Hitler's Last Witness (17 page)

From then on, the two paintings adorned our living room. Hitler never got them back. When my wife returned to her parents at Rudow towards the end of the war, she left them in our Karlshorst flat. Either the neighbours appropriated them or the Russians did so.

The paintings were not the only pieces that found their way to my flat from the Reich Chancellery. A ceiling lamp from the staff restroom dangled – and still does – above my kitchen table. When I saw the house technician Johannes Hentschel unscrewing it one day I asked what he was going to do with it. ‘Throw it away,' he replied with a shrug of the shoulders. It was still working and outwardly whole, and so I claimed it. Another lamp from Hitler's reception room, which I liked very much, I had copied by the Berlin-Neukölln manufacturers.

Uncle Paul in a Concentration Camp

The relationship with my parents-in-law was, as I have said, very good. My father-in-law, with his SPD past, left me in no doubt as to what he thought of the regime, but that did not cloud our relationship. Before I met my wife I had never had contact with people, such as Gerda's father, of the extreme left. In my circle they were know as proletarians. In the intimate family circle, we often spoke about earlier SPD times. ‘Uncle' Paul, the often-mentioned close friend of my parents-in-law, had been a leading light with the Social Democrats for some time.
[5]

By chance, Paul's difficulties began when I was staying in Berlin. Excited fellow travellers of his hurried to Gerda to let her know that the Gestapo had come for him and taken him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg. Gerda rang me at the Reich Chancellery at once. She sounded distressed. It was clear that people were hoping I could help. I knew to whom I should turn, and lost no time. Immediately, I went to Lieutenant General Karl Wolff at his offices in Prinz-Albrecht Palace.
[6]
It was not far to the SS RSHA from the Reich Chancellery.
[7]
Wolff was head of Himmler's personal staff, and from time to time acted as Waffen-SS liaison officer at FHQ. He did not seem to me to be an unpleasant type. He was also very calm and objective.
[8]

Wolff received me at once, and I explained to him that a relative of my family had been wrongly arrested. I admitted that ‘Uncle' Paul had once been a member of the SPD and active in trade unionism. But all that was long behind him. I swore that he no longer had any contact with prohibited opposition groups. The lie slipped easily off my tongue. On one thing I was certain: I would put my hand into the fire for ‘Uncle' Paul. My feathers being ruffled, I added, I would not leave the room until I could be sure that he, Wolff, would look into the case. Wolff promised to do so without much fuss, took down the name, and three days later ‘Uncle' Paul was back home. He and his wife called by my flat to thank me. I asked him about his experiences at the concentration camp, but he avoided the question, saying only that the worst thing had been the paper shirts the inmates were made to wear. Despite all my enquiries, I could get nothing out of him. Never in my presence did he ever say anything about what befell him there. Neither shortly after his release, nor later.

A Handshake with Mussolini

I was at the Berghof from April to July 1943. It was not such a carefree time as it has been the previous year. Hitler surrounded himself only with his intimate circle and met the most important Axis statesmen primarily at Schloss Klessheim. Besides Mussolini and Horthy, he received representatives from Norway and Slovakia, as well as King Boris of Bulgaria, Ion Antonescu of Romania and the French politician Pierre Laval. The times when the Berghof would be filled with a large number of guests, including those from Eva's circle of friends, were past. Visits by the Speers were still very well received. Hitler continued to enjoy his conversations with Albert Speer on questions of architecture and city planning. One might suspect that the Allied air raids were nothing more than welcome demolition work for all the wonderful new city buildings that the pair were developing. Hitler found in Speer his ideal counterpart, a man capable of embracing his visions and turning them into what he had in mind in this area. Whenever Hitler and the buildings inspector-general were engrossed in their plans and drawings, Hitler was usually in a good mood. For his ability to cheer Hitler up, we of the bodyguard valued Speer, but otherwise he seemed to us to be a really queer fish, even a little crazy, as artists tend to be.

