Hitler's Last Secretary (30 page)

The new clothes feel odd hanging on my body. Now the men are in full marching gear too. Many of them have removed their epaulettes and decorations. Captain Baur has taken the oil painting of Frederick the Great out of its frame and rolled it up. He wants it as a souvenir. Hewel can’t make up his mind what to do. He always was an indecisive character. Now he doesn’t know where to die – should he take his poison or join our fighting group? He decides on the latter, and so does Admiral Voss. And so do Bormann, Naumann, Kempka, Baur, Schwägermann, Stumpfegger, they all want to get out.

I suddenly remember the children. There’s no sign of Frau Goebbels. She has shut herself in her room. Are the children still with her? Some girl from the kitchen, or maybe it was a chambermaid, had offered to take the six children out with her. The Russians might not harm them. But I don’t know if Frau Goebbels accepted this offer.

We sit around and wait for evening. Only Schädle,
¹¹³
the wounded leader of the escort commando, has shot himself. Suddenly the door of the room occupied by the Goebbels family opens. A nurse and a man in a white coat are carrying out a huge, heavy crate. A second crate follows. My heart stands still for a moment. I can’t help thinking of the children. The size of the crate would be about right. So my dulled heart can still feel something after all, and there’s a huge lump in my throat.

Krebs and Burgdorf stand up, smooth down their uniform tunics, and shake hands with everyone in farewell. They are not leaving, they’re going to shoot themselves here. Then they go out, parting from those who mean to wait longer. We must wait for darkness to fall. Goebbels walks restlessly up and down, smoking, like a hotel proprietor waiting discreetly and in silence for the last guests to leave the bar. He has stopped complaining and ranting. So the time has come. We all shake hands with him in farewell. He wishes me good luck, with a twisted smile. ‘You may get through,’ he says softly, in heartfelt tones. But I shake my head doubtfully. We are completely surrounded by the enemy, and there are Russian tanks in the Potsdamer Platz …

One by one we leave these scenes of horror. I pass Hitler’s door for the last time. His plain grey overcoat is hanging from the iron coat-stand as usual, and above it I see his big cap with the golden national emblem on it and his pale suede gloves. The dog’s leash is dangling beside them. It looks like a gallows. I’d like to take the gloves as a memento, or at least one of them. But my outstretched hand falls again, I don’t know why. My silver fox coat is hanging in the wardrobe in Eva’s room. Its lining bears the golden monogram E.B. I don’t need it now, I don’t need anything but the pistol and the poison.

So we go over to the big coal-cellar of the New Reich Chancellery. Otto Günsche leads us through the crowds; his broad shoulders forcing a way for us four women (Frau Christian, Fräulein Krüger, Fräulein Manziarly and me) through the soldiers waiting here ready to march. Among them I see the familiar faces of Bormann, Baur, Stumpfegger, Kempka, Rattenhuber and Linge, all now wearing steel helmets. We nod to each other. Most of them I’ve never seen again.

Then we wait in our bunker room to be fetched. We have all destroyed our papers. I take no money with me, no provisions, no clothes, just a great many cigarettes and a few pictures I can’t part with. The other women pack small bags. They are going to try to find their way out through this hell too. Only the nurses stay behind.

It could be about eight-thirty in the evening. We are to be the first group leaving the bunker. A few soldiers I don’t know from the guards battalion, we four women, Günsche, Mohnke, Hewel and Admiral Voss make our way through the many waiting people and go down underground passages. We clamber over half-wrecked staircases, through holes in walls and rubble, always going further up and out. At last the Wilhelmsplatz stretches ahead, shining in the moonlight. The dead horse still lies there on the paving stones, but only the remains of it now. Hungry people have come out of the U-Bahn tunnels to slice off pieces of meat …

Soundlessly, we cross the square. Sporadic shots are fired, but the gunfire is stronger further away. Then we have reached the U-Bahn tunnel outside the ruins of the Kaiserhof. We climb down and work our way on in the darkness, over the wounded and the homeless, past soldiers resting, until we reach Friedrichstrasse Station. Here the tunnel ends and hell begins. We have to get through, and we succeed. The whole fighting group gets across the S-Bahn bend uninjured. But an inferno breaks out behind us. Hundreds of snipers are shooting at those who follow us.

