The Death of Hitler: The Final Word

As of March 1945, Hitler decided to take refuge in his bunker beneath the new Reich Chancellery, in the heart of Berlin. The big final Allied offensive was launched a few weeks earlier. In the East, the Red Army, after a first failed attempt in October 1944 (Operation Gumbinnen), entered Eastern Prussia on 20 January; the Western Allies (in this instance the troops of the 1st American Army) had also entered German territory on 12 September 1944, near Aachen. The city would fall on 21 October. As the threat became more clearly apparent, Hitler left his refuge less and less often. He spent the last days of his life 8.5 metres underground. All of the details of the Führer’s last moments are supplied by the survivors of the bunker. Those men and women were mostly military personnel, as well as a few civilians (particularly secretaries). Their witness statements need to be treated with caution. Let us not forget that they were all members of the Nazi Party and, to varying degrees, admired Hitler.

These statements come from two different sources: the interrogations carried out by the Soviets and/or the Allies after the arrest of the witnesses, and the witnesses’ memoirs which they published after being freed, as well as a number of interviews. In the first instance, the information was taken by fair means or foul, not intended to be published and revealed to the wider public; in the other, it came freely from the individuals themselves. It allowed them to justify their own actions to the whole world and, most often, distance themselves from the Nazi regime.

In either case, the stories are far from neutral. But a comparison of the two sources does allow us to establish a fairly credible picture of the twelve last known days in the life of the German dictator. At least until the afternoon of 30 April 1945.

19 APRIL 1945

In the Führerbunker, they were finally getting their smiles back. The order to flee should be coming soon! Escaping the bombing, and the Berliners who were becoming increasingly hostile to the Nazi regime. They were scheduled to leave the next day, 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. What better present could they hope for than an escape to the fortress of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian mountains? That way he would be able to celebrate his fifty-sixth birthday under the milky sky of the German Alps that he loved so much. And most importantly, he would be leaving his bunker, that reinforced concrete mausoleum buried beneath the gardens of the new Reich Chancellery. Since mid-March, Hitler had transferred his quarters to this air-raid shelter right in the middle of the German capital.

The whole of the dictator’s entourage dreamed of that escape. From the Wehrmacht officers to the men who had been in the SS from the beginning, via the senior officials in the state apparatus, they were only waiting for a sign from Hitler to pack up all their belongings. Of course their haste to leave the front was officially dictated only by the need to preserve the physical health of the master of Germany and continue the fight. Few confessed their fear and wish to save their skin. How many people had taken refuge in the Chancellery? About fifty? Sixty? Hard to say. Every day, new people turned up at 77 Wilhelmstrasse and requested a place, a bed, in a dormitory or even a corridor. Technically speaking, the whole of the Führerbunker could hold two hundred people. More than that and they risked running out of oxygen in spite of the powerful ventilation system. The Führerbunker consisted of two underground shelters. First of all there was the Vorbunker, or “upper bunker,” buried 6 metres beneath the big hall of the New Chancellery. It was built in 1936 and extended over almost 300 square metres. It consisted of fourteen rooms with an area of 10 square metres each on either side of a 12-metre corridor. Created to resist the air attacks, its ceiling was 1.6 metres thick and its walls were 1.2 metres deep. Or exactly twice as thick as the shelter beneath the Aviation Ministry in Berlin. But it still wasn’t enough.

Hitler, after the first British bombing raids on Berlin in January 1943, ordered the construction of an even more solid bunker, the Hauptbunker, or “main bunker.” It was 2.5 metres deeper than the Vorbunker, or 8.5 metres underground. The two bunkers were connected by a staircase at right angles framed by airtight armoured doors capable of resisting a gas attack. The security norms in the Hauptbunker swept away all previous records. The walls were 4 metres thick. It was protected by a 3.5-metre layer of concrete and measured just under 20 metres wide by 15.6 metres long, a total of 312 square metres.[4] The partition walls of the rooms were designed to resist large-scale bombing attacks. They were 50 centimetres thick. Creature comforts were few. No parquet on the floor, no carpet, and only the barest minimum in terms of furniture. Damp was a constant presence at this depth. The pumps with the task of removing any water that seeped in did not prevent the sensation of damp and cold. The walls were painted grey or left bare. Because of the thickness of these partitions, the rooms were even smaller than in the Vorbunker. Even the ones attributed to Hitler were no more than 10 square metres in area and 3 metres high. There were six tiny rooms for the military personnel opposite his apartments. The only luxuries for the Führer were a personal bathroom, an office, and a bedroom. These rooms, unlike the rest of the shelter, were thoughtfully furnished.

“Hitler had his own bunker with only a few rooms for himself, his doctor, his manservant and the staff absolutely necessary for his team,”[5] his personal pilot, Hans Baur, remembered in his memoirs. The men that Hitler didn’t want to be separated from included: his personal doctor, Dr. Theodor Morell; his secretary, Martin Bormann; his aide-de-camp, Otto Günsche; and his valet, Heinz Linge. There was also Blondi, the Führer’s dog. She was sometimes locked up in the room where the daily strategic meetings were held. Eva Braun returned to the shelter of the New Chancellery early in April. Hitler didn’t know whether to be furious or delighted that his companion had the audacity to venture into the heart of battle. Be that as it may, he accepted her presence near him and ordered a bedroom to be assigned to her next to his own. She would be in safety there, he thought.

At least for now. Because the two bunkers soon risked being turned from refuges into a death trap if the order to flee the capital was not given quickly. The military situation was catastrophic. Since 16 April, Russian troops led by Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev launched their big offensive on Berlin. For now, they were still some way away fighting about a hundred kilometres east of the Reich capital, on the River Oder. But all the German officers knew that the city would be difficult to defend. Vast in area, with a large urban conglomeration, Berlin required too much effort in terms of men and materials to be protected. Hitler couldn’t ignore it. And yet he didn’t order the evacuation of the civilian population. By the time the fighting extended as far as the central district around the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin was still refuge to 2.5 million inhabitants.

At first, with resolute speeches and slogans, Nazi propaganda tried to transform the Oder into the last natural bulwark against the vengeful invasion of the Soviet soldiers. Muddy water against the wave of Russian steel–an image that might carry a certain panache in a Wagner opera, but in the spring of 1945 it looked like collective suicide.

The idea of suicide wasn’t displeasing to Hitler. Not his own, but that of his people. Suicide as the ultimate sacrifice to his murderous ideology.

To persuade public opinion to go on fighting, the Nazi dictator joined in personally. In early March he went to the front line at the Oder. It would be his last official outing into the combat zone. The intention was to show the Germans that their Führer was in control of the situation. The slogans proclaimed in the papers and cinema newsreels sought to be sober and martial: “The Führer in person is on the front line of the Oder!” and “The defence of Berlin is being carried out on the Oder.” But it had been a month since then… and another era, the era of hope.

If war is a matter of will, sacrifice, and, sometimes, tactical genius, most often it is based around the simplest mathematics. Stalin knew that all too well. And he didn’t stint on the forces deployed. Against a million German soldiers, the master of the Kremlin assembled over twice as many men, 2.1 million. Most importantly, the Russians were better equipped: 41,600 pieces of artillery, 6,250 tanks, and 7,500 fighter planes against 10,400 pieces of artillery, 1,500 tanks, and 3,300 fighter planes on the Nazi side.

Hitler’s generals were well aware of this. If the Red Army crossed the Oder, Berlin would only hold out for a few days. But that wasn’t serious because provision had been made for everything in the Nazi camp. The battle would be fought in the “Alpine redoubt” towards Bavaria and Austria, in a mountainous triangle between Salzburg, Bad Reichenhall, and Berchtesgaden. Since mid-March, the Führer’s secretariat had given orders to transfer the Nazi state apparatus there. A network of bunkers was built, specially connected by telephone lines. Even the Chancellery’s fleet of cars had been sent there.

Years later, during their detention in Russian prisons, Heinz Linge and Otto Günsche, Hitler’s valet and personal aide-de-camp, revealed this planned withdrawal.

After the fall of the Reich, the British secret service would interrogate Hitler’s close colleagues, whom they had taken prisoner. Their testimony corroborated the planned escape on 20 April. Here is an extract of the secret report issued on 1 November 1945 by the British Brigadier Edward John Foord, who was in charge of military information at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). This report was meant for his counterparts in the American, Soviet, and French secret services based in Berlin. “Hitler’s original intention was to flee for Berchtesgaden on 20 April 1945, the date of his birthday, and orders had been given to his servants to prepare for his arrival on that date.”[7] But Hitler would suddenly change his mind. On the afternoon of 19 April, General Hans Krebs, the new chief of staff of the land army, informed him that Russian tanks had managed to pierce the line, and that they were only 30 kilometres north of Berlin. The situation in that territory was becoming untenable. Hitler raged at his officers. He thought each was more incompetent than the other, and concluded that he would have to take charge of operations himself. Consequently, he had to stay at the heart of the battle and put off the withdrawal to Berchtesgaden.

The Führer’s decision soon circulated along the corridors of the two bunkers. His entourage were stunned by the news, and saw it as a tragedy. For the inhabitants of the Chancellery shelters, but also for any officials still in the capital–it was impossible to leave if Hitler didn’t wish to. Would he change his mind? Heinz Linge witnessed this anxious dance among the biggest figures in Nazism: “Ley, Funk, the Minister of the Economy, Rosenberg, Speer, Axmann, Ribbentrop and others who were still in Berlin were constantly making phone-calls. Their questions were always the same: ‘What’s happening at the front? Where are the Russians? Is the front holding? What’s the Führer doing? When is he leaving Berlin?’”[8] Otto Günsche systematically gave them the same reply: “The front at the Oder is holding. The Russians will not reach Berlin. The Führer sees no reason to leave Berlin.”

20 APRIL 1945

The orders were precise. Hitler didn’t want a party for his birthday. It would have been both ridiculous and inappropriate. The day before, he informed his valet, Heinz Linge, of this, and immediately demanded that his will be respected by everyone in the bunker. But no one paid any heed. The Führergeburtstag (Führer’s birthday) remained a holy date in the calendar in Nazi Germany, almost the equivalent of 25 December. So how could the most fervent zealots of the regime be prevented from celebrating their hero? It was the custom in the dictator’s closest circle to wish him a happy birthday at midnight. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers advancing on Berlin wouldn’t change that. Like good school pupils anxious to attract the favour of their teachers, seven Nazis crammed into the dictator’s tiny antechamber. Their uniforms perfectly ironed and their medals on display, chins held high, nothing in their attitude revealed their ardent desire to flee Berlin. Linge remembered that those present were General Hermann Fegelein (Eva Braun’s brother-in-law), General Wilhelm Burgdorf, SS officer Otto Günsche, the diplomat Walther Hewel (Ribbentrop’s liaison agent, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs), Werner Lorenz (representative of the Reich’s head of press), Julius Schaub (Hitler’s personal aide-de-camp), and Alwin-Broder Albrecht (Hitler’s naval aide-de-camp).

