End of a Berlin Diary

THE ATLANTIC SERIAL

by WILLIAM L. SHIRER

1

Aboard Queen Mary, Monday, October 1, 1945. — New York out of sight now, and one’s spirits sink a little. You would think it was the first time instead of the hundredth. Eileen and Linda came down to the dock with Tess. I held them by the water’s edge while they gazed up at the giant liner. Very impressed they were. Linda kept calling it the “Big Canoe.” She said it reached to the sun. We said our farewells and they went off to school. Both seemed resentful at the separation. You’d think they would be used to them by now. Ed Murrow arrived, in uniform. For the first time since Lisbon, in December, 1940, we shall have time for much talk. A last walk up and down with Tess (our millionth farewell, but always sad), and then they began to pull the gangplank up.

At sea, Thursday, October 4. - Tea and a long talk with Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada. He seemed greatly concerned with the atomic bomb. Up most of the night with Ed and General X, discussing the future of broadcasting, if any. So far, radio has missed most of its chances, chiefly, I suppose, because too many executives regard it as a business just like any other, and have been more concerned with making huge profits than with making broadcasting a public service. State ownership is not the answer either, at least in the U.S.A. No ideal solution, I guess. But even if it is a profit-making business, can’t radio in our land grow up?

At sea, Saturday, October 6. - Southampton tomorrow, then London and Paris, and finally Berlin! It’s hard to be honest with oneself about returning to Berlin. I am not thrilled. Is there a smug feeling of the fine revenge I shall experience? I don’t think so. My hatred of the Nazis is more complex. I remember the day I left Berlin. I said to myself: “I don’t care if I ever see this town, this people, again.”

London, Thursday, October 11. — Dinner, and long into the night with Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Nation, and Dick Crossman. Dick is a new Labor member of Parliament. He was brilliant, as usual, but almost completely cockeyed on Germany and on America. Labor circles here see a Gargantuan United States swamping them out of the world markets at a moment when Britain must increase its exports 50 per cent over the pre-war level in order to exist. They think we have gone imperialist in Asia and they are not impressed by my argument that whatever imperialist touch we once had, we have lost. Much wild and silly talk in the same circles that America is on the verge of war with Russia. I tell them that the people at home don’t want a war and, in fact, do not even think about it. Back of all these ideas, I gather, is the Labor feeling, which probably has some — but not much — justification, that capitalist America will not be very coöperative with socialist Britain.

On Germany, I find my Labor party friends definitely bad. They want to build up Western Germany—especially the Ruhr —they say, “in the interests of European economic prosperity.” That this may mean building up Germany again as a military power (since military power is based on economic strength) is a consequence they refuse to face. Just as after the last war, these nice Liberal-Labor people feel that Germany is too thoroughly beaten to come back. Depressing that such intelligent folk want to be wrong twice.

London, Friday, October 12. — Drinks with Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist, the most intelligent economic weekly in the world. He is not unduly alarmed at the prospects of five years of socialist rule in Britain. He is more alarmed, he says, at what the Russians and the Americans may do. We argued about Germany, his journal being much too strong for restoring Germany’s economic strength.

London, Tuesday, October 15. — I leave England for the bleak Continent, full of exciting yet confused impressions, but pretty certain of one thing: there will be no revolution here, or anything slightly resembling it, as long as the present socialist government is at the helm. There will be an evolution toward a state-controlled private economy with government ownership of a few key industries and the Bank of England.

Paris, Monday, October 29. — It has been a striking and encouraging experience — this brief stopover in Britain and France on my way back to Germany. Britain is not the nation we knew in 1939, nor apparently will it ever be again. France stumbles out of the nightmare of four years under the barbarian conquest and, after a year of trying, suddenly finds its feet. But they are not the feet we knew in 1939. The old ones, apparently, are gone forever.

The structure of society in Western Europe is being completely overhauled — economically, socially, politically. The war swamped the old one, and few regret its disappearance. It spelled misery for too many people. In Western Europe the common people have taken over political power. They intend to use it to obtain economic and social power as well. Thus it is that Paris and London — once the centers of wealth and fashion in the Western world — have taken on aspects of great proletarian cities. The clothes of the rich are as shabby as those of the poor. That old law of supply and demand (so sacred at home) has lost all meaning over here. You can flutter a whole fistful of banknotes and shout to the housetops for something you want to buy. It will do no good. What the nation produces is allocated by the state to those it considers most in need. Priorities and ration coupons are worth more than any amount of cash.

What the great majority of people in Western Europe want is democratic socialism. They intend to get it this time — gradually, to be sure, and by orderly methods, preserving always their democratic freedoms and their respect for the individual and his dignity as a human being.

With luck and decent flying weather, I shall be back in Berlin tomorrow. Nearly five years since I left. December 5, 1940, it was.

2

Berlin, Tuesday, October 30. — That first view of Berlin from the air this afternoon! The great city demolished almost beyond recognition.

The center of the capital around the Leipzigerstrasse and the Friedrichstrasse a vast acreage of rubble. Most of the little streets I knew, gone, erased off the map. The railway stations — Potsdamer Bahnhof, Anhalter Bahnhof, Lehrter Bahnhof - gaunt shells. The Imperial Palace of the Kaisers roofless, some of its wings pulverized, and here and there the outer walls battered in. The Tiergarten, like any other battlefield from the air, pockmarked with shell holes, the old spreading trees that I had known, bare stumps. And as far as you can see in all directions from a plane above the city, a great wilderness of debris, dotted with roofless, burnt-out buildings that look like little mousetraps, with the low autumn sun shining through the spaces where windows had been.

When we flew over Tempelhof the ground officer would not let us land. Ground fog, he said, though we could see the field perfectly.

“How about a little tour of your old stamping ground?” the pilot asked. When we ran out of gas in half an hour, the stubborn officer would have to let us land, he said. I crawled into the copilot’s seat. Around and around the sprawling city we circled. But I could not take it all in so quickly. My brain became blurred. Soon I was lost staring down at the awful wasteland.

Our gas was about gone. The pilot was arguing with Tempelhof field on his radio. The ground officer kept ordering him back to Wiesbaden, 200 miles away. Ground fog, he kept saying, though visibility was so good we could see from 2000 feet the faces of German prisoners of war repairing the field.

The pilot began to perspire.

“Why not land at Gatow?” I said. “It’s the RAF field, and I know it well. I used to sail on the Wannsee near-by when Gatow was a Luftwaffe base.”

“Give me the Berlin map,” the pilot said to his co-pilot. But there was none to be found.

“I’ll guide you in,” I said. There really was ground fog at Gatow, but we made it on the second try.

Toward sundown we got permission to come into Tempelhof. In this district around the airfield I had had my home for three years but. I could not make it out. Then, from the canal and the railroad tracks I got my bearings. As we banked toward the field I saw our old house. It was still standing, and with a roof— the only intact building in the entire neighborhood. Had Frau K, who owned it, survived then? She had not liked the Nazis, who had hounded her husband, a famous ace of the First World War, to the grave when he refused to knuckle down to Göring. But, like all Germans, she had pitched in to help win the war for Nazi Germany. The last night I had seen her she had talked for hours about her patriotic duty as a German. And Germany would win, she had said. Well, at least her roof was still on.

It was dark before I got billeted in an atrociously furnished middle class villa of a German washingmachine manufacturer in Zehlendorf-West. Before I could set my gear down he was bowing and scraping and protesting in loud guttural tones that he had always been the staunchest of Hitlerhaters.

Wednesday, October 31. — A foggy, chilly morning, my first in Berlin. Very much like the last one, December 5, 1940, when I drove to Tempelhof to get away. I remember it was snowing then.