For hours we crawl through cavernous cellars, burning buildings, strange, dark streets! Somewhere in an abandoned cellar we rest and sleep for a couple of hours. Then we go on, until Russian tanks bar our way. None of us has a heavy weapon. We are carrying nothing but pistols. So the night passes, and in the morning it is quiet. The gunfire has stopped. We still haven’t seen any Russian soldiers. Finally we end up in the old beer cellar of a brewery now being used as a bunker. This is our last stop. There are Russian tanks out here, and it’s full daylight. We still get into the bunker unseen. Down there Mohnke and Günsche sit in a corner and begin to write. Hewel lies on one of the plank beds, stares at the ceiling and says nothing. He doesn’t want to go on. Two soldiers bring in the wounded Rattenhuber. He has taken a shot in the leg, he is feverish and hallucinating. A doctor treats him and puts him on a camp bed. Rattenhuber gets out his pistol, takes off the safety catch and puts it down beside him.

A general comes into the bunker, finds the defending commander Mohnke and speaks to him. We discover that we are in the last bastion of resistance in the capital of the Reich. The Russians have now surrounded the brewery and are calling on everyone to surrender. Mohnke writes a last report. There is still an hour to go. The rest of us sit there smoking. Suddenly he raises his head, looks at us women and says, ‘You must help us now. We’re all wearing uniform, none of us will get out of here. But you can try to get through, make your way to Dönitz and give him this last report.’

I don’t want to go on any more, but Frau Christian and the other two urge me to; they shake me until I finally follow them. We leave our steel helmets and pistols there. We take our military jackets off too. Then we shake hands with the men and go.

An SS company is standing by its vehicles in the brewery yard, stony-faced and motionless, waiting for the order for the last attack. The Volkssturm, the OT men and the soldiers are throwing their weapons down in a heap and going out to the Russians. At the far end of the yard Russian soldiers are already handing out schnapps and cigarettes to German soldiers, telling them to surrender, celebrating fraternization. We pass through them as if we were invisible. Then we are outside the encircling ring, among wild hordes of Russian victors, and at last I can weep.

Where were we to turn? If I’d never seen dead people before, I saw them now everywhere. No one was taking any notice of them. A little sporadic firing was still going on. Sometimes the Russians set buildings on fire and searched for soldiers in hiding. We were threatened on every corner. I lost track of my colleagues that same day. I went on alone for a long time, hopelessly, until at last I ended up in a Russian prison. When the cell door closed behind me I didn’t even have my poison any more, it had all happened so fast.
¹¹⁴
Yet I was still alive. And now began a dreadful, terrible time, but I didn’t want to die any more; I was curious to find out what else a human being can experience. And fate was kind to me. As if by a miracle, I escaped being transported to the East. The unselfish human kindness of one man preserved me from that. After many long months, I was at last able to go home and back to a new life.

NOTES

1
.   State control of jobs as practised by the National Socialists in order to realize the ideas and plans of the ‘New Order of German Living Space’. Job allocation and changes of workplace were supervised and regulated by ‘obligatory services’.

2
.   Albert Bormann,
b
Halberstadt 2 September 1902,
d
Berlin May 1945 (probably committed suicide by taking cyanide); profession: bank clerk; from 1931 employed in the Führer’s private chancellery office; 1933 head of the Führer’s private chancellery office; 1938 member of the Reichstag; 1943 NSKK Gruppenführer and personal adjutant to Adolf Hitler.

3
.   Martin Bormann,
b
Halberstadt 17 June 1900,
d
probably Berlin 2 May 1945 (suicide by cyanide); profession: agriculturalist; 1924 joins the NSDAP; 1933–1941 head of staff in the Deputy Führer’s office; 1933 appointed Reichsleiter of the NSDAP; from 1938 on Hitler’s personal staff; 12 May 1941 appointed head of the Party Chancellery; 1946 condemned to death
in absentia
as a war criminal at Nuremberg.

4
.   Gerda Christian, ne´e Daranowski (‘Dara’),
b
Berlin 13 December 1913, office clerk at Elizabeth Arden in Berlin; 1937 secretary in Hitler’s personal adjutancy office; from 1939 works with Hitler in his various Führer headquarters; 2 February 1943 marries Eckhard Christian, a major in the Luftwaffe and adjutant to the Wehrmacht head of staff at Führer headquarters, stops working for Hitler until mid-1943; then until 1945 works at Führer headquarters; 1 May 1945 succeeds in fleeing to West Germany from the Reich Chancellery.

