, the anti-Semitism, the waging of war.

Goebbels accepted his short-lived promotion, a reward for loyalty, as Eva accepted her wedding. He had finally beaten all his rivals and reached the pinnacle of his career.

The exploding shells shaking the concrete shelter proclaimed that these were the last hours of the Third Reich.

On the evening of 29 April, General Weidling, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, came to the Führerbunker and reported the situation: the troops were totally exhausted and the situation of the population was desperate. In his opinion, the only possible solution now was for the troops to withdraw from Berlin and break out of the encirclement. Weidling asked Hitler for permission to begin the break out.

Hitler refused.

How would such a breakthrough help? We will merely get out of one ‘cauldron’ into another. Do you think I want to skulk around and wait for my end to come in a peasant house or some such? It is better, in this situation, for me to remain and die here. After that they can break through if they want to.

There could, however, be no delay. Under the circumstances there was not an hour to lose.

‘Even if a path from the bunker to freedom had been cleared for him, he would not have had the strength to take advantage of it,’ said Hanna Reitsch later. But, completely routed, incapable of effective action, he put off the hour of his death, steadily diminishing the prospects of survival for those he was holding back.

The situation in the bunker was bizarre. Until the previous day what was required was loyally to confirm your readiness to die with the Führer. Now, after the distribution of the symbolic portfolios, it was to confirm your readiness to continue a lost war at the head of a Germany defeated and occupied by the enemy. An entrenched habit of obedience, of reverence for orders, and of imbecile automatism continued in some to function like clockwork.

On the night of 29 April Professor Haase, head of the Reich Chancellery hospital, was brought to Hitler. ‘Hitler showed Haase three small glass ampoules, each in the casing of a rifle cartridge,’ Rattenhuber, who was present, relates,

Gertraud Junge, Hitler’s secretary, who retyped papers addressed to him, accompanied him on trips and took down his speeches in shorthand, said a month later,

On 30 April it was reported that the Russians were within 200 metres of the main Wilhelmstrasse entrance to the Reich Chancellery. In the past this had always been besieged by journalists. (Goebbels, four years earlier, had bypassed it, secretly entering the underground complex through the emergency exit for his clandestine meeting with the Führer.) It was 3.30 p.m. Berlin time. That was the moment when the ampoule of poison came into play. A fateful time by the hands of the clock! It had been at 3.30 a.m. on 22 June 1941 that, on Hitler’s orders, Germany began its war against the Soviet Union.

Death is death, and the bodyguards now carried the body out through the emergency exit of the concrete shelter to burn it, as they had been ordered to by Hitler. The doctor present in the bunker was not called.

Rattenhuber wrote later,

Much the same words were repeated to Günsche:

How events unfolded on that day, 30 April, was described by three of the surviving witnesses: Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Günsche; the head of his bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber; and his valet, Heinz Linge.[1]

Günsche: At 15.30 he was at the door of Hitler’s anteroom, together with the chauffeur, Kempka, and the commander of the Führer’s personal SS bodyguard, Franz Schädle.

Rattenhuber:

His deputy, Peter Högl, told Rattenhuber that Hitler had committed suicide. The Führer’s valet, Linge, came to him and confirmed it. ‘My nervous tension gave way to depression, and for a time I could not recompose myself.’

Linge:

Günsche: After he announced to those waiting in the meeting room for the end, ‘The Führer is dead’,

Günsche helped to carry them out.

Rattenhuber:

Linge:

Günsche:

Rattenhuber:

Günsche:

Linge:

Rattenhuber:

Linge:

Bormann, Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, and Reichsjugendführer Axmann observed, hiding from the bombardment in the shelter, crowded on the stairs of the emergency exit from the bunker.

They did not comply with Hitler’s last order, to wait until the bodies had completely burned to ashes. The grounds of the Reich Chancellery were under heavy bombardment and it was dangerous to remain there.

Günsche:

Hitler’s death caused a sudden discharge of nervous energy in the tense atmosphere of the bunker. Cigarettes appeared, that no one would have dared to smoke while Hitler was alive. There was a grisly sense of excitement, with wine being drunk and preparations made to escape.

Rattenhuber:

Günsche: Even as the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were burning,

Shortly afterwards Günsche heard that

This group was formed mainly from the Führer and SS escort battalions.

More hours passed as they waited for a response and anticipated an opportunity to get out of Berlin.

Bormann’s diary has an entry about the death of Hitler and Eva Braun under the date 30 April 1945.

On 1 May, evidently after Krebs returned, the entry consists of just one phrase: ‘Attempt to escape the encirclement!’ On that the diary ends.

At 18.00 hrs the previous day, Bormann had informed Grand Admiral Dönitz by radio-telegram that the Führer had appointed him, Dönitz, as his successor instead of Göring. Dönitz, not having heard of Hitler’s death, responded with effusions of devotion to the Führer and promised to come to his aid.

On 1 May at 07.40 hrs Bormann sent a top secret radio-telegram to Dönitz: the Führer’s will had come into force, but an official announcement should be postponed until Bormann himself arrived to see Dönitz.

Later the same day, at 15.00 hrs, he, jointly with Goebbels, sent Dönitz a last radio-telegram reporting the death of the Führer and his appointments to the top posts.

‘In the buffet corks were popping ,’ Rattenhuber writes, ‘as the SS men ratcheted themselves up before a desperate attempt to escape under Russian fire.’

The only people who remained were less fearful of retribution. All the others fled.

Voss:

The refusal Krebs brought back, and the words of Sokolovsky and Chuikov he reported – that, as agreed among the Allies, only unconditional surrender could be discussed – were the final catastrophe for Goebbels. He told Vice Admiral Voss that there was no point in him, with his limp and his children, even attempting to escape. He was doomed.

In fact, as I write about this now, I very much doubt he had any illusions about the possibility of an armistice. The British king had already rejected Himmler’s machinations out of hand. It was a fanatical careerist who sent Krebs to parley, purely in order to consolidate his place in history, Goebbels the second person in the Reich, Goebbels the Reich Chancellor, in case his emissaries to Dönitz proved unable to deliver the will.

He was no stranger to gestures and hypocrisy. In his will, Goebbels wrote that he was disobeying the Führer’s order to leave the capital and participate in the government he had appointed only because of his desire to be at the Führer’s side during these difficult days in Berlin.

In fact, however, for as long as Hitler was alive he did not allow Goebbels to leave him. When he decided on 22 April to remain in Berlin, Hitler surrounded himself with people devoted to him. It was he who, knowing Goebbels’ unquestioning obedience, ordered him to move, together with his wife and children, into the bunker.

Magda Goebbels told Dr Kunz and Hanna Reitsch that she had pleaded with Hitler at this time to leave Berlin. If Hitler had agreed in a timely fashion, both they and their children would have been able to get out. She must obviously have been thinking about that. There is testimony to the effect that she asked her husband to have the children evacuated in armoured personnel vehicles, but by that time it was impracticable.

Murdering his children if defeat seemed imminent was something Goebbels had thought about a long time ago, and imposed on his obedient wife. As early as August 1943 he advised his devoted adjutant, Wilfried von Oven, of his intention. Oven wrote later that ‘his thinking was directed to just one end: the effect on history.’[1]

Careerism was fundamental to Goebbels’ personality. Right up until the end of his life, he fusses tirelessly, backstabbing his rivals, portraying them in a bad light to the Führer and in his diary, and extolling himself at every turn in the expectation that his monstrous diary, which reads like misbegotten self-parody, will remain a primary source on the basis of which history will award points to fanatics inflamed by their own vanity.

In the farewell letter Magda Goebbels wrote from the Führerbunker to her elder son, Harald, ‘The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and that is why I also brought the children here. I could not bear to leave them for the life that will come after us, and a merciful God will understand me if I myself give them deliverance from it.’

And then, after describing how patiently the children had put up with the conditions in the bunker in which they were destined to die, she reports, ‘Last night the Führer took off his gold badge and pinned it on me. I am proud and happy.’

Goebbels, too, in the farewell letter to his stepson, goes on about the Führer’s gold badge and how it has been given to Harald’s mother.

Both these letters were spirited out of encircled Berlin by Hanna Reitsch. If he had sent the letter a day later, after Hitler had signed his testament listing the appointments in his new government, Goebbels could have told Harald about his culminating moment of destiny. Everything was jumbled together in that underground complex: genuine despair and posturing, fanaticism, hypocrisy and death.

Goebbels was sometimes called the Führer’s faithful dog. Well, Hitler tried out the poisonous ampoule on his beloved sheepdog, Blondi. Similarly, he kept Goebbels and his family close to him to the last, until it was too late for them to do anything about their predicament. With each successive betrayal of the Führer by his accomplices, Goebbels moved a rung up the ladder towards his ultimate ambition of becoming the second in command in the Reich. At last, on the day after Hitler’s wedding, when Red Army soldiers were already in the Reichstag, Hitler awarded Goebbels the post of Reich Chancellor of a defunct empire. The pantomime continued. Goebbels accepted the top job, only a day later to follow Hitler to the grave.

Sergeant Major Tornow came one last time to chef Lange for food for the puppies. Having the day before informed the cook of the death of the Führer, he was back with a similar message. Lange told us,

Those fleeing the underground complex made their way to Wilhelmplatz, and there walked along the metro track to Friedrichstrasse. From there they needed to break through in the wake of Mohnke’s combat group, but intensive artillery shelling made any mass breakthrough impossible. They broke through in groups.

Günsche:

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 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:

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.

Colonel Gorbushin decided in these difficult circumstances to obtain indisputable evidence. We were stationed in Buch, and whether in a modest house or a shed I found it difficult to say with any certainty until I later revisited the place. Sure enough, it was a small house. The remains of Goebbels, his wife and children were removed to its cellar.

Here, too, to Buch, on the orders of Colonel Gorbushin, were brought the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

This was a street of small, modest detached houses with a great vault of sky overhead. Young children were pedalling around furiously on their bicycles; the adults walked by, engrossed in their worries and cares, unaware of, and showing no curiosity about, what was now located here.

I was confident that within another day or two the whole world would know we had found Hitler’s body. If I had known then that years later I would testify about all this in detail, I would probably have overcome my squeamishness and taken a closer look at those crudely constructed crates with their hideous, blackened remains – I had already seen them in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery – but I did not do so.

Here in Buch, when Hitler came to power, on his orders, people were subjected in the old, reputable clinics to ‘racial evaluation’ for the first time. In 1936 a card index of ‘hereditary biological health’ was introduced here, encompassing all residents of the large Berlin district of Pankow. A person’s fate, his career, the right to marry, the right to life itself, all depended on what was on his index card.

And as chance would have it, this was where Hitler himself was now brought to be subjected to forensic medical examination. On 3 May, following the discovery of the bodies of Goebbels and his family, a commission of army doctors appointed by order of Lieutenant General Telegin of the Military Council of the 1st Byelorussian Front, got to work in a brick building at the clinic in which Surgical Mobile Field Hospital No. 4961 was currently housed.

Now, without needing to inform Telegin, a couple more corpses were tossed the commission’s way, rather like cuckoos’ eggs. The commission included eminent forensic medicine specialists and pathologists: the chief pathologist of the Red Army, Lieutenant Colonel Kraevsky; Doctors Marants, Boguslavsky and Gulkevich. The man in charge was Medical Service Lieutenant Colonel Faust Shkaravsky, principal forensic medicine specialist of the 1st Byelorussian Front.

