Berlin
April 3
,
1945
Entering Hitler’s bunker was like descending into the claustrophobic confines of a cement submarine. It reminded the SS general of the tight squeeze Wolf Pack crews had to endure on torpedo runs under cold Atlantic waves, cut off physically and mentally from surface reality.
Firebombs devastated Berlin up there.
Down here, utensils rattled.
The
Führerbunker
was an underground tomb on two levels. Behind the bulkhead that separated it from Kannenberg Alley, where the guards had confiscated Streicher’s pistol and his sons’ daggers, were the upper-level servants’ quarters. A long oak table laden with food, cognac, wine, and bottled beer ran the length of the central dining passage. The aromas from the hearty German cooking prepared in the kitchen still lingered in the stuffy recycled air. Single file, the general and his sons skirted one side of the table, where several drunks slept off the booze with their flushed faces cradled in their arms, and made for the spiral staircase at the opposite end.
Clang …
Clang …
Clang …
The general’s jackboots stomped down the dozen wrought-iron steps.
The lower level continued under the chancellery garden. As this was the innermost sanctum, and Hitler rarely left it, another team of armed sentries guarded the steel door through the last bulkhead. Beyond this point, rumor was, lunatics ran the asylum.
“General, der Chef is waiting for you,” a voice chastised Streicher as he and his sons stepped past the point of no return. If there was a meat hook waiting for him in the torture chamber at Gestapo HQ, he would soon know. “I see you’ve come dressed for the occasion,” said Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary.
“He
is
the führer,” Streicher replied.
“Follow me.”
With the Reich crumbling around them and fear of traitors lurking everywhere now that the Nazis’
Kriegsglück
—war luck—had all but run out, the SS general and his sons had dressed up to remind the führer of his glory days. After a downtrodden cavalcade of wartorn, bloodstained officers reporting military defeats in field gray battledress, would Hitler not yearn to feast his eyes on the black dress uniform of his SS elite? And—even though it was unseasonable attire for the first week of April—would not the summer uniform of his Hitler Youth, a version of what Nazi Brownshirts had worn during their climb to power, warm his heart?
Streicher hoped the garb was meat-hook insurance.
Inside the bunker, it was ghostlike and bleak. So low was the ceiling and narrow the central passage that Streicher felt as if he were being buried alive in a crypt. So poor was the mechanical ventilation that the rough, bare concrete of the rusty brown walls dripped moisture and in places was splotched with mold. The relentless bombardment of Berlin had kept the masons from finishing their plasterwork. As the SS general and his sons followed the odious Bormann toward the center of the Third Reich’s unraveling web, they passed from a cocoon of sultry warmth to a pocket of clammy cold. The resulting shivers felt like the bony finger of death caressing their spines. At this hour of the night, it was eerily quiet, except for the sound of their echoing footfalls and the loud hum of a diesel generator in the powerhouse to the right. On their left, a steel door opened into the toilets. To the musty odors of fungous boots, sweaty woolen uniforms, and coal-tar disinfectants was added a wretched stench. A drainage backup had befouled the bunker, turning it into a public urinal.
A divider split the central passage into a general sitting area and a conference hall beyond. Passing the switchboard room, next to the powerhouse, Bormann entered the conference hall, stopped, swiveled, and ushered the Streichers toward a threshold just inside the divider and to their left.
Hitler’s anteroom.
Martin Bormann brought to mind a stuffed
weisswurst
sausage. Like the Munich delicacy, his puffy face was blanched white by the artificial light. Streicher knew Hitler’s take-charge toady by reputation. Universally hated and feared by the staff of the bunker, this stocky, hard-drinking bully had maneuvered his own desk into the anteroom and was always hovering at Hitler’s elbow. By controlling access to der Chef, he could pull strings for personal gain in these dying days of the Nazi power game.
A sycophant.
A fawner.
An obsequious turd of a yes-man.
