Eva (12 page)

Time had run out.

Everyone tensed as the door to Hitler’s study opened. All eyes were upon the Führer and Eva as they stepped out into the corridor. Both were pale, but composed. Eva was wearing her favorite Italian-made shoes, and once again she wore her husband’s favorite dress, the black taffeta. A pink scarf added a touch of color. Only hours before, the dress had been a wedding gown. Now it was to be a shroud.

She embraced the women. To Trudl Junge she whispered sentimentally: “Don’t forget to give my love to my beautiful native Bavaria—
das schöne Bayern.”
She smiled prettily at the generals and officials, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann. And
SS Sturtmbannführer
Otto Günsche, her husband’s senior SS Adjutant, who faithfully had guarded his life. Until now. They kissed her hand. The hand of the
Führerin
of the German Reich.
Führerin
for a day.

Hitler shuffled from one solemn leave-taker to another. In utter silence he shook their hands, one by one. But he did not look into their faces. Only when he came to his valet, Heinz Linge, did he speak. In a barely audible voice he said: “
Linge, mein alter Freund,
you must escape Berlin—and live.”

Startled, Linge said: “Yes,
mein
Führer. Why?”

“To serve him who will come after me,” Hitler whispered, his voice strangely constricted. “As faithfully as you served me.”

The last one was Otto Günsche. The officer had his orders. He would guard the door. No one was to enter the Führer’s study for ten minutes.

And Hitler and Eva went into the study.

With an ominous clang of finality the vault-like steel door swung shut behind them, and Günsche, his Schmeisser machine pistol at port arms, took up his position at the door.

Hitler took Eva by the hand. For a brief moment he stood gazing at the empty spot on the wall where the portrait of Frederick the Great, his favorite possession, had hung until a few hours ago. He had given it to his loyal pilot, Hans Baur. He looked at Eva.

“My little
Tschapperl,”
he said softly, calling her by the banal Bavarian term of affection he so often used. “My little ‘honey pie,’ now I have nothing but you.”

She squeezed his hand.

He looked at the table standing before the blue-and-white velvet-covered couch. On it his Walther 7.65 and a smaller caliber handgun, a Walther 6.35, had been placed—and two glass phials. He turned to Eva.

“Now,” he said.

Quickly Eva removed her scarf. She threw it on the table next to the little gun. She began to unbutton her dress.

Suddenly the door to the corridor opened.

Startled, Hitler whirled toward it.

Otto Günsche stood in the open doorway. “
Mein
Führer,” he said apologetically, “
Frau
Goebbels insists on speaking with you. She says it is of vital importance.”

Behind the officer Hitler glimpsed the woman, Magda Goebbels. She seemed hysterical. She was shouting: “There is still hope,
mein
Führer! You can still reach Berchtesgaden! There is still hope! You must not die! You
cannot
die! . . .”

He was furious. It had been close. Another few seconds. He glared angrily at Günsche. “You have your orders,” he growled. “I will not see her. I will not see anyone! You will keep that door closed. For ten minutes. Whatever happens. Is that understood?”

“
Jawohl, mein
Führer!”

Hastily Günsche closed the door.

Shaken, but still under control, Eva began to remove her dress. It had been close.

Hitler quickly strode to the door leading to his private room.

“Strelitz,” he called hoarsely. “Bring her out.”

SS Sturmbannführer
Oskar Strelitz walked into the study. The unconscious woman in his arms bore a striking likeness to Eva.

She was without a dress. Hitler merely glanced at her. She was of no importance, a necessary sacrifice to serve his purpose. And the future. He did not know her name. Strelitz had found her. Working as a volunteer in the Bunker Lazaret. No one knew her. No one would miss her.

But she was vital to the success of the operation.

Eva Braun had to die.
An
Eva Braun. Her body had to be found with his. There could be no doubt. No one must have a reason to hunt for her once the Reich had been struck down.

When the time came she knew what to do.

Eva helped Strelitz to put her black dress on the unconscious woman. And her Italian-made shoes. She said not a word, but the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

Strelitz placed the woman on the sofa. He picked up one of the glass phials from the table and put it in her mouth.

Eva looked away as, with a quick motion, Strelitz clamped the woman’s jaws together, crushing the phial. Part of the broken glass fell to the floor. A violent spasm racked the unconscious body and left it still in death.