There was something portentous about Adolf Hitler being dissected under the watchful eye of Dr Faust. The autopsy was performed by a female doctor, Major Anna Marants, acting principal pathologist of the 1st Byelorussian Front, and it took place in Berlin-Buch on 8 May 1945.

Here is how Hitler appeared at the autopsy, as described in the official report:

After a detailed examination, the commission concluded,

No other signs of harm that could result in death were established. Western researchers, journalists and memoirists frequently insist that Hitler shot himself: some from simple ignorance because of all the inaccurate information circulating about Hitler’s death, others from a desire to embellish the circumstances of his end. It was a German Army tradition that a commander, if he committed suicide, should use a pistol. It is instructive, however, that General Krebs, who ‘had the army in his bones’, preferred to take poison as the more reliable method.

To us the manner in which Hitler committed suicide was immaterial, and neither were we versed in the traditions of the German Army: they were of no interest to us. The fact remains that Dr Faust Shkaravsky and his competent colleagues carried out at that time a thorough medical examination and concluded that Hitler had taken poison.

Günsche, standing outside the door, did not hear a shot but did notice a strong smell of bitter almonds when the door was slightly open. Some people, Hitler’s secretary Gertraud Junge, for example, did hear a shot. She said, ‘When I left Hitler’s office and went up the stairs to the shelter landing, I heard two shots. I imagine the shots were fired in Hitler’s office.’

Be that as it may, people decided that Hitler shot himself. Thus, Hitler’s orderly, Bauer, who shortly after met the SS guard Mengershausen, told him that. Other close associates of the Führer said the same.

Was there really a shot in Hitler’s room, or did those awaiting the end outside the doors imagine it? And if there was, who fired it? The testimony of the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber, sheds light on this. He writes,

Rattenhuber evidently did not know another circumstance that prompted Hitler to give that order to Linge. The problem was that, when the poison was tested on a second dog, the poisoned puppy struggled against dying for a long time and was then shot. This was established at the autopsy of the dead dogs found in the crater, although at first it was overlooked and is not mentioned in the report detailing how they were found.

The conclusion reached by the doctors was,

This may have heightened Hitler’s fear, as he watched the poisoned dogs, that the poison might not work.

‘Linge shot Hitler,’ Rattenhuber wrote in his testimony.

I imagined that Linge’s hand might have been shaking when he shot at the dead Führer and the bullet missed him. So if a shot really did ring out in Hitler’s room, was it Linge who pulled the trigger? But there was no sign of a shot.

The autopsy report on Eva Braun notes a chest wound. In the first edition of my book I suggested that the bullet might have hit the dead Eva, but after the book was published I received a letter from Faust Shkaravsky drawing my attention to the fact that this was not a bullet wound. The report says, ‘Evidence of a shrapnel wound to the thorax with haemothorax, damage to the lung and pericardium, six small metal fragments.’

‘When and how this wound occurred I cannot say with confidence,’ Shkaravsky wrote, ‘but it is entirely possible that while the body was being taken out of the Führerbunker it was damaged by shrapnel from a mine or artillery shell.’

A long time later, when the State Archive of the Russian Federation declassified a large number of documents, the following evidence came to light: a year after the events I am describing, in May 1946, the Ministry of Internal Affairs organized a special expedition (code-named ‘Myth’!) to the bunker in Berlin in order to collect data to support the claim about Hitler’s ‘disappearance’. This initiative came not from Stalin, but was born of the rivalry between two government departments: the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Smersh Counter-intelligence Department. Witnesses were also brought to Berlin: Hitler’s adjutant (Günsche), his valet (Linge), and other staff who served him who were in Russian captivity. However, no matter how much duress was applied to get them to admit that Hitler was alive, they answered as one: ‘He is dead and we cannot make him alive.’

Contrary to its own mission, the expedition discovered yet another piece of evidence that Hitler had committed suicide. From the bomb crater where the burnt remains were found in May 1945, after further excavation, two detached fragments of skull bone were discovered, one of which showed signs of a bullet exit wound (the absence of part of the skull is noted in the autopsy report of 8 May 1945). This, of course, suggested Hitler had shot himself, but since it was impossible to dismiss the data from the first examination, which had established that Hitler was poisoned, an assertion appeared in print that he had simultaneously taken poison and shot himself. Many experts doubt the feasibility of performing these two actions simultaneously. The account given in the testimony of the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, Rattenhuber, seemed convincing to me: Hitler, fearing the poison would be insufficiently effective, ordered his valet to shoot him after he had been poisoned, and the order had been carried out. And perhaps the ‘bullet exit wound’ is the missing evidence of Linge’s shot. But I am not going to join this polemic. Just as then, when Hitler’s remains were found, so now, in May 2007, I find the whole controversy profoundly uninteresting. What really mattered was that Hitler was dead.

Subsequently, Faust Shkaravsky confided in a letter to me that he still had a feeling of ongoing unfairness: the Commission was strictly forbidden to photograph Hitler’s body, whereas the Commission was photographed in full force next to Goebbels’ body strapped to the dissection table. There are also plenty of photographs taken during the investigation. But with Hitler, oh, no! Shkaravsky was not privy to the circumstances that required that prohibition.

Here again, chance played an important part. During the autopsy it was found that Hitler’s dentures and teeth had come through surprisingly intact. The autopsy report includes two large non-standard sheets of paper documenting Hitler’s teeth in meticulous detail. The experts removed the dentures (and lower jaw). Now the crucial task was, at all costs, to find Hitler’s dentists.

In Berlin-Buch on 8 May, the very day when the document of surrender of Germany was ratified in Karlshorst, although I did not yet know that, Colonel Gorbushin called me in and handed me a box, saying it contained Hitler’s teeth and that I was answerable with my head for its safe-keeping.

It was a second-hand, burgundy red box with a soft lining and covered with satin, the kind of thing made to hold a bottle of perfume or cheap jewellery.

Now, however, what it held was the irrefutable proof that Hitler was dead, because in all the world there are no two people whose teeth are exactly alike. In forensic medicine this is held to be the fundamental anatomical item that clinches any argument about a person’s identity. Moreover, this evidence could be preserved for many years to come.

The box was entrusted to me because the safe was still back with the second echelon and there was nowhere secure to put it. Why me? For the simple reason that everything connected with Hitler was being kept top secret and must not be allowed to leak out from Gorbushin’s group which, as already mentioned, had dwindled by now down to just three people.

All that day, so pregnant with the sense of imminent victory, it was decidedly tiresome to be carrying a box about, and to turn cold whenever I thought of the possibility of accidentally leaving it somewhere. It burdened and oppressed me.

The situation in which I found myself was odd, unreal, especially when I look back at it now, out of the context of the war. War is itself pathological, and everything that happened during the war, everything we went through simply cannot be translated into the concepts of peacetime and does not fit into the familiar psychological categories.

Already by this time, the sense of history surrounding the fall of the Third Reich was fading. We had experienced too much. The death of its leaders and everything connected with that seemed nothing out of the ordinary.

I was not the only one feeling that way. When I was called to front headquarters to translate Goebbels’ diaries, I met up with Raya, our telegraphist, and saw her trying on a white evening dress that had belonged to Eva Braun and which had been brought to her from the underground complex of the Reich Chancellery by Senior Lieutenant Kurashov (who was in love with her). It was a long dress, reaching almost to the floor, with a plunging neckline, and Raya did not care for it. As a historic memento it was of no interest to her. Shoes from a box labelled ‘Für Fr. Eva Braun’ were just right and she appreciated them far more.

Towards midnight on 8 May, I was about to go to bed in the downstairs room I had been allotted in a two-storey house when I suddenly heard someone calling my name from the first floor. I hastily ran up the very steep wooden staircase. The door to the room was wide open, and Major Bystrov and Major Pichko were standing beside the radio craning their necks.

It was strange really, because we were expecting this, but when the newsreader finally came on air to announce solemnly, ‘The signing of the instrument of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces…’ we just stood there, overwhelmed.

The voice of Yury Levitan resounded, ‘To commemorate the victorious culmination of the Great Patriotic War…’ We yelled something and waved our arms about in the air.

We poured out the wine in silence. I put the box on the floor and the three of us clinked glasses, deeply moved, excited but hushed as the cannonades boomed out in celebration over the airwaves from Moscow.

I went back down the steep wooden stairs to the ground floor. Suddenly it was as if something jolted me and I clutched at the banister. Never am I going to forget the feeling that electrified me at that moment.

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.

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.

He had rendered us a great service in taking us from Eicken to Blaschke’s surgery, but had contributed nothing to the actual identification, because we had thanked him and then seen no more of him.

During the time the student was with us, he could easily have worked out why we so needed to track down Hitler’s dentists and his dental history. But then, just when this unexpected, titillating adventure into which the young man had been plunged was approaching its culmination, the curtain had fallen and the actors were lost to view.

On the way to the Reich Chancellery, Käthe Heusermann told me she used to travel with Blaschke to Berchtesgaden, where her patient was Eva Braun. In Berlin the existence of Hitler’s mistress was meticulously concealed until the very last days; there were constant statements to the effect that the Führer did not smoke, did not drink, held aloof from earthly gratifications and devoted himself only to serving the people. That was the cornerstone of all the propaganda.

We parked the car and the three of us walked in silence down the as yet uncleared, deserted Wilhelmstrasse. On a round advertising pillar there was pasted the order of the Soviet commandant of Berlin, General Berzarin, printed on orange paper.

Once more the Reich Chancellery, pockmarked by shells and bullets, blackened with soot, its walls breached in places, a long, straggling building with a single balcony, its architecture an expression of the ‘single will of Germany’ which, in the person of the Führer, would appear on the balcony during Nazi celebrations. Above the entrance, in bas-relief, was the Nazi emblem: a spreadeagle clutching a swastika in its talons. Within a few days this bronze had been hacked down and transported to Moscow, to the Armed Forces Museum, where it can be seen to this day. The sentry did ground his rifle, but barred our way – he had been ordered not to let anyone pass without a special permit from the commandant of Berlin.

Gorbushin whipped out his pistol and pushed the sentry aside. The man was taken aback: he would have had every right to shoot. But we needed to get in.

We opened the heavy oak door. To the right was the assembly hall: the door had been torn off its hinges, chandeliers had fallen to the floor. To the left was the gentle descent to the bomb shelter. Hitler had worked here until 21 April, when our artillery fired a volley of shells into the centre of Berlin and he moved to the Führerbunker.

We passed through the vaulted vestibule and down two flights of stairs, with one dim torch between the three of us. It was dark, deserted and spooky. In the radio studio from which Goebbels broadcast, a Red Army soldier was sleeping with his helmet slipped down over his ear. Only Käthe could find her way around in this Tomb of the Pharaohs. She led us to a boxy little room which, until recently, had been at the disposal of her boss, Dr Blaschke.

The pocket torch faintly picked out in the darkness a dentist’s chair, a couch with an adjustable headrest, and a small desk. There was something on the floor. We picked it up and shone the torch on it. A photo. Käthe recognized the Führer’s deceased Alsatian being taken for a walk by his adjutant. It was damp and there was a musty smell.

We searched through a box with a card index, looked in the desk and a locker. With Heusermann’s help we found the X-rays of Hitler’s teeth and his dental records. We were lucky, incredibly lucky, that the hurricane which had blown through the underground complex a few days ago had left this nook untouched. We found gold crowns which, according to Käthe, had been made for Hitler although, as she admitted in her memoirs written many years later, here she was slightly overdoing it: the crowns were in fact for one of the secretaries. She was understandably anxious to stay on the right side of us. Fortunately those crowns did not figure again in the investigation.

