by Mark Felton
Knowing that the end was near seemed to make up Hitler’s mind concerning a personal matter. Just after midnight on 29 April, Hitler married his longtime girlfriend Eva Braun in a simple ceremony inside the bunker.4 It was her reward for her years of loyalty to him. She was under no illusions – she had come to Berlin to die with Hitler.
At 1.00am on 30 May Generalfeldmarschall Keitel reported to Hitler that all German forces that had been ordered to relieve the capital were either surrounded or had been forced on to the defensive.5 No relief of the government quarter could be expected. Later that morning the attacking Soviets managed to penetrate to within 500 metres of the Führerbunker, despite the fanatical resistance being put up by Hitler’s guard detachments. Hitler met with General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area. He informed the Führer that there was enough ammunition to sustain the defence for a maximum of twenty-four hours. Weidling asked permission for the remaining troops to attempt a breakout, but Hitler did not reply. Weidling returned to his headquarters at the Bendlerblock. At 1.00pm he received permission from Hitler for a breakout.6
Hitler had lunch with two of his secretaries and his cook and then he bade farewell to his staff and the remaining bunker occupants, including Bormann and Goebbels. With his wife, Hitler went into his study and closed the door at 2.30pm. Differing accounts of what happened next have surfaced over the years. The officially accepted story is that at shortly after 3.30pm Heinz Linge, with Bormann right behind him, opened the study door and was met with the strong smell of burnt almonds, a signature of hydrogen cyanide.7 Again accounts differ in the details but according to Linge, Eva Hitler was slumped to the left of the Führer on a sofa, her legs drawn up. Hitler ‘sat . . . sunken over, with blood dripping out of his right temple,’ wrote Linge. ‘He had shot himself with his own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65.’8
Hitler’s adjutant Günsche then entered the room, surveyed the scene and left shortly afterwards to declare to those waiting outside that the Führer was dead. Preparations had already been made to dispose of the bodies of Hitler and his wife, as Hitler had made sure that Günsche understood that on no account was his body to be found intact by the Soviets. A few hours before Hitler killed himself Günsche had telephoned the Reich Chancellery garage and spoken to Hitler’s principal driver, Erich Kempka. Günsche ordered Kempka to bring over a large quantity of petrol. ‘I was . . . to ensure that five cans of gasoline, that is to say 200 litres, were brought along,’ recalled Kempka. ‘I at once took along two or three men carrying cans. More were following, because it took time to collect 200 litres of gasoline.’9 The cans were left near the bunker’s emergency exit.
Hitler’s body was wrapped in a blanket and carried up the stairs to the bunker’s emergency exit by Linge10, SS-Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff and SS-Obersturmführer Hans Reisser of the SS-Begleitkommando, and SS-Obersturmbannführer Peter Högl, deputy commander of the RSD. Bormann carried Eva Hitler’s body upstairs. Once outside, the SS officers placed both of the bodies, still wrapped in grey blankets, into a shell crater and then doused them liberally with petrol.11 An attempt was made to light the petrol, but it was unsuccessful. Linge went back into the bunker and returned with a thick roll of papers. Bormann lit the papers and threw them into the hole, the petrol igniting with a whoosh. Others had joined them. Standing just inside the emergency exit door Günsche, Bormann, Högl, Linge, Lindloff, Reisser, Kempka and Goebbels raised their arms in the Nazi salute.12 But the party was soon driven inside as Soviet shells began to land in the Reich Chancellery garden.13
For Heinz Linge it was a peculiar and emotional event. He had been Hitler’s valet for ten years, and knew him perhaps more intimately than anyone. He was reminded of how much had changed in that decade of service. ‘The man who had asked my name in Obersalzberg in the summer of 1934 had been a domineering personality exuding a spellbinding charisma to which few were not prey. He embodied sovereign power, total power. The man whom I burnt and interred under a hail of Red Army shells near the Reich Chancellery was a terribly old man, a spent force, feeble, a failure.’14 Linge was struck by the parallels between the destruction of Hitler and the ruin of the nation he had led. ‘Like the Reich which he had said would bring in an era of unparalleled brilliance and opulence and had become a heap of rubble, he was the disfigured embodiment of his earlier self.’15
Thirty minutes after the cremation of Hitler and his wife was begun, Günsche ordered Lindloff to go out and see how it was progressing. Lindloff reported that both bodies were charred and had burst open. He also said that they had been damaged by shellfire. During the afternoon, SS-Begleitkommando guards continued to add jerry cans of fuel to the burning hole in between the Soviet barrages.16
At 4.15pm Linge ordered SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Krüger and SSOberscharführer Werner Schwiedel to roll up the bloodstained rug from Hitler’s study, carry it up to the Reich Chancellery garden and burn it.17 At 6.30pm Lindloff reported to Günsche that he and Reisser had disposed of the remains.18 It appears that from the remains later found by the Soviets some days later that the bodies of Hitler and his wife were burned beyond recognition and possibly damaged by shellfire, if indeed they were the mortal remains of the tyrant and his spouse.
