The next morning, the center of Berlin was under fire from Soviet artillery. Ribbentrop, who until that point had not been allowed in to any meeting with Hitler, apparently pushed once again for Hitler to retreat from the capital in a conversation with Eva Braun.54 Traudl Junge reports in her memoir that Braun told her about a “discussion” with Ribbentrop, who told her that she was “the only one who could get the Führer to leave”; she should tell him that she wanted to “leave Berlin with him.” Eva Braun answered: “I will not speak a word of your suggestion to the Führer. He has to decide alone. If he thinks it is right to stay in Berlin, then I will stay with him. If he leaves, I will, too.”55 In fact, Hitler was hardly responsive to anything anymore. Unhinged to the end, he wanted to keep fighting, and ordered in all seriousness another counterattack, with a hastily thrown-together panzer corps under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner. Hitler screamed and threatened the air force chief of staff Karl Koller that they had to “deploy every man,” and that anyone who kept forces in reserve had “forfeited his life within five hours.”56 He was so beside himself that he did not even let Morell approach him that night, because he was afraid that Morell would sedate him so that he could be taken out of Berlin against his will. The doctor had to leave the bunker and was sent back to the Berghof with Eva Braun’s jewelry the following day.57
The next day, April 22, saw Hitler’s complete psychological breakdown, after he learned in the afternoon briefing that Steiner’s counterattack had not taken place. Those present sat through a violent half-hour outburst of rage in which Hitler was especially worked up about the military’s “years-long betrayal.” He then sank into a chair and said that the war was lost. They should all leave Berlin, but he would stay. That was his “irrevocable decision.”58 He ordered Eva Braun, too, and the hurriedly summoned secretaries, to leave the bunker immediately and evacuate by plane to southern Germany, but Eva Braun, as Traudl Junge recalled, spoke to him as to a “child” and promised to stay, at which point Hitler, in front of the people present, kissed her “on the mouth” while the officers stood outside the conference room “and waited to be dismissed.”59 None of the young secretaries dared to leave. Then Hitler summoned Schaub and ordered him to destroy all his personal files. “Everything must be burned immediately,” he ordered, “everything… there is in my steel cabinets. Here in Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgaden, you have to destroy everything… do you hear?… everything, everything!” “Not a scrap” must be allowed “to fall into enemy hands.”60
Hitler had clearly decided to end his life. Eva Braun wrote a rushed letter to her friend Herta that same day, April 22, surrounded by the six Goebbels children, who had just moved into the bunker with their parents, saying that these “are the very last lines and therefore the last sign of life from me.” The end was “drawing dangerously near.” She could not describe how much she was “suffering personally on the Führer’s account”; he had “lost faith.” She went on: “Regards to all the friends. I shall die as I lived. It’s no burden. You know that.”61 Eva Braun still seemed unsure about how seriously Hitler’s intentions were, though, since she added in closing that Herta should keep the letter “until you hear of our fate.”
In fact, Hitler postponed his death once again. With the support of Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, he now pinned his hopes on the Twelfth Army under General Walther Wenck at the Elbe, which was to march to Berlin from Magdeburg and “fight the Reich Capital free again.”62 In a letter from Eva Braun to her sister Gretl from April 23, 1945, it says: “There is still hope. But obviously we won’t let ourselves be taken alive.” She had just now “spoken to the Führer” and believed that “the future looked brighter today than it did yesterday” to him, too. Still, she was putting a few last affairs in order, instructing her sister to burn her entire private and business correspondence immediately, except for Hitler’s letters, and to pay any outstanding bills.63 It turned out, of course, that Wenck’s assignment could not be carried out. On April 25, the Soviet army completed its encirclement of Berlin.64
Meanwhile, Albert Speer, presumably driven by feelings of guilt, had returned to the bunker one last time, on April 23. No one can say with certainty what he and Hitler talked about during their last meeting—no one else was there. In Inside the Third Reich, Speer writes that he wanted to “see” Hitler once more and “tell him good-bye.”65 Around midnight, clearly unable to tear himself away from Hitler, Speer sat up for hours with Eva Braun in her small room in the bunker. She revealed, Speer said later, “an almost gay serenity,” offered him champagne and sweets, and said: “You know, it was good that you came back once more. The Führer had assumed you would be working against him. But your visit has proved the opposite to him.”66 Even more than Hitler, Braun now seemed to demand loyalty until death from Hitler’s closest companions, and seemed not to understand why one after another was vanishing and trying to save his or her own life. Looking back, Traudl Junge described Eva Braun’s behavior as a “loyalty complex.”67 Speer, in contrast, obviously admired her for this attitude: during his interrogation in Kransberg a few months later, he said that “Hitler had always emphasized, with resignation, that he had only one person who would stay true to him in the decisive moment, true to the end: Eva Braun. We refused to believe him, but his feelings did not betray him here.”68
The Wedding and the End in the “Führer Bunker”
It must therefore have come as no surprise to Speer when he later learned that Hitler and Braun had married before taking their lives together in the bunker. On the Obersalzberg, though, where Eva Braun’s mother, sisters, and friend Herta Schneider had brought themselves to safety and where Hitler’s staff who had fled Berlin after April 20 were gathered, no one suspected anything about the upcoming wedding. At first, the people there, including Morell and the photographer Walter Frentz, hoped that Hitler and Eva Braun would be arriving shortly.69 Only when Julius Schaub appeared at the Berghof on April 25, a day after it had been badly hit by bombers, to destroy the contents of Hitler’s safe, must it have become clear to everyone that Hitler would not be coming and that the end was near. In fact, according to Gretl Fegelein in September 1945, terrible mistrust prevailed when Schaub arrived at the residence, drunk and accompanied by his girlfriend. Christa Schroeder recalls that he burned “letters, files, memos, and books” on the Berghof terrace “without saying a word.”70