Suddenly, from the depths of the corridor, we heard, ‘By the Vol-ga – a stone…’ It was a lonely voice. Some partying soldier was quaffing expensive wines the German generals that he had sent packing had been drinking as they sought to banish despair. The soldier must surely have been written off by his unit, while here he was consoling himself for a seventh day, sleeping, waking, drinking to the glory of Russian arms and the repose of those who never made it to the Reich Chancellery.

We left, taking with us our incredibly important finds, the most miraculous, the most wonderful of which was Käthe Heusermann herself. Through the empty underground corridors a woozy voice echoed, intoxicated by wine, victory and grief: ‘Someone wai-ting alone…’

No sooner had we got into the car than the engine conked out. Driver Sergey lifted the bonnet. We alighted, and found ourselves right at the Brandenburg Gate. I pictured Nazi detachments with flaming torches marching through the six columns of the gate to the Kaiserhof Hotel, where Hitler usually stayed when in Berlin before he came to power. On the hotel balcony the puny figure of Goebbels would try to make himself seen behind the burly backs of his comrades-in-arms. Hitler would raise an arm in salute over the crowd. The torches of future conflagrations, destruction and book burnings flickered, lit by the Nazis and destined ultimately to consume them. It seemed fitting that ‘torchers’ was the name given in the German Army to soldiers whose job it was to set fire to towns and villages as they retreated.

We had driven on a little when suddenly the roar of guns broke the stillness that had reigned for the last few days. My heart sank instantly. What was this? Surely not war again? I did not immediately realize it was a celebratory salute! Above the hideous ruins, above the smoke and dust of battle that had yet to clear, above the grim Reichstag building and the new spring grass, tracer bullets flew skywards and the smoke-laden heavens were lit up by flashes of colour. Heavy artillery boomed, machine guns rattled, submachine guns were fired. Shrapnel clattered down on the cratered roadway. The thunder grew louder and everything around was shaking as it did in time of battle.

We returned to Buch, taking Käthe Heusermann with us. There were no lights burning in the windows of Germans: the vanquished were asleep. The victors, having celebrated all day, quietened down, but none of the wine of victory passed my lips. I just went to bed.

Lovers of crime novels will, perhaps, be disappointed: there were no ambushes, no shots fired from round a corner, no safes were cracked. I will add, to the chagrin of those who prefer legend to the truth, that there were no cunningly disguised doubles.

I told the tale above of the origin of one would-be double. But that male corpse with his darned socks, who was so lovingly filmed for the newsreels, was no double, put in place as a decoy and to facilitate Hitler’s escape, as suggested by later, romanticized accounts. It was just the body of one of the many occupants of the bunker, killed by shrapnel or shot by Hitler as the end approached, and any resemblance to the Führer was mostly the product of the over-excitability of the time.

Other ‘doubles’ popped up, and here is why. Colonel General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, promised he would nominate for the award of Hero of the Soviet Union anyone who located Hitler’s corpse. As a result, half a dozen dead ‘Hitlers’ were dragged along to the Commandant’s Office, giving rise to the tale of doubles.

At this crucial stage in our mission, luck was on our side. As always, much was down to chance. Crucial circumstances jostled side-by-side with insignificant developments but, by the same token, the insignificant sometimes proved crucial.

Käthe Heusermann might have flown to Berchtesgaden, where Hitler was assembling his attendant staff with the intention of moving there himself. Dr Blaschke had, after all, urged her to fly out with him. She had refused, because for so long she had had no letters from her fiancé, the non-commissioned officer stationed in Norway, and was afraid he would be unable to find her if she left. She told me she had also buried her dresses at a resort near Berlin to keep them safe from the bombing and fires, and was reluctant to leave them. That, too, had caused her to stay.

That is how historically insignificant circumstances did history a big favour. Käthe stayed in Berlin and, as a result, did not vanish into oblivion, did not simply disappear. She was the only available person who knew and remembered all the distinctive features of Hitler’s teeth, and her contribution to identifying his remains was crucial. With Käthe Heusermann’s help we obtained irrefutable evidence that Hitler was dead and were able to pass it on to our descendants.

Käthe first described Hitler’s teeth from memory. It was now 10 o’clock in Berlin-Buch, the following morning, 10 May. She was being interviewed by Colonel Gorbushin and Major Bystrov, and I was translating and making notes. I asked her not to give the teeth their specialist names – incisor, canine and so on, for fear I might not correlate the German and Russian terms correctly. Instead she simply gave them numbers. The note I made is as follows:

Käthe told us:

We could compare this with the report of the medical examination of 8 May, which read, ‘Bridge of upper denture on left behind premolar tooth (4) sawn vertically’. The report devotes a lot of space to a meticulous description of the other teeth. We had also X–rays that we found in Dr Blaschke’s little room under the Reich Chancellery.

Most importantly, we could compare her description with the contents of the jewellery box. Käthe Heusermann examined these and confirmed that they were indeed Hitler’s teeth.

She recalled this many years later for Die Welt. The article, like other materials from abroad, came into my hands quite by chance. Leon Nebenzahl, who translated my Notes of a Military Translator, showed me the magazine clipping on a visit to Moscow.

‘This took place in a house near Berlin,’ she writes, ‘in the presence of a colonel, a major and an interpreter. “Look closely,” the colonel instructed me, “and tell us what this is, if you know.”’

She describes examining the teeth taken out of the box and recognizing them. ‘I took the dental bridge in my hand. I looked for an unmistakeable sign. I found it immediately, took a deep breath and blurted out, “These are the teeth of Adolf Hitler.” I was showered with expressions of gratitude.’

Subsequently Heusermann talked to the specialists. Their report notes that, in conversation with the principal forensic expert of the front, Medical Service Lieutenant Colonel Shkaravsky, ‘which took place on 11 May 45’, Citizen Heusermann, Käthe ‘described in detail the condition of Hitler’s teeth. Her description coincides with the anatomical features of the oral cavity of the charred unknown male on which we conducted an autopsy.’ She also drew a diagram of Hitler’s teeth from memory, pointing out all their specific features.

After reading the first edition of my book, Faust Shkaravsky thanked me for mentioning him and corresponded with me for many years until his death. He sent me a photographic reproduction of that diagram, which he had kept, accompanying it with an explanation:

At the end of our preliminary conversation, Käthe Heusermann was shown Hitler’s teeth and we conducted a joint inspection of them. Käthe Heusermann was right: a third post was found in the right lower canine. This disagreement, in which Heusermann proved correct, was further proof of how precisely she knew everything about Hitler’s teeth.

‘All this can be confirmed by Blaschke’s dental technician, Echtmann,’ Käthe told us at the first interrogation. Bystrov and I went to Echtmann’s apartment. In my diary I have a description of Echtmann’s worn-out, listless wife (who I thought must be suffering from a thyroid disorder). She clung desperately to her husband, who was also frail and sickly.

Fritz Echtmann, dental technician, was a short, dark-haired man with a pale complexion, aged thirty-something. He had worked at Dr Blaschke’s private laboratory on Kurfürstendamm since 1938, and made false teeth for Hitler. He, too, first gave a description of them from memory, and then had an opportunity to inspect them in Buch, where he, too, identified them.

This was a German starkly confronted with the death of Hitler, but Echtmann himself had been through too much, having lived with his wife and daughter in Berlin throughout the war, to be shocked by anything. He inspected Hitler’s teeth calmly. When, however, he looked at Eva Braun’s, he became agitated. On 11 May he said, and I wrote it down,

Many years later I saw a photograph of Fritz Echtmann in the December 1964 issue of the West German Stern. He had two fingers raised and had been photographed as he testified under oath to a court in Berchtesgaden that he really had identified Hitler’s teeth on 11 May 1945, and could thus certify that he was dead.

Back in 1945 we were, unfortunately, not aware of the testimony of two other very important witnesses of Hitler’s death: Otto Günsche and Hans Rattenhuber. They were both taken prisoner in sectors allocated to our neighbouring army, but there was no staff headquarters or any centre coordinating our separate activities. Later, their testimonies ended up in the same place in the archive as our documents, but it was almost twenty years before I was able to read them. How desperately we needed, from the very outset, people who had witnessed Hitler’s death, his cremation and burial.

Our investigation was already nearing its end when the Smersh agents of Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko detained a member of Hitler’s SS bodyguard, Harry Mengershausen. A handsome, broad-shouldered fellow, now wearing civilian clothes, Mengershausen said he could indicate the place where the bodies were hidden, covered with earth and rubble. He pointed out the crater, not knowing that the bodies had already been removed from it.

Klimenko had displayed a lack of conscientiousness, and even gloried in his negligent attitude towards the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. ‘Frankly,’ he wrote to me, ‘ I wasn’t that bothered, and in any case I had more urgent things to do than mess about with these corpses, especially since I’m squeamish, so I went out of my way to avoid them.’ That was the reason he sent Deryabin, instead of going personally, to retrieve the bodies from the crater. Now, however, he moved with commendable alacrity. Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, with a group of officers and men, returned with Mengershausen to the Reich Chancellery and an official report was compiled:

The document was signed by Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, Senior Lieutenant Katyshev, Guards Major Gabelok, photojournalist Junior Lieutenant Kalashnikov, and Privates Oleynik, Churakov, Navash and Myalkin.

A copy of this document was mailed to me by Ivan Klimenko when he heard my book was being prepared for publication. He also wrote,

Major Bystrov interrogated Mengershausen and I translated. We were sitting on logs in the courtyard. Mengershausen told us,

Major Bystrov enquired whether any of the other guards had seen the bodies of Hitler and Braun being burned. Mengershausen did not know for sure. ‘Of all the security guards I was the closest to Hitler’s bunker at that time.’ He bent down and began to outline a map of the garden on the ground with a piece of wood.

Thus we found our missing link: somebody involved in or who had witnessed the actual cremation, who would have been so helpful in the first phase of our mission, when we were hunting Hitler. We went into the house with Mengershausen and wrote down everything he had told us.

From his post Mengershausen had been able to see only Günsche and Linge but, shielded by the bunker, hiding from the shellfire, Goebbels, Bormann and the others were observing the burning of the bodies. Nearby, a battle was raging; the Reich Chancellery was under intense bombardment. The wailing of shells, the crash of explosions throwing up columns of soil, the smashing and whistling of flying window glass. The buffeting wind disturbed the clothing on the bodies. The fire flared up and then died down as the petrol burned off. More petrol was poured over them and again ignited.

Then what did Mengershausen do? He escaped, acting on his own initiative and without waiting for new orders. ‘That same day, 30 April, I changed into civilian clothing and hid in a cellar.’ He was wearing a raincoat that was too short for him and obviously belonged to somebody else. His long arms protruded from the sleeves. Major Bystrov handed him a photograph of the Reich Chancellery garden. I translated, ‘Tell me what you see in this photo.’

This is a photo of the emergency exit from Hitler’s bomb shelter. I know this place well and can show you where the bodies of Hitler and his wife Braun were burned, and also the place where they were buried.

With one cross I am indicating on the photo where the bodies of Hitler and Braun were burned, with two crosses the place where they were buried, and with three crosses the emergency exit from Hitler’s bunker.

The next time I saw that photo with Mengershausen’s crosses on it was in the Council of Ministers Archive.

