“Poor, poor Adolf, abandoned by everyone, betrayed by everyone!”
(Eva Braun)
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.”* 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.
* Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, op. cit., p. 484.