“Eva, you must leave the Führer…”
(Hermann Fegelein, SS General and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law)
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!”*
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.
* Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour, op. cit., p. 178.