But, Berlin this morning — this utter devastation where once stood the proud capital of the regime that Hitler said would last a thousand years!

Howard Smith and I drove through the Kurfürstendamm from the American sector in southwest Berlin. Someone had told me this equivalent of New York’s Fifth Avenue had escaped the heavy bombing. But hardly a house was intact.

We got out of the car and strolled around the neighborhood — a familiar one to me, for I had lived up the street in the Tauentzienstrasse at one time and, like everyone else in Berlin, had always patronized the restaurants, cafés, and movie palaces of the quarter. Now I could scarcely recognize it. The Romanisches Café, where the Berlin bohemians used to forgather, was largely rubble. The Eden Hotel, down the Budapesterstrasse, where the racy girls of the town hung out, was entirely rubble. How had these lighthearted damsels, I wondered, taken the horrors of the bombing? All the buildings across from the Gedächtniskirche on the south side of the Zoo were smashed in. One of them, a gaudy place where we had occasionally dined and danced, was no more.

But the Zoo? What was that I read in the local newspapers this morning? Something about the director of the Zoo assuring the population that the animals would be fed as usual this winter. The Berliners, who are hungry themselves, will not resent that. Curious, the German’s tenderness toward animals, even the wild, vicious ones, in contrast to the way he treats his fellow men — in a concentration camp, for instance.

Opposite the façade of the Gedächtniskirche, the Gloria Palast, a popular movie house, was just a mound of broken bricks and stone. German women, some of whom looked — from their fur jackets — as though they had once been staunch, if smug, members of the middle class (Hitler’s most fanatical supporters), formed a chain gang, passing broken brick to one another with their dainty hands.

A Russian motor convoy rounded the church, a long file of Chevrolet trucks filled with loot. The pickings must be getting slim. Aside from a few bicycles there seemed to be only junk — piping, wheels, broken machinery.

We walked up the Kurfürstendamm. The beer halls on the right, in which I had spent many an evening trying to forget the Nazis, were all smashed in. Kranzler’s café-restaurant, where, in the crisp autumn, I used to go for Rebhuhn and red kraut, washed down with a dry Rhine wine, was just another ruin. And so it went. Life had been gaudy on this broad avenue between the wars. It had glittered like tinsel and had been about as deep and meaningful. The Kurfürstendamm had expressed, in a way, the vulgarity, the cheapness, the showy pretentiousness, the dreadful emptiness of life for the middle classes during the uneasy peace. Was its destruction such a loss? I wondered.

We left it and hit down the East-West Axis - the triumphal boulevard that Hitler had widened from the old Charlottenburger Chaussee into a sort of Via Triumphale, down which his goosestepping supermen used to parade before the war, in the brief hours of the Nazi glory. As a reporter, I had often stood in the reviewing stand and watched them, a feeling of despair and disgust gnawing at my stomach. Up this broad, flagdecked avenue, Hitler’s new tanks and huge guns had lumbered, sending the German people massed along the curbs into wonderful ecstasy, and the rest of the world’s people, when they read our dispatches or listened to our broadcasts, into hysterical fear.

This boulevard, which cut a wide ribbon through the wooded Tiergarten, had come to stand, for me, as an ugly symbol of Nazi Germany’s military might, as the near-by Siegesallee, with its statues of all the Prussian Fürsts, Kurfürsts, and kings, had stood for the cruel, pompous vainglory of Prussia. But before I left Berlin, the great street’s symbolism — at least for me — became diluted. The spacious boulevard through the Tiergarten turned out to be a great landmark for RAF pilots in the night, and I used to watch them fly up and down it as if they owned it. Somehow their regular visits helped to wipe out my memory of this great highway as the parade ground of the strutting German Army. Hitler, enraged, had had the avenue covered at great expense with wire netting to camouflage it from the British bombers, but one night a fierce wind from the east had blown the covering down, and even the Berliners had chuckled. Yes, the mighty symbol was fading, even then.

Now gangs of German prisoners of war were at work on the once proud avenue, filling the holes made by the bombs and shells. Beyond the curbs, on both sides, the Tiergarten, which for so many years had been the scene of my walks and my meditations, and whose wonderful rose garden in June had been a special delight, looked like a dozen other battlefields. Here the Nazi die-hards had made their last stand after the Reich Chancellery had fallen, and Hitler and his mistress, and Goebbels and his wife and children, had liquidated themselves. Half of the trees had been shot away, and the ground was crisscrossed with trenches and foxholes and scattered with the rusty things you see on any battlefield — parts of tanks, armored cars, half-trucks, guns, helmets.

Curiously enough, that ugly abortion, the Siegessäule—the Victory Column—was still standing in the middle of the Grosserstern. Neither British and American bombs nor Russian shells had toppled it over. But high in the gray sky - the fog was clearing a little now — I could make out a French flag floating atop it, atop this Germanic monument to Prussia’s victory over France in 1871.

I recalled how fickle the fates have been in Europe, and how shortsighted it has been for Europeans to conclude that their latest victory over the enemy would be final for all time. I should like to close an eye to history and think now that this time, certainly this time, the Germans are either down for good or will never rise again in the detestable form they have shown during the last seventy-five years.

There was another reminder of how often in history — as in our personal lives — the tables are turned. Two thirds of the way down the Axis toward the Brandenburg Gate, on the left side, hundreds of workmen were laboring like beavers behind an enormous scaffolding. Howard said it was to be a mammoth monument to the Red Soldier, to commemorate the Russian troops killed in the Battle of Berlin. It was to be unveiled on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution — in just a week now.

Neither Hitler nor the German people, for that matter, ever dreamt the day would come when a monument to the Red Army would rise in the midst of the German capital, indeed on a spot within sight of the Reichstag, where Hitler had so often fulminated against Russia and its Bolshevism— yes, on the very spot past which, in the high time of the Nazis, Hitler’s arrogant hirelings had done some of their fanciest goose-stepping.

We drove on through the Brandenburg Gate, which was still standing, though a horse or two in the statuary on the top had been badly wounded and the Grecian columns were nicked with shrapnel. The Pariser Platz, just beyond the Gate, which had been pretty much the geographical center of my life in Berlin during the war years (for I lived at the Adlon and went often to the American Embassy near-by), was scarcely recognizable. The Adlon was a shell, the Embassy completely destroyed, as was the French Embassy across the little square. There was a sign on the battered from door of the Adlon, through which I had passed so often in my Berlin years. It announced bravely that “Five O’Clock Tea” was being served.

“But where?” I asked Howard. Through the broken walls of the once famous hostelry you could see nothing but debris.

“In the cellar,” Howard said. “And some of the old waiters are still around in their long, formal coats and starched collars just as if nothing had changed.”

3

WE TURNED into the Wilhelmstrasse, that famous little street from whose ugly ministerial buildings and palaces first Prussia and then Germany had been ruled with an iron hand.

As far as you could see down the street, not a single building stood intact. Hindenburg’s old palace, which Ribbentrop had taken over and remodeled, and the Foreign Office further down, where we had been convoked so often by the insufferable Ribbentrop every time Germany broke another treaty or attacked a new neighbor, were both gutted. Back there on the left-hand side of the street, the shell of a building where Rudolf Hess used to have his office. Next to it, another shell where the clown “Putzi” Hanfstaengl used to receive us before he fell out of favor with his Führer. Further down on the left, the few remains of the Propaganda Ministry. I could recognize it only by its position at the end of the street. Most of its walls were gone, and the interior — those palatial rooms where Goebbels had so often strutted in (despite his limp) to lecture us and lie to us, and where, after the war began, we had assembled each afternoon for a press conference presided over by the cocky Dr. Boehmer and his gang of liars — was simply a mess of twisted girders and pulverized brick and plaster.

