A half hour later the second wave arrived. The major attack on the Berghof began. The bombs rained down, many directly on the bunker. The explosions echoed eerily against the rocky mountainside. At each hit I ducked involuntarily. The technical installations of the bunker, so highly praised as secure, stopped working. The lighting and ventilation failed, and water began to enter the bunker by way of the steps. We feared that Frau Fegelein, who was within a week or so of giving birth, would miscarry. The chaos and fear were indescribable.
We left the bunker eventually at about 1430, slowly plodding up the sixty steps into the daylight. A picture of appalling destruction greeted us. The Berghof had been badly damaged. The walls still stood (only one side had been burst open) but the metal roof hung in ribbons. Doors and windows had disappeared. Inside the house the floor was thickly covered with debris and much of the furniture had been demolished. All the ancillary buildings had been destroyed, the paths scrambled to rubble, trees felled at the root. Nothing green remained, the scene was a crater landscape.[140]
Since there was nothing habitable, Greta Fegelein and Herta Schneider moved into Eva Braun’s bunker, Johanna Wolf and I into Hitler’s. A few days later Herta and Greta, after spending the intervening period packing, left by lorry and car from Hitler’s ready-vehicle park on the Berg for Garmisch, where Herta lived. They had filled many trunks with Eva Braun’s clothing and left them at Schloss Fischhorn near Zell am See where there was an SS post. A short while before, Eva Braun had written to her sister: ‘We await hourly the end. We do not intend to fall alive into the hands of the enemy,’ and she concluded with the hope that Greta ‘should have no worries, she would see her husband again.’ Here Eva was either mistaken, or she wished to put her sister’s mind at rest.
A day or so later Johanna Wolf went by car to Miesbach to ask friends if they would put us up temporarily. Two men from the SS-Hauptamt whom we had got to know at the Berghof mentioned the possibility of getting false papers for us, also possible lodgings. Meanwhile Schaub arrived and without a word set about clearing Hitler’s safe in the Führer-study. On the terrace of the Berghof he put a few cans of petrol to work burning letters, files, memoranda, books, etc. He only allowed a lad[141] from FHQ to help him; everybody else he deliberately ignored. He exchanged no pleasantries with us, no message from the boss, nothing of what was happening. Schaub’s bonfire below a leaden sky made a miserable impression.
When Schaub disappeared into the ruins of the Berghof for a brief while, I had a closer look at what he was burning. A shoebox filled with Geli Raubal’s correspondence caught my eye. Unfortunately I took only a single letter from the carefully assembled batch with male handwriting. It was however conclusive and set out clearly and distinctly the situation in which Geli had found herself. I also took a bundle of Hitler’s architectural plans, which I hid from Schaub and retained. A short distance away from the bonfire, where the compacted snow had heaped up against the terrace wall, was an A4-size binder burnt at the edges similar to an old-fashioned accounts ledger. It had a white label affixed to the cover with the typed title ‘Idea for and construction of the Greater German Reich’. Unfortunately I left this where it was.
Albert Bormann lived with his wife, who had given birth during the bombing raid, in the Berchtesgadener Hof, as did Schaub. They only came up to the Berghof to organise food and alcohol. Schaub also brought a friend, Hilde Marzelewski, a dancer from the Berlin ‘Metropol’. On 29 April it was announced in a radio broadcast that Hitler would not leave Berlin. At last it was clear to me that all was lost. Albert Bormann told the men of the SS-Begleitkommando, ‘Do not lose courage, it is not the end.’ I asked myself what else it could possibly be.
When Hitler’s death was announced on 1 May 1945 the change occurred in a manner scarcely to be described. Chaos broke out on the Obersalzberg. People from Berchtesgaden stormed the farm and cleared it, dragging off animals and breaking open stockpiles of potatoes. From the Bechsteinhaus, the former guest house for state visitors, and Speer’s house, the native population removed not only the articles which were easily transportable but also all the furniture. Nothing was left in the Platterhof hotel hairdresser’s shop.
In the cavernous Berghof bunkers where we were living strange women appeared, possibly friends of the Kripo officers, and made off with full containers. The police officers so previously devoted to law and order, the house staff and SS men of the Begleitkommando, all were suddenly transformed and unrecognisable. After clearing the Berghof kitchen of rubble, house administrator Mittelstrasser made off with a loaded lorry. His wife followed him a few days later after extensive packing. They were not heard from again. The cook Blüthgen, a previously demure young girl, had risen to absolute power. Previously clumsy and dim, she matured overnight. Negus, the Scotch terrier so adored by Eva Braun but loathed by everybody else because he growled at everybody and nibbled at their boots, slunk unnoticed and abandoned through the ruins. He had not been badly treated before, but now he was just another stray.
Negus was symbolic of the change that had come over the place; I felt alone and abandoned too, incapable of deciding my next move. The Pension Posthof at Hintersee near Berchtesgaden had long been reserved for employees and members of the adjutancy and Führer-household in Berlin. Food and drink were sent there for them. Albert Bormann had arranged rooms for Johanna Wolf and myself in this pension. He kept insisting that I should come at once, but I preferred to wait for Johanna first. Once the Americans began to close in he was suddenly of the opinion ‘that it was not good for everybody to be concentrated in one place. It would be better if everybody took it upon themselves to find their own accommodation.’ But where? I had neither the means to take off, nor anywhere to go after so many years cut off from the world in Hitler’s circle. So I stayed at the Berghof, living in the bunker.
The Berghof staff wanted to ship out the furniture and I contacted Albert Bormann at the Berchtesgadener Hof to obtain his agreement.[142] I also mentioned to him the intention of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) people to blow up the bunker rooms where Hitler’s private art collection was stored. Boxes of hand grenades were already placed at the bunker entrance. I considered it madness to destroy these valuable paintings. Albert Bormann was of the same opinion and agreed that everybody should take a picture with him. Meanwhile the Kripo officials had begun destroying everything they could lay their hands on in the bunkers. In Eva Braun’s bunker I surprised them smashing her valuable porcelain. These bore her insignia, painted by Sophie Stork, a monogram in the form of a four-leafed clover designed by Dr Karl Brandt. When I expressed my horror, they told me that ‘everything had to be destroyed which indicated the existence of Eva Braun’. What remained of her wardrobe, hats, dresses, shoes, etc., everything in fact which indicated a woman’s presence, was burnt on the terrace. Photo and film albums of Eva Braun with Hitler were senselessly cremated. The Kripo officials even ripped out the fly-leaf of any book with her name on it. It was pure madness, but apparently Schaub had the dead Hitler’s orders to go through with it. Even the valuable silver ware was to be destroyed, but here at least somebody saw sense and on 5 May an SS lorry arrived to cart away the silver, the carpets, tapestries and paintings.
140
The first wave of bombers which came in over the Hohe Göll took out the flak and smoke batteries, the second wave dropped no less than 1,232 tons of bombs. The bunkers and underground galleries, up to a hundred metres down, were largely undamaged, and of the 3,500 potential victims in the area at the time, only six were killed. Seidler and Zeigert,
141
This ’lad’ was actually thirty-year old SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Doose (b. 1.7.1912 Kiel, d. 16.1.1952 Piding). From 1937 with the
142
In her notes Schroeder wrote: ‘I obtained his permission that the girls should have some of the furniture. He had no idea what to do about the paintings. I was to give everybody a note of what I was taking and remove them myself.’