They were all bustling about around Linge, the dilettante SS officer who had only ever seen the front from an open-topped car beside his master. Linge, who wore the epaulettes of a lieutenant colonel even though he was only a valet. But this was no longer a time for contempt. Linge was the last person in the bunker who was in permanent contact with Hitler. All of those proud officers, those Nazi Party officials, came to him to persuade the Führer to accept their best wishes. “After informing Hitler of this,” Linge recalled, “he gave me a tired and depressed look. I had to tell the arrivals that the Führer had no time to receive them.”[9] But that didn’t take into account Fegelein’s determination. This young and scheming thirty-eight-year-old general had felt almost untouchable since marrying Gretl, Eva Braun’s sister, on 3 June 1944. Hitler couldn’t refuse to receive them if it came from Eva, Fegelein said to himself. And he was right! He asked his sister-in-law to persuade Hitler. Reluctantly, the Führer came out and quickly shook the hands extended to him. His men barely had time to wish him “happy birthday,” before he returned to his study, his back bent. Fegelein was proud. He thought he had made his point. That could always be useful when the right time came.

During the rest of that day, other personalities from the Reich came to the Chancellery that stood above the bunkers. Hitler left his shelter and came up into the fresh air to meet them in the halls of the imperial building. One by one the apparatchiks saluted the Führer like serfs saluting a feudal lord, more out of obligation than devotion. The Gestapo kept a close eye on everyone’s attitudes, and no one was immune to the possibility of a death sentence for treason. Not even the generals and the ministers. Top-ranking visitors included the Nazis most fully implicated in the regime: Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS; Hermann Göring, Reich Vice-Chancellor; Admiral Karl Dönitz; Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

With an arm outstretched in attempts at a fascist salute, they were engaging in an act of pretence. Pretence that the man in front of them was still capable of saving Berlin, let alone the country. Hitler was officially fifty-six, but he looked more like a cursed phantom. A phantom haunting the damp soil of the capital of his Reich.

What had become of the man who had galvanised millions of Germans only twelve years before? An old man with Parkinson’s disease, barely capable of ruling over a reinforced concrete air-raid shelter. Here is what Erwin Giesing, one of his personal doctors, wrote of the Führer after examining him in February 1945:

Erich Kempka, his personal chauffeur, was present on that occasion. “On the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday, 20 April 1945, I reflected on past years when the German people celebrated this day and held great celebrations and parades.”[11] Gone were the grand parades! Gone the military bands with their bombastic music in the square of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. The cohorts of admirers lined up by the side of the road clutching little black swastika flags lay crushed by the Allied bombs. As to the hundreds of diplomats who had come from all over the world to offer their allegiance to the strong man of a conquering Germany, where were they now?

There is an astonishing document that sums up this fall of the Nazi regime. It is in the Russian State Military Archives in Moscow. When the Red Army entered the Reich Chancellery on 1 May 1945, they laid hands on a curious book. It is a large book bound in red leather, emblazoned with an eagle holding a laurel wreath with a swastika in the middle. This document is nothing other than a visitor’s book. Foreign diplomats invited to major ceremonies had to write their names in it. The feasts celebrated included New Year’s Eve, the national German day of celebration, and, of course, the Führer’s birthday. Every guest signed, gave their function and sometimes declared their fervent admiration of the Nazi regime.

On 20 April 1939, Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday. He had already been in power for six years, he had annexed Austria, the Sudetenland, and then Bohemia-Moravia, he had openly persecuted the German Jews, and he had caused ever greater alarm to the European democracies. But no matter. The dictator was no less available to the sixty or so diplomats who had come to pay him tribute. Their decoratively written signatures are lined up over six pages of the visitors’ book. They include representatives from France and the United Kingdom. For them, it would be the last opportunity to wish Hitler a happy birthday, because in less than five months, on 1 September, war would be declared between those two countries and Germany.

Let us turn the pages. Here we are in 1942. Hitler is celebrating his fifty-third birthday. He’s stopped making the western democracies nervous; he terrifies them now when he isn’t actually destroying them. The list of victims is long: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Poland… The Führer is at the height of his power, and that is apparent from the number of diplomats attending his birthday party. Over a hundred signatures over twelve pages. Admittedly there are no French people now, no British names, and even fewer Americans, but there are still Italians, Japanese, Spaniards. And one loyal guest at the Nazi celebrations, the apostolic nuncio of Pope Pius XII.

20 April 1945. The last date in this imposing collection of signatures. No more block capitals at the top of the chapter. One imagines that the Führer’s personal secretariat were short of time. In its place, a simple date hastily scribbled in the margin: 20.4.45. And five signatures from diplomats. Five. Who are they? Their names are barely legible, the writing seems so nervous. The ones that can be deciphered are the following: an Afghan ambassador, a Thai, one from China. Where are the other ambassadors? The ones who were honoured to attend the regime’s celebrations? They have disappeared. Even the representative of the Vatican no longer added his signature to this now cursed book. But the apostolic nuncio hadn’t missed a single Nazi ceremony since 1939. He was still there for the New Year’s celebration on 1 January 1945. His conscientious handwriting on these villainous pages attests to diplomatic connections that many would prefer to keep under wraps.

On 20 April 1945, everyone is fleeing Hitler. All those who can, or who dare. Even among the Nazis, not least in the first circle of senior leaders, including one of the most emblematic of the regime: Marshal Göring.

Hermann Göring certainly did come to Berlin. In line with his outrageous temperament, he enthusiastically swore his profound attachment, his eternal loyalty and his certainty of imminent victory. Then he fled as quickly as possible for the mountains of Obersalzberg. Not for fear of the fighting in Berlin but, he claimed, to prepare the counter-offensive in the Bavarian Alps. The hasty departure of the spirited marshal did not go unnoticed in the bunker. “After a surprisingly short time, Göring left Hitler’s office and the Führerbunker,” wrote the Führer’s personal chauffeur, Erich Kempka. “The same day he fled Berlin and never came back.”[12] Göring’s escape shocked the other inhabitants of the bunker, but more than that, it terrified them. Would they have time to wait for Hitler’s decision to leave Berlin? Adjutant Rochus Misch was a telephone operator in the Führerbunker. He bears witness to the danger that lay in wait: “On 20 April, the day of Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, Soviet tanks had reached the outskirts of the capital. The city was practically encircled. That day or the day before, someone went down to the bunker to announce that the roar of artillery fire could be heard.”[13]

For the Russian troops, 20 April 1945 was an extremely worrying date. What if the rumours of a Nazi special weapon, a weapon that could turn the war around, were true? According to German propaganda, that weapon was due to be unveiled on the day of Hitler’s birthday. “Some people had seen tarpaulin-covered vehicles transporting the secret weapon in question,” said Elena Rzhevskaya, a German interpreter with the Red Army. “We fantasised, trying to imagine its destructive force. We waited for the announcement on the radio.”[14] But nothing came. That new weapon was the atom bomb. Nazi engineers had been working on it for years. The Allied air raids on German industrial sites over several months considerably hampered Hitler’s mad project. The Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, speculated in his memoirs that “with extreme concentration of all our resources, we could have had a German atom bomb by 1947, but certainly we could not beat the Americans, whose bomb was ready by August 1945.”[15]

21 APRIL 1945

The Russian tanks were now no more than a few kilometres from Berlin. The Soviets threatened the capital on three fronts: to the north, the east, and the south. To the west, on the other hand, the city was still spared. The Anglo-American offensive had slowed down, and their first troops were 500 kilometres away from the outskirts of Berlin. Hitler took advantage of the fact to transfer his units from the western front towards the Russians.

That didn’t make the situation any less catastrophic. The Soviet shells were now reaching the Chancellery gardens. The exploding bombs blew in the windows of Hitler’s palace, dug furrows in the marble walls as if they were made of cardboard, and the noise echoed all the way down to the underground shelters. Once more, the Führer’s entourage begged him to flee. There was still time. Gatow Airport, south-west of Berlin, was accessible. Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, had moved to the bunker some weeks previously to be ready to evacuate the Führer at any moment. Several aeroplanes had been specially prepared, and were only waiting for a green light to take off. Bormann, the most trusted member of Hitler’s inner circle, was also urging an immediate departure. The previous day he had even taken the initiative of accelerating the transfer of Berlin General Headquarters to Obersalzberg.

Hope faded again with Hitler’s decision to launch a counter-attack. In order to carry it out, he was counting on SS General Felix Steiner, a military man with a strong character and a complexion tanned by two years on the Russian front. He was given the difficult task of preventing the fatal encircling of Berlin. Steiner had certain points in his favour in this respect. Hitler had assembled thousands of well-equipped and battle-hardened men for him, in a new army that he called “Armeeabteilung Steiner” (Steiner Army Detachment). It was clear to the Führer that these shock troops would smash the assault from the Red Army. As in 1940, during the battle for France, Hitler would show these gentlemen of the Wehrmacht how to wage a war. But things had changed in five years. The German units, by virtue of having been killed, now existed only in Hitler’s autocratic ravings. The troops who were supposed to join Steiner’s army were virtual. They had disappeared in the noise of combat, or were obstructed by Soviet troops and unable to move towards Steiner.

Hitler refused to see that. And his entourage didn’t dare to put him right. Whatever the situation, the Führer decided to stay as close as possible to the fighting, in his bunker. There was no question of him leaving Berlin at the height of battle. However, he did agree to his personal belongings and the military archives being transferred to safety in the “alpine fortress.” At the same time he indicated that anyone who wanted to leave was free to do so. The news immediately spread through the two bunkers and at first set off a panic. The candidates for evacuation knew that the few four-propeller Condors and three-engine Junkers still in service wouldn’t be able to take everyone. A list of the lucky elect was drawn up. People were practically fighting to appear on it. “Everyone wanted to leave. New people were constantly turning up who absolutely had to get to Obersalzberg on the pretext that their families were in Bavaria, that they came from the region, that they wanted to defend it on the spot, etc. In fact they only wanted to get away from Berlin as quickly as possible.”[16]

All the planes would reach their destination. All but one. The one containing Hitler’s personal documents was shot down by the American Air Force.

The chief Nazi’s luck had deserted him once and for all.

22 APRIL 1945

In the morning, the Russian artillery fire resumed its murderous rain of shells on the Chancellery. Even about ten metres underground, the bombing echoed dully, and finally woke Hitler at about 10 o’clock in the morning. The Führer complained about the noise. Who was daring to disturb his sleep like that? Everyone in the Führerbunker knew that he didn’t usually wake until 1 pm.

