Hitler's Last Days (15 page)

Otto Frank's beloved wife, Edith, died of starvation just six weeks ago right here at Auschwitz. His daughters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany in the fall of 1944. Margot Frank died of typhus in early 1945.

Her sister, Anne, is still alive when her father is liberated but has just weeks to live. She will die bald and covered with insect bites, her emaciated body finally done in by a typhoid outbreak that will kill seventeen thousand inmates at Bergen-Belsen.

She is just fifteen years old.

PART THREE

IN THE F
Ü
HRERBUNKER

CHAPTER 17

BERLIN, GERMANY

JANUARY 30, 1945

A
DOLF
H
ITLER CONTINUES TO BLAME
the Jews for Germany's problems. It has been two decades since he spoke or had contact with a Jewish person, and yet he is obsessed with eradicating them from the planet.

On this, the twelfth anniversary of the day he became chancellor, he tells the German people, “Judaism began systematically to undermine our nation from within.”

A young member of the Hitler Youth hands Hitler a letter written by his mother.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Richard Freimark and William O. McWorkman]

Hitler's physical health is declining. His hands shake. His eyes water. He is now getting twice-a-day injections of methamphetamine so he can function. This is not the trim, vibrant man whom Eva Braun first met. Fifteen years ago, in 1929, a man who was introduced to her as “Mr. Wolf” came into the shop where she was working to speak with the owner. She was invited to have lunch with the group and remembered that he seemed to be “devouring me with his eyes.” As most people were, she was attracted to his charisma and power. And he was kind to her. Even now, he and Eva Braun carry on the charade that the war can be won. But Hitler's location inside the bombed-out ruins of Berlin tells the true story. It has been two weeks since his personal train slunk into the once proud capital of Germany in the dead of night. The curtains were drawn as a precaution against Allied bombing—though that is really more of a habit than anything else. The Luftwaffe, the German air force, has been destroyed. American and British bombers are free to attack Berlin in broad daylight—which they do most days by nine in the morning, as the city's embattled residents hurry off to work—and again at night.

Eva Braun, about age twenty.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

From left to right, Eva Braun, Hitler, Blondi, Sepp Dietrich, and Albert Speer.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Paul von Hindenburg and Hitler, 1933.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

How different this is from twelve years earlier, when Hitler came to Berlin as the newly appointed second-in-command to Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the president of Germany. Then Hitler and his Nazi Party were seen as the saviors of the country where six million people were unemployed. More than fifty thousand people are said to have joined the Nazi Party in the weeks following Hitler's rise to power. At that time he told the German people,

The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.

Now he knows that his dream of the ideal Germany is in ruins. There will be no stopping the Allies on the western front. To the east, where the Russian superiority is eleven soldiers for every one German fighter, the situation is even worse.

On this very day—January 30, 1945—Hitler's minister of armaments, Albert Speer, has sent Hitler a memo informing the F
ü
hrer that the war is lost. Germany does not have the industrial capacity necessary to churn out the tanks, planes, submarines, and bombs necessary to defeat the Allies. Nor does it have the manpower.

Nevertheless, Hitler has no plans to surrender. In his anniversary speech today, he says,

On this day I do not want to leave any doubt about something else. Against an entire hostile world I once chose my road, according to my inner call, and strode it, as an unknown and nameless man, to final success; often they reported I was dead and always they wished I were, but in the end I remained victor in spite of all. My life today is with an equal exclusiveness determined by the duties incumbent on me.

Hitler now makes his home in central Berlin, underground, in an elaborate bunker built underneath the Reich Chancellery. The complex consists of two levels: The upper-level Vorbunker contains a conference room, dining facility, kitchen, water storage room, and bedrooms for support staff, which number more than two dozen. Below that is the F
ü
hrerbunker, with lavishly decorated rooms for Hitler and Eva Braun. A large oil painting of his personal hero, Frederick the Great, covers one wall. The entire complex lies beneath a garden, where Hitler goes most days to walk Blondi.

The Reich Chancellery in Berlin housed the Berlin parliament and Hitler's offices.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Eva Braun still tends to him, though she does not live inside the bunker with him. She remains calm, believing that Hitler's cruel genius can win the day. Living in an underground bunker is just one more precaution that is necessary in a time of war. Adding to the air of normalcy is that Blondi has new puppies, which make their home in the bunker as well.

Even though he fears that a direct hit from an Allied bomb will kill him instantly, Adolf Hitler believes he will be saved. In the conclusion to his speech, he says,

However grave the crisis may be at the moment, it will, despite everything, finally be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice and by our abilities. We shall overcome this calamity, too, and this fight, too, will not be won by central Asia [meaning Russia] but by Europe; and at its head will be the nation that has represented Europe against the East for fifteen hundred years and shall represent it for all times: our Greater German Reich, the German nation.

Adolf Hitler has ninety days to live. He will never leave Berlin again.

CHAPTER 18

REMAGEN, GERMANY

MARCH 7, 1945

O
N
M
ARCH
7
, A SMALL
A
MERICAN
unit of armored infantry succeeded in crossing the Rhine in the town of Remagen, sixty-three miles north of Patton's location in Trier. The incredulous Americans could not believe that the bridge remained intact, and crossed immediately. And while they were not able to advance beyond a small toehold on the Rhine's eastern shore, the symbolism of the Allied achievement struck such fear in the minds of the Nazi high command that Adolf Hitler ordered the execution by firing squad of the four officers he considered responsible for not destroying the bridge. The men were forced to kneel, then shot in the back of the neck. The final letters they had written to family were burned.