Chapter 11

My Escape from Berlin

WHEN I RECOVERED MY senses after an unknown period of time I was still blinded by the stab of flame from the explosion. Immediately I feared that I had lost my sight. I felt around me with my hands. My consciousness began to return. Apparently the explosion threw me into the ruins of the houses along the street. I was still unable to see, so I crawled about forty metres until I reached an impassable obstruction. I felt my way along a towering wall. I was back at the barricade from where the effort to break through had originated.

Gradually I began to see shapes again. I remained crouched at the barricade entrance. After some time I was able to make out my surroundings and saw a blurry figure. I recognized Hitler’s second pilot, Flugkapitän Georg Beetz. To my horror, I saw that a shell splinter had torn open his skull from forehead to the nape of the neck. He told me it must have happened when the panzer blew up, the same explosion that had tossed Bormann, Naumann, Stumpfegger and myself into the air.

Arm in arm for mutual support we headed back at a slow pace to the Admiralty building. Just behind Weidendamm bridge, Beetz felt unable to go on. I placed him on a refugee’s handcart. To my great relief I noticed Dr Häusermann, a female dental surgeon on the staff of Dr Blaschke (Hitler’s personal dentist), at work tending the injured. I asked her to look after Beetz, and then fetched medical supplies from the Admiralty building. Together we bandaged the seriously wounded man. It seemed out of the question to get him away from Berlin in his condition, so Häusermann promised to take Beetz to her flat locally and care for him there. Unfortunately, as I discovered later, he succumbed to his injuries shortly afterwards.

I returned to the Admiralty building convinced by my experience that it would not be possible for a whole group of people to get away. Therefore I dissolved the group, telling each individual to obtain civilian clothing at the first opportunity and then to attempt to filter through the enemy lines. That concluded my last duty as a soldier, and now I was free to seek my own escape route. Leading about seven men I ran to Friedrich-Strasse railway station and followed the tracks in the hope of reaching Lehrter station, but this was not possible because the rail embankment was under heavy enemy fire. Anxiously I reviewed the other possibilities of a route to follow, or somewhere to hide up. There was firing in all directions. We went down the embankment to where the tram tracks curved into sheds of sidings. Cautiously entering one of these sheds I came across some female and male foreign workers. They told us animatedly that we had to get rid of our uniforms immediately or we would be murdered out of hand by the Russians. One of the girls gave me some oily overalls and sent me between the rusting radiators to change and hide my uniform. My companions also received civilian clothing. While undressing I had a closer look at a wound on my right upper arm. We were totally exhausted. Nothing was more important now than sleep, from which I hoped to regain my strength.

I had hardly stretched out when I heard loud talking below and a torrent of words in Russian. I leant over the manhole and looked down towards the doorway. A mob of Russian soldiers had discovered the foreign workers. With great jubilation they fell into each other’s arms, kissing and hugging. From pure exhaustion I no longer realised the danger that had arrived so unexpectedly.

The young Yugoslav girl who had given me the overalls called up to me that I should come below. I had no option but to comply. If I had not done this, all would have been lost for us. I descended to the foreign workers and Russian soldiers in the yard. With a laugh the Yugoslav girl took my hand and led me to the Russian commissar. He gave me a brief once-over and then hugged me just as I had seen him embrace the foreign workers a few minutes before. The girl introduced me as her husband. I had the ‘honour’ to be embraced by the commissar again. ‘Tovarich! Berlin finished – Hitler finished – Stalin great man!’

The Russians brought vodka, tinned meat, bread and butter. I called for my comrades above to come down because the commissar, drunk with victory, even wanted to embrace the ‘German workers’. It was rather like a crazy dream. At last the commissar led off his soldiers, no doubt feeling that he had done his duty for the Motherland.

We returned upstairs. These few moments had drained me of more nervous energy than anything we had done since the breakout. We collapsed on the floorboards – sleep – nothing but sleep, if only for a short while. For an hour we were dead to the world. Uneasy, I awoke and staggered to my feet. We were still our own masters. I shook awake my sleeping comrades and ordered them to burn at once all identification papers, documents, orders and pay books. I emptied my pockets of any paperwork, threw my SS standard on the heap and the pennant for my vehicle. All were consumed by the flames.