Finally, across the street from the Propaganda Ministry, the remains of the place where the war had been plotted — Hitler’s Chancellery. The Russians, you could see, had pretty well cleaned it up. Howard said it had been in an awful mess when the Russians stormed it the day after an orgy of suicides and murders had at last removed Hitler, his mistress Eva Braun, Goebbels and his wife and children, and a few bitter-enders, from this world.

A rather bedraggled Russian sentry stood guard over the doorway. He seemed chilly and bored. Would he be bored though, I thought, if he had my memories of that particular building?

How many times had I stood opposite on the curb and watched the comings and goings of the great! They would drive up in their black superMercedes cars: the fat, bemedaled Göring; the snakelike little Goebbels, though he lived just across the street; the arrogant, stupid Ribbentrop, though he lived a mere 100 yards down the street —these and Hess and the drunkard Ley and the debauched-looking little Funk with the small eyes of a pig, and the sadist Himmler (though he looked like a mild schoolmaster), and the other swashbuckling party hacks, and then the generals, their necks stiff even when they dismounted from a car, one eye inevitably squeezing a monocle, their uniforms immaculately pressed. They would come, be saluted by the guard of honor, and pass within this building to plot their conquests.

Today, I reflected, standing there in front of the Chancellery’s ruins, they are all dead or in jail. This building in whose stately rooms they worked out so confidently and cold-bloodedly their obscene designs is, like them, smashed forever. Germany, their land, which they wanted to rule the world, is smashed too. It will not recover for a long time, and perhaps never.

And yet, what suffering they caused on this planet, these German men, before an aroused world turned them back and fought through to hunt them out and kill them or capture them. How many millions dead, killed, and murdered? How many maimed and broken? How many homes in ashes? Even though the fighting has stopped, the peoples of Europe this winter are hungry and cold, and a million or so of them probably will die all because of what these evil, stupid little men — in this building before it was smashed — did.

And do not forget either that these criminal men with their brutal, inhuman designs were—when I last stood before this building less than five years ago — the heroes of this weird and tragic land. Crowds cheered them in the streets. The workers cheered them in the factories. The whole German nation followed them not only obediently but with enthusiasm. And the German people toiled like beavers so that these men might succeed in their plans to destroy or enslave the rest of the world. So many of our own people forget this as they pity the dazed and broken Germans hauling wood on their backs through the rubble of the German cities today.

We went on from the Chancellery, turned left past the Kaiserhof, the hotel which had been Hitler’s headquarters before he came to power, and where, during the war years, I had often snatched an evening meal before the broadcasts. On many a dark night I had swallowed down my food and watched the Nazis in another corner toasting their early victories as if they already owned the earth. About all that is left of this little Nazi citadel is the charred front wall on which you can make out the blurred word “Kaiserhof.”

With difficulty we made our way through blocks of rubble to the Alexander Platz. For the first time we began to see numbers of Russian soldiers, for we were now in the Soviet sector, having passed through the British sector in the Kurfürstendamm and Tiergarten areas. Most of the Russian troops appeared poorly clad, their uniforms dirty and shoddy. Perhaps that was because they had done so much magnificent fighting in them. About one Russian in four, officer or man, carried a slung carbine. Almost all of them carted ordinary civilian suitcases, looted, no doubt, from Germans, and filled, no doubt, with black-market purchases.

The Russians, Howard said, had recently received two or three years’ back pay in paper marks, and our GI’s had not been slow to take advantage of it. Our troops had had cigarettes and cheap watches shipped posthaste from home, and here in the Alexander Platz or in the Tiergarten they disposed of them at fantastic prices to the Russian comrades. “Mickey Mouse” watches — whatever they are — fetched 10,000 marks, Howard said, which a GI could convert into one thousand American dollars and send home. Now, however, the Army was stepping in to stop the racket, and the Russians were also beginning to coöperate. Both commands were checking up not only on their own troops but on Germans who were palming off a weird assortment of knickknacks on the property-hungry Red Army men.

Indeed, hardly had we entered the square and paused to see that the sinister Gestapo jail and headquarters had been nicely smashed, before a large squad of Russian military police began rounding up a hundred or so black-market operators, about a third of whom were Soviet soldiers and the rest German civilians.

One little incident followed that I did not like. The Russians, as every American soldier here knows, do not let you take photographs in their sector without a special permit. But an American Lieutenant Colonel was blandly photographing the roundup of the black-marketers by the Russian MP’s. Two Russian guards immediately grabbed him and proceeded to march him off to the hoosegow. He was a rather elderly fellow and evidently not a combat officer. But he grew combative enough with the Russians. What I did not like was that the German civilians on the Platz gathered around with obvious glee to see the spectacle of a couple of Russian soldiers arresting an American colonel. A Russian officer intervened and appeared to explain in Russian that if the colonel would give up his film he would be freed. But the American either did not understand or did not want to part with his film. So off to the jug he was marched, while the Germans guffawed. Perhaps, I thought, they saw their first, glimmer of hope in this little incident. In the end — Ja? — the Russians and Americans would never understand each other, never get along. If so, that was the German’s chance.

We came home by way of Wedding, a German workers’ district in north Berlin and now part of the Russian sector. At every street corner you saw a big Russian poster in German which read: “The experience of history shows that the Hitlers come and go, but that the people of the German nation live on.” It was signed: “Stalin.”

Now our Russian friends, I reflected, stand for a tough peace with Germany because they are determined not to have to defend themselves against any more German attacks. But they know something about propaganda. We Americans, alas, do not.

4

Thursday, November 1. — At the invitation of General James Gavin, Commander of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, I sat in today on the seventeenth meeting of the Allied Kommandatura, which rules Berlin. It was something of an experience. Here, on a practical plane, you could see the four victorious Allies, so different in their backgrounds, psychology, and national structures, trying to work together in peace as they had in war. The gulf between the East and the West was certainly there as the four generals tried to agree on various details of ruling the conquered city. But on the whole, they did not get along badly. General Smirnov, the Russian, who presided, conducted himself, I thought, with tact, humor, and dispatch, though an American diplomat had solemnly assured me that the Russians were simply too ignorant to know how to participate in an international meeting, much less conduct one.

Altogether, watching the Kommandatura meeting was a rather encouraging experience when you consider that the future peace of the world depends on the four major Allies getting along together, especially here in Germany.

In the evening, with some colleagues, to General Robertson, the British deputy commander. He seemed anxious to see that the Germans were treated well, and, moreover, made it look as though that was official British policy.

Friday, November 2. — I must try to get the story of how we Americans are running our part of Germany. Last night an earnest young American Army captain spoke bitterly and discouragingly on the subject. He thought we were doing a pretty lousy job. He said that in Darmstadt our CIC had gone so far as to employ Nazi Gestapo agents to track down German Communists, though the Communist Party is recognized as legal in our zone, as in all the others. Nazi elements, he said, run the German prisoner of war camps, and illtreat anti-Nazi prisoners just as they did in the POW camps at home. He stressed how badly antiNazi German refugees in the U.S. were needed here — yet we do not allow them to return. He told a weird story about how one of our chief political advisers here was a sinister German, a former protégé of Schacht, a former SS man, and a rabid German nationalist. This Nazi now advises us on what to do with the Germans!