I was told later at front headquarters that SS officer Mengershausen, when he was taken there, told them in his written testimony that he not only watched the Führer being cremated but was also involved in it himself. What exactly that consisted of I did not hear at the time, and found nothing he had written about it among the archive documents. But then, in a manuscript written by his superior, Rattenhuber, I read,

Going on to describe the behaviour of those in the shelter, who set about preparing to escape the moment they became aware of the Führer’s death, Rattenhuber once more mentions Mengershausen.

Mengershausen’s testimony was the missing link we had needed in order to produce an evidence-based reconstruction of the last hours of Hitler’s life and the exact nature of his death. It was time to summarize. Reports that Hitler had been positively identified went first to front headquarters, and from there to the top.

The people involved in this investigation had a sense of great personal responsibility to obtain irrefutable evidence, recognizing only too well that a lack of clarity about Hitler’s death would be harmful. It could only facilitate his intention of disappearing without a trace, turning into a myth, and thereby fuelling the fanaticism and galvanizing the Führer’s adherents. Nazism was very centred on Hitler personally, and the peoples of the USSR, who had put everything they had into winning the victory over Nazism, had an inalienable right to know that the last full stop had been written in this history.

Having obtained incontrovertible evidence, I really believed that all the nonsensical rumours would be swept away and truth would prevail. I wrote a brief letter to my family, which they have preserved, to say that I had taken part in an important mission, that we would shortly be returning to Moscow, and I would see them soon.

I was sure we would be sent to Moscow with all the data and principal witnesses to the identification. I was sure that Käthe Heusermann, for her services to history, would be appreciated and rewarded. Nothing stirred. Everything stayed just as it was. Now what was going to happen?

Hitler – corpse or legend? We moved to Finow, a small town near Berlin, and then our Colonel Gorbushin was told specifically by Colonel Andrey Miroshnichenko,[1] that too much time was being spent on all this messing about with dead bodies and he should stop. Vasiliy Gorbushin departed for Flensburg, as a member of the Allied delegation to accept Dönitz’s surrender. He entrusted to Major Bystrov the task of ensuring the safety of our ‘trophies’. They were secretly moved to Finow and buried, still in their crates.

A few days later, on 18 May, a general appeared from General Headquarters, flanked by Lieutenant General Alexander Vadis,[2] Andrey Miroshnichenko and other bigwigs from front and our army headquarters, with, we were told, instructions from Stalin to check everything relating to Hitler’s death and return with a report. Miroshnichenko could have been in big trouble for failing to realize that Stalin’s reluctance to make Hitler’s death public, or indeed to let anyone else know about it, did not indicate that he was prepared to take the fact on trust, without having everything thoroughly verified by his personal representative. Stalin wanted to ‘own’ this secret all by himself.

There is a well known saying that in war a day lived is equivalent to three days in peacetime, but in those days of May 1945, even with the war over, the days were so busy and passed so rapidly they exceeded that score.

Something major was afoot. Käthe Heusermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann had been arrested and brought in; SS bodyguard Harry Mengershausen, whom we had questioned, reappeared. A new investigation began. The whole identification and interrogation process restarted and was referred to as a ‘repetition’.

In these interrogations, Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann are referred to as ‘detainees’. This time, each interrogation was preceded by an official warning to me, as the interpreter, of my potential liability under Article such-and-such. At no time during the war, no matter what level I was translating for, had there been anything of that kind. This was new. In part, no doubt, it reflected the special burden of responsibility I bore in the interrogation, but it reflected no less the coming of a new, postwar era. During the war there had been more trust and less formality but, of course, a full seventeen days had elapsed since victory had been celebrated in Berlin.

The general studied everything, asked questions and listened attentively. He did not sign the records, but during breaks their text was forwarded verbatim to General Headquarters over the government’s special highsecurity communication lines. The records were signed by the assembled top brass and, in front of my eyes, I witnessed the brazen falsification of history. Anyone reading those documents would suppose Miroshnichenko was the leading figure in the investigation, the man who made history. It was straightforward fraud. Gorbushin is nowhere in the records. The historian commentators, bless them, are unaware that he had been sent off to Flensburg as a member of the Allied Commission.

At the end of the second day, this terribly senior investigation reached its climax. Picture the scene: a small town, the gentle light of evening, and a strange procession on its way to the city outskirts. There, in sparse woodland, during the curfew to ensure no snoopy spy among the local townsfolk should witness the deed, the crates containing the remains brought from Buch had been committed to the earth and a covert 24-hour guard deployed. Now Major Bystrov again walks ahead, showing the way. Behind him, the general, the Supreme Government Inspector, so to speak. Next, the military. Next, Hitler’s dentists Heusermann and Echtmann. Next the Führer’s bodyguard, Mengershausen, then some others.

Hardly speaking among ourselves, we walk slowly, oppressed by knowledge of what is imminent, our approaching confrontation of the mystery that always surrounds death. Finally we enter the woodland. The crates have already been exhumed.

Another report is compiled. All present, the Germans as well as the Soviet military (except for the general), sign. This report, compiled in the presence of his nuncio, is for Stalin himself.

The materials discovered by the investigation, the irrefutable proof of Hitler’s death, namely his jaw and his denture, are readied before my eyes to be sent to front headquarters and thence, presumably, to Moscow with the general, who departs shortly afterwards.

Judging by the documents, soon after the general left Finow, there was an influx to ‘the heights’ of top secret information ‘concerning the discovery of Hitler’s body’. The Council of Ministers Archive preserves a ‘Note via the top-security line’, sent by Lieutenant General Vadis to Beria and Abakumov on 23 May 1945,[1] detailing the circumstances of the discovery of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun; the testimony of Kunz and Schneider, the former having heard about Hitler’s suicide from Goebbels, while the latter reported the request for petrol; the interrogations of Günsche and Linge confirming the fact of the suicide and burning of the bodies; and the identification of Hitler’s teeth by Fritz Echtmann and Käthe Heusermann. And the note from Beria to Comrade Stalin and to Comrade Molotov, passing on the information. Everyone was very busy, but what would Stalin do? Would he announce the discovery?

Next, Colonel Gorbushin was summoned to Moscow to report on Hitler to Stalin. Gorbushin had just returned from Flensburg. When he returned from Moscow, he told Bystrov and myself he had been ordered not to leave his hotel room and to await a call from Stalin, which never came. Instead, he was summoned by Abakumov, who said,

Vasiliy Gorbushin told me and Bystrov now to forget what he had said.

‘Hitler – Corpse or Legend?’ Such was the title of an article by Ronald Belford, circulated on 25 May 1945 by Reuters,[1] and that was precisely the question we confronted. ‘The examination of these human remains’, Reuters’ reporter wrote, ‘is the culmination of a strenuous week-long search in the ruins of Berlin.’ It was a culmination, however, that never happened. What happened instead was a cover-up.

A tyrant is always a mystery and that is his strength. Everything emanating from him is imbued with a secret significance hidden from the eyes of his subjects. Stalin’s pragmatic motivations are easier to work out, but not sufficient to explain why he would conceal such an important historical fact. The answer is largely hidden away in his inscrutable personality, in his ambiguous attitude towards Hitler, in the way he measured himself against certain analogous situations in which Hitler found himself, in the devastating sense of loss he may have experienced with the death of the hated, alluring enemy he had spent the days and nights of the war opposing, and in Stalin’s many psychological complexes. These depths I will not attempt to plumb.

The foreign enemy and, no less, the domestic enemy, were an essential component of the system Stalin created. He loathed the idea of detente, and there would be less pressure for it if Hitler was still alive and secretly hiding somewhere. If Hitler was alive, Nazism was not yet vanquished and the world was still in danger. Stalin saw that as tactically important in the imminent discussions with the Allies about the nature of the postwar world. So in Potsdam, when he was asked whether anything was known about Hitler, he was evasive. With a knack for dealing unceremoniously with inconvenient facts that by rights belonged to history and hence to the people, Stalin sat on the truth.

History abhors the arbitrary removal from its narrative of this or that particular event, no matter what the motivation. It is a great theatre producer, and trying to correct its productions only spoils them.

Was Stalin wise? Was there some advantage he derived from keeping his secret? Hardly. The political and moral damage, however, was immense. At the end of the war, and for some time after it, the approval rating (as people would say nowadays) of the Red Army throughout the world was extremely high. If, when Stalin was asked about Hitler at the Potsdam Conference, he had announced he was ready to provide proof that Hitler had been found, imagine the impact! A total triumph for Stalin! For the Red Army! And his work at the conference would have benefited from that far more than it did from galvanizing a corpse. But I wonder now, as I write, whether Stalin was already sensing a growing tension between himself and his Allies, and concealing a truth that was their common achievement was perhaps his first move in the approaching Cold War. So he threw that question at ‘played-out’ Zhukov: ‘Well, where is Hitler?’

When I was demobilized and, five months later, left Germany for good, as it then seemed, the Allies continued to work, trying to reach a definite conclusion. In late October and early November (by which time I was already back in Moscow), they were trying to bring together all the loose ends and appealed to the Soviet side for assistance. On 31 October, as a goodwill gesture, the record of the interrogation of Hanna Reitsch was sent by US intelligence to Major General Sidnev,[1] Following that, on 1 November, Brigadier General Ford sent a circular to Brigadier General Conrad (USA), Major General Sidnev (USSR) and Colonel Poulu (France), proposing that the next meeting of the Intelligence Committee should discuss the various claims about Hitler’s death.

First paragraph of that text: ‘The only conclusive proof of Hitler’s death would be the finding and definite identification of the body.’

It was, however, just this conclusive proof that was being denied, concealed both from the Allies and from Russians themselves. Brigadier General Ford continues, ‘In the absence of this proof, the only positive proof consists of the detailed accounts of particular witnesses who were either acquainted with his intentions or were eyewitnesses to his fate.’

As we have seen, there really was no shortage of such witnesses. Analysing the testimony of those witnesses who fell into the hands of the Allies, and the information that had leaked from our side, the British intelligence officer summarizes:

However, the evidence about the last days and death of Hitler is ‘not yet complete’, and Brigadier General Ford appeals to his colleagues on the quadripartite Intelligence Committee for information about the where-abouts of, and a request to be allowed to interrogate, Günsche and Rattenhuber (who are in captivity ‘according to the Russian communique of 7 May’), Traudl Junge (Gertraud but called Gertruda in our records) and Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, who had been seriously injured and, according to unconfirmed reports, was in hospital, again in the Russian sector.

At the end of this message to his colleagues is the most important point:

There was no response.

Evidently it had not proved possible to conceal the facts completely, and perhaps nobody had tried all that hard. The main thing was to keep everybody guessing. ‘Nothing for sure.’ ‘Hitler vanished without trace’. That provided a foundation for legends and myths about him: just what Hitler wanted. A romantic aura was created around his image, while the truth that we knew was simple and prosaic. But it was the truth.

Hitler wanted to remain an enigma, to become myth, a new phoenix ready to be reborn in someone else’s lunatic dreams of power and violence.

Back then, in May 1945, I supposed our adventure was over and that I would soon be home. I did go home, but not soon by any means, only on 10 October 1945, four years to the day after I had gone off to the war. During those first postwar months I was again to encounter the documents from the Reich Chancellery. First, at front headquarters I was instructed to translate the Goebbels diaries, but things did not work out. There was nothing of operational value in his old diaries, and the historical value of documents from a war now ended, as I have said, declined rapidly. I was sent off back to Stendal, where the headquarters of our 3rd Shock Army was stationed.

The German town of Stendal was my last stop in a war that had lasted four years and that, no doubt, is why I so remember it. We moved there when the demarcation line was drawn on the map of Germany and Stendal, though situated to the west of Berlin, fell within the Russian zone. The Americans had been there in the morning, and we moved in at noon.