For several months Hitler had suffered from insomnia, and didn’t go to bed until about four or five in the morning. Everyone around him quickly had to adapt to the new sleep cycle of the master of Germany. Because he couldn’t get to sleep, he decided to take advantage of his wakeful nights. So it was quite natural for him to organise military meetings at between two and three in the morning. The secretaries weren’t spared, because they were regularly summoned to drink tea with him. And that always happened in the middle of the night. An exhausting rhythm of life.

Hitler couldn’t bear to be woken at ten in the morning. He complained to his valet, SS officer Linge. “What is that noise?” he asked. “Was the Chancellery district being bombed?”

Linge reassured him that it was only the German anti-aircraft defence, and a few Russian long-range guns.

The reality was quite different. The defences around Berlin were cracking under pressure from the Russians. To the south, they had opened a breach, and were making their way towards the outskirts. To the north and east, the Red Army tanks were crushing everything in their path.

But that would soon stop because Steiner and his army must by now have started attacking the assailing forces. A matter of time, Hitler imagined. At four o’clock in the afternoon, during a situation conference, his general staff dared to tell him the terrible truth: for want of men and materials, the Steiner offensive had not taken place. And more importantly, it never would.

According to witnesses, the dictator’s reaction was terrifying. Nicolaus von Below, the Führer’s Luftwaffe armaments officer, was there. “Hitler became very irate. He ordered everybody from the room with the exception of Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, and Burgdorf and then unleashed a furious tirade against the Army commanders and their ‘long-term-treachery.’ I was sitting near the door in the annexe and heard almost every word. It was a terrible half-hour.”[17] The dictator was so furious that the Wehrmacht and SS generals present in the room reacted like terrified schoolboys. They lowered their heads and avoided their master’s eye. Trusty Linge, an intimate of the Führer’s, wasn’t spared his fury. “There you have it, Linge. Even the SS goes behind my back and deceives me wherever they can. Now I shall remain in Berlin and die here.”[18]

Die here! The idea that the Führer might die chilled everyone in the room. Josef Goebbels was informed, and hurried back to the bunker. At first he tried to bring him back to reason. Seeing that that was impossible, he did an about-turn. As usual, he aped his master and announced to anyone willing to listen that he too would stay in Berlin whatever the cost. He even managed to find the idea of the ultimate sacrifice absolute genius. Among those in the room, discouragement did battle with disgust. The officers couldn’t understand Goebbels’ morbid complacency. Suicide meant abandoning the German people. That was an impossible option! Not with the enemy at the gates of the capital. “What are your orders?” the generals asked, almost begged Hitler. They had become so accustomed to blind obedience over many years that taking initiatives seemed impossible, inconceivable.

Just after the war, in June 1945, one of the officers present in the conference room, General Alfred Jodl, later captured by the British, would communicate some details about the crisis of 22 April. “I have no orders to give you, Hitler replied. If you want a boss, turn to Göring. He’s the one who will give you orders.” Göring? Jodl, like the other officers in the general staff, refused to be ordered about by one of the most corrupt and incompetent men in the Reich. “No soldier will agree to fight for him!” they cried. “But who’s talking about going on fighting? It’s no longer a question of fighting, Hitler continued seriously. We need to negotiate… and Göring is better than me at that game.”[19]

Like a good Bavarian officer, Jodl clicked his heels and transmitted the information to General Karl Koller, Göring’s representative in the bunker. Koller left immediately afterwards for Obersalzberg to warn them about Hitler’s decision.

Goebbels witnessed the scene. There was no question of letting his mortal enemy, fat Göring, take power. If Hitler died, the new Führer would be automatically Göring. To Goebbels, it was obvious that he had to persuade the Führer to keep the war going. It had to remain a hope, a military option. Goebbels went to see Jodl. He asked him if it was still possible to prevent the fall of Berlin. “I told him it was possible only if we disengaged our troops from the Elbe to relaunch them in the defence of Berlin.”[20] Goebbels immediately informed Hitler. That hope exists, he said. So it wouldn’t be Steiner’s army that would deliver the Reich, but the army of another general, Walther Wenck, at the head of the 12th army. This was made up of about fifteen divisions consisting of almost 70,000 men, most of them trainee officers and cadets, badly trained and badly equipped.

Hitler agreed to believe in this new chimera.

Goebbels had won against Göring.

23 APRIL 1945

The previous day’s crisis had left its traces deep in the two bunkers. Some of the generals and senior officers in the Nazi apparatus had left the shelter as one leaves an area contaminated by a deadly virus. The intimate circle shrank a little more. The only ones remaining were the last stalwart supporters, the crazed devotees of the Reich, including Goebbels, who had gone to the Führerbunker the previous day with his wife and children, the loyal Eva Braun, and the servile Martin Bormann.

Since making the decision to stay in Berlin to the bitter end, Hitler seemed calmer, almost resigned. Of course, his physical health remained fragile, his left hand trembled more and more, and he regularly complained of pain in his right eye. Every day, Linge had to give him an eye ointment containing 1 per cent cocaine. Despite this, according to the testimony of the bunker’s inhabitants his mental health was unaffected.

However, a radio telegram shook Hitler’s fragile serenity to the core. The message arrived from Obersalzberg late in the afternoon, and was signed by Göring. The commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe had been informed of Hitler’s decision to give him the chance of negotiating in his name. This was quite unthinkable in normal circumstances, so accustomed was Hitler to make all his decisions himself. The regime’s heir apparent drew the conclusion that his master was no longer at liberty to move or even to act. Was he already in the hands of the Russians? Or technically incapable of communicating his orders to the various general staffs of the German Army? However that might have been, from the depths of his command post in the Bavarian Alps, Göring surmised that Hitler was no longer in a position to rule the Reich, and that he had to take his place. He prudently informed his master of his intention, and gave him the opportunity to reassure him and therefore stop everything. Here is an excerpt from the radio telegram: “[…] I feel obliged to consider, if no reply reaches me before 22 hours, that you have lost your freedom to act. I should then apply the conditions of your decree and take the necessary decisions for the good of our Nation and our Fatherland.”

No sooner had the message reached the bunker than Bormann intercepted it. The Führer’s secretary was delighted. At last he was going to be able to get rid of Göring, that man whom he had considered incompetent and corrupt for years. He presented himself before Hitler clutching the radio telegram and shouting about a coup d’état, an ultimatum, treason. And he suggested leaving immediately for Obersalzberg to restore order to the Reich and throw Göring in irons.

Bormann had discovered that on this day, 23 April, south-west Berlin was still free, and they would be able to find an escape route. Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister and architect of the Reich, witnessed the scene. At first Bormann’s ranting had no effect on Hitler. But then a second radio telegram from Göring arrived:

Bormann was delighted, here was confirmation of Göring’s duplicity. “It is an act of treason,” he told a shocked Hitler. “He is already sending telegrams to the members of the government to tell them he is going to assume your functions tonight at 24.00.” Speer remembered the Führer’s reaction: “With flushed face and staring eyes, Hitler seemed to have forgotten the presence of his entourage. ‘I’ve known it all along. I know that Göring is lazy. He let the air force go to pot. He was corrupt. His example made corruption possible in our state. Besides, he has been a drug addict for years. I’ve known it all along.’”[21] Göring would not have the opportunity to plead his case. Bormann assumed the task of writing the telegram to his enemy:

At the same time, the commander of the SS units of Obersalzberg received another message from Bormann. It stated that Göring has been guilty of treason, that he must be arrested immediately and that if Berlin were to fall over the coming days, Göring would have to be executed.

Half an hour later, Göring’s reply reached the Chancellery bunker. Officially, he stepped down from all his functions because of a serious heart condition.

24 APRIL 1945

Berlin was almost entirely encircled. Schönefeld Airport on the city outskirts had fallen. Zhukov and Konev were making rapid progress. The two Soviet marshals were staking their careers on this battle. Whoever caused the fall of Berlin and caught Hitler would emerge victorious.

Every hour, thousands of Germans were perishing under the Russian bombs. Most of them were civilians, women and children, all trapped in the capital. In the German army, the legal age limits for bearing arms had been considerably enlarged. Teenagers and pensioners were being requisitioned and thrown onto this apocalyptic battlefield.

Refusal to fight, trying to surrender to the Russians to bring an end to a war that was lost in advance, would lead to an equally tragic end. Groups of Nazi fanatics scoured the streets of Berlin day and night in search of “traitors,” who they publicly shot or hanged.

Hidden away in his little room in the Führerbunker, Goebbels was bursting with energy. The Reich capital was about to fall, while the Propaganda Minister sent out more and more delirious and threatening communiqués. He called on all Berliners, healthy or wounded, to come and swell the groups of Nazi fighters. Vacillators were “sons of bitches.” At the same time, German radio unstintingly broadcast messages like: “The Führer is thinking for you, you have only to carry out orders!” or “The Führer is Germany.”

The Nazi daily Panzerbär (“The Armoured Bear,” in reference to the historically emblematic bear of Berlin), published on its front page on 24 April 1945 what would be Hitler’s last declaration:

Nearly ten metres underground, Hitler and his last faithful followers could not imagine the hell that Berliners were living through above ground. And for good reason–they didn’t dare to emerge into the open air. Only the SS men responsible for the safety of the air-raid shelter and its occupants went in and out of the building. But their opinion concerning the situation was never sought and, besides, they didn’t think for a moment of giving an account of events to the Führer. As for the idea of trying to leave the shelter, even battle-hardened soldiers shivered at the very idea. Martial law had been imposed on the whole of Berlin since 20 April. Rochus Misch, the bunker’s telephone operator, did not escape that anxiety: “Wandering through the ruins, the Gestapo would soon pick me up. […] Hentschel [his colleague on the bunker telephone switchboard] and I were convinced that the secret police would kill us if they ever caught us.”[22]

With every passing hour the Führerbunker was turning into a tomb for its occupants.

Still, life was becoming gradually more organised between the thick concrete walls. The daily reports of bad news were flooding in monotonously. The final act of Hitler’s tragedy was playing itself out most dramatically. There were barely a few dozen players, but they played their part with absurd perfection. In this microcosm of a Third Reich in its death throes, a small group of animals were desperately trying to survive. There were military men convinced that blind obedience to their boss would absolve them of all responsibility, politicians united in mutual hatred, and a young generation of Germans Nazified from their school days onwards and devoted unto death. Hitler alone was still able to unite men and women whose nerves were in shreds, and keep them from killing each other.