Although Hitler was dead, the business of government continued, as well as the defence of the remaining areas of the government quarter by Hitler’s bodyguard units and associated troops. Hitler’s Last Will and Testament had broken up the position of ‘Führer’ into three separate offices. Goebbels was named Reich Chancellor, with Grossadmiral Dönitz appointed Reich President and Bormann made Party Minister.19 But at this stage, only Dönitz could exercise any limited control from Flensburg in the north. Goebbels made it very clear that he and his wife Magda would emulate their beloved Führer and commit suicide when the time came.
On 1 May Chancellor Goebbels drafted a letter to the Soviets and ordered 47-year-old General der Infanterie Hans Krebs, Chief of the Army General Staff (OKH), to deliver it under a white flag of truce to General Vasili Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army which was occupying central Berlin.20 The letter informed the Soviet High Command of Hitler’s death, the appointment of Goebbels as Reich Chancellor and his offer of a cease-fire. When Krebs was sent packing with the clear instruction that the Soviets would only accept unconditional surrender, Goebbels knew that it was futile to continue. Later that day Vizeadmiral Hans-Erich Voss and almost a dozen other military officers arrived at the Führerbunker to say farewell to Goebbels as their supreme commander.
At 8.00pm that evening Goebbels instructed dentist SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Kunz to drug his six children with morphine. Then Hitler’s personal physician, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, crushed a vial of cyanide in each of their jaws, killing them. A little while later a subdued Goebbels pulled on his gloves and hat, and arm-in-arm with his wife, climbed the stairs to the bunker’s emergency exit and emerged into the Reich Chancellery garden. His adjutant, 29-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Gunther Schwa¨germann, followed him.
Schwa¨germann went to collect more petrol to burn the Goebbels’ bodies while Goebbels and his wife went around the corner out of sight. Schwa¨germann said that he heard a pistol shot and came upon his master and Magda Goebbels dead. She had taken poison while Goebbels had shot himself in the head. Schwa¨germann ordered the SS-Begleitkommando sentry at the bunker emergency exit to shoot Goebbels again in the head to make sure – Schwa¨germann could not face doing so himself. The two men then poured petrol over the bodies and set fire to them. Unfortunately, there was insufficient petrol remaining to burn the bodies and the fire-blackened corpses remained easily recognizable to Voss when he was forced by the Soviets to identify them the following day. The shape of Goebbels’ head and jaw as well as his leg brace were unmistakable, along with the remains of his brown Nazi uniform and Golden Party Badge.
There was another suicide on 1 May. SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Scha¨dle, the 38-year-old comman
der of the SS-Begleitkommando, shot himself through the mouth with a pistol inside the bunker.
Before he killed himself on 30 April, Hitler had signed an order permitting the remaining members of the bunker to attempt to break out of Berlin. ‘It was planned for ten groups to break out from the Führer-bunker on the night of 1 May 1945 and penetrate the encirclement by force of arms,’21 recalled Hitler’s driver Erich Kempka. In the event three groups eventually departed from the Führerbunker during the night of 1–2 May.
Group 1, led by SS-Brigadeführer Mohnke, included Hitler’s three remaining secretaries, Traudl Junge, Gerda Christian and Else Krüger, his cook Constanze Manziarly, one of Hitler’s doctors SS-Standartenführer Dr Ernst-Gunther Schenk, diplomat Walter Hewel, Otto Günsche and SS-Sturmbannführer Arthur Klingermeyer plus fifteen other mostly SS officers and men. The group was armed to the teeth and Mohnke planned to link up with German forces still fighting on the Prinzeallee. Mohnke’s group initially made good progress and eluded Soviet detection before reaching the underground railway station at Wilhelmplatz. From there the group walked down the tunnel towards Stadtmitte Station. They had no contact with the other two groups as they had no radios with them. Eventually they arrived at a closed steel door that sealed the tunnel. Two uniformed officials were guarding it and refused to open the door. Mohnke’s group returned to the surface and eventually reached the Schulteiss-Patjenhofer Brewery on Prinzeallee where they surrendered to the Soviets on 2 May.