Now we were anonymous. None had proof of his previous activity. An hour ago we had worn uniforms of which we had been proud for as long as we could remember; now we were vagabonds. Despite ridding ourselves of our documentation, and wearing very original attire as tram workers, we knew that as a squad we could never make it through. Difficult though it was, I had to part from these loyal comrades. It was the only possibility for any of us: to try his or her luck alone.

Just as I was leaving, by sheer bad luck I ran into the same mob of Russian soldiers returning. I was greeted with great effusiveness. They were just on their way back to the covered sidings. I had no option but to join them. As we re-entered, the Yugoslav girl who had claimed me as her husband greeted us with a smile. The commissar announced that we must now have a big victory celebration. Huge quantities of alcohol were produced. The party took place below the railway tracks.

Continually my thoughts strayed to my ruined dwelling in the Reich Chancellery garden, beside whose collapsed walls lay interred the charred remains of the man to whom I had devoted my life, together with a woman, his wife, whom I had treasured and venerated. The burial had occurred no more than forty-eight hours previously. All my thoughts were still there, where I had had to perform the most difficult duty of my life. And yet – to hang on to this laughably short life to which we are so attached I had to go along with this charade with the Russians. From all sides without pause I had to answer toasts, and countless times I had to clink my glass with the Russian soldiers.

Once when I had had some time to myself I had read a good German translation of Dante’s Inferno, although without completely understanding it. At the time I smiled and told myself that ultimately all great writers are just fantasists. No longer so sober as he had been, the commissar insisted I should dance with my ‘Yugoslav wife’. During this dance I noticed that I was bleeding from the wound in my right arm. To prevent this being noticed I put my hand in my pocket. Even these dreadful hours in the Inferno, which I have no pleasure in recalling, finally ended. That brave young Yugoslav girl, who had nothing in common with an SS officer other than sympathy born of the circumstances was the truest of true friends that day. Many men would do well to use her as a shining example of humanity. She led me, and a Hungarian baroness who joined us on the way, through all the Russian checkpoints, from where the Russians fanned out to comb the ruined city for German soldiers, to Tegel and safety. There she simply left us and returned to her people. It remains a mystery to me what this strange girl saw in me. Perhaps she had found happiness as a foreign worker in Germany.

On 30 May 1945 I reached Wittenberg. After swimming the Elbe, I went through Weimar, Nuremberg and Munich towards Berchtesgaden. Nobody knew me or interfered with me. On the way I had another enormous piece of luck. A German girl recently employed by the Allies as an interpreter managed to get me identification papers in my own name. With these I could reach my goal, Berchtesgaden, without hassle. There I spent a day and a half with my wife, recovering from the terrible strain to which I had been subjected. Nobody bothered about me – perhaps recompense for never having intentionally done anybody any harm in my life. No matter where one is nor in what century, it is always the case that after a collapse the spirit of the times will not allow malign influences to rest. It was my intention – after convalescence – to report myself to the occupation authorities as the ‘head of the motor pool of the Führer and Reich Chancellor’. That was my duty, and I was fully conscious that I had to do it.

Germany’s greatest writer, Goethe, who understood the world, said: ‘The worst swine of all is he who denounces.’ I was fingered. The following night the US Counter-Intelligence Corps came for me. After twelve hours of interrogation I was thrown into the jail at Berchtesgaden.

Now began an era in my life when I was moved from one POW camp to another. The Allies thought that Hitler was still alive. At every camp the competent officer had the sole ambition of establishing, by means of everlasting questioning, what had become of the Führer and his closest staff. This objectively very laudable ambition was a torment for me. The same questions over and over. Always the same traps rigged to ensnare me. I was not badly treated though. In general, the Americans respected my former rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer, equivalent to lieutenant colonel, and were very decent and open with me. Yet none of them could imagine how a man like Adolf Hitler could just simply die, as the facts appeared to force them to believe. They took my word for it about the death of Goebbels, for Russian propaganda had confirmed finding his body, and those of his wife and children, but the possibility that Adolf Hitler had declined to avail himself of any of the thousand opportunities open to him – no, here Erich Kempka must be lying.