If some people were beginning to doubt, most were still totally devoted to the cult of the Führer. He had calculated, predicted, organised everything, they thought. All those repeated defeats could only be a trap that would inevitably close on the Russians. The proof was that Hitler seemed so relaxed. He played with his Alsatian Blondi, who had just had puppies. They ran yapping around the corridors filled with boots and helmets. Besides, the whole bunker had become a nursery since Goebbels had asked his wife, the proud blonde Magda, to come and join him with their six children. Room was found for them in the Vorbunker. Four rooms were requisitioned just for them and their mother. Joseph Goebbels himself lived in the holy of holies, the Hauptbunker. He was only a few metres away from his beloved little ones. There was Helga, twelve, Hildegard, eleven, Helmut, nine, Holdine, eight, Hedwig, seven, and Heidrun, who was only four. They all had names beginning with the letter H, H for Hitler. That was the least the Goebbels could do for their Führer.

How could children aged between four and twelve spend their time in a bunker under heavy bombing day and night? They played. They squabbled. They ran shouting from one room to another. Sometimes the soldiers were obliged to tell them off and chase them out of the military operation rooms. Others took the time to teach them a song, inevitably a song to the glory of the one they affectionately called “Uncle Führer.” The children didn’t seem worried. They very quickly got accustomed to the din of the bombs, the trembling concrete foundations. Even more than adults like Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Morell. This obese charlatan with questionable hygiene and a grim expression was literally dying of fear. Unable to go on, he begged for and was granted the right to leave, since his heart, he claimed, could no longer bear the constant hammering of the Russian artillery. The little Goebbels children were almost amused by the severe and worried expressions of the SS men around them. Naively, they couldn’t imagine their “Uncle Führer” lying to them. Hadn’t he said that nice soldiers would turn up soon and send the wicked Russians packing back home? And that tomorrow they would have permission to go and play in the garden, in the fresh air?

Magda Goebbels tried to keep herself occupied too. That almost Wagnerian figure of the Nazi wife used every means she could think of not to crack. She was forty-three, and had long ago ceased to believe in the fantastical tales that her husband told her. By now she was only pretending to believe in certain victory and the prescience of the Führer. She had understood perfectly well that the bunker would be her and her children’s grave. She quickly found an activity to keep herself from losing her mind, an obsession with housekeeping that might have seemed absurd in such dramatic moments, but which brought her back towards the world of the living: keeping her children’s clothes clean and tidy. Like the Valkyries so dear to the Nazi imagination, she accepted the tragic end that was about to engulf her family. She was convinced that if the Third Reich had to perish, then she preferred to perish with it and preserve her children from life in a world without Nazism. Only one fear paralysed her–that of being killed too soon. Too soon to be able to take her beloved children’s lives herself. Or worse, to lack the courage at the last moment, and not find the strength for the six-fold infanticide that she had to commit. Then, regularly, with an almost crazed look in her eye, she asked around in the bunker for help, for support. Help to kill her children when the moment came.

25 APRIL 1945

The offensive by the Wenck army produced nothing. The spirited general was stopped at Potsdam, half an hour south-west of the capital. The centre of Berlin now offered itself up to the Soviet shock troops. The New Chancellery, that massive building designed and built by the regime’s architect, Albert Speer, was standing up surprisingly well to the deluge of the Russian guns. And yet the artillery of the Red Army was concentrating its fire on the Führer’s lair. For their part, the Americans were carrying out a heavy bombing raid on Obersalzberg. The Nazi leaders’ main option of retreat had just disappeared.

In the corridors of the Führerbunker, discipline, normally so strict, had made way for an end-of-an-era atmosphere. Men smoked and drank alcohol, both normally unthinkable, so opposed was Hitler to both. The Führer’s secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, had nothing to do (the two other secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Johanna Wolf, had left the bunker on 22 April), and talked with the Führer’s personal dietician, Constanze Manziarly, often joined by Eva Braun, around a cup of tea. Magda Goebbels kept to herself. Everyone avoided her, so close did she seem to madness, and liable to burst into tears every time she mentioned her children.

Eva Braun, on the other hand, was quite at her ease in the bunker. The young thirty-three-year-old was as radiant as ever. She passionately savoured those historical moments. After all, the Führer’s mistress was able to live life to the full. Hitler was too enfeebled not to need her. The elegant Bavarian never shed her smile, and loved receiving high-ranking visitors at the bunker. Obviously, comfort was sparse, and she apologised in advance. So when Speer dropped in to say goodbye to the Führer, Eva Braun invited him to have a drink. For the occasion, she even managed to lay her hands on some chilled champagne–some Moët et Chandon. Instead of the Promethean reception rooms of the Chancellery, they had to make do with a little room with bare walls and the sharp smell of concrete. “It was pleasantly furnished; she had had some of the expensive furniture which I had designed for her years ago brought from her two rooms in the upper floors of the Chancellery,” Albert Speer recalled. “She was the only prominent candidate for death in this bunker who displayed an admirable and superior composure. While all the others were abnormal–exaltedly heroic like Goebbels, bent on saving his skin like Bormann, exhausted like Hitler, or in total collapse like Frau Goebbels–Eva Braun radiated an almost gay serenity.”[23] And with good cause–the young woman was about to get what Hitler, her lover, had been refusing her for so long: marriage! While she waited for her wedding night, she spent her time making herself up, adjusting her clothes, serving tea to her unfortunate neighbours, and regretting the fact that the war was so murderous for the Germans. As to her own death, it wasn’t a problem, she was ready for it. But how to die with dignity? “I want to be a pretty corpse,” she confided in Traudl Junge. So she couldn’t very well fire a bullet into her mouth and blow her pretty face apart like an over-ripe melon. That would be terribly ugly, and besides, how would anyone recognise her? she argued. She was in no doubt that her body would be photographed by the winners and presented to the whole world and then in the history books. The only solution, she concluded, was poison. Cyanide. Apparently all the officers in the bunker had some in capsules. Even Hitler.

26 APRIL 1945

All Hitler’s generals were abandoning him. Hitler woke up in a bad mood. The Wehrmacht officers, the SS officers, he loathed them all. In his eyes they were incompetent at best, at worst they were traitors and cowards. The bunker was surrounded. Now it was the time for Tempelhof Airport to fall into Russian hands. All that remained was the runways in Gatow, in the south-west of the city. For how long would they hold out? The Russians had doubled their attacks. But a small two-seater aeroplane, a Fieseler-Storch, managed to land. Its pilot was the air force general Ritter von Greim. He travelled with Hanna Reitsch, his companion, twenty years his junior, who acted as his navigator. She had just celebrated her thirty-third birthday and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see Hitler again for anything in the world. And as a plus, as a civilian German flying ace, she wasn’t afraid of slaloming between the shells of the Soviet anti-aircraft fire. Von Greim and Reitsch had been in Rechlin, a Nazi base 150 kilometres to the north, when, two days earlier, they had received a clear order from the Reich general staff: “Come to Berlin straight away! The Führer wants to see you.”

Having arrived in Gatow, von Greim interrogated the Nazi officers: why was he risking his life to come to Berlin? Secret defence, they told him. “But does the order still apply?” the general said irritably. “More than ever.” the officer replied. “Go to the bunker whatever the cost.”

Gatow Airport was only about thirty kilometres from the Führerbunker, but the routes were almost entirely blocked by enemy checks. The only way of reaching the Führer was by air. So they had to take off again in their little aeroplane. The pair did their best to dodge the Soviet shells that pierced the Berlin sky. After a few minutes, the hedgehopping plane was hit by machine-gun fire. “I’m wounded,” von Greim shouted, before fainting. A bullet had passed through the cabin and struck him in the foot. Hanna Reitsch, sitting behind him, reached over his shoulder and grabbed the joystick. She knew Berlin like the back of her hand, having flown over it many times. But she had never piloted a plane under fire from the most powerful artillery in the world. In Gatow, the Nazi officer had assured her that a makeshift runway had been cleared so that they could land near the bunker, beside the Brandenburg Gate. Hans Baur had seen to everything. The lampposts had been removed over several hundred metres to keep the plane from breaking its wings on landing. An ingenious idea. Reitsch just about managed to land in the middle of the street, but a little further away from the place Baur had prepared. The propeller was still turning when the Soviet soldiers arrived, but a Nazi vehicle arrived at great speed to pick up the pilot and her wounded companion.

They reached the bunker at about 6:00 pm, safe and almost sound. The first to welcome them was Magda Goebbels. In the middle of a fit of hysterics, she burst into tears when she saw them. Did she think they had come to take them all away? Von Greim paid no attention; he had regained consciousness but was bleeding copiously from his foot. He was immediately taken to a little operating theatre. Hitler soon joined him there. At last a man of courage, he rejoiced. The rest of the dialogue between von Greim and Hitler was reported by Hanna Reitsch to the American secret services in October 1945, after she was taken prisoner:

Hanna Reitsch, who admired the Führer without ever having been a member of the Nazi Party, described the scene as “dramatically poignant.” According to her, Hitler had tears in his eyes when he spoke of Göring’s betrayal. He seemed deeply hurt, almost like a child. Then, as so often, his mood switched in a flash. His eyes sprang back to life, a frown appeared on his brow and his lips pursed nervously. “An ultimatum!” he began shrieking like a lunatic. “An ultimatum!! I am spared nothing. No allegiance is respected, there is no honour, there are no disappointments I have not had, no betrayals that I have not experienced, and now this on top of everything. Nothing is left. Every wrong has been done to me!”

Von Greim and Reitsch didn’t dare to interrupt him. They were petrified by this outpouring of hatred from the man for whom they had just risked their lives.

They knew nothing about the “betrayal.” Von Greim was a Luftwaffe general and, as such, depended directly on the “traitor” Göring, who remained the all-powerful German Aviation Minister until 23 April. “I immediately had Göring arrested for treason to the Reich,” Hitler continued calmly. “I stripped him of all his functions and drummed him out of all our organisations. That was why I summoned you to me.”

Von Greim sat up painfully in his makeshift bed, his foot causing him terrible pain. He concealed a rictus of pain.

“I hereby appoint you Göring’s successor as Oberbefehlshaber [commander-in-chief] of the Luftwaffe.”

So that was why Hitler had asked von Greim to come to the bunker! Such an appointment could have been made perfectly well at a distance. But Hitler had absolutely no idea about the situation outside his shelter, and he was still utterly unconcerned about the lives of his compatriots, even when they were the last generals still loyal to him.

Now that the announcement had been made officially, von Greim had nothing to do but head back towards Rechlin. Not a moment to lose, the Führer told him. And the wound in his foot? An unfortunate incident, but one that was endurable in wartime! “Go away and lead the counter-offensive from the air,” Hitler ordered. Except that the sky over Berlin was now Russian-speaking. Making an emergency landing on a bombed street was one thing, taking off again quite another. Hitler couldn’t have cared less. His orders were more important than reality on the ground. So Rechlin airbase had sent its best pilots, its very last, to bring the brand-new head of the Luftwaffe to Berlin. One by one, the German planes were being shot down by the Russians. Von Greim and Reitsch would have to extend their stay in the bunker. A prospect that enchanted them, since the prospect of dying by their Führer’s side seemed like the ultimate privilege.

