While his closest followers were thus slowly drawing away, Hitler continued to receive daily briefings about the military situation in the oppressively close quarters of the workroom in the bunker. The briefings began long after midnight and lasted until 6 a.m., and at the “morning teas” that followed—and took up another two hours—Hitler was, according to Christa Schroeder, “almost constantly on edge” and talked “only about dog training, questions of diet, and how bad and stupid the world is.”42 Eva Braun, on the other hand, remained strangely calm in this tense situation, while the bunker constantly shook under air attacks, lights flickering when bombs hit. Even in March, she occasionally escaped the depressing atmosphere underground to her apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, where she threw small parties with the young secretaries. “And so, while Hitler was in meetings,” Christa Schroeder later wrote, “we played records in her apartment, drank a glass of champagne, and now and then managed a dance with the off-duty officers.”43
A month later, even this was apparently no longer possible. On April 19, Eva Braun wrote to her friend Herta Schneider that they could “already [hear] the artillery fire on the eastern front” and that she “unfortunately” was “ordered to stand ready at every alarm, in case of flooding,” though she would be spending the rest of her life “only in the bunker” in any case.44 The orders came from Hitler personally, who was afraid a bomb hit could break open the bunker and let groundwater come in. Whenever a report of enemy planes came over the radio, Hitler now shaved and dressed in all correctness so as to be able to leave his room immediately when the air raid started.45 Eva Braun seems not to have shared his fear of flooding. Rather, her letter of April 19 gives a carefree, even confident impression. “The secretaries and I are practicing with the pistol every day,” she writes, adding that she was “very happy to be near him, especially now.” She admits that she was constantly being told to save herself at the Berghof, but “up till now I’ve always won.”46 How should we understand these statements? Are they consoling words for the person closest to her, while she kept her real thoughts and feelings to herself? Or had she accomplished her goal in life—to be with Hitler—so that she did not need to pay attention to threats from without? It is difficult to answer these questions from a distance. But it does seem to be the case that she was absolutely at peace about everything, and had arrived where she always wanted to be. Further evidence is provided by the fact that, according to Nicolaus von Below—actually, according to everyone who saw her then—Eva Braun continued “to always take care of herself” in the bunker, to “dress carefully and impeccably,” act “as accommodating and gracious as ever,” and show “not the slightest sign of weakness right up to the final hour.”47 She also seemed to expect from Hitler that he play his part perfectly to the very end. In fact, her conduct helped him rigidly cling to his insane confidence in victory, and reinforced the delusion that he would still “beat back the Russians and liberate Berlin.” She permitted him no weakness and reprimanded him even for slight negligence, such as a fleck of dirt on his uniform. “You can’t copy Old Fritz in everything and run around as unappetizingly as he did,” Braun would say, referring to Hitler’s worshipping of Friedrich the Great, to whom he often compared himself—and Eva Braun would do so even in the presence of Goebbels, Bormann, army Adjutant-General Wilhelm Burgdorf, and the secretaries.48
On the night of April 20, 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and into the morning hours, another party took place in Eva Braun’s rooms in the Old Chancellery. Hitler had withdrawn to his bedroom in the bunker, after accepting since midnight the congratulations of his staff, the military, and leading Nazi politicians including Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, Ribbentrop, and Speer. Many of them had advised Hitler to leave Berlin as quickly as possible and go to the Obersalzberg, because all efforts to halt the Soviet advance had failed. In fact, the first Soviet units reached the southern edge of Berlin that night, April 20–21. The attack on the city center was imminent.49 The henchmen were thus ready to scatter; they had long since prepared their departures. Even Hitler now seemed undecided whether or not to leave Berlin, according to his adjutant Below. In the briefing on the afternoon of April 20, he had said, according to Speer: “I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!”50 And that same day, he had sent his two oldest secretaries to southern Germany, saying that he would need them later and would “follow them in a few days.”51 Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver of many years who supervised the fleet of cars belonging to the Reich Chancellery (forty cars and sixty drivers), then received orders to bring several cars to carry the secretaries and others to various Berlin airports.52