‘When interrogated by the CIC, a German U-boat commander said that his boat lay at Bremen at the Führer’s disposal ready to sail from 25 April 1945 onwards. He stated that at least ten other U-boat commanders had been given the same order. What is your opinion on that, Herr Kempka?’ I could only give a weary smile. ‘We have heard from twelve pilots that they had secret orders from Führer-HQ to be at readiness to fly Adolf Hitler abroad.’ In order to make their interrogations more interesting, some idiots or fantasists had actually claimed to have taken Hitler and his wife abroad.

During these dozens of interrogations I would always remember a conversation I had with Hitler in 1933, shortly after the seizure of power. I was driving him from the Reich Chancellery on the second or third occasion. At the time the words struck me as queer and I never forgot them: ‘Do you know, Kempka, I shall never leave here alive!’

Perhaps all epochs have their illusions. For a person such as myself – and until I breathe my last I will never forget seeing on that April afternoon the petrol being poured over the body of the man whom I had so esteemed and honoured – they were just words that made no sense at the time I heard them.

Often the questions they asked appalled me: ‘When he got up in the morning, did Hitler stand on his left leg or his right leg first? Did he hold his fork in the left or right hand?’ They were rather like children asking you to explain the meaning of a fairy tale. Certainly they had been ordered to follow this line of questioning, and there was no intention to give offence. For them, Hitler had been the most fearsome and yet most interesting phenomenon of the century.

At the end of June 1946, a jeep brought me from the POW/internment camp at Darmstadt to the Nuremberg Trials. They had not known where they held me, and had had to broadcast two days of radio appeals before I was discovered. Before being taken from the prison to court, an American officer inspected my clothing. He was very correct. Apparently I was better dressed than Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer. The only thing I lacked was a decent tie. On his order I was given a new one. I spent the afternoon in a guarded waiting room. Nobody took down my statement. After five in the afternoon I was returned to my cell without explanation. The night was difficult. A small searchlight was hung in the viewing flap in the door, and shone on my face all night.

Next morning towards eleven I was taken to the court and sworn in. They wanted to know a lot, and they were astonished that I knew so much. During the cross-examination, the US prosecutor remarked to me: ‘It is a funny thing that you, of all people, happened to be everywhere.’ For me, it was not funny at all. Nearly all my comrades who had experienced the death of Hitler and his wife, of the Goebbels family, of Bormann and Naumann, were either dead or in Soviet captivity. For me as somebody who had found himself in a very special position of trust vis-à-vis the former Führer and Reich Chancellor, it was more than a bitter pill to be exposed to such a cross-examination about my dead chief.

I had nothing to hide. I was a young man from a middle-class background with no pretensions to scholarship. I had led my life following my beliefs, honestly held. These men, the accused, had always been decent and kind to me. I would have been a swine had I allowed some crafty trick in cross-questioning to have lured me into stating something at variance with the truth. Despite everything, I was shown sympathy by one of the highest American justice officers at Nuremberg and that is something that gives me hope for the future.

In those crazy years now behind us, good and evil became intertwined. During the war I held a book in my hands in which Churchill himself had stated in the Foreword: ‘Perhaps Adolf Hitler is the greatest European who ever lived.’ It is not for me to deliver an opinion on the Nuremberg Trials. The Führer often told me that it is the business of the future to judge the past. We live today (1950) in the present.

I was held for weeks in the witnesses’ wing at Nuremberg. There I saw once more many old comrades from better days. One for whom I had never had any time had grown into a true man; others I had respected were now Allied lapdogs. We had little opportunity to talk, but the few words we exchanged taught me more than the twelve years of conversations we had had together. Thus it was difficult then to maintain my belief in the inherent goodness in people.

As I have said in this memoir, it is not my purpose to decide between right and wrong. As a simple man, what mattered to me was how men proved their class. Almost without exception those around Hitler enjoyed only the best from him. As he used to tell me as he sat in the passenger seat beside me, often he had kept people on against his better judgement because he believed in their inner decency. I cannot condemn him for this, but perhaps history will make this its greatest reproach of him, that he was too trusting of those around him.

From Nuremberg I was brought to Langwasser camp to be discharged as a POW. Its function in this regard had ceased, and so I went to Regensburg camp for transfer from POW to internee status. On a drive from Regensburg to Ludwigsburg I was involved in a serious accident in the transport vehicle as a result of which, following court proceedings, I was released in October 1947.

I know that many Germans had to go through terrible times. I also know that Adolf Hitler today is one of the most controversial personalities in history. Only later generations will be able to form a precise assessment of this man.