Later that evening, Hitler summoned the young woman pilot. She was the same age as Eva Braun, but very different in character. Hanna Reitsch liked nothing more than adventure and risk and the excitement that went with them. A test pilot for the Luftwaffe, she was used in the regime’s propaganda to illustrate the valour and courage of the Third Reich. As a result she was the only woman in the Nazi empire to receive the Iron Cross, the country’s highest military decoration, and from the hands of Hitler himself. That was at a different time, when Nazi Germany terrified the whole of Europe and defeated all opposing armies one by one. In those days Hitler had subjugated men and women with his vengeful words. It was said that his eyes penetrated you like a blade of the finest steel. On 26 April, did Hanna Reitsch recognise the man who had charmed her so? The man, or rather the ghost in front of her–was it really Hitler? Here is what she said to the American secret services about that conversation: “In a very small voice, he said to me, ‘Hanna, you are one of those who will die with me. Each of us has a capsule of poison like this one.’ He gave me a little bottle.” For the intrepid pilot it was the coup de grâce. She slumped on a chair and burst into tears. For the first time she realised that the situation was desperate. “My Führer, why are you staying?” she asked him. “Why are you depriving Germany of your life? When the newspapers announced that you were going to stay in Berlin until the end, the people were petrified with horror. ‘The Führer must live, so that Germany can live,’ that’s what the people said. Stay alive, my Führer, it’s the will of every German!”

How did Hitler react to such a declaration of love, such an act of devotion? There were no witnesses to the scene, and only Hanna Reitsch related it. Did she want to present Hitler as a man of good sense, a head of state concerned about the future of his people, a humanist? Certainly. She attributed sympathetic words to him, words that no other member of his intimate circle had ever reported on other occasions. But let us go on experiencing that episode in Hanna Reitsch’s version.

With great calm and profundity, the Nazi dictator told the young woman that he could not escape his destiny, that he had chosen to stay in Berlin the better to defend the three million or so Berliners trapped by the Soviet attacks. “By staying, I thought all the troops of the country would follow my example and come to the aid of the city. I hoped they would make superhuman efforts to save me and thus save my three million compatriots.” Hitler sacrificing himself for the good of his people? Until now he had never cared about the fate of the Berliners. Quite the contrary. Though his advisers had begged him to leave his bunker to take refuge in the Bavarian Alps, thus sparing Berlin a long destructive siege, he had always refused.

Traudl Junge, one of the Führer’s personal secretaries still present in the bunker, remembered Hanna Reitsch being fascinated by Hitler. “She must have been one of those who adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations. […] She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals.”[24]

Hanna Reitsch incapable of the slightest objectivity where Hitler was concerned? What is certain is that she left the Führer with a capsule of poison in her hand and went back to see von Greim with his wounded foot. She told him the war had been lost.

27 APRIL 1945

It was impossible to sleep. In spite of the thickness of the ceilings and the walls, the Führerbunker was shaking to its foundations. The inferno of the Russian artillery continued all night. Hitler understood that a counter-attack by Wenck had been blocked, and that his general needed fresh troops. But where were they to be found?

For their part, the inhabitants of the shelter were losing hope and cracking one after another. The ones who didn’t drown their sorrows wondered out loud about the best way to put an end to it once and for all. Others locked themselves away in their room to weep, away from other people’s eyes. Hitler sensed that he was losing control. Rather than delivering yet another military briefing, he decided to organise a quite extraordinary meeting. He called it simply a “suicide meeting.” Calmly, before a thunderstruck entourage, he set out his plans so that no one would miss his suicide when the time came. In plain language, as soon as the Russian soldiers set foot in the garden of the Chancellery, they were all to take their own lives. None of those close to him were to be taken alive. To preserve themselves from such a disaster, those who hesitated could count on the zeal of loyal SS men or members of the Gestapo to help them. The meeting ended with the usual Nazi salutes and noisy pledges to keep their promises until the end.

Once that had been sorted out, Hitler was appalled. A loud noise rang out through the bunker. Not bombs this time, but something else. Linge, his valet, told him that the ventilation in the shelter was barely working. The Führer grew worried. Without it, it was impossible to breathe. An enormous fire was raging outside, just above the bunker. It was the flames that had caused the ventilation system to jam. Hitler listened to his valet’s explanations with anxious perplexity. A fire in the gardens of the Chancellery? Could it be? For the first time since 20 April and the little improvised birthday party ceremony improvised in the great hall of the New Chancellery, the Führer asked to leave his shelter. He wanted to see what was happening with his own eyes. He struggled towards the stairs leading to the surface and climbed them one step at a time, clutching the metal rail. Linge was just behind him to keep him from falling. The thick armoured door leading to the garden was closed. Linge was hurrying to open it when a shell crashed only a few metres away. The explosion was deafening. When the valet turned around to check that the Führer was all right, he had disappeared, he had already returned to his lair. He wouldn’t leave it again.

SS General Fegelein had left the bunker and had no plans to come back. The absence of Himmler’s official representative went unnoticed until the evening, at a meeting of the general staff. The Führer entered in a frosty rage; he knew that Fegelein wasn’t joining in with his decision to commit collective suicide. The inveterate gambler and skirt-chaser was only thirty-eight, and an ardent desire to live had led him to do the unthinkable and flee. Hitler took it personally. He wanted Fegelein to be found immediately. Erich Kempka, the Führer’s personal chauffeur and also responsible for the bunker’s fleet of cars, knew where he was hiding. He revealed that Fegelein, at about five o’clock, had asked him to put at his disposal the two last vehicles that were still fit to drive. “For military reasons,” he explained. Thirty minutes later, the vehicles and their drivers came back to the bunker but without the SS general. After a quick enquiry, it turned out that Fegelein had taken refuge in his private apartment in Berlin. Hitler and Bormann cried treason. Soldiers were dispatched as a matter of urgency to Fegelein’s address. They found him in bed with a woman. It certainly wasn’t his wife Gretl, Eva Braun’s sister. In the room, the soldiers laid hands on suitcases prepared for a long journey, but also bags filled with gold, banknotes, and jewels. Fegelein didn’t defend himself. He was blind drunk and barely capable of walking.

But so what. As Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, wasn’t he practically part of the Führer’s family? He had married Gretl Braun in June 1944, with the sole objective of protecting himself from the Führer’s immediate circle, the Bormanns, Goebbels, and consorts, who hated him so much. They quickly worked out that he had never believed either in Nazism or in the cult of the superman, that Aryan German so dear to Hitler. Fegelein was too fond of women, life, and money to take pleasure in a doctrine as severe as it was deadly.

And besides, wasn’t he one of Hitler’s favourites? Hadn’t he been the first to wish him happy birthday on 20 April? All would be forgiven. This demonstrated a fatal lack of knowledge of the Führer. If at first it seemed that Fegelein would be punished by being made part of a combat unit right in the middle of Berlin, Hitler finally changed his mind. He would be judged by an improvised courtmartial for desertion. The sentence would be death.

Eva Braun didn’t want to do anything in defence of her brother-in-law. She even told Hitler that he had called on the phone the previous evening. He wanted to persuade her to flee Berlin with him. This is what he was supposed to have said to her: “Eva, you have to leave the Führer if you can’t persuade him to get out of Berlin. Don’t be stupid–it’s a matter of life and death now!”[25]

That was all it took to seal the SS general’s fate once and for all. But the idea of putting a drunk man on trial was out of the question. Fegelein was put under close guard in a cell. He would have to sober up before his examination.

28 APRIL 1945

The day got off to a bad start. At about nine o’clock an SS officer from a combat unit came to deliver his report to Hitler. He told him that the first Russian commando squads were approaching Wilhelmstrasse, just over a kilometre from the Chancellery. And Wenck still hadn’t arrived. The question was no longer whether the bunker would fall, but when that fall would take place. As soon as the news spread, everyone in the shelter asked for their little cyanide capsule. There weren’t enough for everyone, and only a small elite had the honour. The soldiers who formed the last guard around the Führer would have to commit suicide with their service weapons. As to alerting anyone outside who might have been able to bring help, that was a waste of time because the last telephone lines had been cut. To find out about enemy troop movements, the bunker telephone operators listened to wireless radio broadcasts, particularly those of the BBC. Thanks to the British station the Führer learned of a new betrayal. A betrayal yet more painful than Göring’s. Although the sound was barely audible, the news being repeated on an endless loop on the BBC left no room for doubt: Himmler had proposed that the Third Reich capitulate to the Allies. The BBC quoted a dispatch from the British Reuters news agency, saying that the supreme head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was offering a separate peace to the Anglo-Americans. The Reuters article is headlined “Himmler’s Opening Gambit To End European War” and reads: “Himmler’s reported overture of surrender to Britain and America alone, excluding Russia, which provided the sensation of the week-end, is regarded as the opening gambit of moves which will bring the war in Europe to an end.” The deal was as follows: Hitler would be deposed, Himmler would take his place, the Third Reich would be maintained, and the German army would join the Allies to fight the Bolsheviks. In the bunker, that was too much. While Göring’s attitude hadn’t really surprised anybody, the position of Himmler, the man of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” the most trusted and true of Hitler’s followers, destroyed the last certainties of the Nazi regime.

Hitler reacted like a madman. Hanna Reitsch remembered: “From pink, his face turned crimson and really unrecognisable. […] After that very long fit, Hitler finally sank into a kind of stupor, and the bunker fell entirely silent.” As he had done with Göring, Hitler immediately dismissed Himmler and excluded him from the Party.

Fegelein would pay for his betrayal of the head of the SS. Since he was officially Himmler’s representative to Hitler, his death sentence was authorised on the spot. For the Führer, Eva Braun’s brother-in-law must have been aware of Himmler’s plans to take power and negotiate with the enemy. His attempt at flight was proof of that in Hitler’s eyes. “An RSD [Reichsicherheitsdienst, Reich Security Service] colleague […] shot Fegelein from behind with a machine pistol in the cellar corridor.”[26]

Following these multiple betrayals, a feeling of paranoia spread throughout the bunker. Who would be next? Everyone was keeping an eye on everyone else, wary of the slightest hint of flight, of any criticism of the supreme commander. Meanwhile, outside, above ground, the centre of Berlin was a field of ruins. The fury of the Russians continued to rain down on the Reich capital. The powerful Soviet tanks were eviscerating the buildings on Potsdamer Platz, very close to the bunker. The German resistance consisting of a few soldiers and, above all, a civilian militia, the Deutscher Volkssturm (“German People’s Storm”) could only slow down the inexorable defeat by a few days.