The city was intact and vibrant with life. We settled in a quiet street with detached houses covered in vines. From early morning middle-aged German housewives were busy in the orchards by the houses. Their hair in old-fashioned buns and the low hems of their skirts made them resemble their peers to the east.

German children played in the square, and never ceased to amaze us: they never cried and did not make a lot of noise when they were playing at war. In the square, old women dressed in black sat all day long on a bench. They had probably been brought together long ago by widowhood, and would not have been very young even at the time of the First World War. Sometimes they began to gossip excitedly about something, trying to outdo each other as they wagged fingers in black cotton gloves.

From time to time a black hearse would appear, drawn slowly, smoothly, contemplatively by two horses. What we knew about horses was that they were used for pulling artillery or galloped with a courier in the saddle, or died in battle, or were eaten. There had been none available for other purposes for years.

These black, gleaming, well-fed horses wearing a solemn funeral caparison and a fluffy pom-pom above their withers, with a black-clad driver wearing a bowler hat, sitting on the box of the glazed and lacquered hearse, were the custodians of the majesty and sacramental nature of death, of the death that is called ‘natural’. Not death in battle, or from wounds, or the agonies of captivity, but the death of someone who has passed away ‘naturally’, the kind of death that used to happen so long ago that we had forgotten during the war that it was possible.

In the evening, always at the same hour, a column of German prisoners of war returned. It turned off into our street through a dark archway, separating it from another street that led down to the market square.

All day the soldiers were taken off somewhere to work, and in the evening, at the exact same hour, they returned. You could hear them coming even before their first rank appeared under the archway. Tired, sweaty, hungry, they sang as they marched, and their singing reached our street before they marched down it. They sang in tune, like a good male voice choir, something of their own, something German, and they passed us in an orderly column.

The housewives peered out of open windows. Lying on embroidered cushions placed on the sills for that purpose, they were resting at the end of their day’s housework. Downstairs, by their front doors, the old men sat in chairs they had brought out, casting long, faint shadows on the pavement. Listening to the men marching, they rocked slowly in time to the song, and their shadows, etiolated by the late hour, also rocked a little.

But overall everything was so calm, not agitated. It was as if those presently marching into the street had no connection with those who lived on it. The appearance of the prisoners took me aback every time. Even later, when there was no singing because they had been forbidden to sing, they marched in line, silently, down our street, their steel-shod boots clacking rhythmically, to where they would be under guard by sentries. I stared at them transfixed. They were a living part of a war that was taking revenge on them for their defeat.

The town was intact, but there were ruins on the outskirts. By the time we got to Stendal, however, the ruins were no longer redolent with drama. The war in Germany had been over for two months, and the ruins already looked dilapidated. The inferno of war, it transpired, becomes extinct immediately the all-clear is sounded. You, a tiny ember, are still hissing and smouldering and flaring up, but it has gone out, and the flames of war no longer tint the now cold ruins. By now they only merit a paragraph as the property in the town is inventorized, an essential part of its variety.

These ruins are the town’s contribution to the past and its new starting point.

At the front, I did find myself talking to captured German soldiers whose psychology was wholly permeated by Nazism, but they were the exception. Much more commonly, the soldiers were just ordinary human beings bizarrely at odds with the monstrous monolith of which they had been a part until half an hour ago. That was distressing. In Stendal, up close, I found many of the town’s residents likeable, and the creature known as ‘a Nazi’ was nowhere to be found.

This was a strange period, without war, in a foreign, largely incomprehensible world that did not need you to come and organize it, because it was not you who were going to be living there. Shortly before I left Stendal, wandering through the streets one evening, I found myself in the town’s park. On the overgrown paths, a courting couple might be glimpsed in the distance, before disappearing and again leaving the park deserted. There was a brook with a little bridge over it. In the stagnant water matted with algae, the elongated leaves of a willow had clumped together. They were glued also to a moss-covered stone.

Along the bank the grass was swaying on long stems. A handful of sparrows flew up out of it. On the other side of the bridge I could see, where the pond weed had not taken over, the water moving on its way to somewhere. I gazed at it helplessly, surprised by a kind of awakening, having up till that moment been separated off by the war from that water, that grass, from everything that was not war.

Now it was August and the fourth month without war. In Stendal the headquarters of my army was accommodated in houses whose windows looked out to a highway. A barrier placed across the street was supposed to keep out the civilian population.

A retired railway official scuttled resolutely across the highway and burst through the screen of bushes that separated it from our street. He had come from wherever he had been temporarily resettled with his family. In a worn suit and wearing a bowler hat, wiry and tense, he came on some pretext into his house, which we had occupied, hoping by turning up to avert destruction and chaos. His carpets, rolled up and sewn into covers, stood in the corners of the rooms, but in the humid twilight, moths were in the air. The glass cabinet with his delicate porcelain coffee cups, which we used when cleaning our teeth, now had empty spaces on its shelves, and the cups were to be found in the bathroom perched precariously on the edge of the wash-hand basin, from where it was only too easy inadvertently to send them crashing to the tile floor. The house’s small garden was sadly and plaintively offering up its fruits.

Not far away, on the bridge or by the market square late at night, it did happen that a soldier would stop a lone passer-by and say, ‘Yer watch! Gerrit off,’ but by now marauding was being punished.

An ex-typist for the Gestapo, as dark-skinned as an Indian, her back as slender as a boy’s, with a black fringe of straight hair, in a short, fluttering skirt, climbed lightly and impudently over the fence, ready to make herself useful or make herself scarce, and walked along ‘our’ street with an arch spring in her step, showing off gleaming legs and dangling a broadbrimmed raspberry red hat by its elastic. (Hats were still fashionable.) She walked bouncily along, audaciously intending to treat someone with apples from her bag, evidently wanting to dispose them favourably towards her. This seemed not to be an insurmountable challenge, if the tall, handsome soldier sent here to headquarters from a Lithuanian division, in view of the acute need for translators, was anything to go by. This risk-taking young fellow was, in defiance of all regulations, smitten by the diabolical Gestapo girl. On the other side of the wooden fence, the typist’s fit, handsome young husband was waiting for her. Climbing back over the fence in the same manner as before, she quickly rejoined him and they went off back to their uneasy, and to us incomprehensible, life.

Hungry refugees sat all day on the ground in the square by the town hall. Victorious soldiers, growing languid in the hot sun, hung round the necks of stray dogs long ropes of precious pearls recovered from a bombed jewellery shop during the advance, and were drowsily amused, watching as these strange, weightless collars dangling on the dogs’ chests and, when they ran, flapping up in front of their muzzles, goaded them. The dogs rushed around crazily until the thread broke and the pearls scattered over the roadway. Then the dogs went back to the soldiers and waited patiently to be thrown something to eat, and wandered around with strands of thread, strung with pearls, caught in their fur.

A truck driver I barely knew, having only ever been driven once or twice in his truck, hailed me in the street: ‘Comrade Lieutenant, wait!’ He handed me a letter and asked me to read it when I had a moment. It was a written proposal of marriage. He promised me a good life, on the basis of a house in Sochi which he co-owned with his sister. The letter brimmed with confidence that I would respond positively, but he was not in the least downhearted or offended when I did not. From then on, though, when we met we would stop and chat like friends, not mentioning the letter but with a sense of having a connection, because we knew about something that had happened, and also knew something about each other that nobody else knew.

He was still wearing the tunic of the rank-and-file front-line driver, but these days of peace had given him new confidence: very soon he would again be behind the wheel in a holiday area and, moreover, in the midst of all the devastation, owning half a house on the fashionable Black Sea coast. He was probably mentally asking me, ‘How many of us men have survived, and how many of you women are going to be looking for a man back there in Russia?’ – and aware of his immeasurably stronger negotiating position. ‘Not every woman is going to get one. The wretched war has done you quite some disservice.’ Or perhaps he was genuinely taking pity on me in what he took to be my unenviable circumstances by offering his candidacy.

When a sergeant happened to come by one day with a camera my suitor yelled, ‘Oy! Take a photo!’ He inscribed on the back of the photo, which showed the two of us standing together, words of parting that had become almost traditional in the war: ‘If not I, at least my picture is always with you.’

An elderly, nondescript looking lieutenant (on our travels all he ever did was issue us our monthly allowance), had until very recently been shy and self-effacing, presumably burdened by a sense of the insignificance, and even oddity, of his position as an accountant in the headquarters of an army on active service. But now he opened up and lost his inferiority complex. A roadside incident had helped. On the highway, a huge Studebaker truck that was hurtling towards a pedestrian, him, suddenly braked. As was not uncommon now on the roads, a huge black driver jumped down from the cabin to greet him. He grabbed his puny form in his arms, pressed him ardently to his bosom, expressing his admiration for the Red Army, and delightedly tossed the accountant, along with his briefcase, up in the air. Having endured the initial terror and survived (he did not crash down on to the concrete of the highway), the diffident accountant suddenly had a blinding revelation of the part he had played in the heroic events of the war.

We unrolled the old carpets smelling of mothballs and rolled up and sewn into their covers, and spread them on the floor. Perhaps we wanted to live the way the people who were here before we came had lived, to have a taste of their comfortable German way of life. Or perhaps we were in a hurry: when would life again be so comfortable and seemingly carefree?

The old plush armchair, the standard lamp with its faded grey silk lampshade, the cabinet with the porcelain… A place for everything and everything in its place. And the moths circling, businesslike, in the humid evenings just above the carpets. And completely covering the end of the house, the crimson leaves of the twining vine. And in the evenings the old wrought iron lantern will be lit. What could be better? And yet, something is missing. There is no sense of being at home. Something is not right. There’s no living in a house where there’s no master. This is no more than a billet. In places we had been put up in at the front, even in dugouts, we had felt far more at home, far more carefree, more relaxed and secure. The owner’s wife is working away in the tiny garden where one kind of fruit succeeds another. On the porch the owner’s ginger-haired mongrel, Trudi, is slumbering. The owner brings her something to eat in a paper poke, the dog gulps it down, whimpers, quietly licks its owner’s hands, runs after him, wagging its erect tail, following him as far as the dense barrier of shrubbery stretching along the boulevard. Until recently, no one, neither the owner nor his dog, would have dared to push their way through those bushes.

Before disappearing into them, her master firmly orders Trudi to turn back (the dogs here are amazingly well behaved), and she trots back to the house with her tail between her legs. The owner, holding his bowler hat firmly on his head, disappears into the bushes. Then the dog, after looking all around, nervously wagging her tail, heads for the kitchen of the victors.

Bystrov was greatly impressed by Germany, by its roads, and particularly by the way the town merged unnoticeably with the countryside and how the countryside, with its stone buildings, merged with the town. ‘This is where socialism should really have been built,’ he told me in confidence. ‘It should have been started here, not in Russia.’ In Rathenow, from where we later moved to Stendal, we had lived in the gloomy mansion of the owner of a factory that made cases for spectacles. For some reason Bystrov particularly took to that house. It had a grand staircase up to the first floor and a chandelier in the hall. He seemed so downcast when he said there was absolutely no possibility he could ever have anything to compare with it. I felt nothing remotely like that regret. I was, of course, much younger than him, and what had I in common with the respectable owner of the house, who on Sundays invariably took his ease on a chaise longue on the balcony?

Bystrov changed. Little by little, it has to be admitted, he forgot Klavochka, which is forgivable given that their romance had lasted for only the one evening of their acquaintance, when our army was being given a send-off. What a succession of massive events and alarums were to follow.

