COLUMN ONE : A Witness to Hitler’s Last Stand : As Germany debates sealing the Berlin bunker where the Nazi leader killed himself, one of its last occupants describes the intrigues and tension of the final days.

The bulldozers have begun their march toward the barren patch south of the Brandenburg Gate in downtown Berlin where, 50 years ago Sunday, in a concrete redoubt 24 feet beneath his shattered chancellery, Adolf Hitler aimed at the roof of his mouth with a Walther pistol and squeezed the trigger.

By the end of the century, when the seat of Germany’s government has fully returned to Berlin, the neighborhood of the notorious Fuhrerbunker will be home to powerful federal ministries, embassies and office mid-rises of fantastic rental value. The plot above the bunker will be a small park that calls no attention to itself or its foundations.

The Berlin government is set against preservation of what little is left of Hitler’s end-game burrow. And hardly anyone is left of the small number who lived and worked with Hitler in the terrible spring of 1945, beneath the soil of Potsdamer Platz, where today developers and hard hats attend industriously to the future.

“I am really one of the very last people to talk about these things,” said Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, an 81-year-old Munich resident who spent the last days of World War II in the bunker with Hitler.

Von Loringhoven, a baron who was the principal adjutant to the German army chief of staff at war’s end, is a vigorous, white-haired man who recalls those final days with a gin-like clarity, and who can describe them half a century later with a precision befitting an intelligence officer’s respect for detail.

A talk with him yields a rare, personal view of the evil that the great undoer of the German soul personified. And it offers a cautionary reminder of the unimaginable cruelty and destruction that came about not so long ago, when the more thoughtful members of a society that also gave the world Bach and Beethoven, Rapunzel and “Silent Night” failed to stand up to dictatorship until it was too late.

Von Loringhoven’s story is a jarring tale of one sensible young man’s struggle to survive in close quarters, day after day, with a man who even today sticks to the bottom of the German shoe like a piece of filth, someone commonly remembered as one of history’s signal lunatics.

But “ ‘crazy’ isn’t the right expression” to describe Hitler, Von Loringhoven said in an interview at his home in an elegant neighborhood in the heart of Munich:

“His comprehension and his head were still working. In many respects, he still had clear views. But you realized that he was an evil man, full of hatred for everybody.”

In late April, 1945, most Berliners understood that the war was lost. The Red Army was massing outside the city, readying for the final push. Von Loringhoven particularly remembers a meeting on April 20, two days after Hitler’s 56th birthday. Most of the Fuhrer’s old circle were in the bunker’s stifling briefing room; all urged Hitler to flee south to Bavaria, and spare the capital a blood bath.

But Hitler would have none of it. He decided to stay in Berlin, order his armies to fight to the last man and, if he went down, take what was left of the Reich with him.

“When I heard this, I was very shaken,” said Von Loringhoven, whose billet as an army major was to assemble the military intelligence for Hitler’s daily briefings. “I knew the military situation. There was no question that the Russians would soon encircle the town. I felt that there would be no escape. It sounded like a sentence of death.”

Von Loringhoven wanted no part in Hitler’s twisted vision of a Teutonic struggle to the finish.

Von Loringhoven had been born in Estonia into an aristocratic family that moved to Leipzig after World War I, and in the very early Nazi years, he said, a career in the German officer corps appeared to him an acceptable means of avoiding the Nazis’ thuggery in the civilian world.

“I had no inner feeling of loyalty to Hitler,” said the baron, who lost a cousin in 1944 when the plotters of an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer were executed. “I was forced to serve as best I could because I was bound by my oath.” (Beginning in 1934, German officers were required to swear a loyalty oath to Germany and to Hitler.)

And so, in early 1945, with the rest of Hitler’s entourage, Von Loringhoven shared an eerie, twilight world of dust, smoky corridors, nasty air and artificial lighting that flickered every time a shell or a gravity bomb hit nearby.

Most of the two dozen others sharing these suffocating surroundings talked every day of suicide, he said: “They talked about whether they should shoot themselves or take poison. And they talked about whether, if they shot themselves, they should put the gun in their mouths, or put it to their temples.”

The features of the Fuhrerbunker itself contributed to its residents’ crushing sense of doom. It, of course, had no windows and only one emergency exit, in a round, concrete tower at the end of a central hall. There was a room for Hitler’s cherished (and soon to be poisoned) dogs; a suite for his mistress, Eva Braun, and a sitting room for the Fuhrer himself, where he tried to buck himself up by contemplating an oil portrait of his idol, Frederick the Great.

Spreading out from the bunker were corridors leading to less solidly reinforced bunkers, where lesser folk toiled and slept. Von Loringhoven’s cot was in one of these, and he has not forgotten the cracking and groaning of the ceiling and the jets of dust that came with every nearby explosion.