The Volkssturm was created in autumn 1944 on the basis of an idea of Himmler’s. The whole people had to take part in the war. At first the mass enlistment involved all healthy men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Then, particularly in Berlin, even the wounded, younger children, and old men were called in to swell troops destined to be cannon fodder. Poorly equipped both in arms and uniforms, the Volkssturm militiamen were seen as mavericks by the Soviets, and as such they did not benefit from the protective frameworks of the international conventions in case of war. In plain language, even if they surrendered they were shot.

For the last time, the inhabitants of the bunker begged Hitler to escape. Artur Axmann, the head of the Hitler Youth, wanted to save the day. He claimed that he could get the Führer out. Thanks to a commando unit of hand-picked men ready to die for him, flight was still possible. There was still one aeroplane fit to fly to Gatow Airport. The improvised runway just beside the Chancellery remained under German control. Hans Baur confirmed that it was dangerous, perilous, but possible. A word, a gesture on the part of the Führer, and the escape would get under way.

Hitler doubted, and listened, but he was tired. With his sick body and his fragile nerves, would he even survive the shock of leaving? For Hanna Reitsch, that fifty-six-year-old man was now no more than an old man at the end of his life. “If a safe passage had existed, allowing him to leave the shelter, he wouldn’t have had the strength to take it,” she believed. His ultimate hope of leaving the bunker was to win the battle of Berlin.

29 APRIL 1945

It was midnight. Hitler was very agitated. He thought he had found the solution to escaping the clutches of the Soviets. Axmann’s offer to flee beneath the bombs wasn’t the one that he chose. He strode resolutely to the room where his new head of the Luftwaffe, von Greim, and Hanna Reitsch were resting. The young woman’s statement concerning this episode is classified as “confidential” by the American authorities. Here is what it contains:

The whole of Berlin was deluged with Red Army soldiers. On the ground, there were now over two million of them, reducing the Nazi capital to ashes, and the sky was criss-crossed by almost a thousand red-starred fighter planes. Von Greim and Hanna Reitsch tried to bring Hitler to his senses. If he made them leave, he was signing their death warrant. “As soldiers of the Reich,” Hitler raged, “it is your sacred duty to try every possibility, however small. It’s our last chance. It is your duty and mine to grasp it.” The debate was closed. He commanded and his soldiers obeyed. But Hanna Reitsch wasn’t a soldier. The young woman was a civilian with a strong character. “No! No!” she shouted. In her eyes it was all pure madness. “Everything’s lost, to try and change that now is insane.” Contrary to all expectations, von Greim interrupted her. The new marshal didn’t want to go down in history as the man who hesitated to help the Führer. Even if there was only a one-in-a-hundred chance of success, he had to take it, he declared, looking his young colleague straight in the eyes.

The preparations for departure took only a few minutes. Von Below, the Luftwaffe representative in the bunker, encouraged his new boss. “You must succeed. It all depends on you: the truth must be revealed to our people, saving the honour of the Luftwaffe and Germany in the face of the world.” The inhabitants of the shelter had been warned of Hitler’s plan. They all envied the potential leavers. Some gave them hastily handwritten letters for their families. Hanna Reitsch would later tell the Allied officers who interrogated her that she had destroyed them all–including the one written by Eva Braun for her sister Gretl–so that they didn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. All but two. Two letters from Joseph and Magda Goebbels for Harald Quandt, Magda’s oldest son from her first marriage. Harald was twenty-four at the time, and the only one not to have gone to the bunker. And for good reason, since he had been taken prisoner by the Allies in Italy in 1944. Magda Goebbels gave not only this letter to Hanna Reitsch. She also gave her a diamond-studded ring as a souvenir.

Just thirty minutes had passed since Hitler’s order. Von Greim and Reitsch were ready. They went up to the surface and jumped into a light armoured vehicle placed at their disposal. They were only about half a mile from the Brandenburg Gate, where a small plane, an Arado 96, was waiting for them under a camouflaged tarpaulin. The Russian mortar fire rang out in the streets with a crazy jagged rhythm, the sky above the capital echoed with the crackle of hundreds of blazing buildings. The ashes that filled the air blackened people’s faces and tickled their throats. In the car slaloming along the streets, which were piled high with corpses, Hanna Reitsch was thrown from one door to the other. She was concentrating so hard that she barely pulled a face. She knew this was the simplest part of their escape.

In a few seconds, she would take the controls of the plane that she could see in the distance. It stood right in the middle of the boulevard, on an east–west axis, beside Berlin’s most famous monument, the Brandenburg Gate.

The Arado 96 wasn’t a warplane; the Luftwaffe used it chiefly for training its student pilots. It wasn’t very fast, only 200 mph, whereas the Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane went at over 400 mph. But it demonstrated impressive manoeuvrability. Hanna Reitsch knew the model well; she had felt capable of all her daredevil exploits in just such an aircraft. But she first had to take off from a road covered with debris. On the plus side, the makeshift runway wasn’t pitted with holes like a Swiss cheese by shell-fire. The downside was that it was only a quarter of a mile long. Hanna Reitsch sat down at the controls and barely gave von Greim time to sit down behind her. She only had one chance. The Russians, as soon as they heard the roar of the Arado’s 465 horsepower engine, would soon understand the situation. Perhaps Hitler was escaping! Like demons, dozens of them climbed the flaming ruins and ran towards the plane. But it was too late. It was already leaving the ground and rising almost vertically to escape the machine-gun fire. Once they were above the buildings, another danger arose. Giant spotlights from the Soviet anti-aircraft defence darted around the sky. Then came the barrage fire, a wave of metal trying to halt their incredible escape. By some miracle, the plane took only a few harmless hits. At an altitude of 20,000 feet it couldn’t be touched. The feat was unimaginable. More than that, it was pointless. Fifty minutes later, at about two o’clock in the morning, von Greim and Reitsch reached Rechlin airbase. As he had been ordered by the Führer, the new Luftwaffe commander-in-chief launched all available planes for Berlin. Obviously there wouldn’t be enough of them to change the course of the war.

Von Greim didn’t wait in Rechlin to check. His only thought was to fulfil his second mission: that of stopping Himmler. With this in mind, he and Reitsch flew to Grand Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters in Plön, almost 200 miles north-west of Rechlin. Dönitz, one of Hitler’s last stalwarts, had not been informed of Himmler’s betrayal. There were other fish to fry beyond arresting the head of the SS. That was what he explained to von Greim, whose failure was now complete.

At last, on 2 May, Himmler found himself face to face with Hitler’s emissaries in Plön. The SS chief had come to take part in a military briefing with Dönitz. Hanna Reitsch intercepted him before he could get to the meeting.

Reitsch assured the American secret services that she had stood up to the head of the SS, and that their conversation was stopped only by an Allied attack on Dönitz’s headquarters.

Did Himmler say these things? It is possible. He repeated them several times to other senior Nazi dignitaries. That sudden lucidity about Hitler’s destructive madness wouldn’t allow him to get away. Hunted by the Allies, he would be captured on 22 May 1945 while attempting to escape to Bavaria. He would commit suicide the following day with a cyanide capsule. The same as the one he had given to Hitler.

Let’s get back to Berlin on 29 April. Hitler didn’t suspect that his order to liquidate Himmler would never be respected. He had just learned of the success of his Luftwaffe commander’s crazy escape with Hanna Reitsch. There at last was a sign that the situation was changing, and that all was not lost.

Now he could devote himself calmly to the ceremony that was preparing itself in front of his eyes.

For a few minutes, soldiers had been busying themselves feverishly in the little room where Hitler normally held his military meetings. Beneath Linge’s eye, they sorted chairs and changed the position of the furniture with considerable haste. Did this mean they were leaving at last?

A stranger in a Nazi uniform appeared in the corridor. His name was Walter Wagner, and he had just arrived from outside. He was escorted by two severe-looking men. The residents of the shelter wondered what was going on. Who is he? Does he have something to do with Himmler’s betrayal? Adjutant Rochus Misch asked one of his comrades who it was.

Eva Braun was delighted. For several days, she had been begging her lover to marry her. She couldn’t resign herself to the idea of dying without officially bearing the name of the man she loved. The man she had met in Munich in 1929. At the time, she had only been seventeen years old, working in the studio of Hitler’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. The couple formed very quickly. She talked to him about marriage. He replied that he wasn’t free, that he already had a bride, her name was Germany. Today, Germany no longer satisfied him. As if she were a mistress unworthy of his love, he decided to break his vows, and since then he had felt free to unite with Eva Braun.

The choice of witnesses for the marriage was limited by circumstances: they would be Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. No female witnesses. Eva Braun raised no objections, and like it or not she accepted the presence of Bormann, whom she so hated. They had contended for Hitler’s affections for years. They were jealous of each other’s influence over the master. Bormann, like many close to Hitler, was severe in his judgement of the young woman. She lacked depth, she was too trivial, more concerned with the colour of her nail varnish than with politics. Hanna Reitsch, perhaps because she was secretly in love with Hitler herself, even presented Eva as a selfish and infantile simpleton.

At about one o’clock in the morning, the future bride and groom entered the reception room. Hitler had the waxy complexion of those who have not seen sunlight for several days. He wore his usual waistcoat, crumpled by hours spent lying on his bed. In one concession to smart dressing, he had pinned to it the gold party insignia, his Iron Cross first class and his medal for the war-wounded from the First World War. Eva Braun was smiling, wearing a dark blue silk dress. Over it she had draped a grey cape of downy fur. The engaged couple held hands and took their place in front of Walter Wagner. He was trembling with fear. He still couldn’t get over the fact that he was standing face to face with the master of Germany. His voice unsteady, the functionary began reading the two standard pages on the obligations of marriage in the Third Reich. As he read out these obligations, Walter Wagner realised that they could not be fulfilled. Trained and conditioned to respect in a literal sense the rules decreed by the Nazi regime, he didn’t know what to do. He lacked so many official documents, such as the clean criminal record (to which Hitler could not have laid claim, having been condemned to five years in prison after his failed putsch in 1923), the police certificate concerning their good morals, or the couple’s assurance of political loyalty to the Reich. It represented an impossible task for the civil servant. However, the Führer couldn’t wait. In the end, the man decided to make an exception and stipulated in black and white on the marriage certificate that the couple had cited exceptional circumstances due to the war to free themselves of the usual obligations and time limits. So it was only on the good faith of the engaged couple that the registrar could validate their purely Aryan origins, and the fact that they did not carry hereditary illnesses.

Then came the essential question. Wagner cleared his throat and got down to business: “In the presence of witnesses, I ask you, my Führer Adolf Hitler, if you wish to join Frau Eva Braun in matrimony. If so, I ask you to reply with a ‘yes.’”

The ceremony lasted only ten minutes. Just long enough for the couple to reply in the affirmative, sign the official documents, and congratulate one another. Eva was no longer called Braun, but Hitler. The bride was so moved that she made a mistake when signing the marriage certificate. She began signing with a capital B for Braun before catching herself. The B is clumsily crossed out and replaced with an H for Hitler.