In Rathenow Bystrov had a modest lyrical interlude, a light, amusing romance with a pretty German woman, the local hairdresser. It was so uncomplicated, so irresponsible, and had an added dash of danger, because it could have done serious damage to his career. I think he looked back fondly on his amorous escapade. It is no small matter how we see ourselves afterwards, remembering, and now Bystrov could remember himself as a fine, gallant gentleman, with none of the churlishness of a victor, with little posies of flowers, sneaking out through a window at night, completely unseen, in violation of a strict prohibition of intimacy with German women, overcoming the conditioning of servile obedience and fear, seizing a moment of freedom, and feeling almost European.

But that, too, passed and Bystrov changed again. I do not think I knew anyone as inwardly restless as he was. He worried feverishly about what direction his life should take now, what choices he should make, whether he should go back to his previous studies as a biologist or stay in the army. There was some obscure, disquieting obstacle to his returning to his old career. He could not speak about it with his usual directness, something remained unsaid. He also lamented the loss of a loyal, discriminating counsellor in his mother-in-law, who had died before the war. He evidently had been guilty of some pre-war misdeed in respect of one of his colleagues and wondered whether now, in what seemed like the purer atmosphere after the war, he would be welcomed back by his fellow biologists. It troubled him.

At first he wondered about staying in the army. An observant person, he asked me, ‘Do you see the type of commander they want now?’ He saw for himself that promotion was coming to those who made relentless, harsh demands on their subordinates over even the most trifling detail. He understood that he himself needed to change, to change his completely inappropriate manner when dealing with his subordinates. Having given a task to a private, he would often ask, ‘Right then, sport, sure you’ve got that?’ He tended to be indulgent, over-lenient, too understanding of the other person’s situation, and was inclined to cover up if they got something wrong.

He began trying to break himself in, to act a part, to adapt to the stereotype of the successful officer. Instead of his easy-going, and often affectionate, term of address (‘sport’), he now became relentlessly demanding and obnoxious. Soon, however, realizing he was a round peg in a square hole, that he did not belong in the army and would never go far, Bystrov gave up the idea and tried to go back to being his old self. That, however, proved impossible. You cannot violate your true self without leaving a wound.

There was only one thing left, and that was to go back to biology. He was soon acting with his characteristic purposefulness, still unable to imagine living without setting himself targets and achieving them.

If the refugees are sitting on the ground by the town hall; if at the customary lunchtime, between twelve and one o’clock in the afternoon, the Germans, closing their stores and shops and offices, greet each other when they meet in the street with, ‘’Mahlzeit!’; if in the atelier a dress is being sewn for the wife of the Burgomeister to attend the opening of the local theatre; if Trudi, dishevelled, going feral, is torn between her master and the foreigners’ kitchen, breaks free and, jangling on her collar the highest Nazi military and paramilitary award, the ‘Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves’, and a medal ‘For Participation in the Winter Campaign in the East’, rushes to greet her master and he, squeezing through the green hedge, with some effort replaces the bowler hat on his head, totally ignoring Trudi’s satanic decorations and responds with his customary strictness to her greetings and walks unabashed into the house, leading his wife – if all this happens, then truly the war is over.

In the evening, through the open window of a nearby house come the tones of Alexander Vertinsky, a captured record. That, instead of a low whistle, is the signal for a secret assignation with R.

Even before Vertinsky has finished the song, a captured 8 mm film projector for home use is switched on. ‘Wait till you see this!’ The projector clatters and on a white pillowcase hung on the wall as a screen a little mouse starts running round a pantry in pursuit of a sausage hanging from a hook.

‘Funny?’ ‘Uh-huh.’ But it isn’t the least bit funny. I translate the subtitles, but my viewing is being blocked by a sorrow rising from the bottom of my heart. Something is leaving us, evaporating. A beastly German cat puts an end to the beastly German mouse that nibbled a beastly German sausage…

What is happening to us? Where are we? We are being dragged out to the provinces of a victory. We are now two trains on a narrow-gauge track. One lets the other pass, not yet knowing which route to follow into the chasm of days ahead, not exchanging whistles, deaf to each other.

How shall we honour this victory? How shall we honour the life it has given us, which we have yet to know? That tumultuous sense of living that bubbled up with victory, is receding.

Life without enchantment. During the war nobody expected any, but in the war nobody was ordinary. No one. The ordinariness followed almost immediately, in a foreign, vanquished land, with the hatefulness of occupation.

And that wonderful sense of being alive: is it possible now or was it taken away with them by those who perished? Perhaps, too, victory itself is only a short period of festivity followed by a persistent sense of disquieting responsibility.

While we were in occupation of Stendal there swept out of the darkness of the Nazis’ concentration camps the Eternal Chancer, an obligatory character that follows in the wake of wars and cataclysms. In Stendal he appeared in the guise of an adroit, nimble gentleman with a narrow-brimmed hat and a face moulded from grey, heat-resistant clay, on which the dots of eyes, the crosses of nostrils, and the line of his lips had been etched.

Declaring he was a former political prisoner, he lost no time in setting himself up nicely. He moved into the Schwarzer Adler (Black Eagle) Hotel and cornered the legal owner. His eye had alighted on this wellkept hostelry because its owner, who had vanished without trace, had been a prominent Nazi in the town, which now enabled this type, whose first name was Hans and whose surname I have forgotten, to carry out, covertly and with impunity, an expropriation. The abandoned co-owner, a small, rounded woman, now spent her inactive days in an obscure corner of her restaurant in the guise of an employee, and in reality under house (restaurant) arrest. The old staff were fired and their replacements kept a close eye on her. The chef, a concentration camp chum of Hans, was a hunchbacked strongman with a cheery, red, roguish face who could cook dishes unimaginable for that time, in total disregard of norms and the strict ration limits.

A theatre opened in Stendal and a dreamy actress with luxuriant ashblonde hair crooned something pre-Nazi. From the screens, Marika Rökk, ‘The Woman of My Dreams’, in a chinchilla fur coat, raked over old coals by hymning the blandishments of the high life. ‘Ex-prisoner’ Hans sent out a team of women he hired near Potsdam to find champignons. German boys walked with their arms round German girls as if we were simply not there. At the time-honoured hour, the Germans, locking up their Geschäfts and offices, dispersed for lunch, calling ‘’Mahlzeit!’ to their acquaintances. Ramming their spades into the ground, the road workers stood in trenches in the street, unwrapped their packed lunches brought from home, and ate the stale bread of poverty.

An interpreter was constantly in demand, if not for anything of great importance. It was an odd life, as if you were imagining it. There was nothing here for Bystrov to do. A car he had captured was being repaired in a German garage and he was planning to drive back home in it. He was expecting at any moment to be given the signal that would allow him to leave. There was already a distance between us. It was like approaching your destination in a train when the food for the journey has been eaten, everybody has told their personal stories to everybody else, the cases have been put out in the aisle and scarves are already on necks. The temporary community that has come together on the journey is falling apart. Everybody is on their own, separately thinking about what they have to do next, about the excitement of imminent reunions.

But the train has come to a stop and is waiting for the green signal to allow it to pull into the station. The delay is irksome, and the remoteness of everyone and the emptiness that has appeared is a pain, and everyone is now irrevocably only looking out for themselves.

But now, out of the Black Eagle, from the fraternity of questionable ex-prisoners, the sturdy, ruddy faced hunchback is bringing across the highway a roast suckling pig, standing on all fours in a dish. The dish is being steadied by the owner himself, the Eternal Chancer. The pig, with a tomato stuck in its jaws, with carrots and green branches stuck in its back, is placed at the head of a farewell banquet. Major Bystrov is leaving.

Later Bystrov did come to see me once or twice in Moscow. He had a new position. He told me about his problems over moving from Omsk. I passed on a request from Klavochka to see him and he agreed to meet her at my apartment. I will never forget that evening, Klavochka in an attractive black silk dress with a square neckline and heavily embroidered with beading, patiently getting colder and colder in our chilly apartment, still under the impact of how much in love with her he had been and his proposal. Waiting for him to come at any moment, whereupon everything would work out well. He stood her up.

It seems to me that in the candlelight on that day in wartime so long ago, by the stove in Bydgoszcz, when he confided to me his plan to capture Goebbels, he began to dissolve, and was dissolving the whole time from then on, until he became a phantom and ultimately disappeared, leaving a trace in the form of Klavochka’s sequins, and a profound, sad puzzlement in her heart.

But, for now, we are still in Stendal. People are gradually leaving. Bystrov has gone, driving off in his car. The headquarters courier, Zhenya Gavrilov, looks at me with plaintive courtesy. In Poznań I had witnessed what at first had seemed no more than a harmless flirtation with Zosia, a local girl, and their inconsolable separation washed with his tears. The memory of that happiness only grew more intense in his sorrowful separation, until his heart was filled with despair. He passed his days now in a state of stupefaction, all his old initiative gone. Victory had not been the harbinger of a reunion with his beloved. While the war was going on, he had been able to hitch-hike back, with the kindly permission of Colonel Gorbushin, once or twice to Poznań. Now, as day by day ever more stringent conditions were being imposed on us, there was little chance of that, and marrying foreigners had been prohibited. He lost the will to live. Puffy, red eyelids corroded by tears reluctantly opened a slit, to reveal dull eyes which not so long ago had been quick and covetous.

Did it happen at the front that a soldier cried on leaving a village and bidding farewell to a girl he had fallen in love with? Hardly. In war men are warlike. Victory is the time for love, and that is why Gavrilov is crying now.

‘And you? After all, we agreed.’ ‘Well, what about you?’ ‘My grandmother used to say, “Victory is a disaster. Look what it’s done for us.”’ ‘She said that?’ ‘She was talking about something different. We will honour our Victory.’ ‘We shall.’

‘On 9 May, when they let off the fireworks, no matter where we are, we will think about each other. That is forever. The first glass on 9 May I will always, in my mind, drink to you.’ ‘And I to you.’

‘You have important work ahead of you. I know you will cope with it. How much we have been through. That cannot just disappear. I believe in you. You will write, I know, and you will not have to make anything up. You will write everything just the way it was.’

When we were still in the Baltic States, we came across a single domino piece, a double two. I broke it, gave half to him and kept half myself. These jokey halves seemed to be a pledge nobody else knew about of our secret oneness, or rather, and this was no joke, two talismans, which people so need at the front. Six months later, when R. was in Moscow, and through the years when he dropped in as he was passing through, he would ‘present’ his half of the double-two as a sign of faithfulness to our memory of the past.

I do not know what missions his native land sent him out on with my talisman in his pocket. He rose in his career through the ranks, and perhaps this modest little fragment reminded him of a time when he was pure, aloof and brave, like a free man. I keep my half of the double-two in a jewellery box with my medals.

Eventually a lorry took me from Stendal to front headquarters, to which I had been ordered to report for demobilization. We drove through Berlin and saw an American patrol, soldiers in khaki overalls strolling confidently down the street arm-in-arm with young German women.

Our truck sped another forty kilometres along Hitler’s famous autobahns. The driver, that same driver, my would-be ‘intended’, looked at me without a hint of ruefulness. Keeping his left hand on the steering wheel, he offered me a pack of American cigarettes a black driver had presented to him. ‘Help yourself, Comrade Lieutenant!’ Only I was a non-smoker.

He delivered me to my destination in Potsdam, front headquarters, lowered the side of the truck and carried a big heavy radio into the hotel. It was a parting gift to me from our army unit.