5
.   Johanna Wolf,
b
Munich 1 June 1900,
d
Munich 4 June 1985; from 1929 clerical assistant in Hitler’s private chancellery and member of the Nazi Party; after 1933, when Hitler comes to power, secretary in his chancellery and later in his personal adjutancy office in Berlin; is with Hitler during the war at his various Führer headquarters. Hitler says goodbye to her and Christa Schroeder on the night of 21 April 1945, and advises her to leave Berlin. Interned until 14 January 1948.

6
.   Christa Schroeder,
b
Münden, Hanover 19 March 1908,
d
Munich 28 June 1984; 1930–1933 secretary to the Reich leadership of the NSDAP in Munich; 1933–1939 secretary in the Führer’s personal adjutancy office. Until 22 April 1945 accompanies Hitler as his secretary during the war, on all his journeys and at all the Führer headquarters. Interned until 12 May 1948.

7
.   Heinz Linge,
b
Bremen 23 March 1913,
d
Bremen 1980; profession: mason; 1933 joins the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH, Hitler’s bodyguard); 1935–1945 Hitler’s valet; 2 May 1945 taken prisoner by the Red Army and interned in Russia; 1950 condemned to 25 years’ penal labour; 1955 released.

8
.   Walther Hewel,
b
Cologne 2 January 1904,
d
Berlin 2 May 1945 (probably suicide); 1923 standard-bearer of the ‘Hitler Stormtroop’ in the attempted putsch in Munich and imprisoned, works as a businessman abroad after his release until 1936; 1933 joins the NSDAP; 1938 enters the Foreign Office as Legation Councillor First Class, head of the Reich Foreign Minister’s personal staff; 1940 appointed Envoy First Class and Head of Section in the Foreign Office as the Foreign Minister’s permanent liaison officer with Adolf Hitler. He leaves the Reich Chancellery with Martin Bormann on 2 May 1945.

9
.   Joachim von Ribbentrop,
b
Wesel 30 April 1893,
d
Nuremberg 16 October 1946 (executed); trained in banking in Montreal; 1915 a lieutenant in the First World War; 1920 marries Annelies Henkel and becomes a representative of the Henkel sparkling wine firm in Berlin; 1930 joins the NSDAP; from 1933 works on foreign policy with Hitler; 1934 responsible for questions of disarmament; 1936 ambassador in London; from 1938 Reich Foreign Minister; May 1945 arrested by the British Army; 1946 condemned to death at Nuremberg.

10
.   Hans Hermann Junge,
b
Wilster in Holstein 11 February 1914,
d
Dreux, Normandy, 13 August 1944. Profession: white-collar worker; 1933 joins the SS; 1934 volunteers for the LSSAH; 1936 joins the SS Führer’s escort commando; 1940 becomes valet and orderly to Adolf Hitler; 19 June 1943 marries Traudl Humps; 14 July 1943 joins the Waffen-SS; from June 1944 at the front with the 12
^th
SS Hitler Youth Armoured Division. The organization for the care of German war graves, based in Kassel, gives the date of death as 18 August 1944. The same date is given on Junge’s gravestone in the German Military Cemetery at Champigny St.-André in Normandy (block 6, grave no. 1816).

11
.   Julius Gregor Schaub,
b
Munich 20 August 1898,
d
Munich 27 December 1967; profession: pharmacist, member of the SS, membership number 7, Nazi Party membership number 81, SS-Obergrup-penführer and personal adjutant to Hitler; 1936 member of the Reichstag, Hitler’s chauffeur; 1945 destroys Hitler’s confidential files in Munich and Berchtesgaden. Interned in various camps until 1949.

12
.   Christian Weber,
b
Polsingen 25 August 1883,
d
Munich 1945; innkeeper, bookie and politician, one of the first members of the ‘Hitler shock troops’; 1926–1934 Nazi city councillor in Munich; 1935 city councillor, inspector of the SS riding schools and many other offices; killed by Bavarian rebels in 1945.

13.   The cook Otto Günther was originally an employee of Mitropa, and in 1937 was employed in Hitler’s special train and then in Führer headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair.