Hitler (144 page)

For all its casual character, this marriage represented a significant step. It was not only a gesture of gratitude toward the one living being aside from the dog Blondi who, as Hitler once remarked, remained faithful to him to the last. It was also a definitive act of abdication. As the Führer, he had repeatedly declared, he must not be married. The mythological conception he had of his status could not be reconciled with ordinary human ties. Now he was abandoning this stand, with the implication that he no longer believed in the survival of National Socialism. In fact he did remark to his guests that the cause was done for and would not spring to life again.
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Then he left the group and went into one of the adjacent rooms to dictate his last will.

He produced a political and a private testament. The former was dominated by violent polemics against the Jews, by asseverations of his own innocence, and appeals to the spirit of resistance: “Centuries will pass, but the ruins of our cities and monuments will repeatedly kindle hatred for the race ultimately responsible, who have brought everything down upon us: international Jewry and its accomplices!”

Twenty-five years had passed. He had experienced an unprecedented rise, undreamed-of triumphs and defeats, despairs and downfall, and he himself had remained unchanged. Down to the very phrasing, the ideological passages of the testament might have been taken from the first document of his political career, the letter to Adolf Gemlich in 1919, or from one of his speeches as a young local agitator. The phenomenon of early and total rigidity, of the rejection of all experience, which was so typical of Hitler, was confirmed for the last time in this document.

In a special section he expelled Göring and Himmler from the party and from all of their offices. He named Admiral Dönitz as his successor in the posts of President, Minister of War, and supreme commander of the armed forces. His comment that in the navy the sense of honor still survived, that any thought of surrender was alien to it, was obviously intended to be understood as an injunction to continue the struggle even beyond his death, to ultimate doom. At the same time, he appointed a new government, headed by Goebbels. The document concluded: “Above all I call upon the leaders of the nation and all followers to observe the racial laws scrupulously and to implacably oppose the universal poisoner of all races, international Jewry.”
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His personal testament was considerably shorter. Whereas the political document asserted his claims on history, the personal one expressed the custom's official's son who had remained behind all the disguises. It read:

 

During the years of struggle I did not think I could responsibly undertake to establish a marriage. But now, before the completion of this earthly course, I have decided to take as my wife the girl who after long years of faithful friendship entered this city, already almost besieged, of her own free will, in order to share my fate with me. At her request she is joining me in death as my wife. Death will compensate us for what my work in the service of my people robbed from us both.

All that I own—in so far as it had any value—belongs to the party. If this ceases to exist, to the state; and if the state also is annihilated, no further decision on my part is necessary.

My paintings in the collections I bought over the years were never collected for private purposes, but always only for the expansion of a gallery in my hometown of Linz on the Danube. It would be my heartfelt wish if this bequest could be duly carried out. I appoint as executor of my will my most faithful party comrade, Martin Bormann. He is legally entitled to make all final decisions. He may transfer any personal mementos, or whatever is needed for the maintenance of a modest middle-class standard of living, to my brother and sisters, and particularly to my wife's mother, and to my faithful associates who are well known to him—principally my old secretaries, Frau Winter, etc., who for many years have sustained me by their work.

I myself and my wife choose death to escape the disgrace of removal or surrender. It is our desire to be burned at once at the place in which I have performed the greater part of my daily work in the course of twelve years of service to my people.

 

The two documents were signed at four o'clock in the morning on April 29. Three copies were prepared, and in the course of the day arrangements were made to have them taken out of the bunker by different routes. One of the people selected for this messenger service was Colonel von Below, Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, who took with him a postscript directed to General Keitel. That was Hitler's last message and ended with the characteristic sentences:

 

The people and the armed forces have given their all in this long and hard struggle. The sacrifice has been enormous. But my trust has been misused by many people. Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined resistance throughout the war. It was therefore not granted to me to lead the people to victory. The
Army
General Staff cannot be compared with the General Staff in the First World War. Its achievements were far behind those of the fighting front.

The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people.
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At various times during the past weeks Hitler had expressed anxiety that he might have to appear as an “exhibit in the Moscow zoo” or as the principal actor in a “show trial staged by Jews.”
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These fears were intensified when, in the course of April 29, the news of Mussolini'S death reached him. The Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, who had hastily joined him that same day, had been caught by partisans and on the afternoon of April 28 shot without formalities in the small north Italian hamlet of Mezzagra. The bodies were taken to Milan and suspended by the heels from the roof of a garage on the Piazzale Loreto, where a screaming mob beat, spat upon, and stoned the corpses.

Under the impact of this news, Hitler began making the arrangements for his own death. He charged many members of his entourage, including his servant Heinz Linge, his chauffeur Erich Kempka, and his pilot Hans Baur, with the task of seeing that his remains did not fall into the enemy's hands. The preparations he made seemed like a last manifestation of his lifelong efforts to conceal his real self. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between Hitler's crawling into a hole to die, as it were, and the end of Mussolini, who called upon his remaining adherents to go together to the Valtellina and there “die with the sun in our faces.”

But Hitler also feared that the poison he had provided might not bring about death fast enough or reliably enough. Consequently, he ordered the effect of the poison to be tried out on his Alsatian dog. At midnight Blondi was coaxed to the toilet in the bunker. Sergeant Tornow, who was in charge of Hitler's dogs, forced the animal's mouth open while Professor Haase, one of the medical staff, reached into the dog's gullet and with forceps crushed an ampoule of poison inside. Shortly afterward Hitler entered the room and glanced expressionlessly at the corpse. He then invited the occupants of the two adjacent bunkers to come to the conference room for farewells. With a faraway expression, he went down the row, silently shaking hands with each person. Several said a few words to him, but he did not answer, or only moved his lips inaudibly. Shortly after three o'clock in the morning he had a telegram sent to Dönitz complaining about inadequate military measures, and in a kind of stale, repetitive gesture he once more commanded the admiral to proceed “instantly and unsparingly against all traitors.”