Some of those who remained joined Eva Braun and Hitler once more for a glass of champagne in his workroom in the bunker: von Below, Schaub, Heinz Lorenz (adjutant to the Reich Press Chief), the secretaries Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, and Hitler’s dietitian, Constanze Manziarly. But the group broke up before long, since Hitler, as Traudl Junge recalled, was quiet and when asked had replied that he could not leave Berlin, he had to “bring about the decision here—or die!” Then, while the young secretary was shocked by this confession, Eva Braun threw her last little improvised party in the Old Chancellery. It is unclear who was there besides Traudl Junge, Bormann, and Morell. According to Junge, Braun had brought along “anyone she came across.” Boisterously, in a “desperate frenzy,” they drank champagne, laughed, danced to an old hit record from 1929—Junge quotes the line “Blood-red roses caress you all over”—and tried to forget the fear of the end that was fast approaching.53
The next morning, the center of Berlin was under fire from Soviet artillery. Ribbentrop, who until that point had not been allowed in to any meeting with Hitler, apparently pushed once again for Hitler to retreat from the capital in a conversation with Eva Braun.54 Traudl Junge reports in her memoir that Braun told her about a “discussion” with Ribbentrop, who told her that she was “the only one who could get the Führer to leave”; she should tell him that she wanted to “leave Berlin with him.” Eva Braun answered: “I will not speak a word of your suggestion to the Führer. He has to decide alone. If he thinks it is right to stay in Berlin, then I will stay with him. If he leaves, I will, too.”55 In fact, Hitler was hardly responsive to anything anymore. Unhinged to the end, he wanted to keep fighting, and ordered in all seriousness another counterattack, with a hastily thrown-together panzer corps under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner. Hitler screamed and threatened the air force chief of staff Karl Koller that they had to “deploy every man,” and that anyone who kept forces in reserve had “forfeited his life within five hours.”56 He was so beside himself that he did not even let Morell approach him that night, because he was afraid that Morell would sedate him so that he could be taken out of Berlin against his will. The doctor had to leave the bunker and was sent back to the Berghof with Eva Braun’s jewelry the following day.57
The next day, April 22, saw Hitler’s complete psychological breakdown, after he learned in the afternoon briefing that Steiner’s counterattack had not taken place. Those present sat through a violent half-hour outburst of rage in which Hitler was especially worked up about the military’s “years-long betrayal.” He then sank into a chair and said that the war was lost. They should all leave Berlin, but he would stay. That was his “irrevocable decision.”58 He ordered Eva Braun, too, and the hurriedly summoned secretaries, to leave the bunker immediately and evacuate by plane to southern Germany, but Eva Braun, as Traudl Junge recalled, spoke to him as to a “child” and promised to stay, at which point Hitler, in front of the people present, kissed her “on the mouth” while the officers stood outside the conference room “and waited to be dismissed.”59 None of the young secretaries dared to leave. Then Hitler summoned Schaub and ordered him to destroy all his personal files. “Everything must be burned immediately,” he ordered, “everything… there is in my steel cabinets. Here in Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgad
en, you have to destroy everything… do you hear?… everything, everything!” “Not a scrap” must be allowed “to fall into enemy hands.”60
Hitler had clearly decided to end his life. Eva Braun wrote a rushed letter to her friend Herta that same day, April 22, surrounded by the six Goebbels children, who had just moved into the bunker with their parents, saying that these “are the very last lines and therefore the last sign of life from me.” The end was “drawing dangerously near.” She could not describe how much she was “suffering personally on the Führer’s account”; he had “lost faith.” She went on: “Regards to all the friends. I shall die as I lived. It’s no burden. You know that.”61 Eva Braun still seemed unsure about how seriously Hitler’s intentions were, though, since she added in closing that Herta should keep the letter “until you hear of our fate.”