Walter Kerr, Howard, and I had another look at the ruins today. Going into Wittenberg Platz, I noticed another sign put up by the Russians. It was in German and said: “No foreign enemy ever brought so much misery to the Germans as Hitler.” Misery there was, such as no living German had ever dreamt was possible. Those middle class German women toiling in the rubble on halfempty stomachs were an example of just part of it. And yet, how many Germans realized why this misery had come? Didn’t they blame the foreign enemy for it? Wasn’t the only blame they had for Hitler merely that he had lost, not won, the war? Walter and Howard, who have been here some time, said the Germans they had talked to blamed the Nazis not for starting this incredibly destructive war, but merely for having lost it.

The German people, I fear, have not — by a hell of a long way — learned the lessons of this terrible war. They have no sense of guilt and are sorry only that they were beaten and must now suffer the consequences. They are sorry only for themselves — not at all for those they murdered and tortured and tried to wipe off this earth.

I was curious to see what had happened to the little pub on the south side of the Platz which Hitler’s half brother, Alois Hitler, had started shortly before the war, much to the disgust of the Führer, who did not like the people to be reminded of the lower middle class origins of the Hitler family. It was still there, and open for such business as pubs, without suitable food or drink, conduct at the moment. But we could not find Alois Hitler within. The name did not seem to ring a bell in anyone’s mind, though it had struck terror up and down Europe and the world.

The great K.D.W. department store, on the west side of the square, where I had done my meager Christmas shopping in the days when I lived across the street and was broke, was battered and burnt out. So was the house in the Tauentzienstrasse opposite it, where, in 1934, Tess and I had rented a studio from a cultivated German Jewish couple. He had been a sculptor and she an art historian, and they had had the good sense to beat it hurriedly for England, and later for the United States, at a time when many of their Jewish friends thought things could still be arranged with the Nazis.

In the little studio atop this building, which had now been bombed to ground level, we had given refuge and what help we could to certain victims of the Nazi barbarism. One of them, a half Jewish lawyer who had lost an arm for the Fatherland in World War I, had come to us, I remember, on his release from the dread Gestapo prison of tortures in the Columbiahaus. He was out of his head, though he was one of the bravest men I ever knew, and we kept him until he had become a little normal, a little human, a little like himself, before we took him back to his wife and children. That, of course, was in the beginning of Nazism and we were quite shocked at the time. Innocent we were —then.

All of Berlin’s railway stations have been smashed, but most are functioning after a sort. Before the Anhalter station, hundreds of German refugees were milling around with their great bundles full of what earthly goods they had managed to save. We stopped a moment to question them. They had come in from the East they said, from Poland, from Czechoslovakia, from the Russian zone. Where they were going, or how, they did not know; nor, apparently, did anyone else. They looked very forlorn, these same sturdy German folk many of whom had rushed so joyously in 1939 and the ensuing good war years to settle on land which the Germans had stolen from the Poles, Russians, and Czechs. Now the rightful owners had taken back their land, and these German conquerors, in their rags and their hunger, were looking for refuge in the shrunken, already crowded German land.

We drove and prowled for hours through the prostrate city. On the whole, the residents of Berlin - as distinguished from the refugees pouring into the capital — were better dressed than the people in the liberated Western countries, or even in London. In Paris the women still went stockingless. In Berlin almost all women wore stockings, many of them, no doubt, leftovers from the huge stocks sent back by German soldiers from Holland, Belgium, and especially France, in 1940-1941. I had seen them buying out the stores in these countries then. I remarked today how many German women sported stylish fur coats, though, to listen to some Germans and their American friends here, the Russians were supposed to have torn the fur coats off the backs of all the women in Germany.

I am beginning to question the tales I heard at home about how the Russians raped. In Budapest, one hears here, it was pretty bad. But it does not appear to have been excessive in Berlin. There is always some rape when an army overruns a land. Our own Army has done it little on occasion. But when you consider what the Germans did to the Russian population when they overran half of European Russia, - and that the Red Army soldier may have remembered this,— and when you take into account that the Soviet troops had been in the field fighting constantly for two to three years, and that capturing Berlin was a costly operation, and that some of the Russian divisions were made up of very inferior material, not to mention a weird assortment of Asiatic troops, then the amount of raping by Russian troops here apparently was not above the average to be expected.

I have met only one German woman who admits she was raped (and she does not take it very tragically, I must say, perhaps because she is well on in years). I have talked to several who say that while the Russians took their watches and some of the junk out of their houses, there was no attempt to rape them. A lot of houses where Germans complain of Russian looting have a surprising amount of good furnishings left.

The German women in the street look pretty well, though I am not implying that they were ever a beautiful race. The men look more dilapidated, probably because of their clothes. Many of them, demobilized, found their homes destroyed and their civilian clothes gone.

The people in the streets of Berlin amble along at even a slower gait than they used to when things were good. Our officers think it is partly because they are still dazed from the bombings and their personal catastrophes — loss of their homes and of their much loved property, loss of their menfolk, sudden defeat when victory had looked near for so long - and because the German’s reflexes, never very speedy, are slowed down by hunger and cold. He plods along the street, pays little attention to the snorting, speeding Allied military vehicles careening up and down, and sometimes gets run over, without making much effort to avoid it.

The most sorry-looking folk on the street (to say pitiful would be dishonest for me, since I have no pity for them) are the demobilized German soldiers. They hobble along in their rags, footsore from walking in worn-out shoes stuffed with newspaper; their uniforms, which in my day were so smart, are tattered and filthy. They make an impressive picture of defeat and desolation. On a street in Wedding, we stop to talk to a group of them scraping along. Are these the crack soldiers who goose-stepped so arrogantly through Poland, France, Russia, and other temporarily conquered lands? These, the Herrenvolk? They are certainly not arrogant now. They are bent, broken, dirty, tired, and hungry.

“Where do you come from?” I ask them.

“From Stalingrad,”they say. “ Alles kaputt.” They grin and you can see that few of them, though they are young men, have any teeth left. They beg for cigarettes and we pass a pack around. Then they shuffle and hobble away.

5

AFTER lunch I went to X’s office to peruse some documents. Rather interesting, I must say.

One was an interrogation of Dr. Schacht, now in the hoosegow in Nuremberg waiting trial with the other Nazi gangsters. Schacht, according to this confidential American report, paces his cell, fuming against the Nazis. Admitted that he never loved them, the fact is he did more than almost anyone else to bring them to power in 1933, and for many years his peculiar financial talents served Hitler well. How often have I seen him on the platform of the Reichstag beaming with pleasure and approval as Hitler harangued, and excused some new treaty broken, some new country murdered. Now he rages that he was always against the Nazis, and whimpers at the Americans for having locked him up.

And some interesting dope on Ribbentrop, the former German Foreign Minister, one of the most truculent and stupid of the Hitler gang and a mean little liar to boot. I remember how he used to prance into the Foreign Office press room to tell us in his most arrogant fashion of some new Hitlerite aggression. And now here’s his preliminary interrogation at Nuremberg, which makes clear that he was not only a liar but a monstrous ignoramus. Only a Hitler would have made such a worm his Foreign Minister.

Some hasty notes scrawled from Ribbentrop’s interrogation: —

“Hitler told me for the first time on April 22 or 23 that the war was lost. . . .” But early in April, Ribbentrop says, he and Hitler were still talking about making a deal with Britain. He quotes Hitler as telling him, “We must make some sort of arrangement with England.” Were there ever such fools as these Germans!

Ribbentrop claims that after the fall of France, Hitler still spoke of a “quick peace” with England which would leave the British their “prestige.” He discourses at length on the theme that Hitler always sought an understanding with Britain. The idiot is still rattling off the old Nazi propaganda line, probably partly because he is too enmeshed in the big Nazi lie to extricate himself and partly because, being an incredibly stupid man, he thinks such silly talk may save his neck.

