Ex-Nazi Youth Member Recalls the Final Days of Adolf Hitler

In the morning, Armin Lehmann gets out of bed and uses two crutches to make his way to the bathtub, where he soaks in scalding water so he can walk.

In this way he’s not unique, for he’s an aging veteran who still suffers from wounds received in World War II. But in another way, this 73-year-old retired travel executive is far different from other veterans. For Armin Lehmann spent the last 10 days of the war in a bunker with Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann and the dozens of other Nazis during the Battle of Berlin.

He was Hitler’s last courier, a 16-year-old member of the Hitler Youth who ran back and forth across bloody Wilhelmstrasse from the Fuehrerbunker to Nazi Party headquarters, carrying water, medicine, and messages. “I wasn’t fearless,” Lehmann writes in his book, “Hitler’s Last Courier.” “But I was able to conquer my fears. I was miserable, but like a soldier I didn’t buckle under the cries, the screams and the shouts around me. I parted with those horrors inside me and maintained as valiant a state of mind as possible.”

Thousands of miles away and 56 years later, Lehmann sits in his airy living room a few hundred yards from the Pacific in this small Oregon town, 150 miles southwest of Portland.

He speaks of nightmares, of piles of bodies. He speaks softly, with traces of a German accent. He runs a hand through his gray hair, shifting on his couch, looking for a comfortable position. “I had to be a good boy, obedient. My father was straight Prussian, and he never repented. Even in ’46 he said the Jews had themselves to blame,” Lehmann said.

Lehmann’s father was a car salesman who joined the Nazi Party and became a propagandist in Hitler’s intelligence unit. The Nazis made him feel important. He had money, he wore a uniform.

Lehmann’s father beat him, mocked him as a “washrag” and forced him to carry a medicine ball to become strong. On April 20, 1938, at age 9, Armin Lehmann was initiated into the Hitler Youth.

Jews and communists were identified as enemies of the state. Theories of the master race were drilled into the young members. No one contradicted the teachers. By April 20, 1945, Lehmann, then 16, had been wounded at the eastern front, earning a medal for bravery. He was selected by Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann to serve Hitler in the bunker.

Lehmann puts his feet on a cushion in his living room, his voice rising. “I had seen Hitler in ’38. He looked tall to me then, powerful. But when I saw him there in the bunker he had aged 20 years.” Lehmann stands stiffly, curling his shoulders forward. “Hitler hunched like this,” he said. “There were black circles under his eyes, his hand trembled, he tried to hold his uniform coat with his other hand so we didn’t see him tremble.”

Hitler spoke to a group including nine new couriers that day--his 56th birthday. He shook Lehmann’s hand and Lehmann could see Hitler’s eyes were “filled with moisture, perhaps because he was taking some kind of drug.”

Hitler spoke of a new weapon and said it was imperative that everyone keep fighting with an “iron will.” For 10 days Lehmann lived in a world without day or night, a world of constant danger that filled his mind with ghastly images.

On April 30, Axmann told Lehmann that Hitler was dead.

Lehmann was the last German runner at his post when the war ended. He broke out of the bunker and was wounded, buried in rubble. The Russians questioned him but did not ask about the bunker.

On the last night before Germany was divided, Lehmann crossed the Mulde River into the hands of the Americans.

“My eyes were opened by documentary films of the concentration camps. Some people said these films were fake. They weren’t a fake; they couldn’t have been staged. I was stunned.”

Lehmann’s new life began. He became a reporter on a German paper, married an American teacher and came to New York in 1953. He landed a job with the Associated Press in 1955 and stayed away from Germany. He went to Japan. He collected art for a gallery in Greenwich Village. He worked for SITA World Travel, advancing from a tour operator to executive vice president. He became an anti-nuclear activist. He wrote poetry. The bunker receded, but it didn’t disappear.

In 1965, Lehmann, then 37, had the first of five heart attacks. A psychiatrist told him “one reason for the attack might be your unresolved past.” As he was recovering, several German journalists who had talked to Axmann arrived on his doorstep. He told them his story and was offered a handsome fee to write his biography.

“I either had to take a lot of money for the book or stick with my career. I was told if I wrote the book I would lose my job. We had a lot of Jewish clients. I decided not to write the book and kept my career.”

By 1995 Armin Lehmann was living on the Oregon coast and his story popped up again, he isn’t sure how. He did an interview on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. He was in the local post office when a child pointed and said, “Is that the Nazi war criminal?”

“I was flabbergasted and just left the post office. I decided I had to write the book,” he said.

Getting it published was no easy task. Publishers wanted “war stories without the background. They wanted something for the Hitler buffs. I didn’t want to write the book for Hitler buffs and I don’t see how you can understand my story without my background,” he said.

But technology intervened and his book was published by the on-demand Internet press XLibris. It can be ordered through https://www.xlibris.com, or https://www.amazon.com.

Lehmann’s unrepentant father did not live long enough to read it; he died in 1983. “We held a reunion of the family in the late ‘60s, after my heart attack. I attended on condition that no politics would be discussed, but my father got up and began to talk about the old days.

“I gave him a swift kick in the shin. It was the last time I saw him,” Lehmann says, running a hand through his hair once more, a wrinkled smile crossing his face.