The measure of Martin Bormann was the extent of his lying. Because Hitler didn’t drink, the toady hid his own drinking. Because Hitler didn’t smoke, Bormann hid that too. The ultimate hypocrite, he even professed to being a vegetarian. Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler—Streicher’s boss in the Black Corps, the head of the Gestapo and architect of the final solution—had an aversion to the hunting of animals. “Pure murder,” in Himmler’s lexicon. The führer’s vegetarianism dated back to 1931, when the love of his life, his niece Geli Raubal, committed suicide by shooting herself in the heart. From that point on, Hitler could no longer stomach meat. “It’s like eating a corpse!” he would tell dinner guests as they cut into their schnitzels. Bormann, the fawning “vegetarian,” was known to hang a salami for midnight snacks from a hook on the back of his cot.
“The führer!” Bormann announced as the SS general and his sons stepped into the anteroom.
The glare that Hitler’s henchman shot Streicher was ripe with malevolence. He was a dangerous foe who was jealous of what Streicher controlled down in the SS mines.
At Dora-Mittelbau.
And east in the Sudeten.
Clicking the heels of his jackboots, the general shot his right arm forward in the Hitler salute. Flanking him, Fritz and Hans acknowledged the führer too.
“
Heil
Hitler!”
In the next room, they could see him.
And the Angel of Death.
* * *
The candlelight reminded Fritz of the Nuremberg rally and his first Nazi salute. Of the thirty rooms on both levels of the
Führerbunker
, the three that made up Hitler’s private quarters were slightly larger than the rest, ten by fifteen feet. The anteroom fronted the study where he now sat in flickering gloom, staring at the wall. Off the study to the right was his bedroom, and to the left was a toilet and shower. In keeping with Hitler’s monastic nature, his spartan cells were furbished with but a few sticks of furniture. In Hitler’s study, the candlelight burnished the couch on which the führer sat, a coffee table, three chairs, and—the only wall decoration—a portrait of Frederick the Great.
“Come with me, boys.”
It was the angel who summoned.
As the son of an SS general who moved in Himmler’s inner circle, Fritz had heard rumors and whispers about females offering up their bodies to the führer. Women around Hitler were prone to suicide. Two had thrown themselves from apartment windows. One had jumped in front of Hitler’s car. Another had slashed her wrists. And two had shot themselves. It was said that the führer’s current mistress—was she this angel?—had tried to kill herself twice. First, she had shot herself in the chest, narrowly missing her heart, because the führer had built a shrine to a woman named Geli Something-or-other. Later, she had swallowed too many pills. All should have known, Fritz thought, that they couldn’t have him. Even had the führer not stated publicly, “My bride is Germany!”
“Go with her,” the general ordered.
Fritz and Hans stepped forward to join the beckoning angel.
“Hello,” she chirped with a buoyant Bavarian accent. “My name is Eva Braun.”
The Todesengel! The Angel of Death. Fritz wondered why the SS had dubbed her that. Eva seemed perfectly charming to him. Slim and demurely girlish, she was a strawberry blonde in a stylish black dress. Hitler liked his females
“weich, süss, und dumm”
—soft, sweet, and dumb—so they could fulfill the primary role of women in the Third Reich: giving birth to lots of Aryan children destined to rule the world. Girls were trained to be mothers in the Bund Deutscher Mädel—the German Girls’ League—their equivalent to the Hitler Youth. As he and Hans neared her, Fritz fell under the seductive spell of Eva’s French perfume, and wondered if this was what the mother he had never known had been like.
The angel set her champagne glass down on the coffee table. With the siren song of silk lingerie looted from the Champs Elysées shops of occupied Paris rustling beneath her skirt, she led the boys past the führer and headed for the dark bedroom beyond like a heavenly Pied Piper.
“My youth,” Hitler murmured as Fritz moved within reach. His right hand rising as if to return the Nazi salute, he instead paternally patted the Hitler Youth’s cheek.
His touch was like an electric bolt, like the touch of God, like God in that ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel, where he extends his finger to touch the hand of man. It felt to Fritz as if the führer was passing the torch of the Third Reich’s thousand-year future to him.
“Sieg heil,”
the Hitler Youth replied.
Were those tears in God’s fire-sparked eyes?
Eva Braun stood aside at the bedroom door and allowed the boys to precede her into this holiest of holies. Here was where the führer slept and mounted the Todesengel. Only after closing the door did she switch on a weak lamp. The pool of yellow revealed more bare-bones furniture: a single bed, a night table, and a dresser. On the dresser sat a photograph of Hitler’s mother, Klara, whose death in 1907 had severely traumatized her teenage son.
