Hitler’s Final Days Described by Bodyguard

On the streets of Berlin, Soviet and German forces were locked in the apocalyptic finale to World War II in Europe. Tens of thousands were dying and whole city blocks were collapsing in rubble. But 30 feet underground, in Adolf Hitler’s bunker, a strange calm had taken hold.

Hitler’s bodyguard, SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch, had just been told that the fuehrer was not to be disturbed. And everybody knew what that meant.

“We heard no shot, we heard nothing, but one of those who was in the hallway said, ‘I think it’s done,’ ” Misch recalled. “Then everything was really quiet.”

Somebody mustered the nerve to enter the sitting room, and Misch peered inside. What he saw is engraved in his memory: Hitler crumpled over a table, his cheek streaked with blood from the self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head.

The failed art student and World War I corporal who brawled and manipulated his way to power, plunged Europe into war and caused the Holocaust, had come to an ignominious end at age 56, in a fortified burrow that Misch remembers as a “concrete coffin.”

It was April 30, 1945. In a week, the war would end with Germany’s unconditional surrender.

“I saw Hitler lying on the table like so,” Misch said, putting his head on his living room table to demonstrate. Next to Hitler lay his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, whom he had wed two nights before. She had taken cyanide.

“Eva lay like so on the sofa with knees up, her head to him,” Misch said in an interview before the 60th anniversary of the war’s end.

The silence exploded into frenzied activity. Misch ran upstairs to tell his supervisor. By the time he returned downstairs, Hitler’s corpse was in a blanket on the floor.

“Then they bundled Hitler up and said, ‘What do we do now?’ ” Misch said.

“As they took Hitler out ... they walked by me about 3 or 4 meters away, I saw his shoes sticking outside the sack.” Hitler and Braun were being taken above-ground to a small garden to be doused in gasoline and incinerated.

From upstairs, an SS guard yelled to him: “The boss is being burned! Come on out.” But instead, Misch retreated deeper into the bunker in case the Gestapo decided to kill witnesses to the suicide.

He was 27, and feeling helpless.

Misch had been a member of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler division, originally formed as the fuehrer’s personal bodyguard, since 1937. He was attached to a regular army unit for the invasion of Poland that started World War II.

Wounded in action, he was sent back to Germany to recover and in 1940 was picked as one of two loyal SS men who would serve as Hitler’s bodyguards and general assistants.

For the next five years, Misch accompanied Hitler almost everywhere, and followed him into the bunker in the center of the capital about four days after the final Soviet onslaught on Berlin began.

Today, at 87, his is an oft-told tale, yet one that continues to resonate in a world still struggling to fathom the demons that created and drove Hitler. Even today, any attempt to portray him as human risks fierce objections.

The recent German film “Der Untergang” (“Downfall”) traces Hitler’s final days in the bunker in a strikingly lifelike portrayal by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz of a fuehrer crumbling to pieces in one maniacal tantrum after another.

The Academy Award-nominated movie has drawn critical acclaim but also has been criticized for supposedly showing Hitler with human touches.

Misch, who is played by actor Heinrich Schmieder in the film, says it exaggerated reality -- “It was an entertainment film, not a documentary.”

Ever the loyal servant, Misch freely expresses nostalgia for his five years with the man he called “der Chef” -- the boss.

“He was a wonderful boss,” Misch said. He remembers delivering flowers to one of the fuehrer’s favorite musicians who had just gotten engaged; the card said: “Best wishes, Adolf Hitler.”

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin gave the order for the final push into Berlin on April 16, not only to take the Nazi capital but to punish the Germans for waging a war that killed 26.6 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, by official Russian count.

The plan pitted about 2.5 million Russian troops with 6,000 tanks against a Berlin defense force of 300,000, some of them old men and children equipped with bicycles and single-shot antitank weapons.

The Red Army took some 350,000 casualties, including 78,000 dead. On the German side, about 100,000 civilians were killed and as many women raped. There has not been a full German military toll because of the chaos of the final days.

To this day, the bones of the dead regularly turn up in the fields outside Berlin.

Six days into the attack, Misch remembers Hitler making a remark that startled even his confidants.

“He said, ‘That’s it -- the war is lost.’ ”

On April 28, Misch saw Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler confidant Martin Bormann enter the bunker with another man who turned out to be a magistrate, come to wed Hitler and Braun in a short nighttime ceremony.

The day after Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels relieved Misch of his duties and the bodyguard fled, but the Soviets caught him.

He spent nine years in prison camps near Moscow and in what was is now Kazakhstan, interrogated over and over about the last days in the bunker. He returned to Berlin in 1954, married and opened a shop.

Misch makes no excuses for his service to Hitler and does not talk about guilt or responsibility for the Holocaust, saying only that he joined the SS in the “fight against Bolshevism” and that he knew nothing of the murder of 6 million Jews.

With Hitler, “That was never a topic. Never,” he said.

Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors’ office that has hunted Nazis since 1958, said that Misch was never investigated for war crimes.

Berlin capitulated the day after Hitler’s suicide, and Germany surrendered to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander, in France six days later. Berlin, most of it in rubble, was occupied by Soviet, American, French and British troops and became two cities -- a communist east and democratic west, later divided by a high wall. Only in 1990 was it reunited and reincarnated as the German capital.

All traces of Hitler’s bunker are gone, buried under a children’s playground behind an apartment block.

The attempt to burn Hitler’s body was only partially successful, and his remains were recovered by the Soviets. The find was kept secret, allowing Stalin to perpetuate a Cold War myth that Hitler survived and was hidden in the West.

After decades of uncertainty and disinformation, the demise of the Soviet Union has allowed researchers to establish what they believe is the truth about what happened to the body.

Hitler’s jaws and skull were only recently rediscovered in secret archives in Moscow and went on display in Russia’s Federal Archives Service in 2000.

The rest of him had been buried beneath a Soviet army parade ground in the former East German city of Magdeburg.

His remains were exhumed in the 1970s and incinerated. The ashes were flushed into the city’s sewage system.