The reception that followed lasted only a few minutes. The Führer’s room had been chosen to welcome the few high-ranking guests still present in the bunker. Weary generals, depressed Nazi officials, and three women on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Magda Goebbels and Hitler’s two personal secretaries. They were all allowed some cups of tea and even some champagne. Only Traudl Junge, the youngest of the secretaries (she was only twenty-five) did not take advantage of this rare moment of relaxation. She barely had time to present her congratulations to the new couple before anxiously disappearing.

“The Führer is impatient to see what I have typed,” she writes in her memoirs. “He keeps coming back into my room, looking to see how far I’ve got; he says nothing but just casts restless glances at what remains of my shorthand, and then goes out again.” Traudl Junge was busy tidying up what Hitler had dictated to her just before the wedding ceremony. His will, or more precisely his wills. The first, a personal one, the second longer and political. In his personal will, Hitler began by justifying his sudden marriage to Eva Braun. As if in his eyes such a gesture, quite unusual for a man who had been living as man and wife with a woman for so many years, needed explanation. “I have decided, before the end of my earthly career, to take as my wife that girl who, after many years of faithful friendship, entered, of her own free will, the practically besieged town in order to share her destiny with me.” A generous gesture, but one with a price: death! In the next paragraph, he indicates that his wife will follow him to the grave. On that occasion, if he mentions suicide, he never mentions the word itself. “I myself and my wife–in order to escape the disgrace of deposition or capitulation–choose death. It is our wish to be burnt immediately on the spot where I have carried out the greatest part of my daily work in the course of twelve years’ service to my people.”

Eva Braun, if she was directly concerned by these words, did not involve herself in the writing of the will. Was she even aware of the “wedding present” that her husband was preparing for her?

Traudl Junge read through her notes once more. She was aware of the historic dimension of her task, and couldn’t afford to make a mistake. When, thirty minutes earlier, Hitler had asked her to follow him into the “conference” room of the bunker, she had expected to find herself typing up new military orders. As usual, she had sat down at her typewriter, the one that was specially designed with big letters so that Hitler could read them without making an effort. But then, breaking with his usual habits, he said: “Take shorthand notes directly on to your pad.” After a brief moment’s reflection, he had continued: “This is my political testament…”

After the war, Traudl Junge never tired of telling the press, writing in her memoirs and communicating to the Allies, the disappointment that this text inspired in her. She had expected so much, something like an epilogue that could have given a meaning to all the suffering unleashed by Nazism. Making intellectually acceptable the blood-drenched madness of a disaster that had been on the cards since the publication of Mein Kampf in 1924. Instead, the secretary heard the same Nazi logorrhoea that she knew so well. And still those special formulas of the language of the Third Reich. A Jewish-German intellectual, the philologist Victor Klemperer, analysed that Nazi language and gave it a name: LTI (for Lingua Tertii Imperii). Victor Klemperer observed the expansion and universalisation of this new form of expression over the twelve long years of the Third Reich. Staying in Germany, he had to hide and narrowly escaped the death camps. It was only after the fall of the Hitler regime that he was able to publish, in 1947, his work devoted to LTI. In his view, it respected perfectly established rules. Its goal was to adapt to the new man that the regime claimed to have created for centuries to come. LTI had been invented as much to frighten the enemy as to galvanise the people. Its vocabulary stressed action, will, and strength. Like a drum roll, words were repeated, hammered out emphatically and with great aggression. Words that made the worst acts of cruelty sound ordinary. So one did not kill, one “purified.” In the concentration camps, one did not eliminate living beings, but “units.” As to the genocide of the Jews, it became only a “final solution.”

Hitler’s political testament is in itself one of the best examples of this language. The Führer begins by presenting himself as a victim, then very quickly rages against his perennial enemy: the Jew.

Traudl Junge did her best to replicate the Führer’s style as faithfully as she could on the basis of her notes. Beneath her master’s fevered gaze, she went on typing as quickly as she could on her typewriter. The passage that follows evokes, without explicitly mentioning it, the fate that the regime reserved for millions of Jews.

In spite of the deadly outcome of the conflict provoked and fanned by his aggressive politics, Hitler had no regrets.

In the second part of his testament, he officially confirms his decisions concerning the exclusion of Himmler and Göring, whom he subjected to public scorn. “Göring and Himmler irreparably dishonoured the whole nation by secretly negotiating with my enemy without my knowledge and against my will, and also by trying illegally to take control of the state, not to mention their perfidy towards me.”

Then he appointed his successor at the head of the Third Reich: Grand Admiral Dönitz. He received the title not of Führer, but of President of the Reich. Goebbels was appointed chancellor. In all, a dozen or so ministries were doled out to the last remaining loyalists, not to mention the general staff of the army, the air force, and the navy. So many virtual posts, given that the Nazi state and war machine were on the brink of imploding.

Hitler concluded with one final piece of advice: “Above all, I recommend that the rulers of the nation and their subjects meticulously adhere to the racial laws and ruthlessly resist the poisoner of all nations: international Jewry.”

Traudl Junge was about to finish when she was interrupted by a visibly overwhelmed Goebbels. He had just learned of his appointment as chancellor. He refused it categorically, because it meant that he would have to survive his master. That was impossible. At the risk of complicating still further the task of secretary, the head of German propaganda decided to dictate his own testament to her on the spot. “If the Führer is dead my life is pointless,” he laments with tears in his eyes. Then he too dictates his testament. The style is typically Nazi again. It concerns his loyalty to Hitler and his decision not to survive the fall of National Socialism in Germany. He includes his whole family in his desire to die. “Bormann, Goebbels and the Führer himself keep coming in to see if I’ve finished yet. They make me nervous and delay the work,” Traudl Junge reports. “Finally they almost tear the last sheet out of my typewriter, go back to the conference room [and] sign the three copies…”[28]

It was four o’clock in the morning by the time Goebbels, Bormann, and Generals Burgdorf and Krebs signed Hitler’s political testament as witnesses. Three copies were handed to three messengers. Each of them was given the grave and perilous task of conveying the precious document outside of Berlin. One to Grand Admiral Dönitz, in the north of the country, another to Marshal Schörner (the commander of the central group of the German army), currently retrenched in the Czech region, and the last to the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Munich.

Exhausted, the Führer went to bed. He would not rest for long.

A new Russian attack on the bunker woke him suddenly at six o’clock in the morning. Cries rang out around him, some people being sure that the Chancellery was already surrounded. The emergency door of the shelter was believed to be under machine-gun fire. Would it hold for long? Hitler looked at the cyanide capsule that he always kept in his pocket. A doubt nagged at him. Wasn’t it Himmler who had given him the capsules? And what if it was a trap? Himmler would only need to have replaced the deadly poison with a powerful sleeping pill, and he would be captured alive by his enemies. To be absolutely sure, he wanted to test one of them on somebody. But on whom?

It was to be his dog, the faithful Blondi. The German sheepdog that he loved so much. To make him swallow the poison, the Chancellery dog-keeper would have to intervene. The animal fought back. It took several men to hold its mouth open and crush the capsule with a pair of pliers. Blondi soon went into convulsions and, after several minutes of intense suffering, died in front of her master’s eyes. Hitler watched his animal without a word. He was reassured; it was definitely cyanide.

The occupants of the bunker couldn’t bring themselves to wait for certain death without trying to flee. But for that they would need Hitler’s authorisation. Without that, they were bound to end up with a Gestapo bullet in their heads. Several young officers got the green light from the Führer. “If you bump into Wenck outside,” he said to them, “tell him to hurry up or we’re lost.” The Luftwaffe colonel Nicolaus von Below also decided to try his luck. He left the bunker during the night of the 29 to 30 April and headed west. He was given two letters: one from Hitler for Marshal Keitel, the other from General Krebs for General Jodl. Just like Hanna Reitsch the previous day, no sooner had he left the Chancellery than von Below burnt the two letters. For fear that they might fall into the hands of the enemy, he claimed. More probably the better to conceal his identity if he was arrested by the Russians. In the end, it was the British who would capture him, much later, on 8 January 1946. In any case, the war was lost, he would argue to the British officers who questioned him. So what did those letters matter? Before destroying them, von Below did take the trouble to read them. And from memory he gave the gist of them to the British Intelligence Bureau in Berlin in March 1946. According to von Below, this was what Hitler wrote to Marshal Keitel:

Hitler clearly set out his decision to commit suicide. As the British officer who signed the report on von Below rightly observed, nothing proved that Hitler had actually written those words. But “they coincide with other evidence obtained from other sources.”

If, for von Below, the night of 29 April marked the end of weeks of mental torture in the Führerbunker, for Hitler the nightmare continued. In the middle of the night he received some devastating news, a hint of what was to come. He learned that his faithful ally, the one who had so inspired his beginnings, Benito Mussolini, was dead. The Duce had been executed the day before by Italian partisans while trying to escape through northern Italy disguised as a German soldier. It wasn’t so much the death of his ally that chilled Hitler’s blood as the fear of the similarity of their two fates. The Italian dictator had been killed like a dog with his mistress Clara Petacci after a sham trial. Then their corpses were displayed in Milan, in Piazza Loretto, hanging by their feet. The enraged crowd savagely mutilated the bodies. Only the intervention of Allied soldiers who had come to liberate the country brought a halt to these scenes of collective hysteria. Mussolini would be buried secretly the same evening in a cemetery in Milan.

Hitler was terrified. Undergoing a similar humiliation was out of the question. He told Hans Baur, his personal pilot: “The Russians will do anything to capture me alive. They are capable of using sleeping gas to stop me from killing myself. Their objective is to put me on display like an animal in a zoo, like a trophy of war, and then I will end up like Mussolini.”

30 APRIL 1945

“Wenck? Where is he?” It was one o’clock in the morning and the same question was still being asked in both bunkers. When would Wenck’s attack save him? The Führer couldn’t hold out for much longer. For several weeks he had spent his nights pacing the corridor of his lair, seeking sleep that he couldn’t find. Besides, by night, by day, all of these notions had become abstract by virtue of living underground, far from any natural light. The damp air of the shelters attacked the skin and the respiratory tracts. Was that also what disturbed everyone’s minds, making even the toughest people so fragile? Or the certainty that these wrecks of the Third Reich were destined for absolute hell?

Their few contacts with the outside world were shrinking the range of possibilities still further. Soldiers covered with dust, their eyes filled with alarm concerning their own survival, came regularly to deliver their reports. The battle was lost: that was the essence of what they said. The Russians were crushing everything in their path. They were advancing towards the Reichstag building (the Reich assembly), and were no more than three hundred tiny metres away from the New Chancellery. Or, to put it another way, a rifle shot away.