‘At home they’ll be preparing the dough for me, distilling the schnapps!’ he exclaimed euphorically, anticipating the welcome he would soon also be enjoying. ‘All the best for your life in peacetime,’ he said. He shook my hand firmly, and with that last handshake all my ties were broken. For four years I had not been my own person, I had been one of a community in the thick of a war and suddenly… I was out, completely alone. It was something I had forgotten or perhaps never known, something stupefying, just very bewildering.

On my own now, in those bewildered days in Potsdam, I slope in perplexity past gardens barely touched by yellow and crimson rust that screen the detached houses and the concealed, muted liveliness within them. I meet almost nobody coming the other way. It is a warm autumn. Lakes, mist above them, a haze that envelops and engulfs the feverish, nagging pain of parting.

What lies ahead? What is going to happen? I have no profession, only the unrelenting obligation I have, for some reason, taken on myself: to write. And is it an obligation? More likely, it is an alarming, doomed destiny. It is so little, but at the same time too much for my impending life, when I will be completely alone with everything that happened, everything yet to happen, with my secrets and my faltering faith in the logic of ordinary life and its fragmented routine.

In May we were still full of marvellous hopes for our peacetime future. On the threshold of victory, and for a brief moment after it, we all imagined a renewed world of real living, with much more freedom and much less mistrust than before. Our people, who had so selflessly displayed their best qualities in the war, could surely, we believed, count on the trust of their rulers. Had not the children of ‘enemies of the people’, and those ‘enemies’ themselves, to the extent that they were released from the prisons – priests, the supposedly ‘wealthy’ peasants who had been purged, the thieves – all risen up to defend the Motherland? Had they not given their lives?

In line with these awakened hopes, for a time excited ‘news’ spread, and Bystrov shared it with me, that some freedom of initiative would be allowed, like under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, as the quickest way of healing the gaping wounds left by the war. Or that now we would be allowed to go on holiday abroad. In a word, we were thrilled and excited by the prospect of new uplands.

I do not remember why I was travelling somewhere with Bystrov when we got stuck and were sitting by the roadside on overturned empty cans, waiting for a vehicle to be going our way. We got to talking about the future, because I, too, had applied for demobilization. Bystrov, forgetting the failure of the ‘creative’ days he had allowed me for writing stories, told me with solemn confidence and hope, ‘There were three of us at every stage of this Hitler saga. Of those three, you are the only one who can write about it. It is your duty.’ He had taken care to keep copies of records not known to the rest of the world, and had also given copies to me. He had supplemented his private collection with invaluable photographs, and these he shared as well.

Five months had now passed without war. Little news reached us from Moscow, and it was beginning to look as if the future would not differ much from the patterns established in the years preceding the war. But if, in the midst of the war, our pre-war life had seemed alluring, vivid and varied, somehow now it had dulled. Some of those who were older than me, and had already had jobs in the past, now decided life had been better during the war. That was true primarily of the officers, although similar sentiments were to be found among the rank and file, who had found the front exhilarating.

In the war, they found, there had been more freedom, more room to breathe; there was not the same suspicion and persecution, not the same danger lurking round every corner, and the goal for which you might have to give your life was necessary, was righteous, not just a lot of hot air and speculation. It was clear, indubitable and palpable. Staking your life on that, a person could feel like a human being, a hero – something you had been deprived of before the war.

In Potsdam, Raya the telegraphist and I sat, taking our farewell of each other in an autumnal garden. It was the quiet hour before sunset. The German owner of the house climbed a stepladder he had placed by a fruit tree and carefully picked the apples with a gloved hand. Everything was right, as if a deep peace had descended on the Earth. Only not in my heart.

The demobilization paperwork might have been completed but it was not possible just to go home. Demobbed troops besieged the trains and battled for a place in them, clung to the roofs of the carriages. We heard it could be months before things settled down. Everyone was in the grip of a furious urge to get back home. Every day of delay counted as a disaster. Yells and guffaws from those who had climbed in, or clung on, or clambered up; singing, wanton recklessness. ‘We are back from the war!’ proclaimed posters along the carriage. ‘Welcome us!’ ‘We won!’ ‘Back from Berlin!’ It was only later, when people actually were back home, moving away from all that, settling down to peacetime living, that they began to feel nostalgia for the war and you would hear, as contagious as a yawn, the officers joking, ‘Oh, for an hour of that damnable war again!’ as they remembered, or now imagined, their finest hour.

Meanwhile I was wilting in this demoralizing wait to get away. There was nothing I could do, except live in hope that someone would do me a favour. For the present, I was accommodated in the officers’ hotel – a vast building with wide corridors and spacious rooms which, until recently, had been an almshouse. Where were the old ladies who had inhabited it living now?

In the room I had been allocated there were traces of its recent occupant: under a glass dome was a little ivory church with a crucifix in it, crosses on a rosary made of mother-of-pearl or wooden beads. Soon these objects of devotion were joined by a prominently displayed white enamel colander. It belonged to Tanya, the girl now sharing with me. I was leaving but she had just arrived in Germany, having served the whole war in the army, but seeing it through to the end in the USSR.

Her large, happy, hospitable family had all been killed in Stalingrad, with the exception of her mother, who lived on among the ashes, a prey to deprivation and loneliness. Tanya, womanly and gentle, was full of positive feelings about life and of constructive intentions. Once she had a job in Germany she intended to bring her mother over. She wanted to have children and, to that end, to marry a good man, never doubting that she would soon meet one here. The colander, purchased or otherwise acquired, was the first step in realizing that life, and the therapeutic news about it flew by mail back to Stalingrad to her mother who had lost everyone and everything, including her kitchen utensils that were completely irreplaceable in our devastated country, and in the midst of which she had spent her life, taking care of her family. Tanya had nothing other than the colander to show for the present, but she had made a start. Her calmness, her warmth, her very basic human aspirations and attractive, womanly appearance made it easy to like her.

There she was, waiting to be appointed to a job, while I was waiting to be sent home, and neither of us had anything to do. We walked through the outskirts of Potsdam in the warm autumn haze of the lakes. How still it was here, and beautiful. The German gardens were preparing for their winter rest: we had no inkling on those walks of the terrible winter about to befall the Germans in their unheated homes.

Living in Potsdam at that moment, I knew nothing of Cecilienhof, where just over two months previously a conference of the Allies had taken place. I knew nothing of the Garrison Church to which, when he came to power, Hitler immediately repaired, wearing a tailcoat, to pose for journalists at the grave of Frederick the Great. I did not even know about Sanssouci, the palace of that emperor in Potsdam, which had suffered during the war. If I had, I would in any case have had no interest in it, because the only thing I wanted was to go home. That gentle, healing autumn, Tanya and I wandered by the shores of the lakes, in the park, along the streets past the hedges in front of the houses, and a sense of joie de vivre was born in my heart. It was not that keen, animal sense of being alive that could transfix you for a moment at the front, but a different, quiet feeling, consoling, lifeaffirming.

We did not stray far from headquarters, and one day I was sent for to report immediately to the aerodrome. I cannot remember now who the kind person was who had taken the trouble to help me. Perhaps it was just the headquarters commandant, for whom I was a burden. It is a pity, though, that I do not remember. It can have been no simple matter to get me a place on Marshal Zhukov’s cargo plane. It was going to take off even though it was not ‘flying’ weather and Moscow would not give permission for it to land. The aerodrome there was closed because of the bad weather.

In order not to overload what was, after all, a cargo aircraft, I was ordered to, and did without regret, leave behind the radio receiver, the official ‘valuable parting gift’ awarded me by my military unit. A car hastily transported me, and Tanya who came to see me off, to the aerodrome. It was a gloomy, overcast day. A few sturdy, surly chaps in leather coats, Zhukov’s aircrew, were standing by the plane. In Poznań Zhukov’s aircrew had often dropped in to have tea or a meal with us, but theirs had not been a cargo plane. These were pilots I did not know. One of them silently jabbed a finger at the leather case hanging from a strap over my shoulder with a complete set of Vertinsky’s records, an unofficial gift when the radio centre was dismantled. ‘The aircraft is already overloaded,’ the others chimed in. I obediently took it off and transferred the strap to Tanya’s shoulder, rescuing only my favourite record.

Whether they were genuinely concerned about overloading the plane, or whether they just thought it was bad luck to have a woman on board, especially in bad weather, I do not know. Perhaps they hoped that, reluctant to part with my booty, I would refuse to fly. At all events, if they were wanting to get rid of this unwelcome passenger, they may have had a point, because I was to give them a hard time on the flight. Then, though, I had no such thoughts in my head and just wanted to make sure they took me with them. My cardboard suitcase, my rucksack, and the box with the doll presented to me by the Italians in the already far-off days of May were grudgingly lifted into the plane. I said goodbye to Tanya and, through her, to everything that had happened or would happen here. I had nobody else to say goodbye to as I bade what I thankfully supposed to be my last farewell to Germany.

It was the first time in my life I had been in a plane. The propellers thundered and I never noticed the aircraft leaving the ground. I was immediately distracted and captivated by the indescribable sight of Berlin beneath us. However devastated it might have appeared from the ground, from above this vast, immense, dead city was a truly monstrous sight. Blackened grey hulks of city blocks, buildings that looked like opened boxes. Our allies’ air forces had bombed the city night and day, systematically wrecking building after building, and appeared to have contrived to drop a bomb in every last one.

And then Berlin, which a moment before had been so close beneath us, was out of sight. The plane gained altitude and the ground, disappearing from under my feet, suddenly lurched towards me. I do not know what that was or how to convey it. It felt as if the force of gravity had suddenly caught up with an inept runaway. I was plunged into a depth of despair such as I had never experienced during the war. I can’t do this, I can’t! Throw me out, let me get back down to the ground!

The Douglas cargo aircraft had two bench-like metal seats solidly attached opposite each other to the sides of the aircraft. Not including me, there were four passengers, all pilots. They took off their leather coats, turned a suitcase on its end, and were soon furiously playing cards. The plane was empty: there was no cargo. The light cardboard box with my doll in it skated up and down its empty floor. I didn’t care. There I was, all my insignia jangling, with my officer’s belt and shoulder straps, as helpless as a kitten and very miserable. The airmen solicitously laid me on an iron bench, magnanimously spread their coats under me and assured me I would feel better lying down.

And no doubt I should have felt better, lying behind their calm, warm backs, but we were tossed around the sky, jerked sideways, and fell precipitously down into some celestial underworld. It was, after all, not flying weather and the aerodrome in Moscow had been closed for a reason. But no prohibitions or weather forecasts deter the aircrews of Marshal Zhukov who was, for some reason, returning them urgently to Moscow. And so I came, however remotely, into contact of a sort with the commander-in-chief who, by commanding them to fly, enabled me to be taken along with them. I little dreamed at the time that I would meet the marshal himself twenty years on. That, too, would be in autumn.

We did, despite the weather, land on the Leningrad Highway, which was where the aerodrome was at the time. I set foot unsteadily on the soil of my home town, of my own street. But had I returned? Even today I feel I have not exhausted everything that needs to be said about what I experienced in the war. Such close personal contact with history is something infinite, because there are so many different facets. From the distance of all these years they sometimes reveal themselves more distinctly, and the reality of what happened is all the more poignant.

It had been in the second half of May 1945 that I was summoned from Finow to front headquarters to translate those diaries of Goebbels we had found. In the same room a special container was being made for sending Hitler’s teeth to Moscow. They were evidently being taken back by the general Stalin had sent to check that the body we had found really was that of Hitler.