A fleet, almost impersonal embrace—as if both Eva and Adolf found it difficult to express affection in the presence of death— and they stood in awkward silence. Strelitz glanced at his watch.

“
Frau
Hitler.
Bitte,”
he said urgently. “The bandages!”

Quickly Eva walked to her own room, followed by Strelitz, who closed the door behind them.

For a moment Hitler stood alone, staring after them. Then he shuffled to the sofa. One last time. Heavily he sat down. Without a glance at the dead substitute Eva at his side he picked up the remaining phial and placed it in his mouth. He reached for his gun and raised it to his temple.

To those waiting in the corridor outside each second was an eternity. The silence was tangible—taut and heavy. The nerves of everyone were tensed to the ultimate. All eyes were on the massive, closed steel door, all ears were straining for the sound of the shot they expected to come. The shot that would take the life of the Führer. The shot they all knew would be impossible to hear through the thick, fireproof, gasproof, and soundproof double door. But still they listened. And the eternal seconds ticked by . . .

Finally Günsche spoke. “Ten minutes,” he said. “The Führer’s ten minutes have gone by . . .” He spoke to no one. Everyone.

At once Bormann strode to the door. He flung it open. Over his shoulder Günsche, Linge, and the others took in the sight that met them—every detail searing itself on their minds.

Sitting on the blue-and-white sofa were Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. From a small hole in the Führer’s right temple the blood slowly oozed down his cheek. His right hand hung limply over the arm of the sofa and below it on the floor lay his Walther 7.65. His left hand clutched a picture of a woman to his uniformed chest. His mother. A few glass splinters fallen on it from his open mouth glinted in the light. Eva Braun was leaning into the corner of the sofa, her face partly hidden. Her little 6.35 pistol still lay next to her gay pink scarf on the table. It had not been fired. On the floor near her left foot was part of a broken glass phial. Mixed with the acrid smell of gunpowder there was a strong odor of bitter almonds in the room. The cyanamide had done its job.

Hurriedly Bormann walked into the room. Two heavy woolen military blankets had been thrown over a chair. He took one of them and quickly covered Eva’s body. Following his lead, Linge took the other and spread it over the Führer.

Bormann motioned to two SS officers. Between them they picked up the blanket-covered body of Hitler. Bormann himself carefully wrapped the blanket around the body of Eva Braun. Only her feet were visible. And on them her favorite Italian-made shoes. He lifted her up—she was heavier than he had expected—and started toward the stairs that led to the garden above.

At the foot of the stairs the six-feet, two-inches-tall Günsche stopped him. For a moment Bormann thought the man was going to pull the blanket aside and look at the body, but he merely took her in his arms and gently carried her up the fifty stone steps to the garden, followed by the grim mourners.

About ten meters from the Bunker exit, amidst the broken masonry, blackened timbers, uprooted trees, and jagged cement blocks scattered throughout the shell-cratered Chancellery garden, a shallow ditch had been dug in the rubble-strewn ground, and nearby a number of gasoline cans had been stacked. Side by side the two bodies were laid in the trench.

As the corpses were being doused with gasoline, a Russian artillery bombardment suddenly exploded around the garden. Quickly the mourners sought refuge in the shelter of the Bunker entrance. Here Günsche dipped a rag in gasoline, set it afire, and hurled it out onto the gasoline-soaked bodies in the pit. At once they were enveloped in a roar of flames—an eerie obbligato to the thundering Russian barrage. And sooty smoke billowed up toward the red haze that lay over the city. Suddenly one of the SS officers snapped to rigid attention and gave the Hitler salute. Awkwardly the others followed his lead.

For a while Bormann stood with the silent group watching the blue flames eat at the shrouded bodies. Startled, he saw their limbs twitch spasmodically as the heat contracted the muscles and boiled away the tissue. The sickening sweet stench of burning flesh soon engulfed him and he quietly slipped away, disappearing into the Bunker.

It was 1853 hours. The Führer, Adolf Hitler, had been dead less than three hours. In the desecrated garden above, the flames had not yet consumed his body, but his Bunker world below had already disintegrated into a wild, profane bacchanalia.