Now, in the interrogating, Ribbentrop squirms and comes through with a typical whopper. “It is false,” he whines, “that I ever said England wouldn’t fight. I said she would. Always, I had violent disagreements with the Führer on this.”

Everyone knows he never dared to disagree with Hitler, even timidly, let alone violently. And everyone knows that it was his assurance to Hitler that Britain would not fight that helped turn the tables for war in August, 1939. He claims Hitler’s speeches on foreign affairs were always made without his advice. He even claims that on August 25, 1939 - seven days before Hitler began his war — he asked the Führer “to stop the advance against Poland.”

After Germany’s demise, Ribbentrop handed a letter to Field Marshal Montgomery to be forwarded to Mr. Vincent [sic] Churchill and Mr. Eden. “Its contents refer — as you will see,” he writes Montgomery, “to a message the Führer gave me before his death.”

The letter, written in Ribbentrop’s inimitable English, follows in part:—

(PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL)

SIRS: -
Radio reports, etc., which I do not quite understand . . . would come to it, that former collaborators of the Führer . . . are trying to depreciate the Führer, falsify his ideas about England. . . . [I wish] to inform you about my last political conversation with the Führer. . . .
As far as I am concerned I have the duty to do everything I can, to fulfill this last wish the Führer has expressed to me and therefore give myself into the hands of the British occupation army. Should you be willing to give me the opportunity of bringing last conversation with Adolph Hitler to your knowledge, I would be grateful, if I could do this personally and verbally.
[Needless to say, Ribbentrop was never able to see Churchill or Eden on this matter. He lakes several pages of his letter to prove that unfortunately Hitler did not follow his Foreign Minister’s advice on relations with Britain, Russia, and the United States, which, he says, he wanted to be peaceful. Finally he gets back to what he claims was Hitler’s final conversation with him and describes the leader as “having suddenly turned around to me and said: ‘You will see, my spirit will arise from my grave and one will see that I have been right.’”]
About one point there has always been entire agreement between the Führer and myself and that was that a strong and united Germany . . . could only exist in the long run by a close collaboration with Great Britain. What the Führer and myself have done ... for the realization of this English-German conception during the last quarter of a century is known to all people concerned. I believe, it was very much. . . .
In spite of all disappointment and embitterment about the repeated English rejection of the German offers the English-German collaboration has to this last hour always been the political creed of the Führer. He has spoken often in vehement terms about British politics, which he did not understand, but everyone who knew the Führer was well aware that it was one of the most outstanding features of his character that, impulsive though he was, he never changed his fundamental convictions. For this reason in all those years I worked for him and in all our discussions on foreign politics he always came back to this cardinal point. Every step, political, military, etc., during these years was always taken with an eye on this final issue, that is to say to bring Great Britain to terms. To the outside world this may at times not have been recognisable and yet, it was so. That England declared war on Germany over the Polish question, a war which we both wanted to avoid by all means and which I tried and almost succeeded to prevent at the last moment, came lastly as a great shock to the Führer.
Now shortly before the bitter end and before his death Hitler has shown himself once more and in spite of his very poor state of health in his old ingenious way. He has with extraordinary clearness quite detached from the events of the day, the war situation and the political combinations given to me an extensive survey of the coming developments of world politics, as he saw it. He has in an almost prophetic way pointed out the decisive importance, which in this century of the formation of large combined political areas must be attached to English-German relations and herewith also to the relations with the present enemies the U.S.A., Soviet Union, France, etc. He said, what after this lost war could be contributed by the German side, to establish a stable balance of power between the big political areas, in order that not again and irresistibly new war catastrophes would come over Europe, over the British Empire and over the whole world.
We spoke of Russia and the Führer mentioned the gigantic display of power of the Soviet Union and its doctrines and ... he repeatedly referred to the creation of the Red Army by Stalin and called this a “grandiose” deed. And he further said, that “in spite of the divergencies in the Weltauffassung” Germany simply had to come to a good relationship with Soviet Russia, as both people had to live side by side on the long run. . . .
We also spoke at length of the U.S.A. Hitler regretted the war with America, because we had no possible divergencies with this big nation. We had always regretted this war from the beginning and have done everything we could to prevent it even when our ships were being attacked. The Führer said, that good and lasting relations with the U.S.A. absolutely had to be found. . . . But always again during that conversation the Führer came back to the question of the EnglishGerman relations. . . .
Sirs, you have won the war and you hold all power in your hands. May I, as the last foreign minister of a defeated nation and as a man, who in spite of all bitterness of war and of all untruths about his alleged antagonism or “hatred” of England, has always considered England as his second home and who has always wanted the English-German alliance just as much as the Führer himself, point out this:
An enormous to me not comprehensible wave of hatred is at present overwhelming the defeated German nation . . . concentration camps are taken as the cause of a very serious campaign against the German people ... it is difficult for me to say anything at all on this question. But in this letter which is meant personal and confidential, I would like to say this: Any inhuman treatment of a prisoner is an impossible way of acting and every decent German will like me deplore such acts and condemn them wholeheartedly. . . . Neither I nor, I am certain, most of my colleagues in the former government, had any idea what was happening in concentration camps. . . . This may perhaps surprise, but for a person acquainted with our government system this is quite comprehensible. . . . I ask myself, can one charge a whole nation with such excesses committed by individuals, as is being done now, excesses which I believe occurred in the history of all nations? As far as my attitude ... in the question of prisoners ... I have stood up for the carrying out of the Geneva Convention. . . .
A few days ago it was published that the Wehrmacht had not fought honourable and that the German people should have to learn decency again.
Sirs, can one say this of a defeated enemy, who has fought bravely and of a people who have made superhuman efforts for their country and have lost everything? Can one put down Germans who as patriots . . . have only done their duty towards their country as war criminals and punish them as such ? I would like to appeal to the generosity of the victors.
I have been a patriot all my life. . . . I have always opposed the policy against Jews, churches, freemasons. . . . When very much against my will, war broke out after all, I have of course taken an attitude of hard determination and complete conviction in the German victory for internal and external reasons. . . . But this attitude has not prevented me, to continuously keep an eye on the question of an arrangement with the enemies, in order to seize the first occasion for a peace feeler. In my more intimate conversations with the Führer I continuously placed this point before him and stressed him to allow me to do something about it, but he, after the fruitless attempt for peace in the Reichstag 1940, was sceptical about my plans and endeavors in this direction. In spite of various confidential peace tentatives there has (owing to the uncompromising attitude of the enemy) never been a serious occasion to end this war. The war is lost for Germany. In spite of this fact I am of the holy conviction, that, the bringing about of a real friendship between the English and the German people is a fundamental necessity if both nations will live on the long run. The Führer was of the same opinion and has therefore entrusted me with the mission to inform you — if possible, about his reasons and ideas concerning this collaboration and the quite new form, which in his opinion should be found for it. In order to fulfill this last mission I lay my fate into your hands.
(signed) JOACHIM VON RIBBENTROP

I would be grateful, if this letter could not be published. I will ask field-marshal Montgomery to send it to you under “personal and confidential.”

For unadulterated hypocrisy, this letter by this lying scoundrel takes the prize. And yet how revealing it nevertheless is, not only of the German Foreign Minister but of the German character.

6

Berlin, Sunday, November 4. — “ This is Berlin!”

It seemed a little strange to say those words on the air again, today. It has been some time since I began a broadcast to America like that.