At about two o’clock the answer that everyone was waiting for arrived by cable: Wenck’s army was still fighting valiantly, but couldn’t get through to Berlin, let alone rescue Hitler.

So it was over.

“How long can we hold out?” The Führer’s question no longer concerned Germany as a whole, nor even Berlin, but just the bunker. How many days, how many hours, before the final assault? The officer standing in front of him stood to attention and answered without a moment’s hesitation: “Two days at the maximum.”

It was now 2:30. All the women who were still in the area around the New Chancellery, principally servants, were assembled in a dining room. There were about ten of them, standing very straight. None of them knew why they had been woken up in the middle of the night. All of a sudden Hitler entered the room. He was followed by Bormann. The scene was set out in a report by the British secret services drawn up on 1 November 1945 from the stories of eyewitnesses. The dictator appeared abstracted, his eyes glazed, as if he were under the influence of medication, of drugs. He greeted them one by one with a handshake, then muttered a few barely intelligible words about the traitor Himmler, the gravity of the situation, and, particularly, of his decision to evacuate the zone. He thus freed them of their oath of loyalty to him. His only advice: flee to the west, because the east is totally controlled by the Soviets. Fall into their hands, he reminded them, and you are certain of being raped and ending up as a soldiers’ whore. He finished speaking, then suddenly exited the room with Bormann. The participants were left on their own. For a few seconds they stood there petrified. Their Führer had just abandoned them to their miserable fate.

It was now the turn of the generals and the inner circle to receive the same orders. Meanwhile, Eva Hitler tidied her things away in her little bedroom. She called in Traudl Junge, who picked up her notebook, imagining that she too wanted to dictate her testament. Far from it. Deep in a wardrobe filled with dresses and fur coats, she beckoned the young secretary over. “Frau Junge, I would like to offer you this coat as a farewell gift,” she said. “I’ve always liked to have well-dressed women around me, and now it’s your turn to have them and enjoy them.”[29] The silver fox fur cape was the one in which she had been married.

At eight o’clock in the morning, the order to evacuate the government building was finally made official. Hitler had just dictated it to Bormann. Immediately, small groups organised themselves. Each one wanted to try their chance. Some opted for the south-west, others for the north. The Russians could patrol the city, but they didn’t know Berlin, let alone its network of underground channels or the twists and turns of the Berlin underground. Escape was still possible. The pilot Hans Baur was bursting with enthusiasm. At last he was going to have a purpose. He ran to see the Führer and tell him he was ready to get him out of Berlin. He knew where to dig up some planes in the capital. Baur had thought of everything. He would then take Hitler to refuge far away. There were still some friendly countries like Japan, Argentina, and Spain… “Or, if not, with one of those Arab sheikhs who have always been friendly towards you in relation to your attitude towards the Jews.”[30]

To thank his excited pilot, Hitler left him the big painting that hung on the wall of his office. It showed Frederick the Great, the famous King of Prussia, the typical incarnation of the so-called “enlightened” despot. A political and military point of reference for the Führer. Baur was mad with joy. Many people in the bunker thought it was a Rembrandt, and that it was utterly priceless. In fact, according to Heinz Linge, it was a work by Adolph von Menzel, a German painter who died in 1905 and was very popular in his own country. “It cost me 34,000 marks in 1934,” the Führer added with the precision of an accountant. A sum equivalent to almost 400,000 euros today. “It’s yours.” Then, in a low voice, he added: “Where are your planes?”

Heinz Linge, the Führer’s personal valet, was also making himself busy. At dawn, his master confided to him that the “hour of truth” had sounded. He advised him to escape towards the west, and even to surrender to the British and the Americans. He confirmed his decision concerning giving the portrait of Frederick the Great to Linge, and absolutely maintained that, even in these moments of chaos, his will was to be respected. The painting became an obsession for the Führer. He wanted to protect it from the looting that would follow the fall of the bunker. Linge assured him that he would take care of it in person.

Reassured, Hitler went to take a rest in his room for a few hours. He lay down fully dressed and ordered his SS guards to stand outside his door.

At about one o’clock he came out to have lunch with his wife, his two secretaries, and his nutritionist. For several days he had refused to share his meals with men. Around the little table, everyone tried to maintain a dignified attitude. But the conversation was stilted. No one had the heart to chat as they had done even the previous day.

Once the meal was over, Eva Hitler left the table first. The secretaries also disappeared to smoke a cigarette. They were joined by Günsche, the Führer’s austere aide-de-camp. He told them that the master wanted to say his goodbyes to them. The two young women stubbed out their cigarettes and followed the impressive SS officer–he was 1.93 metres tall, six foot four–to join a small group. The last loyalists waited there, in the corridor: Martin Bormann, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, and Linge. It was almost three o’clock when the door of the antechamber opened. Hitler came out slowly and walked towards them. The same ceremony was repeated. His soft, warm hand gripped the hands that were extended towards him. He murmured a few words and left immediately. Eva Hitler appeared more alive than ever. Her hair, which she had just had done, shone brilliantly. She had changed her dress, and was wearing one that her husband was particularly fond of, a black dress with an edging of roses printed around the neck. She kissed the secretaries one last time, asked them to escape as quickly as possible, and joined Hitler. Linge closed the door and took up position outside the Führer’s apartments. Everyone was now free to pursue their own fate.

1 MAY 1945

Where is Hitler? In the middle of the night, in the streets of Berlin, the words rang out like a burst of machine-gun fire. The Russian soldiers had learned by heart that phrase in German: “Wo ist Hitler?” Where is Hitler? For the general staff of the Red Army, the issue was vital. Marshals Zhukov and Konev, who were in charge of the assault on the German capital, had received two missions from Stalin: to conquer the city before the arrival of the British and the Americans and to catch Hitler. Neither Zhukov nor Konev had any intention of disappointing the master of the Kremlin.

Very quickly they understood that Hitler was hiding near the New Chancellery. The crazed defence of the Nazis around the imperial quarter gave them a clue as did the size of their forces; and then there were all the witness statements from civilian and military prisoners: “Hitler declared that he would remain in the city to the end,” they said. “He would be locked in a bunker.”

It seemed inevitable now that they would catch him. The symbols of German power fell one after the other. The Reichstag had been taken the previous evening, at about ten o’clock. The flag of the Soviet Union now flew over the ruins of its dome. On the ground, the battles continued to rage with cruel intensity. In fifteen days, the battle of Berlin had claimed at least 20,000 civilian and 200,000 military lives in both camps. It was one o’clock in the morning, the last few metres leading to the government buildings were gained at the cost of the blood of hundreds of soldiers. The last SS regiments fanatically defended the smoking ruins of the New Chancellery.

Suddenly, as if by magic, silence fell. Then a single shot and no more screams. The whole area was plunged into an unreal calm. Two men in Wehrmacht uniforms felt their way across the charred stones and the shapeless rubble of what had once been one of the most beautiful streets in Berlin. The infantry general Hans Krebs spoke reasonably good Russian. It was because of this linguistic skill and his status as head of the land army that he risked his life in the middle of the worst combat zone in Berlin. The orders he received in the Führerbunker had been clear: he had to attempt to negotiate with the Soviets. Beside him, an officer, Colonel von Dufving, had been given the task of assisting him and, if necessary, of protecting him. Certainly, a few hours previously, an agreement had been concluded between the two warring forces to let them pass freely, but would the Russians respect it?

The two German soldiers were quickly led to the nearest Soviet command post, the post of the 8th Army led by General Vasily Chuikov. Of humble origins, indefatigable and intransigent with the enemy, he was the son of a Russian peasant, a colossus with rustic manners. Hans Krebs, on the other hand, embodied the German military aristocracy. Shaven-headed, he had put on his finest military costume with his Iron Cross clearly in evidence and a long, impeccable leather coat. As one last flourish he wore a monocle in his left eye. The two men were almost the same age, the Russian forty-five and the German forty-seven. But in all other respects they were opposites. Chuikov had thick black hair, his forehead furrowed with deep wrinkles mixed with startling scars, heavy, severe eyebrows, a flattened nose, his skin thick and soft from heavy drinking, and most of all, incredible teeth, all of them false, made of silvery metal. It only made his grimacing smile all the more menacing. Krebs remained rigid in the face of the animal power exuded by his enemy. In the photographs taken by the Soviets during those negotiations, the anxiety of the German general is palpable. Krebs committed one first mistake. He stood to attention and gave his best military salute. He thought he was in the presence of Marshal Zhukov. Chuikov was amused by his confusion, and turned gleefully towards his officers. Krebs managed to catch a few words that the Russians exchanged in front of him, notably when Chuikov uttered a thundering: “We’ll have to finish them all off!” which did not presage anything good.

At last the Russian general telephoned Zhukov and said, “Personally, I wouldn’t stand on ceremony. Unconditional surrender, and that’s that.” During the phone call, the attitude of the Soviet soldiers who were present worried the two Germans. Their hatred was palpable. Krebs was even violently taken aside by a colonel, who wanted to remove the pistol that he wore in his belt. It took several other officers to calm him down. For his part, Zhukov confirmed that no negotiation was conceivable in the absence of the Allies.

Krebs then played his last remaining card. He held out a document that he had taken from von Dufving’s saddlebag. It was a letter from Goebbels addressed to the “ruler of the Soviet people.” It said that Hitler had killed himself the previous day and had passed on his power to Dönitz, Bormann, and Goebbels.

Hitler dead! The Russians hadn’t expected that. Zhukov was given the news almost immediately. The information was too serious, and he decided to call Stalin straight away. It was four o’clock in the morning in Moscow and the Soviet dictator was asleep. “I’m ordering you to wake him up,” Zhukov shouted at the officer on duty. “It’s urgent, and it can’t wait till tomorrow.”[31] The announcement of the suicide vexed the head of the Kremlin: “So that’s the end of the bastard. Too bad he couldn’t be taken alive. Where is Hitler’s body”[32]

Meanwhile, at 3:18, an urgent radio telegram reached the general staff of Grand Admiral Dönitz in Plön. It was signed by Goebbels and Bormann:

A few hours later, at about seven o’clock, Radio Hamburg interrupted its schedule and broadcast an extract from Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. Then a communiqué was read several times. It indicated that Hitler was still supported by his troops in Berlin. Two hours later, a sombre voice warned listeners that a solemn announcement was due to be broadcast. Against a background of funeral music, Dönitz’s voice rang out. “German men and women, Wehrmacht soldiers: our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. The German people bow in grief and veneration.”

End of the day in the Führerbunker in Berlin. General Krebs was back. The Russians categorically rejected his offer of a ceasefire. They demanded an unconditional surrender. Most of all they wanted Hitler’s body to prove that he was really dead and not in flight.

2 MAY 1945

The 2 May edition of Pravda, according to a dispatch from the Soviet Press Agency TASS: