29 APRIL 1945

“In the presence of witnesses, I ask you, my Führer Adolf Hitler, if you wish to join Frau Eva Braun in matrimony?”

(Walter Wagner, officer in the Nazi general staff)

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:

“Von Greim was thunderstruck when he heard Hitler giving him the order to leave the bunker that same evening,” she reports. While the Führer’s new air force marshal was still wounded and trapped in Berlin, he found himself entrusted with the crazed mission of reversing the course of history and countering, or at least slowing down, the Russian offensive. To achieve this, first of all he had to reach Rechlin airbase, ninety miles to the north, then, from there, he would run the German air raids on the Soviet forces around Berlin. Hitler was so confident of the success of his plan that he took advantage of the situation to confer another task on von Greim, one that was more personal, even very personal. “The second reason behind your departure for Rechlin is that Himmler must be stopped.” As he uttered the name of the Reichsführer SS, Hitler’s voice began to tremble, his lips and his hands were almost gripped by convulsions. But he insisted. Von Greim had to warn Grand Admiral Dönitz in his headquarters in Plön, near the Danish border, that Himmler had to be stopped. “A traitor will never succeed me as Führer. You have to leave here to ensure this!”

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.

“Just a moment, Herr Reichsführer, this is extremely important, excuse me.”

Himmler seemed almost jovial as he said, “Of course.”

“Is it true, Herr Reichsführer, that you contacted the Allies with proposals of peace without orders to do so from Hitler?”

“But, of course.”

“You betrayed your Führer and your people in the very darkest hour? Such a thing is high treason, Herr Reichsführer. You did that when your place was actually in the bunker with Hitler?”

“High treason? No! You’ll see, history will weigh it differently. Hitler wanted to continue the fight. He was mad with his pride and his ‘honour.’ He wanted to shed more German blood when there was none left to flow. Hitler was insane. It should have been stopped long ago.”

Hanna Reitsch’s statement to the American secret services (copy preserved at GARF)

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.

“That’s the registrar.”

“The who?” I thought I must have misheard, but Hentschel repeated “The registrar!” He was the Stadtrat (city councillor) and Gauamtsleiter (NDSAP regional office leader) Walter Wagner […]. “The boss is getting married today,” the technician informed me.^*

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.

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked solely by international statesmen either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. I have made too many offers for the limitation and control of armaments, which posterity will not be cowardly enough always to disregard, for responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be placed on me. Nor have I ever wished that, after the appalling first World War, there would ever be a second against either England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew against the people whom we have to thank for all this–international Jewry and its henchmen.

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.

I have left no one in doubt that if the people of Europe are once more treated as mere blocks of shares in the hands of these international money and finance conspirators, then the sole responsibility for the massacre must be borne by the true culprits–the Jews. Nor have I left anyone in doubt that this time millions of European children of Aryan descent will not starve to death, millions of men die in battle, and hundreds of thousands of women and children be burned or bombed to death in our cities without the true culprits being held to account, albeit more humanely.

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

After six years of war which, despite all setbacks, will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a nation, I cannot abandon the city which is the capital of this Reich. Since our forces are too meagre to withstand the enemy’s attack and since our resistance is being debased by creatures who are as blind as they are lacking in character, I wish to share my fate with that which millions of others have also taken upon themselves by remaining in this city. Further, I shall not fall into the hands of the enemy who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, for the diversion of the hysterical masses.

I have therefore decided to stay in Berlin and there to choose death voluntarily when I determine that the position of the Führer and the Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained.

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…”^*

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:

“The battle for Berlin is drawing to a close. On other fronts too the end is approaching fast. I am going to kill myself rather than surrender. I have appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz as my successor as President of the Reich and Chief Commander of the Wehrmacht. I expect you to remain in your posts and give my successor the same zealous support as you have given to me. […] The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot imagine they have been in vain. The final objective remains to win the territories in the east for the German people.”

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.”

* Rochus Misch, Hitler’s Last Witness, op. cit., p. 197.

* Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour, p. 185.