The Bunker complex teemed with people. Soldiers and civilians seeking refuge from the hell above mingled with the milling Bunker denizens, imprisoned in a different, ungodly hell deep in the earth. The impending doom had severed every normal restraint of reason and decency. Liquor and lust, fear and despair in hellish fusion permeated everything and everybody and reigned unfettered.

No one paid attention to the three people who made their way through the crowded corridors and chambers of the Bunker system. Two men and a woman. The woman’s head was swathed in bandages and her left arm was cushioned against her body in a sling. The older of the two men wore a large, makeshift patch over one eye; he kept his head pulled down into the upturned collar of an army greatcoat. The younger man, clad in a tight-fitting black uniform, assisted the wounded woman as they hurried through the Bunker labyrinth.

Led by Bormann, Eva and Willibald Lüttjohann were headed for the underground garages on Hermann Goering Strasse directly opposite the Tiergarten. It was a long way from the Führer Bunker itself. They had to travel in a wide, semicircular arch of corridors and shelters under the entire length of the New Chancellery building. Through the officers’ quarters and the huge civilian bunker; through the Lazaret, the hospital rooms, and dental offices; through the mess hall and the SS guards’ bunker.

Bright lights were everywhere; if not, they had been turned off for reasons known only to those who lurked in the gloom. Loud, strident music, screams, and laughter combined in a shrill cacophony filled the air. The stink of cigarette smoke and sour human sweat stung their nostrils.

Eva was appalled. In her entire, ordered existence she had never experienced anything to prepare her for the depraved sights and sounds that now assailed her senses. It filled her with loathing. And fear.

The bunker maze was a bedlam—a Dante’s Inferno with the souls of the damned adorned with blood-red swastika armbands and silver death heads.

As they made their way through the officers’ quarters the atmosphere of sexual saturnalia threatened to overwhelm her. Women and girls who only hours before had fled from basements and shelters in terror of being raped by the Russian barbarians now gave themselves openly and willingly to any German at hand.

One SS officer was shamelessly copulating on the floor amidst a jumble of empty beer and wine bottles and half-smoked cigarettes, drunkenly cheered on by his fellow officers.

A
Wehrmacht
general, naked from the waist down but with a row of gleaming medals on his immaculate uniform tunic, was tearing at the pants of a buxom, giggling teen-aged girl. And next to a gramophone oozing a Viennese waltz, two SS officers, their uniform pants bunched around their feet, were swaying drunkenly to the music in a clutching, orgasmic embrace.

Eva averted her face. She was profoundly shaken. She felt a sourness rise in her throat. She had a fleeting vision of a girl on a blue-and-white sofa. She had been shocked. Then. But nothing, nothing could be more terrible than the horrifying carnality she was now witnessing.

And on through the hellish network of passageways and compartments their obscene odyssey went.

In the Lazaret a half-naked nurse was masturbating a soldier whose legs were lifted in traction—both feet amputated. Madness shone in her eyes as she stared, transfixed, at the swollen penis in her rapidly moving hand, while she sensuously rubbed her own thighs together.

On the adjoining bed an orderly was changing the bloody bandage on another soldier’s chest—oblivious to the spectacle beside him—while two nurses, sitting on a gurney, were stuffing caviar into their mouths with their fingers, emptying a can split open with a surgical instrument.

And in a dentist’s office a naked, corpulent woman, strapped awkwardly into a dentist’s chair, was being savagely sodomized by a huge SS guard, her ululating shrieks of pleasure knifing through Eva’s horrified mind.

She stumbled along, clinging to the arm of Willibald Lüttjohann. She shuddered deep in her soul. A sudden, terrifying thought swept through her. If she were to be seized by those monsters, could her escorts protect her? Would they? Or would she be forced to become part of the monstrous corruption around her? Instinctively her grip on Willibald’s arm tightened.

They entered the SS guards’ room. Ahead lay the garages.

Most of the men in the room were in a drunken stupor. Bottles and empty food containers were everywhere. In a corner a group of noncoms were holding a naked girl on a table, her legs spread apart. One man was pouring champagne over her, drenching her blond pubic hair, while others, roaring with glee, took turns licking it off. Eva glanced briefly at the group. But she felt nothing. Nothing any more. . .