In fact, Hitler postponed his death once again. With the support of Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, he now pinned his hopes on the Twelfth Army under General Walther Wenck at the Elbe, which was to march to Berlin from Magdeburg and “fight the Reich Capital free again.”62 In a letter from Eva Braun to her sister Gretl from April 23, 1945, it says: “There is still hope. But obviously we won’t let ourselves be taken alive.” She had just now “spoken to the Führer” and believed that “the future looked brighter today than it did yesterday” to him, too. Still, she was putting a few last affairs in order, instructing her sister to burn her entire private and business correspondence immediately, except for Hitler’s letters, and to pay any outstanding bills.63 It turned out, of course, that Wenck’s assignment could not be carried out. On April 25, the Soviet army completed its encirclement of Berlin.64
Meanwhile, Albert Speer, presumably driven by feelings of guilt, had returned to the bunker one last time, on April 23. No one can say with certainty what he and Hitler talked about during their last meeting—no one else was there. In Inside the Third Reich, Speer writes that he wanted to “see” Hitler once more and “tell him good-bye.”65 Around midnight, clearly unable to tear himself away from Hitler, Speer sat up for hours with Eva Braun in her small room in the bunker. She revealed, Speer said later, “an almost gay serenity,” offered him champagne and sweets, and said: “You know, it was good that you came back once more. The Führer had assumed you would be working against him. But your visit has proved the opposite to him.”66 Even more than Hitler, Braun now seemed to demand loyalty until death from Hitler’s closest companions, and seemed not to understand why one after another was vanishing and trying to save his or her own life. Looking back, Traudl Junge described Eva Braun’s behavior as a “loyalty complex.”67 Speer, in contrast, obviously admired her for this attitude: during his interrogation in Kransberg a few months later, he said that “Hitler had always emphasized, with resignation, that he had only one person who would stay true to him in the decisive moment, true to the end: Eva Braun. We refused to believe him, but his feelings did not betray him here.”68
The Wedding and the End in the “Führer Bunker”
It must therefore have come as no surprise to Speer when he later learned that Hitler and Braun had married before taking their lives together in the bunker. On the Obersalzberg, though, where Eva Braun’s mother, sisters, and friend Herta Schneider had brought themselves to safety and where Hitler’s staff who had fled Berlin after April 20 were gathered, no one suspected anything about the upcoming wedding. At first, the people there, including Morell and the photographer Walter Frentz, hoped that Hitler and Eva Braun would be arriving shortly.69 Only when Julius Schaub appeared at the Berghof on April 25, a day after it had been badly hit by bombers, to destroy the contents of Hitler’s safe, must it have become clear to everyone that Hitler would not be coming and that the end was near. In fact, according to Gretl Fegelein in September 1945, terrible mistrust prevailed when Schaub arrived at the residence, drunk and accompanied by his girlfriend. Christa Schroeder recalls that he burned “letters, files, memos, and books” on the Berghof terrace “without saying a word.”70
Meanwhile, the “Führer bunker” in Berlin was now under uninterrupted fire and Hitler was handing out poison capsules. These came originally from Himmler and were supplied by Himmler’s former personal physician SS-Obersturmbahnführer Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, the only doctor who remained in the bunker. Nicolaus von Below reported that he himself was given an “ampule of potassium cyanide” by Hitler in person, on April 27.71 Hitler had distributed the poison to the women days before. In fact, as a later forensic examination proved, the poison was not potassium cyanide but hydrocyanic acid, a “liquid clear as water” which caused death within seconds and left a scent like that of bitter almonds on the person’s clothes and in the room.72 The conversations over nightly tea in Hitler’s living room now turned on only one topic: the best way to die. “I want to be a beautiful corpse, I will take poison,” Eva Braun supposedly said on one such occasion. Hitler, on the other hand, told the women that he would shoot himself in the head and then have the body burned.73 It was an atmosphere of hysteria, according to Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, who, as the adjutant of General Hans Krebs, whom Hitler had named as his personal adviser, was stationed at his side in the bunker. The inhabitants of the bunker mostly stood around in the halls, Eva Braun often with Magda Goebbels, smoking and talking. Their psychological state continued to swing wildly between hope and despair. Many numbed their fear with alcohol, of which there was plenty on hand from the Reich Chancellery.74