I kept thinking of that tonight as I did the first broadcast since my return, in an improvised studio in the garret of a former magnate’s villa in fashionable Dahlem. Yesterday I drove past the place on Adolf Hitler Platz (as it was then called) where we used to broadcast. It was just another pile of rubble. Were my former Nazi censors buried beneath it? At least they were not present today to try to scratch the truth out of my copy or to stand over my shoulder to see that I did not, as I had often tried to, at the microphone, cheat for the sake of truth.

Gone they were, and all they stood for. One could broadcast the truth once more.

Monday, November 5.—Is Hitler dead?

The British called us in the other evening to say they thought he was. The Russians claim to be skeptical. They would like to see the dead man’s molars.

No trace has been found of the body, which reportedly was burned with that of Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, in the garden of the Reich Chancellery on or about May 1 last.

Today I am convinced the evil man is dead. I think the documents I have just seen pretty well prove it. The first document, reproduced here in part, is the story told by Hanna Reitsch, the German woman flyer, who flew from Rechlin to Berlin with Lieutenant General Ritter von Greim. It is her account of Hitler’s end but it is written by an American officer who interrogated her and then wrote a summary of the interrogation.

THE LAST DAYS IN HITLER’S BUNKER

This report is the story of the last days of the war as they were experienced by Hanna Reitsch, the well-known German test pilot and aeronautical research expert. Her account of the flight into Berlin to report to Hitler and of her stay in the Führer’s Bunker is probably as accurate a one as will be obtained of those last days, although the “is he dead or is he not dead” fate of Hitler is only answered to the extent of describing the mental state and the hopelessness of the last-minute situation, from which individual opinions must be drawn. Her own opinion is that the tactical situation and Hitler’s own physical condition made any thought of his escape inconceivable. . . .

Throughout Hanna’s stay in the Bunker Hitler’s manner and physical condition sank to lower and lower depths. At first he seemed to be playing the proper part of leading the defense of Germany and Berlin. And at first this was in some manner possible as communications were still quite reliable. Messages were telephoned to a flak tower and from there were radioed out by means of a portable, balloon-suspended aerial. But each day this was more and more difficult, until late on the afternoon of April 28th and all day on the 29th communications were almost impossible. On about the 20th of April, at what was probably the last Hitler war council in the Reich Chancellery, the Führer is said to have been so overcome by the persistently hopeless news that he completely broke down in the presence of all the gathering. The talk in the Bunker, where Hanna heard of the collapse, was that, with ‘this display, even the most optimistic of Hitler’s cohorts tended toward the conviction that the war was irretrievably lost. According to Reitsch, Hitler never physically nor mentally recovered from this conference room collapse.

Occasionally he still seemed to hold to the hope of General Wenck’s success in breaking through from the south. He talked of little else, and all day on the 28th and 29th he was mentally planning the tactics that Wenck might use in freeing Berlin. He would stride about the shelter, waving a road map that was fast disintegrating from the sweat of his hands, and planning Wenck’s campaign with anyone who happened to be listening. When he became overly excited he would snatch the map from where it lay, pace with a quick, nervous stride about the room, and loudly “direct” the city’s defense with armies that no longer existed (as even Wenck, unknown to the Führer, had already been routed and destroyed).

Reitsch describes it as a pathetic thing, the picture of a man’s complete disintegration. A comitragedy of frustration, futility, and uselessness. The picture of a man running almost blindly from wall to wall in his last retreat, waving papers that fluttered like leaves in his nervous, twitching hands, or sitting stooped and crumpled before his table moving buttons to represent his nonexistent armies, back and forth on a sweat-stained map, like a young boy playing at war.

The possibility that Hitler might have gotten out of the Bunker alive, Reitsch dismisses as completely absurd. She claims that she is convinced that the Hitler she left in the shelter was physically unable to have gotten away. “Had a path been cleared for him from the Bunker to freedom he would not have had the strength to use it,” she says. She believes, too, that at the very end he had no intention to live, that only the Wenck hope stayed his hand from putting the mass suicide plan into operation. News that Wenck could not get through, she feels, would immediately have set off the well-rehearsed plans of destruction.

When confronted with the rumor that Hitler might still be alive in Tyrol and that her own flight to that area, after she had left the Bunker, might be more than coincidental, she appears deeply upset that such opinions are even entertained. She says only, “Hitler is dead! The man I saw in the shelter could not have lived. He had no reason to live and the tragedy was that he knew it well, knew it perhaps better than anyone else did.” . . .

Then, on the 29th fell the greatest blow of all. A telegram arrived which indicated that the staunch and trusted Himmler had joined Göring on the traitor list. It was like a deathblow to the entire assembly. Reitsch claims that men and women alike cried and screamed with rage, fear, and desperation, all mixed into one emotional spasm. Himmler, the protector of the Reich, now a traitor was impossible. The telegram message was that Himmler had contacted the British and American authorities through Sweden to propose a capitulation to the San Francisco Conference. Hitler raged as a mad man. His color rose to a heated red and his face was virtually unrecognizable. Additional evidence of Himmler’s “treachery” was that he had asked not to be identified with the capitulation proposals; American authorities were said to have abided by this request, while the British did not.

After the lengthy outburst Hitler sank into a stupor and for a time the entire Bunker was silent.

Later came the anticlimactic news that the Russians would make a full-force bid to overrun the Chancellery on the morning of the 30th. Even then small-arm fire was beginning to sprinkle the area above the shelter. Ground reports indicated that the Russians were nearing the Potsdamer Platz and were losing thousands of men as they fanatically prepared the positions from which the attack of the next morning was to be launched.

Reitsch claims that everyone again looked to their poison.

At one-thirty on the morning of the 30th of April, Hitler, with chalk-white face, came to Greim’s room and slumped down on the edge of the bed. “Our only hope is Wenck,” he said, “and to make his entry possible we must call up every available aircraft to cover his approach.” Hitler then claimed that he had just been informed that Wenck’s guns were already shelling the Russians in the Potsdamer Platz.

“Every available plane,” Hitler said, “must be called up by daylight. Therefore it is my order to you to return to Rechlin and muster your planes from there. It is the task of your aircraft to destroy the positions from which the Russians will launch their attack on the Chancellery. With Luftwaffe help Wenck may get through. That is the first reason why you must leave the shelter. The second is that Himmler must be stopped.” And immediately he mentioned the SS Führer his voice became more unsteady and both his lips and hands trembled. The order to Greim was that if Himmler had actually made the reported contact, and could be found, he should be immediately arrested.

“A traitor must never succeed me as Führer! You must get out to ensure that he will not.”

Greim and Reitsch protested vehemently that the attempt would be futile, that it would be impossible to reach Rechlin, that they preferred to die in the shelter. . . .

“As soldiers of the Reich,” Hitler answered, “it is our holy duty to exhaust every possibility. This is the only chance of success that remains. It is your duty and mine to take it.”

Hanna was not convinced. “No, no!” she screamed. “What can be accomplished now, even if we could get through? Everything is lost; to try to change it now is insane.” But Greim thought differently. “Hanna,” he said, “we are the only hope for those who remain here. If the chance is just the smallest, we owe it to them to take it. Not to go would rob them of the only light that remains. Maybe Wenck is there. Maybe we can help, but whether we can or not, we will go.”

Hanna, still convinced as to the absurdity of attempting an escape, went alone to the Führer while Greim was making his preparations. Through her sobbing she begged, “Mein Führer, why, why don’t you let us stay?” He looked at her for a moment and said only, “God protect you.”