Hitler’s secretaries were all raped by Soviet troops but did eventually manage to get through to American lines, while Hitler’s cook Manziarly was most probably murdered by Soviet troops. The last of Hitler’s secretaries, Traudl Junge, died in 2002 aged 81. Dr Schenk was released from Soviet captivity in 1953 and returned to West Germany. He died there in 1998 aged 94. Mohnke and other senior SS commanders were imprisoned in the dreaded Lubjanka Prison in Moscow. Mohnke was released in 1955 and became a truck dealer in West Germany. He died in 2001 aged 90. Walter Hewel committed suicide when Soviet forces arrived to take their surrender, crunching down on a cyanide capsule the same moment that he shot himself in the head. SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, Hitler’s ever-loyal servant, survived NKVD captivity and brutal interrogation before returning to West Germany in 1956. He died in 2003 aged 86.
Group 2 was under the command of Hitler’s RSD commander Johann Rattenhuber, but was captured by the Soviets the same day it left the bunker. Rattenhuber shared Mohnke’s fate and died shortly after his release from Soviet captivity in 1957 aged 60.
Group 3 was led by Werner Naumann, the State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry who had been created Propaganda Minister in Hitler’s Last Will and Testament. Naumann’s group included Martin Bormann, Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann, Hitler’s pilot Hans Baur22, Kempka, and another of Hitler’s doctors, Dr Stumpfegger plus some other prominent bunker characters. This group managed to cross the River Spree at the Weidendammer Bridge on their third attempt. During the first attempt one of the last remaining Tiger tanks in Berlin had attempted to force back the Soviets at the other end of the bridge but had been knocked out. ‘After the tank had gone about 30 or 40m it received a direct hit,’ recalled Kempka. ‘The tank flew apart. I saw a short flash of lightning and fell to the ground where I remained lying unconscious. My last impression was that Dr Naumann, Bormann and Dr Stumpfegger fell together and remained lying.’23 Eventually, sheer weight of numbers, as thousands of military personnel and civilians charged across the bridge, forced the Soviets to retreat, though they indiscriminately mowed down hundreds including Heinrich Himmler’s brother, during the stampede. Kempka was not among them. He came round to find that Bormann, Stumpfegger and the others had gone on. Kempka was slightly wounded by shrapnel in his thigh and upper arm but otherwise was in one piece. He saw another German attack go on, ‘but I decided not to go along any more because of its futility. I returned to the Admiralsplatz, assembled my men and told them that they were dismissed. Each one could go on his own, to join a combat group or go home. I also advised them to procure for themselves civilian clothes.’24
Hans Baur carried in his backpack one of Hitler’s most prized possessions, the portrait of Frederick the Great that had adorned the wall of his bunker study. Baur was seriously wounded by machine gun fire in the leg, face and chest as he attempted to reach cover in a wrecked train station after crossing the Weidendammer Bridge. A Soviet soldier who found him robbed Hitler’s pilot of his possessions, including the rolled up painting. Baur carried no identity documents and had changed into a nondescript uniform, as had most of those escaping from the bunker. But, in great pain and fearing that he would die if he didn’t receive proper medical treatment, he identified himself to his Soviet captors. Soviet NKVD officers interrogated him in detail, desperate to know as much about Hitler’s supposed suicide as possible, before he was given an operation in a field hospital. His leg had become infected and required amputation below the knee. He was to endure a decade in Soviet hands, held in Moscow along with other members of Hitler’s personal staff, as the Soviets probed the circumstances of the Führer’s demise.25 The Soviets later released him to France in 1955. There he was imprisoned until 1957, before being returned to West Germany where he wrote his memoirs. Baur died in Bavaria in 1993 aged 95.
Dr Goebbels’ adjutant Gunther Schwa¨germann managed to escape Berlin and was eventually arrested by the US Army. He was released in 1947 and lived in West Germany until his death. The SS dentist who had drugged the Goebbels’ children in preparation for their murder, Helmut Kunz, returned to work in the Reich Chancellery casualty clearing station and was captured on 2 May. He spent ten years in Soviet captivity before moving to Munster where he operated a dental practice, German courts refusing to prosecute him for his part in the deaths of the Goebbels’ children. Kunz died in 1976 aged 65.
