Hitler's bodyguard shouted: “The boss is burning!” The last hours of Fuhrer
On Monday morning, Adolf Hitler left his office in the bunker behind the office of the Third Reich. He headed for a small telephone headquarters on the other side of eight meters underground with a concrete shelter. “Are there any news from the Supreme Command of Wermacht?” Führer asked SS Rochus Misch.
Soon the answer came from the army of the Third Reich. The message, which Hitler demanded two hours earlier, was sobering. The first and most important sentence of the message was: “Berlin's situation is hopeless.”
Everything has become clear. Hitler's Empire, in the autumn of 1942, extended from the Bay of Biscai in the west to Stalingrad in the east and from North Cape in Norway to Libya. In the last hours, it has only occupied 24 hectares around the intersection of Wilhelmstrasse and Vossstrasse streets in the central part of Berlin.
The time of the Chancellor of the Third Reich was coming to an end and Hitler had to make final decisions.
In the extensive book “Hitler. The Last Year. Chronology of the Apocalypse” was very accurately reconstructed on April 30, 1945. This was not an easy task – not because there are too few reports and memories – but because there are many of them, and sometimes they contradict each other.
At two o'clock, Hitler convened his closest members of his staff, who were still in the bunker and told them to go to the upper part of their headquarters.
There, with a handshake he said goodbye to his last companions. Only with him: Johannes Hentschel – a mechanic who was responsible for the proper operation of the machines in the bunker, two secretaries – Gerda Christian and Traudl Jung, as well as two doctors – Werner Haase and Ernst Gunther Schenck. Hitler also handed his hand to Johann Rattenhuber, who was the head of the protection of the Chancellor of the Third Reich, and on April 30, 1945 his 48th birthday fell.
Then, with a desperate gesture, he slowed down all those gathered from their oaths and thanked them for their service, then went to rest.
Hitler could not sleep. He invited his wife Ewa Braun to the tea office, as well as other other women with him. Then he was seen when he sat alone in the corridor in the lower part of the main bunker.
“How long will you last?”
Probably at 5.30 in the morning he finally went to bed, but only half an hour later he got up again and called for himself to General SS Wilhelm Mohnke, who managed the defense of the office of the Third Reich.
“How long will you last?” Hitler asked.
Mohnke, only a 34-year-old officer of the Führer's adjutant guard, replied: “At most 24 hours”. As it turned out later, the SS was amazingly precise in his assumptions.
In the following hours, a few members of Hitler's closest enthusiasm saw him with his wife Ewa Braun in front of a small apartment he had in the bunker. On an area of 50 sq m, it housed four rooms and a bathroom. The Chancellor of the Third Reich has not talked to his wife.
At 13 Personal cook of the dictator, Constanze Manziarly, served Hitler's last dinner at the table – pasta with a light tomato sauce. The other two secretaries at the Führer ate a meal with him, while Ewa Braun smoked the last cigarette at the exit of the bunker.
Meanwhile, in the underground shelter of the Chancellor of the Third Reich, discipline began to resolve places. Heavy alcohol supplies were quickly emptied by the generals of Wehrmacht and ordinary SS men.
Hitler's reports from the last hours of Hitler say that the second and this time his last farewell to the immediate surroundings took place shortly after 3pm. Then the Chancellor of the Third Reich and Ewa Braun went to the office located in their apartment in the bunker.
The chancellor closes himself in the bunker
The door to Hitler's apartment was blocked at the latest at 15.25. Assistant Führer Heinz Linger and SS officer Otto Gunsche stood in front of them and listened to them. However, the continuous Soviet artillery fire prevented them from hearing the shots that occurred behind the steel door.
Only around 15.40 two men felt the smell of gunpowder. Linger and Gunsche opened the door. What they saw there, they both later described many times in different ways, also their versions were often contradictory. Similarly, the testimonies of other actual or alleged eyewitnesses who were crowded in the room are excluded.
According to one of the versions, Adolf Hitler and Ewa Braun sat side by side on the couch. According to other testimonies, he rested in an armchair and she on the couch.
There is also no certainty what the dictator's partner was dressed in – in a black dress, pink with flowers or blue with white frills. Until now, it has not been established whether Hitler founded his Golden NSDAP party badge.
Adolf Hitler and Ewa Braun, Date unknown
“The boss is burning”
One of the witnesses reported that they both had bullet holes – Ewa in their mouths, and Hitler on the temple. So did the dictator kill his wife first and then execution on himself?
Another man present at the scene of the events said that only Hitler had visible injuries – so did Ewa commit suicide swallowing a capsule with poison? Maybe that's why the weak smell of bitter almonds came out of her mouth?
There are many descriptions of Hitler's death. To such an extent, they differ in smaller and greater details that a few months later during the war crimes in Nuremberg, the American prosecutor Thomas J. Dodd almost despairing the testimonies of witnesses. The resigned lawyer finished his interrogation with the words: “I think I will not ask more questions, Mr. President.”
At least one thing is certain – both bodies were brought in 36 stairs to leave the Hitler bunker, which went out into the garden. There, the corpse wrapped in blankets was placed in the funnel on the bullet, poured gas and set on fire.
A photo probably depicting the charred body of Adolf Hitler in a wooden chest, April 1945 in Berlin.
This was seen by a member of the Warta SS, who ran downstairs and shouted to the phone operator Rochus Misch: “The boss is burning! Do you want to take a look?”
However, a small amount of gasoline, about nine 20-liter canisters, was not enough to cremate two bodies in the open. Ok time. 18.30 a few SS men pulled out the charred corpse from the funnel, stuffed them into a wooden chest compacted from boards and buried in another hole, which was created after the bullet explosion.