Late in the forenoon the military conference took place as usual. With no sign of emotion, Hitler received the information that the Soviet troops had by now occupied the Tiergarten, Potsdamer Platz, and the subway on Vosstrasse, in the immediate vicinity of the chancellery. Then he ordered delivery of 200 liters of gasoline. At two o'clock he had his lunch in company with his secretaries and his cook; at the same moment, two Soviet sergeants raised the Red flag on the dome of the nearby Reichstag. After the meal he summoned his most intimate associates, including Goebbels, Bormann, Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, his secretaries, Frau Christian and Frau Junge, and several orderlies. Together with his wife, he shook hands with all of them and then, mute and stooped, he vanished inside his room. And as though this life, which had so largely been governed by staged happenings and had always aimed at glaringly dramatic effects, could only end with a preposterous climax, at this time a dance began in the chancellery canteen (if we are to believe the accounts of the participants), a dance in which the weeks of strained nerves sought violent release. Even repeated remonstrances that the Führer was about to die could not bring it to a halt.
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It was April 30, 1945, shortly before 4 p.m.

What happened thereafter has never been completely and unequivocally clarified. According to the statements of most of the survivors of the bunker, a single shot sounded. Shortly afterward, Rattenhuber, the commander of the SS guards, entered the room. Hitler was sitting hunched over, face smeared with blood, on the sofa. Beside him was his wife, an unused revolver in her lap; she had taken poison. In contrast to this version of things, most Soviet accounts have held that Hitler also ended his life by poison. But there are contradictions in the Soviet story. On the one hand, it denies that any traces of a bullet were detectable in the fragments of a skull that were found later. On the other hand, the story attempts to say who in Hitler's entourage had been assigned to deliver the “mercy shot” to make sure of his death. These contradictions tend to indicate that the Soviet version of Hitler's suicide has a political coloration. It sounds like a last echo of the attempts constantly made during Hitler's lifetime to refute him by belittling him, as though a certain mentality could not bear to concede abilities and strength to the morally reprehensible. It was the story of the Iron Cross or his gifts as political tactician or statesman all over again: he was now begrudged the courage required for the obviously sterner death by a bullet.
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Rattenhuber ordered the bodies to be taken into the courtyard. There he had the gasoline poured over them and invited the mourners to come up. No sooner had they assembled than Russian shelling drove them back to the bunker entrance. Hitler's SS adjutant Otto Günsche thereupon tossed a burning rag upon both corpses, and when the leaping flames swathed the bodies, everyone stood at attention and gave the Nazi salute. A member of the guards detachment who passed by the spot half an hour after this ceremony could “no longer recognize Hitler because he was pretty well charred.” And when he visited the spot again toward eight o'clock “a few flakes were flying up in the wind,” as he put it. Shortly before 11
P.M.
the remains of the almost totally consumed bodies were swept onto a canvas shelter half, according to GUnsche's account, “let down into a shell hole outside the exit from the bunker, covered over with earth, and the earth pounded firm with a wooden rammer.”
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Long ago, in the days of struggle, Hitler had let himself be represented grandiloquently as “the man who would rather be a dead Achilles than a living dog.” Later on, he had begun to elaborate the scenario for his obsequies. His burial place was to be a mighty crypt in the bell tower of the gigantic structure he had planned to build on the bank of the Danube at Linz. But in fact he was hastily shoveled into a shell hole among mountains of rubble, fragments of wall, cement mixers, and scattered rubbish.

 

This was not yet the end of the story. Goebbels tried to coax the Russians into separate negotiations by references to their “common holiday of May 1.” When these efforts failed, Goebbels and his family committed suicide. Bormann, together with the other inhabitants of the bunker, made an attempt to break out. Then Soviet troops occupied the abandoned bunker and immediately set about searching for the remains of Hitler's body. A medical report dated May 8, 1945, of an autopsy of a severely charred male body came to the conclusion that this was “presumably Hitler's corpse.” Other statements shortly afterward cast doubt on this assertion. Then again Soviet sources maintained that Hitler had after all been identified on the basis of dental studies; but this statement, too, was questioned, and rumors arose that the British authorities were hiding Hitler in their zone of occupation. At the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, Stalin assured his Western colleagues that the Russians had not found the corpse and that Hitler was hiding in Spain or South America.
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In the end the Russians managed to swathe the whole question in such obscurity that the wildest versions concerning the end of Hitler circulated. Some said he had been shot in the Berlin Tiergarten by a German squad of officers. Others had him fleeing in a submarine to a remote island. Still other stories maintained that he was living in a Spanish monastery or on a South American hacienda. All his life Hitler had owed his successes largely to one or the other of his enemies. Now, once more, his ill-wishers—as if in a last display of all the mistakes of the era—made it possible for him to live a mythical posthumous life.

For all that the event had no consequences, it was a symbol. It once again forcibly suggested that the appearance of Hitler, the conditions of his rise and his triumphs, were founded upon premises that point far beyond the narrow framework of merely German conditions. Granted, every nation bears the responsibility for its own history. But only a mind that has learned nothing from the misfortunes of these times will call him the man of a single nation and refuse to recognize that a powerful tendency of the age culminated in him, a tendency that dominated the entire first half of this century.