Preparations were quickly made and Reitsch is graphic in her description of the leave-taking. Below, late Göring’s liaison officer with the Führer and now a staunch Greim man, said, “You must get out. It depends upon you to tell the truth to our people, to save the ‘honor’ of the Luftwaffe, to save the meaning of Germany for the world.” Everyone gave the departing duo some token, something to take back into the world. Everyone wrote quick, last-minute letters for them to take along. Reitsch says that she and Greim destroyed all but two letters which were from Goebbels and his wife to their eldest son, by Frau Goebbels’s first marriage, who was then in an Allied prisoner of war camp. These Reitsch still had. Frau Goebbels also gave her a diamond ring from her finger to wear in her memory.

Thirty minutes after Hitler had given the order they left the shelter. . . .

Hanna Reitsch did not actually see Hitler die. But we have the sworn testimony of Hitler’s chauffeur, who says he saw the dead body. And there is the conclusion of British military intelligence, as of November 1, 1945, which reads as follows: —

LAST DAYS OF HITLER AND EVA BRAUN

Available evidence sifted by British Intelligence and based largely on eyewitness accounts shows (as conclusively as possible without bodies) that Hitler and Eva Braun died shortly after 2.30 on April 30, 1945, in the Bunker of the Reich Chancellery, their bodies being burned just outside the Bunker.

Hitler’s original intention had been to fly to Berchtesgaden on April 20 and from there continue the struggle. When that day came he postponed his departure. On April 22, at about 4.30 P.M., he held a staff conference at which he made it clear to his advisers that he considered the war was lost and that he intended to remain in Berlin to the last in defence of the capital. If Berlin fell he would die there. It is clear that Hitler at that time suffered from an attack of nervous prostration, during which he blamed everyone but himself for the failure of Germany to win the war. His advisers, both military and civil, endeavored to persuade Hitler to change his mind and leave Berlin. This was of no avail. Goebbels took the same decision and, with Martin Bormann, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler’s surgeon), and others of the personal staff, remained behind to the end, while the generals retired to their new HQ.

Hitler’s breakdown on April 22 was the beginning of his end. From that time he never left the Bunker, surrounded no longer by soldiers and politicians, but by his “family circle” and those officers responsible directly to him for the defence of Berlin. His state of mind was reported by all who saw him to have been very much calmer after the crisis on April 22. He had made his decision. He even gained more confidence as to the outcome of the Battle of Berlin. Every now and again, however, his calm was interrupted by tantrums when he recalled old treacheries and found new ones. His physical health, on the contrary, was poor. The nervous strain, unhealthy living conditions, and eccentric hours told on him. Apart from the reported trembling of the hands, from which he had suffered for some time, and his general decrepitude, he was as “normal” as ever in his mind.

On the night of April 23/24, Hitler was visited by Speer, to whom he disclosed that he had made all plans for his suicide and for the complete destruction of his body by burning. About the same time, Himmler sent Gebhardt, his personal doctor, to Hitler in order to persuade him to leave Berlin before it was too late, but Hitler rejected this.

On the evening of April 26 Field Marshal Ritter von Greim reported to Hitler’s Bunker to receive his commission as CIC German Air Force in succession to Göring, the latter having fallen into complete disfavor by his endeavor to take over control from Hitler a few days earlier. Hitler informed Greim, as he had Speer, that he had made all arrangements for the destruction of his body and that of Eva Braun so that they would not fall into enemy hands, and “that nothing recognizable remains.” He gave Greim and Reitsch poison capsules, which the former has since used. Such capsules had already been issued to all in the Bunker.

On April 28 the inmates of the Bunker heard, with a mixture of incredulity and disgust, of Himmler’s approach to the Allies through Sweden.

During the previous three days, the Battle of Berlin had been drawing nearer the center of the city. Shells were falling round the Bunker, and in the early hours of April 29 it was reported that Russian tanks had broken into the Potsdamer Platz. Hitler then ordered Greim to return to Rechlin to mount a Luftwaffe attack in support, of Wenck’s 12th (German) Army, which was reported also to be within shelling distance of the Potsdamer Platz. (In fact, it was not, but this was probably not known at the time.) Greim, with Reitsch, took off from the Charlottenburger Chaussee in an Arado 96, which had been flown in to collect them.

Later, on April 29, any hope of the effective relief of Berlin by Wenck’s Army had to be abandoned. Captured telegrams sent to Dönitz at the time disclose the hysterical recrimination of despair. On the evening of April 29 Hitler married Eva Braun, the ceremony being performed by an official from the Propaganda Ministry in a small conference room in the Bunker. Eva Braun may have suggested the marriage, for she had always wished for the peculiar glory of dying with Hitler, and had used her influence to persuade him to die in Berlin.

After the ceremony, the newly married couple shook hands with all present in the Bunker and retired to their suite, with Hitler’s secretary, for a marriage feast. According to her, the conversation, which had been confined to suicide, was so oppressive that she had to leave. It was about this time that Hitler had his Alsatian dog destroyed.

At about 2.30 A.M. on April 30, Hitler said goodbye to about twenty people, about ten of them women, whom he had summoned from the other Bunkers in the Old and New Chancelleries. He shook hands with the women and spoke to most of them.

On the same day, at about 2.30 P.M., though the exact time is uncertain, orders were sent to the transport office requiring the immediate despatch to the Bunker of 200 liters of petrol. Between 160 and 180 liters of petrol were collected and deposited in the garden just outside the emergency exit of the Bunker. At about the same time Hitler and Eva Braun made their last appearance alive. They went round the Bunker and shook hands with their immediate entourage and retired to their own apartments, where they committed suicide, Hitler by shooting himself, apparently through the mouth, Eva Braun apparently by taking poison, though she was supplied with a revolver.

After the suicide the bodies were taken into the garden just outside the Bunker by Goebbels, Bormann, perhaps Stumpfegger and one or two others, Hitler wrapped in a blanket, presumably because he was bloody.

The bodies were placed side by side in the garden about three yards from the emergency exit of the Bunker and drenched with petrol. Because of the shelling, the party withdrew under the shelter of the emergency exit, and a petrol-soaked and lighted rag was thrown on the bodies, which at once caught fire. The party then stood to attention, gave the Hitler salute, and retired.

From then on the evidence is less circumstantial. How often the bodies were resoaked or how long they burnt is not known. One witness was informed that they burnt until nothing was left; more probably they were charred until they were unrecognizable, and the bones broken up and probably buried.

On the evening of May 1, Bormann sent a telegram to Dönitz informing him that Hitler’s will was now in force (i.e., that Hitler was dead). This was amplified later by a telegram from Goebbels which stated that Hitler had died at 3.30 P.M. on the previous day, and that his will appointed Dönitz as Reich President, Goebbels as Reich Chancellor, Bormann as Party Minister, and SeyssInquart as Foreign Minister. Goebbels added that Bormann was trying to go to Dönitz to inform him of the situation.

CONCLUSION

The above evidence is not complete; but it is positive, circumstantial, consistent, and independent. There is no evidence whatever to support any of the theories which have been circulated and which presuppose that Hitler is still alive. All such stories which have been reported have been investigated, and have been found to be quite baseless; most of them have dissolved at the first touch of fact and some of them have been admitted by their authors to have been pure fabrication. Nor is it possible to dispose of the existing evidence which is summarized above. It is considered quite impossible that the versions of the various eyewitnesses can represent a concerted cover-story; they were all too busy planning their own safety to have been able or disposed to learn an elaborate charade which they could still maintain after five months of isolation from each other and under detailed and persistent cross-examination. Nor is it considered possible that the witnesses were mistaken in respect of Hitler’s body (of the identity of Eva Braun’s body no doubt is considered possible; not being blanketed she was easily recognized). Such a theory would require that Hitler escaped after 2.30 P.M. on April 30 and that Eva Braun was fobbed off with the corpse of a double which had been secretly introduced. But escape after 2.30 P.M. was almost certainly impossible. Even if it was still possible to fly a training plane from the Charlottenburger Chaussee, there was no pilot to fly it, for Hitler’s two pilots, who were in the Bunker on April 30, both took part in the attempted escape on the night of May 1. In any case, there is no valid reason for constructing such theories, which are contrary to the only positive evidence and supported by no evidence at all.