The mood hit bottom on April 28, when the Reuters news agency broadcast a report from London that reached Hitler: Himmler had offered an unconditional surrender to America and England. Talks had already begun months before between Himmler and the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, in which Himmler had agreed to the release of twenty thousand prisoners from the German concentration camps. Now the Reichsführer-SS and Interior Minister, even if late in the day, was trying to use his contact with Bernadotte to somehow negotiate a way to save his life in the postwar period to come.75 The fact is that—like Göring, Speer, Ribbentrop, and Bormann, too, for that matter—Himmler in no way saw his life as over after the fall of the “Third Reich.” And so, with Hitler’s swift death in view, he met with Bernadotte in the Swedish embassy in Lübeck on the night of April 23 and offered to surrender to the Western powers. He, and the Germans as a whole, Himmler emphasized, would never surrender to the “Bolshevists” no matter what happened. But American President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused a partial surrender, and informed both Stalin and the world media of what had happened.76
Hitler exploded with rage that Himmler of all people, one of his most faithful followers, had betrayed him. Since his liaison officer and protégé Hermann Fegelein was also nowhere to be found, Hitler ordered an SS commando to look for him. Eva Braun had apparently looked into her brother-in-law’s whereabouts days before—she wrote to her sister on April 23: “Hermann isn’t here with us! He has left for Nauen to set up a battalion or something. I am absolutely sure that you will see him again. He will make it through safely, to maybe carry on the resistance in Bavaria at least for a while.”77 But obviously Hermann Fegelein was no longer willing to fight—he was ready to get out. Traudl Junge said that Eva Braun, “disappointed and shaken,” had told her about a call from Fegelein in which, even before Hitler ordered a search for him, he encouraged her to abandon “the Führer” if she was unable to “get him out of Berlin.” It really was now “a matter of life and death.”78 Gretl Fegelein revealed to an American secret agent after the war that she had heard from her father-in-law that Hermann Fegelein had called his father shortly before the fall of Berlin and explained that he would be coming to Fischhorn the next day. But he never arrived.79 Instead, he was apprehended in his private apartment in Berlin, wearing civilian clothes, and was taken to the Reich Chancellery, interrogated, and shot for desertion on April 28.80 At the same time, the Soviet troops were advancing unstoppably t
oward the center of the city. Hitler and Eva Braun made the final preparations for their double suicide.
Their decision to get married at the very end of their life together was made that same day. There has been a great deal of speculation about their reasons, but the fact is that none of the people who left the bunker alive and survived the war knew about the decision in advance, or heard anything firsthand about Hitler’s and Braun’s personal motives. Other than the witnesses, Goebbels and Bormann, only Traudl Junge and Nicolaus von Below knew about the upcoming ceremony. Hitler, at around ten thirty at night, had dictated to her his private and political testament.81 There it says:
Since I did not believe it would be responsible to found a marriage during the years of struggle, I have now decided, before the termination of this worldly career, to take as my wife the woman who, after many long years of loyal friendship, came to the already almost besieged city of her own free will in order to share her fate with mine. It is my wish that she go with me into death as my wife. Death will replace for us what my work in the service of my People has robbed from us…. I and my wife choose death, to avoid the shame of flight or surrender.82
We cannot conclude anything about the actual state of Hitler’s feelings from this statement about his decision to marry. The phrasing is ambiguous and remains mysterious. The ceremony itself took place on the night of April 28–29. Besides the bride and groom, the only people present were Goebbels, Bormann, and a hastily summoned registrar, Walter Wagner.83 Afterward, there was a brief champagne reception in Hitler’s living room, where others took part, including Magda Goebbels, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, General Krebs, Below, Gerda Christian, Constanze Manziarly, and Artur Axmann, the fanatical National Youth Leader who had moved into the bunker on April 23. They all made an effort, according to Below, “to think happily about the old days.” It was a “rather ghostly occasion.”84
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