Meanwhile, the “Führer bunker” in Berlin was now under uninterrupted fire and Hitler was handing out poison capsules. These came originally from Himmler and were supplied by Himmler’s former personal physician SS-Obersturmbahnführer Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, the only doctor who remained in the bunker. Nicolaus von Below reported that he himself was given an “ampule of potassium cyanide” by Hitler in person, on April 27.71 Hitler had distributed the poison to the women days before. In fact, as a later forensic examination proved, the poison was not potassium cyanide but hydrocyanic acid, a “liquid clear as water” which caused death within seconds and left a scent like that of bitter almonds on the person’s clothes and in the room.72 The conversations over nightly tea in Hitler’s living room now turned on only one topic: the best way to die. “I want to be a beautiful corpse, I will take poison,” Eva Braun supposedly said on one such occasion. Hitler, on the other hand, told the women that he would shoot himself in the head and then have the body burned.73 It was an atmosphere of hysteria, according to Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, who, as the adjutant of General Hans Krebs, whom Hitler had named as his personal adviser, was stationed at his side in the bunker. The inhabitants of the bunker mostly stood around in the halls, Eva Braun often with Magda Goebbels, smoking and talking. Their psychological state continued to swing wildly between hope and despair. Many numbed their fear with alcohol, of which there was plenty on hand from the Reich Chancellery.74
The mood hit bottom on April 28, when the Reuters news agency broadcast a report from London that reached Hitler: Himmler had offered an unconditional surrender to America and England. Talks had already begun months before between Himmler and the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, in which Himmler had agreed to the release of twenty thousand prisoners from the German concentration camps. Now the Reichsführer-SS and Interior Minister, even if late in the day, was trying to use his contact with Bernadotte to somehow negotiate a way to save his life in the postwar period to come.75 The fact is that—like Göring, Speer, Ribbentrop, and Bormann, too, for that matter—Himmler in no way saw his life as over after the fall of the “Third Reich.” And so, with Hitler’s swift death in view, he met with Bernadotte in the Swedish embassy in Lübeck on the night of April 23 and offered to surrender to the Western powers. He, and the Germans as a whole, Himmler emphasized, would never surrender to the “Bolshevists” no matter what happened. But American President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused a partial surrender, and informed both Stalin and the world media of what had happened.76
Hitler exploded with rage that Himmler of all people, one of his most faithful followers, had betrayed him. Since his liaison officer and protégé Hermann Fegelein was also nowhere to be found, Hitler ordered an SS commando to look for him. Eva Braun had apparently looked into her brother-in-law’s whereabouts days before—she wrote to her sister on April 23: “Hermann isn’t here with us! He has left for Nauen to set up a battalion or something. I am absolutely sure that you will see him again. He will make it through safely, to maybe carry on the resistance in Bavaria at least for a while.”77 But obviously Hermann Fegelein was no longer willing to fight—he was ready to get out. Traudl Junge said that Eva Braun, “disappointed and shaken,” had told her about a call from Fegelein in which, even before Hitler ordered a search for him, he encouraged her to abandon “the Führer” if she was unable to “get him out of Berlin.” It really was now “a matter of life and death.”78 Gretl Fegelein revealed to an American secret agent after the war that she had heard from her father-in-law that Hermann Fegelein had called his father shortly before the fall of Berlin and explained that he would be coming to Fischhorn the next day. But he never arrived.79 Instead, he was apprehended in his private apartment in Berlin, wearing civilian clothes, and was taken to the Reich Chancellery, interrogated, and shot for desertion on April 28.80 At the same time, the Soviet troops were advancing unstoppably toward the center of the city. Hitler and Eva Braun made the final preparations for their double suicide.
Their decision to get married at the very end of their life together was made that same day. There has been a great deal of speculation about their reasons, but the fact is that none of the people who left the bunker alive and survived the war knew about the decision in advance, or heard anything firsthand about Hitler’s and Braun’s personal motives. Other than the witnesses, Goebbels and Bormann, only Traudl Junge and Nicolaus von Below knew about the upcoming ceremony. Hitler, at around ten thirty at night, had dictated to her his private and political testament.81 There it says:
Since I did not believe it would be responsible to found a marriage during the years of struggle, I have now decided, before the termination of this worldly career, to take as my wife the woman who, after many long years of loyal friendship, came to the already almost besieged city of her own free will in order to share her fate with mine. It is my wish that she go with me into death as my wife. Death will replace for us what my work in the service of my People has robbed from us…. I and my wife choose death, to avoid the shame of flight or surrender.82
We cannot conclude anything about the actual state of Hitler’s feelings from this statement about his decision to marry. The phrasing is ambiguous and remains mysterious. The ceremony itself took place on the night of April 28–29. Besides the bride and groom, the only people present were Goebbels, Bormann, and a hastily summoned registrar, Walter Wagner.83 Afterward, there was a brief champagne reception in Hitler’s living room, where others took part, including Magda Goebbels, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, General Krebs, Below, Gerda Christian, Constanze Manziarly, and Artur Axmann, the fanatical National Youth Leader who had moved into the bunker on April 23. They all made an effort, according to Below, “to think happily about the old days.” It was a “rather ghostly occasion.”84
On the afternoon of April 29, Hitler had his favorite German shepherd, Blondi, poisoned. The dog collapsed immediately and was dead on the spot. The Berchtesgaden district court later concluded that “the poison was tested out on the dog with a view to Eva Hitler’s death by poison, which had already been decided on.”85 By now there was no longer a telephone connection between the bunker and the outside world. On April 30, the Soviet army reached the Reichstag grounds.86 Soviet soldiers were expected to force their way into the “Führer bunker” at any moment. That afternoon, between three and four o’clock, Hitler and Eva Braun died by their own hands. While she bit into a cyanide capsule and died before his eyes, he took a poison capsule into his mouth and simultaneously shot himself in the right temple.87 Their bodies were then taken out to the Chancellery garden, doused in gasoline, and set on fire. The remains were buried that evening in a bomb crater in the garden.
12. AFTER DEATH
Countless legends sprang up after the death of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. One reason for this is the fact that the direct witnesses to the burning of the bodies who survived the inferno in Berlin gave contradictory statements later about the exact circumstances of the double suicide. Another reason is that the Soviet Union concealed from its Western allies and the rest of the world, for years, the fact that Soviet troops had found the bodies of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels family in early May. Instead of passing the information along, Joseph Stalin, in a conversation with the American special envoy Harry Hopkins on May 26, 1945, spread the rumor that Hitler and Bormann were still alive and hidden abroad, possibly in Japan. It was known to Soviet intelligence, Stalin claimed, “that the Germans had three or four large submarines that traveled back and forth between Japan and Germany.” He had “ordered Soviet reconnaissance to locate these submarines, but for now they had not been found.” Stalin was trying to exploit the death of Hitler and his wife to suggest to the Western powers that their common struggle was not yet over and had to be continued in the war against Japan. He clearly struck a nerve with the Americans, as Hopkins’s reply reveals: he immediately told Stalin, according to the notes of the translator, Vladimir Nikolayevich Pavlov, that “Hitler absolutely must be found and put to death.”1