“Sometimes we were afraid that the bunker wouldn’t stand anymore,” he said.

*

Most of the bunker complex is, in fact, gone. It was smashed by Red Army artillery shells and later dynamited by the East German authorities. For half a century, the site has stood scarred and empty; in 1961, the East Germans built their wall and its “death strip” just to the west, closing off the ruins to potential explorers. In 1988, they put up a housing project and a kindergarten just to the east.

In 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell, experts dug underground and found that a few of the bunker’s rooms had survived.

Archeologists found rotted furniture decorated with swastika motifs, a few light weapons and abandoned gas masks, and brightly painted murals depicting eagles, S.S. soldiers striking heroic poses, flaxen-haired Rhine maidens and other subjects of Nazi preoccupation, which apparently had amused the drivers and S.S. guards quartered there.

These discoveries in 1990 set off a strangely impassioned debate--still unresolved--over what might or might not be done with the remaining rooms and the murals: whether they should be preserved and kept accessible to the curious of the future, or whether the bunker should be sealed forever.

“I think it’s better to seal it off,” said Von Loringhoven, “so that it’s gone and doesn’t revive any memories.”

Fifty years ago, he used just such a concrete chamber as a work space for 16-hour days, struggling to stay in telephone contact with the Wehrmacht High Command. He was supposed to piece together enough hard order-of-battle data for his boss, army chief of staff Hans Krebs, to give Hitler a briefing at least once a day.

But the assignment was hopeless. Conversations on the faint and crackling radio phone were almost inaudible, and Von Loringhoven was often reduced to monitoring Reuters war bulletins--something that would have been a capital offense had he been a civilian--and then composing his briefing maps and reports on the basis of what the enemy’s civilian radio announcers had to say.

And in the end, Hitler ignored the intelligence estimates. Ordering nonexistent divisions into battle here and there, he threatened commanders with summary execution if they didn’t commit their men to senseless combat, and he spun out promises about new weapons of mass destruction that would turn the tide for the Third Reich. He even consulted his horoscope.

Von Loringhoven said he spent what little free time he had thinking about escape: “All the time, what I really thought, what always worked in my mind was: Is there a chance to get out of the bunker?”

The key to surviving the unfolding battle of Berlin, he knew, lay not only in getting out of the bunker but in evading the Red Army. The Soviets had fought their way west with a single-minded fury to be spent on Germans, almost four years after Hitler’s bloody invasion of Russia.

It was on April 29, one day before Hitler’s suicide, that Von Loringhoven found his way out. Reuters had reported that Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s trusted S.S. chief, had, on the sly, tried passing word to the Americans and the British that Germany was prepared to surrender, and Hitler treated himself to his worst rage ever.

“He had seen in Himmler his most faithful follower, and now this ‘faithful paladin’ had started the capitulation negotiations,” said Von Loringhoven. Hitler’s face went pale; his eyes bulged. He shrieked ridiculously that Himmler would be stripped of his duties.

“In this situation, such orders didn’t make any sense,” Von Loringhoven said.

When Hitler finally collected himself, he seemed at last to have accepted that all was lost--something he had not been able to do until then. He had a district magistrate who had been fighting nearby brought into the bunker and pressed him into service as justice of the peace. After marrying Braun, he wrote two wills, one a personal testament setting out what was to be done with his possessions and his body, the other the last in a line of diatribes blaming everything on the Jews.

While this was going on 24 feet under downtown Berlin, Soviet units were closing in on the Wehrmacht command and control compound, knocking out the radio transmitter that had been Von Loringhoven’s last real link with the outside world.

“My military (intelligence-gathering) function was over, and I told Gen. Krebs that I had no intention of being killed there, like a rat, in the corridor,” he said. “I asked to be given a chance either to go and find the fighting troops, or else to be given a chance to get out of Berlin.”

Rather than condemn Von Loringhoven for a flagging spirit, Hitler sat down with the young man--and two friends who wanted to get away with him--and discussed the uninviting options.

“Hitler asked me how I intended to get out of Berlin, and I told him there were two possibilities,” Von Loringhoven said, describing one dangerous route through Berlin’s Soviet-filled parks and another trip by boat along Berlin’s Havel River. Hitler enthusiastically recommended the Havel.

“I had the feeling when we talked to him that he had already decided to end his life and that he, as a physical wreck, was envious of three strong young men who still had the chance of getting through,” Von Loringhoven said.

The three men waited until dark, then slipped out of the bunker--straight into a cone of machine-gun fire. The Soviets were 800 yards away. “We had to run for our lives,” the baron said.

They managed to get to the Kurfurstendamm, the once-elegant shopping avenue that had become a mass of broken glass and blasted facades.