There can be no doubt of Hitler’s marriage. Allied authorities discovered the marriage document. The text of Hitler’s personal will, drawn up and signed less than twenty-four hours before he and Eva Braun killed themselves, explains why he decided to marry her at the very end.

PERSONAL WILL

Although during the years of struggle I believed that I could not undertake the responsibility of marriage, now, before the end of my life, I have decided to take as my wife the woman who, after many years of true friendship, came to this city, almost already besieged, of her own free will, in order to share my fate.
She will go to her death with me at her own wish, as my wife. This will compensate us both for what we both lost through my work in the service of my people.
My possessions, in so far as they are worth anything, belong to the Party, or if this no longer exists, to the State. If the State, too, is destroyed, there is no need for any further instructions on my part. The paintings in the collections bought by me during the years were never assembled for private purposes, but solely for the establishment of a picture gallery in my home town of Linz on the Danube.
It is my most heartfelt wish that this will should duly be executed. As executor I appoint my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann. He receives full legal authority to make all decisions. He is permitted to hand over to my relatives everything that is of value as a personal memento, or is necessary for maintaining a petit bourgeois standard of living, especially to my wife’s mother and my faithful fellow workers of both sexes who are well known to him. The chief of these are my former secretaries, Frau Winter, etc., who helped me for many years by their work.
My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation. It is our wish for our bodies to be cremated immediately on the place where I have performed the greater part of my daily work during twelve years of service to my people.
Berlin, 20 April, 1400 hours.
A. HITLER

Witnesses: Martin Bormann, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nicolaus von Below.

POLITICAL TESTAMENT

More than thirty years have passed since I made my modest contribution as a volunteer in the First World War, which was forced upon the Reich.

In these three decades, love and loyalty to my people alone have guided me in all my thoughts, actions, and life. They gave me power to make the most difficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man. I have spent all my time, my powers, and my health in these three decades.

It is untrue that I, or anybody else in Germany, wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin, or worked for Jewish interests.

I have made too many offers of limitation and control of armaments that posterity will not, for all time, be able to disregard, for responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be placed on me. Further, I have never wished that after the First World War there should be a second one against either England or America. Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its helpers.

Three days before the outbreak of the GermanPolish War, I suggested to the British Ambassador in Berlin a solution of the German-Polish questions, similar to that in the case of the Saar, under international control. This offer, too, cannot be denied. It was rejected only because the ruling political clique in England wanted war, partly for commercial reasons, partly because it was influenced by propaganda put out by the international Jewry.

I also made it quite plain that, if the peoples of Europe were again to be regarded merely as pawns in a game played by the international conspiracy of money and finance, they, the Jews, the race that is the real guilty party in this murderous struggle, would be saddled with the responsibility for it.

I left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of children of European races starve, not only would millions of grown men meet their death, and not only would hundreds of thousands of women and children be burned and bombed to death in cities, but this time the real culprits would have to pay for their guilt even though by more humane means than war.

After six years of war, which, in spite of all setbacks. will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a nation, I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of this State. As our forces are too small to withstand any longer an enemy attack on this place, and our own resistance will gradually be worn down by men who are merely blind automatons, I wish to share my fate with that which millions of others have also taken upon themselves by staying in this town. Further, I shall not fall into the hands of the enemy, who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical masses.

I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin, and there to choose death voluntarily, at that moment when I believe that the position of the Führer and the Chancellery itself can no longer be maintained. I die with a joyful heart in my knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in history, of our youth that bears my name.

That I express to them all the thanks that come from the bottom of my heart is as clear as my wish that they should therefore not give up the struggle under any circumstances but carry it on, wherever they may be, against the enemies of the Fatherland, true to the principles of the great Clausewitz.

From the sacrifice of our soldiers and from my own comradeship with them to death itself, the seed has been sown that will grow one day in the history of Germany to the glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement of a truly united nation.

Many brave men and women have decided to link their lives with mine to the last. I have asked and, finally, ordered them not to do this, but to continue to take part in the nation’s struggle. I ask the Commanders of the Armies, of the Navy, and of the Air Force to strengthen with all possible means the spirit of resistance of our soldiers in the National Socialist belief, with special emphasis on the fact that I myself, as the founder and creator of this movement, prefer death to cowardly resignation or even to capitulation.

May it be in the future a point of honor with the German Army officers, as it already is in our Navy, that the surrender of a district or town is out of the question, and that above everything else, the commanders must set a shining example of faithful devotion to duty until death.

Before my death, I expel the former Reich Marshal Hermann Göring from the Party and withdraw from him all the rights that were conferred on him by the Decree of June 29, 1941, and by my Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939. In his place I appoint Admiral Dönitz as President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

Before my death I expel the former Reichsführer of the SS and the Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler from the Party and from all his Slate offices. In his place I appoint Gauleiter Karl Hanke as Reichsführer of the SS and Chief of the German Police, and Gauleiter Paul Giesler as Minister of the Interior.

Apart altogether from their disloyalty to me, Güring and Himmler have brought irreparable shame on the country and the whole nation by secretly negotiating with the enemy without my knowledge and against my will, and also by illegally attempting to seize control of the State.

In order to give the German people a government composed of honorable men who will fulfill the task of continuing the war with all means, as the leader of the nation I appoint the following members of the new Cabinet: —

President, Dönitz; Chancellor, Dr. Goebbels; Party Minister, Bormann; Foreign Minister, SeyssInquart; Minister of the Interior, Gauleiter Giesler; Minister of War, Dönitz; Supreme Commander of the Army, Schörner; Supreme Commander of the Navy, Dönitz; Supreme Commander of the Air Force, Greim; Reichsführer of the SS and Chief of the German Police, Gauleiter Hanke; Industry, Funk; Agriculture, Backe; Justice, Thierack; Culture, Dr. Scheel; Propaganda, Dr. Naumann; Finance, Schwerin-Krosigk; Labor, Dr. Huppfauer; Armaments, Saur; Leader of German Labor Front and member of the Cabinet, Dr. Ley.

Although a number of these men, such as Martin Bormann, Goebbels, and so forth, as well as their wives, have come to me of their own free will, wishing under no circumstances to leave the Reich capital, but instead to fall with me here, I must nevertheless ask them to obey my request and, in this case, put the interests of the nation above their own feelings. They will stand as near to me through their work and their loyalty as comrades after death, as I hope that my spirit will remain among them and always be with them. May they be severe but never unjust, may they above all never allow fear to influence their actions, and may they place the honor of the nation above everything on earth.

May they finally be conscious that our task, the establishment of a National Socialist State, represents the work of centuries to come and obliges each individual person always to serve the common interest before his own advantage. I ask all Germans, all National Socialists, men, women, and all soldiers of the Army to be loyal and obedient to the now Government and its President until death.

Above all, I enjoin the Government of the nation and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.
Berlin, 29 April, 1945, 0400 hours.
A. HITLER

Witnesses: Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Wilhelm Burgdorf, Martin Bormann, Hans Krebs.

(To be continued)