“Sit on the bed, boys,” Eva suggested.
As Fritz and Hans sat, the bedsprings squeaked.
The squeak became a shriek of sexual ecstasy in the fantasy world of Fritz’s Freudian mind. From this position, Eva Braun loomed between the Hitler Youths and the lamp. Fritz could see the silhouette of her long legs through the fabric of her skirt. The image reminded him of Marlene Dietrich—that sexy traitor—in
The Blue Angel
, one of those
verboten
films the camp guards liked to watch. Before the Nazis had crushed their “anything goes” degeneracy, the
Kabaretts
of Berlin had steamed with unbridled sex. Now, backlit Braun stirred both Fritz’s loins and his post-pubescent imagination, conjuring up that Hollywood queen in her early German role—with the top hat, the tight top that clung to her breasts, and the skirt that split at her waist to reveal the frilly knickers of a whore and the dark stockings that sheathed her long, long milky legs.
You bitch in heat, thought Fritz. When
I’m
führer, I’ll have an Angel of Death like
her
.
* * *
The SS called her the Todesengel because Braun’s mid-March arrival in Berlin meant that the führer planned to make his last stand here, smack dab in the path of the vengeful Russians—who were raping, pillaging, and killing their way in from the horrific graveyard of Stalingrad—rather than moving his Nazi elite to the Berghof complex, high in the Bavarian Alps, where the surrender, if it came to that, would be into the gentler hands of the Western Allies.
Berlin meant suicide to the Black Corps.
The Death’s Head for
them
.
By candle glow, the SS general watched the Angel of Death spirit Fritz and Hans away from Hitler’s study. No sooner had Eva Braun shut the bedroom door than the führer dismissed his secretary with a flick of his hand. The scowl that Bormann cast at Streicher was as sharp as the daggers he’d confiscated from the Obergruppenführer’s sons, but the oaf had no option but to retreat to the anteroom.
As Bormann closed the padded door, he switched on the generated light.
The SS general stifled a gasp. Hitler was now a mockery of his former dynamic self. From 1942 on, this man who had conquered an empire from the North Cape of Norway to the African deserts, from the Pyrenees of Spain to the Caucasus of Russia, had been aging at a rate of five visible years for each calendar one. Since he went underground, the slide had hastened.
Plus, he was addled by drugs.
Hatless, tonight the führer wore the same familiar uniform that he had donned on the first day of the war: the once spotless, simple, pearl gray tunic and long black trousers. On the breast pocket were his golden Nazi Party badge, his First World War black wound badge, and—for bravery in the trenches—his Iron Cross. But soup slop and mustard spots now stained the rumpled jacket, into the baggy shell of which he seemed to have withdrawn like a turtle. His head hunkered into his shoulders. His spine was hunched. As he struggled to his feet, he seemed in danger of losing his balance. Unable to stand erect, his body twitching and trembling, the führer braced his left leg against the coffee table for support. Obviously, Streicher had to go to him, for whatever that quack of a doctor had shot into his patient—at best, mysterious tranquilizers; at worst, morphine—der Chef was a palsied wreck.
He’s done, thought the general.
And so am I.
At almost fifty-six, Hitler could have been taken for seventy. His eyes, once ice blue and lustrous, were now as gray and filmy as the skin of a grape. His eyeballs were sunken, the whites bloodshot. Glazed and unfocused, they registered no expression as Streicher approached, and neither did his immobile, vapid face. His brown hair had turned suddenly gray, and drooping black sacs beneath his eyes betrayed lack of sleep. Through the wrinkled mask of a sickly, sallow complexion ran deep folds from his pulpy nose to the corners of his mouth. Up close, the SS general could see the spittle on Hitler’s lips and the drool down the front of his tunic, and he could hear him whistling through his teeth.
“My führer,” Streicher said. “You sent for me?”
With a cold-fish, flapping gesture that was little more than a jerky reflex, Hitler listlessly took the Obergruppenführer’s hand and didn’t let go. That was telling indeed, for Streicher—like every survivor in the upper ranks of the Third Reich—knew that the führer recoiled from physical contact.