Then they picked their way toward the relative safety of Berlin’s western suburbs, speaking bad French at Soviet checkpoints and passing themselves off as hapless guest workers from Luxembourg trapped in the war zone.

*

There was one final, daybreak sprint across a bridge guarded by four tanks--their crews were sleeping in the vehicles, it turned out, and didn’t open fire--and the men were safe in British and American-held territory, where they were delighted to let themselves be captured.

“I think I had not a company but a regiment of guardian angels,” the baron said.

Back in the bunker, Hitler walked into his sitting room with his new bride and closed the door. Aides waiting outside heard a single shot, and rushed in to find Hitler crumpled forward on his sofa, dead. Beside him was Braun, who had taken poison.

The aides lugged the bodies upstairs and out into the garden of Hitler’s chancellery, laid them in a shell crater, soaked them with gasoline, set them afire and watched them flame for a few moments. Then Russian artillery fire drove the cremation party back into the bunker.

Because the Allies did not find a body readily identifiable as Hitler’s, rumors have simmered that Hitler escaped.

But Von Loringhoven said he has never doubted that the Fuhrer killed himself in the bunker: “It was so clear that he would finish his life there. How else could he get out of it?”

And this spring, the news weekly Der Spiegel published fresh information that ought to end speculation. Citing once-secret files newly uncovered in Moscow, Der Spiegel reported that the Soviets had indeed identified a corpse found in the rubble-strewn gardens above the bunker as Hitler’s--charred though it was--and they had trucked the remains to a Red Army base in the eastern German city of Magdeburg.

There, according to Der Spiegel, the Russians buried Hitler, Braun and the family of his fanatical propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels--who had poisoned his wife and six children in the bunker before taking his own life. A quarter of a century later, the Soviets decided to disinter Hitler’s bones and incinerate them completely, lest their location be discovered and turned into a neo-Nazi shrine.

Some of the other bunker inhabitants tried to make escapes of their own after Hitler’s death, but for most it was too late. The majority were captured by the Soviets, some killed themselves, and a few simply disappeared.

Von Loringhoven spent two years as a British prisoner of war, then was reunited with his wife and son. In 1956, he joined the West German army, which eventually promoted him to three-star general. He spent three happy years in Washington on the planning staff of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the only German to serve in that capacity.

In this spring of uncomfortable remembrance in Germany, veterans such as Von Loringhoven are being criticized once again by younger Germans unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom that the Wehrmacht was a relatively “honorable” institution--distinct from Himmler’s S.S.--and that it behaved as well as it could under terrible circumstances.

A photo exhibition in Hamburg, for instance, uses new material from Soviet archives to question the bloodiness of the Wehrmacht invasion of the Soviet Union.

To such criticism, Von Loringhoven said that, in the mid-1930s, he believed that a military career was the only honorable course for a young professional who wanted to remain in Germany and who did not want to join the Nazi Party. The constitution, he said, specified that the army was to remain separate from politics, and it was not until Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 that it was obvious he would use the Wehrmacht as a political instrument. By then, it was too late to resign a commission.

“You become very careful about political life after what happened,” Von Loringhoven said. “It was in this spirit that I rejoined the army. I wanted to do everything to avoid a new war. I’m always all for political solutions rather than military solutions.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Hitler’s Bunker

As Russian soldiers closed in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, took refuge in this bunker. The bunker featured a hospital room, dressing room, even a special room for the couple’s dogs. On April 30, 1945, shortly after lunch, Hitler and Braun went to his study, where they took potassium cyanide. Hitler then put a Walther pistol to his mouth and pulled the trigger. Braun died from the poison.

1. Steps from Reich Chancellery Park

2. Lobby

3. Corridor

4. Room for dogs

5. Map room

6. Hitler’s bedroom

7. Hitler’s study

8. Vestibule to Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s apartment

9. Bathroom

10. Braun’s dressing room

11. Braun’s sitting room

12. Lavatories

13. Small washroom

14. Vestibule

15. Engine room for heating, ventilation and lighting

16. Valet’s room

17. Telephone exchange

18. Joseph Goebbel’s study

19. Valet’s bedroom

20. Goebbel’s bedroom

21. Medical room

22. Stairway to upper level of bunker

Sources: “10 Days to Die,” by Micahel A. Musmanno; “Adolf Hitler,” by Dennis Wepman

WWII Front Pages

* A compilation of historic front pages from World War II’s final months, including Hitler’s death and the capture of Berlin, is available from Times on Demand. To order, send a written request for Item No. 6200 to Times on Demand, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, P.O. Box 60395, Los Angeles 90060. $10 plus $1 for delivery.

Details on Times electronic services, A5