Two of Hitler’s bodyguards were killed as they attempted to cross the Weidendammer Bridge. SS-Obersturmbannführer Peter Högl, second-in-command of the RSD, was shot through the head and fatally wounded. He was 47-years-old. Thirty-six-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff, the officer who had burned Hitler and Eva Braun’s bodies, was also killed alongside Högl. Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver, had left the bunker in company with SS-Hauptscharführer Heinrich Doose, one of the other drivers, and SS-Obersturmbannführer Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet. During the escape they came across Georg Betz, Hitler’s second pilot, ‘who had been wounded crossing the Weidendammer Bridge, he had a serious head injury’26 recalled Kempka. Betz was left in the care of Hitler’s dental assistant Kaethe Hausermann, but he later died.
Kempka returned to Friedrichstrasse Station with seven of his SS drivers. They then crossed the Spree on a footbridge and reached a house on its northern bank without being fired at.27 Pushing on to Albrechtstrasse, they were captured in a rail yard but Kempka, with the help of a civilian overcoat, managed to escape and get through Soviet lines. He was eventually captured by the US Army on 20 June at Berchtesgaden. Released in 1947, Kempka later wrote his memoirs. He died in 1975 aged 64. Linge was not so lucky. He was cornered and captured by the Soviets and hauled off to the Lubjanka for ten years. Released in 1955, he died in Bremen in 1980 aged 66.
Once across the Weidendammer Bridge Axmann, Bormann and Stumpfegger left the main group and started walking along the railway tracks to the Lehrter Station. Bormann and Stumpfegger then continued along tracks towards Stettiner Station. Axmann went on alone in the opposite direction but was forced to backtrack by a Soviet patrol. He later claimed to have seen Bormann and Stumpfegger’s bodies lying near the railway-switching yard at Stettiner Station, though he did not pause to check them.28 Axmann was one of several members of Naumann’s group who managed to break through the encirclement of Berlin and escape the Soviets. He went to ground in the Bavarian Alps under the alias ‘Erich Siewert’ until captured by the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps in December 1945 when he was trying to establish a Nazi underground movement. In 1949 Ax
mann was sentenced to three years and three months in prison. He died in 1996 aged 83, the last of Hitler’s ministers.
The search for Martin Bormann, considered to have been the most senior Nazi to have escaped capture and/or trial in 1945, continued for decades despite Axmann’s insistence that Bormann and Dr Stumpfegger had died during the escape from the Führerbunker. Digs were made for Bormann’s body in Paraguay in March 1964 and Berlin in July 1964 without result. The same year the West German government offered a 100,000 Mark reward for information leading to Bormann’s capture, but it remained unclaimed. In 1965 a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow came forward to claim that on 8 May 1945, or thereabouts, he and his colleagues had been ordered by the Soviets to bury two bodies near the Lehrter Station in the exact same location as that reported by Artur Axmann. Krumnow claimed that one body was dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform – indeed Bormann had changed into nondescript dress for the breakout – while the other was an SS doctor. Krumnow stated that they found a paybook on the SS officer’s body identifying it as Ludwig Stumpfegger’s. When they gave the document to the Soviets, they destroyed it.
Then, in 1972 workmen found two skeletons only 12 metres from where Krumnow stated that he had buried two bodies in May 1945. Using dental records reconstructed in Soviet captivity from memory in 1945 by SS-Brigadeführer Dr Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist, the smaller skeleton was identified as Bormann’s. The skeleton also had a damaged collarbone consistent with a 1939 riding accident suffered by Bormann. The second skeleton was identified as Stumpfegger’s based largely on the body’s great height. Fragments of glass found in the jaws of both skeletons seemed to suggest that Bormann and Stumpfegger had crunched down on cyanide capsules to avoid capture. The British press labelled the investigation a ‘whitewash’ perpetrated by the German government to finally lay its Nazi past to rest. In 1998 DNA tests proved that the skeleton identified as Bormann’s was indeed the ‘Lord of the Obersalzberg’. His remains were cremated and scattered in the sea. However, several authors and researchers have pointed out inconsistencies with the official German investigation’s findings, notably that Bormann’s skeleton was covered in flecks of red clay when the Berlin soil is yellow sand. It is the kind of clay found in Paraguay, where Bormann was reported several times to have been living after the war. Perhaps Bormann did escape and after he died in freedom his skeleton was ‘planted’ in Berlin near to where Axmann and Krumnow claimed to have seen it. It remains an intriguing historical mystery and like that of Rudolf Hess, will continue to generate conspiracy theories for decades to come.29