The notebooks of Goebbels’ diaries that we had found came to an end on 8 July 1941. I found translating it slow work because his handwriting was difficult to decipher. Headquarters decided the diaries were of no immediate operational interest, my work came to a halt, and then it was time to return to my army. I knew, however, that Käthe Heusermann was still somewhere here at front headquarters and wanted to see her. Finding her proved very straightforward: she was only one stair landing away. There was a sentry posted there, who told me which door I needed. Käthe was very pleased to see me. Fritz Echtmann was there with her. He had lost weight, although that might have seemed impossible, given how thin he had been already.

He was not well and Käthe, worried, was trying to look after him. She asked quietly whether I might be able to get more suitable food for him. I did, of course, mention his condition and interceded, but whether it did any good I have no idea. Throughout the war no attention at all had been paid to that kind of ailment.

Käthe came to life in my presence, probably feeling a bit more secure. She raised her foot and deftly prodded the window frame with the toe of her shoe. To her delight the window yielded and opened wide, giving us a breath of fresh air. Perhaps until now she had not been allowed to open it. Käthe and I went out and down into the garden. The sentry did not react.

I liked everything about her: the lightness with which she walked on high heels, her voice, her womanly stoicism even in her present unclear situation. Käthe was just somebody people liked, I sensed; she was a splendid person. For many years she had supported Dr Bruck. Käthe got food vouchers for him in the Reich Chancellery. Helping a Jew was very dangerous for anyone, but for Käthe Heusermann who, with Dr Blaschke, attended Hitler and was in and out of the Reich Chancellery, in Berchtesgaden, and at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, it could, as Dr Bruck pointed out to me, have been fatal. Käthe herself never once spoke about that. We talked eagerly about all our problems as women, which needed urgent attention now that peace had come. ‘I’ll take you to my hairdresser,’ she said, ‘as soon as I get home.’

She did not get back home, and after that meeting at front headquarters I heard no more about her for twenty years.

I was working myself into the ground in the Council of Ministers’ secret archive. Getting into it at all came as a great shock and I had nearly given up. For many years it seemed hopeless. The answer was always the same: there is no access to these materials and no exceptions are likely to be made. On the crest of a wave of national pride, however, as the twentieth anniversary of victory approached, a miracle occurred and the doors opened before me. It was September 1964 and I was allowed to work in the archive for twenty days.

A document retrieved from the depths of bygone times often has an increased impact, and here we had official materials, notes, records and protocols, some of which bore my signature as a military interpreter, some that were in my own handwriting on inferior wartime paper, yellowed with the patina of time. And then there were documents I was seeing for the first time. Taken together they were a significant, eloquent, authentic component of those events.

Again I saw before me those files, folders, bundles of letters, diaries, and also the final notebook of Goebbels’ diary. There were Soviet documents and records that nobody had looked at since 1945. It was my destiny to make sense of them. My appetite for work, while I was digging through them for Berlin, May 1945, was way above normal.

A few words about documents in general. There can be all sorts: aggressive, reticent, biased, or candid and naive, but often in their nakedness the words have an aesthetic dimension. For me they reanimated what I had experienced, threw bridges back to the past, and armed my memory.

This morning, too, Vladimir Ivanovich put a new pile of folders on my table. The one on top seemed rather thin. I pulled it over and opened it. Inside were delivery notes for items the staff at front headquarters were sending to the Smersh directorate in Moscow: a table lamp, an adding machine, a stapler with instructions in German and my translation. I was about to close this irrelevant folder and move it aside when I mechanically turned over another sheet. It was like an electric shock. Two of Hitler’s tunics and his cap were being sent to the directorate, along with two other seemingly inanimate items: K. Heusermann and F. Echtmann.

I just sat there dejected, switched off. What the hell was I doing here anyway? I would stand on my head to prove, to clarify, to persuade, but no matter what digging I might do, the unyielding inhumanity would be there to stop me. Here was the proof. At that time there was no way I could bring it to the surface. I just had to live with it, another secret.

I was so jealous of my working hours in the archive: there was no telling, perhaps they had already put a time limit on them and would suddenly announce, ‘We’ve let you work here but that’s enough,’ but I continued to sit there, my enthusiasm wilting in the face of total wretchedness. It was not because I am so brave, it was because of the sheer intolerableness of the situation; there in that top secret folder was my own name. It was unendurable. I scrubbed it out.

The foreign press was excitedly debating what should be done as the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war approached. Under the statute of limitations then in force, a criminal who had not been charged with his crime within twenty years could not be held legally liable for it. So was Hitler still alive? How would the law play out in his case if he suddenly showed up? It was at this moment that the sensational ‘admission’ by Mihail Arnaudov, the Bulgarian who had accompanied us to the surgery of Dr Blaschke, became public knowledge. He claimed to reporters to have identified Hitler’s teeth, but became muddled over details. In fact, however, Arnaudov had already been exposed: ‘The False Witness’ was the damning caption under his photograph in the press. He had, nevertheless, done us a great service. Almost simultaneously, a photo of Fritz Echtmann appeared in Stern in 1964. He is photographed taking the oath in the Berchtesgaden court where he confirmed that he identified Hitler’s teeth and could therefore certify that he was dead.

The name of Heusermann cropped up too. I received a clipping from Die Welt in which she recalled our first interrogation in Buch on 10 May 1945, when she definitively recognized Hitler’s teeth, and how we showered her with thanks.

So they were both alive. But what had happened to them? Perhaps they had quietly been used as dental experts. Perhaps among our top bureaucrats there was one who could boast that his false teeth were as good as Hitler’s. Who could tell?

After many more years there chanced to come into my hands some pages of Käthe Heusermann’s memoirs. These had not been published: they were in typescript and with sentences inserted in places in her own handwriting. Poorly photographed, at times indecipherable, there was nevertheless enough that was legible to tell me about the outrageous, monstrous injustice she had suffered in Moscow. After rendering a uniquely important service to history, Heusermann was held as a dangerous criminal first in the Lubyanka, then in Lefortovo Prison in solitary confinement for six years!

In Lefortovo, finding the isolation intolerable, she rebelled and loudly demanded some company at least. A woman was moved into her cell: a cousin of Hitler (who had never met him). She and Käthe did not get along well and she again found herself alone.

‘In August 1951 I was finally charged: by my voluntary participation in Hitler’s dental treatment I had helped the bourgeois German state to prolong the war. While attending to Hitler’s teeth I could have killed him with a bottle of water and thereby done the world a favour.’ What are we to make of this? Was it lunacy, barbarism? Was it the shameful silencing of a witness? Or a bit of all three together?

Falling between such stone idols as Stalin, Zhukov and Hitler, who attract all the limelight of history, silently, inconspicuously a human life was crushed.

In the camp in Taishet [700 km northwest of Irkutsk], lacking the strength to fulfil the labour quota, Heusermann was put on penal rations. She received no parcels because her relatives knew nothing about her. She would have died of starvation had it not been for another prisoner who became her lifelong friend, a Carpathian Jew, as Käthe calls her, who spoke German. This woman was able to meet the quota and, earning a little money, had a few rubles to spend when the mobile food store came round. She shared her food with Käthe and, when released before her, memorized the addresses of her relatives. She let them know about her and Käthe began receiving parcels.

Käthe Heusermann was in prison for ten years. The end of her camp term coincided with a visit to the USSR by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who reached an agreement with Khrushchev about returning German prisoners to Germany. Then came the end of her sentence, transfer between prisons, arrival at Moscow’s Bykovo Airport. After all the nightmare she had lived through, accommodation was provided in a well-furnished house near Moscow with a garden and a library of German books. According to Heusermann this was where Field Marshal Paulus ‘served’ his sentence. Now she was leaving, there were amazing courtesies – after all her torment, a fascinating sightseeing bus trip round Moscow: the Kremlin, the University and, above all, the Moscow Metro ‘with its artistically designed stations’. She specially liked Mayakovsky station. All that was in the run-up to her departure by train for Germany. ‘And then we were off, in sleeping compartments with white bedlinen and silk lampshades, to Berlin.’

Alas, her fiancé or husband, returning from Norway and not receiving news or even knowing if she was alive, waited five years before marrying and raising a young family. Käthe was forty-five when she returned.

In these notes Käthe writes that she had a good life in Düsseldorf. For a while she worked in a dental practice, then retired with an enhanced pension. Her Carpathian Jewish friend came to stay with her in Düsseldorf every year. Happily, she did at least live another forty years after her release, a free woman. I learned she was alive from documentary filmmakers who wanted to interview us as witnesses to Hitler’s death for some anniversary.

An Australian film director who made a film titled The Berlin Wall suddenly stopped shooting and, evidently thinking something over, said to me, ‘How would it be for you to meet up with Heusermann?’ Startled by the unexpectedness of the suggestion, I bristled: ‘Why? What could I say to her?’ I had been spared, but had evidently myself come within a whisker of her fate.

I know that if we had not found Käthe, Stalin’s plan would most likely have been successful and Hitler, as Stalin wanted, would have remained a myth and a mystery. Without Heusermann it would probably have been impossible to refute his version of events. But what a scandalous price was paid, without our knowing it, for achieving our goal. What suffering we unwittingly doomed Käthe Heusermann to endure. That burden of guilt will never leave me.

Shortly before her death, Käthe and I were reunited, if only on the screen, filmed separately for a German film, each of us with her role in Berlin in those days of May 1945.

In 2000 the State Archive of the Russian Federation presented an exhibition of newly declassified documents under the title, ‘The Agony of the Third Reich: Retribution’. For me personally this event proved momentous. There were many interesting and important documents on display, including some I had never seen before.

The organizers gave me a catalogue of the exhibition inscribed ‘To Yelena Moiseyevna Rzhevskaya, without whom this exhibition, and many other things besides, would simply have been impossible.’ That was flattering, of course, but I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the organizers for just one document they found. It is listed in the catalogue together with many others.

That document is the last full stop in the saga of the death of Hitler. Here we see it publicly admitted, and the names of the people who suffered as witnesses to it. International jurisprudence had been unaware of the possibility of such a crime, but it was evidently found needful and this shameful case devised in order the better to keep a secret Stalin found expedient.

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1. Birstein reports that during the Battle of Berlin, NKVD operatives arrested Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur; his adjutant, Otto Günsche; and his valet, Heinz Linge. ‘They were held in NKVD/MVD prisons in Moscow, separately from Smersh prisoners, and brutally interrogated.’ Birstein, p. 308.

1. Wilfried von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, Buenos Aires: Dürer, 1950.

1. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London: Macmillan, 1947, p. 207. https://archive.org/stream/TrevorRoperHughTheLastDaysOfHitler/Trevor-Roper%20Hugh%20-%20The%20last%20days%20of%20Hitler_djvu.txt Accessed 8 November 2017. Tr.

1. Head of the Smersh counterintelligence section of our 3rd Shock Army

2. Head of the Smersh counterintelligence directorate of the 1st Byelorussian Front. Birstein, pp. 306–7.

1. http://feldgrau.info/other/6484-statya-r-belforda-gitler-trup-ili-legenda. Accessed 23 December 2017.

1. R. Belford’s article: ‘Hitler – a Corpse or a Legend?’, in V. K. Vinogradov, J. F. Pogonyi and N. V. Teptzov, Hitler’s Death, London: Chaucer Press, 2005, p. 277.

1. Alexey Sidnev, deputy head of the Smersh directorate of the 1st Byelorussian Front. Birstein, p. 304