At the beginning of July, Hitler returned to FHQ Wolfsschanze. At the same time, the major summer offensive in the east, code-named Zitadelle, began – and I got some leave.
[9]

The choice of where to go I had made some time previously: Niedersee in Masuria. I met my wife in Berlin, and we took the night train to Rastenburg. Earlier, I had informed my colleagues about our arrival, so somebody from the FHQ Wolfsschanze motor pool fetched us from the railway station and took us to Niedersee. The driver returned to FHQ Wolfsschanze, leaving Gerda and myself to spend two weeks holidaying in the region, which I had reconnoitred for that purpose on my many car excursions with my colleagues. We took boat trips, went swimming a lot and enjoyed the amenities of our hotel, in which, incidentally, a troupe of well-known German actors were resting, among them the great René Deltgen. As we discovered, a UFA film was being shot in the area.
[10]

At the end of the two weeks, our holiday was at an end, and the summer offensive had come to grief. The Soviet breach of the German southern front, the Kursk Elbow, had not been repulsed. Now, on all fronts on Soviet territory, the retreat began. I went back with Gerda to Berlin, spent the last week of my leave there and celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday. Then I returned to FHQ Wolfsschanze and caught up with what had happened during my leave. Without exception, it was bad news. Allied troops had landed in Sicily (Operation Husky). Mussolini had been deposed and arrested on the order of King Victor Emanuel III. There had been a coup in Italy, and a devastating thousand-bomber air raid on Hamburg, which had reduced the city to rubble and ashes.
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The mood was edgy. Hitler railed endlessly against the Luftwaffe, calling for an immediate strengthening of the flak and air defences.

At the beginning of September, Italy capitulated.
[12]
Hitler did not have a good word to say about Italian soldiers. They were a mixture of the best and the worst. He considered German and French soldiers to be the most capable. He allowed that Britain was the only nation that could run colonies successfully. In passing, I picked up that Hitler had had Prince Philipp of Hesse, the son-in-law of the king of Italy, arrested.
[13]

Mussolini was finally freed by an SS special squad,
[14]
and later he was installed by Hitler as leader of the Italian Social Republic.
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On 14 September 1943, Hitler received the freed Mussolini at FHQ Wolfsschanze. Everybody paraded on the airfield at Rastenburg to greet him, and the Duce was apparently very touched by the entire event. He shook the hand of every man of the bodyguard very heartily, as if we were old acquaintances from whom he had been long parted. The atmosphere was, in any case, always special when Mussolini visited Hitler. There was no other meeting with a politician that compared to it. The two of them would actually have an almost friendly conversation. Otto Skorzeny, the SS officer who had been behind the liberation of Mussolini, was also at FHQ Wolfsschanze that autumn day. He celebrated amply. I met him as he left the officers' mess, making his way through many handshakes by colleagues. He even shook my hand in elation.

The liberation of Mussolini provided only a brief excuse to celebrate. Along the whole Eastern Front, the Soviets had taken the initiative and did not let it up again. The situation became ever more threatening. My colleagues had intense discussions about every report from the front.

From November 1943, the population of Berlin began to experience heavy air raids.
[16]
Through my duties at Führer-HQ, I was often able to give my family early warning of impending air raids. At FHQ Wolfsschanze, we were obviously informed first by Göring's staff about incoming bomber formations. Often we knew they would be coming before the aircraft in England had even taken off. We told each other at once, and I would ring Gerda in Berlin to warn her. This advance information was naturally of great value. Above all, however, it gave one a feeling of being underhand, but in the anxiety one had for one's family also provided a comforting feeling of safety.

Many incidents would have seemed trifling in peacetime. On the way to lunch in the officers' mess, I could hardly believe my eyes – wasn't that Heinz Rühmann coming towards me? Quax, the pilot who always crashed?
[17]
Yes, it definitely was him. I had no idea what he was doing at FHQ Wolfsschanze, and neither did my colleagues. It was not the case that we of the SS bodyguard would be informed especially of such visitors. Not until later did I discover that Rühmann had shown his new film
Die Feuerzangenbowle
here, because the Ministry of Propaganda had a problem with it, and the matter had to be decided at the highest level. Whether Rühmann showed the film to Hitler personally I do not know; anyway, I never saw the two of them together.
[18]

At the beginning of November 1943, we boarded the special train at Rastenburg for Munich, where on 8 November Hitler made his annual speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, in remembrance of the martyrs of the movement. This would be the last speech on the anniversary of the 1923 attempted putsch.

Belief in ‘Final Victory' was no longer unshakeable. ‘The war is lost' – in the autumn of 1943, the phrase escaped from even Hitler's mouth. I did not hear it myself, but it spread like wildfire. The colleague who told me said that Hitler had not uttered it in conversation, but more to himself, as if he were telling himself.

New strategies and technical developments were always coming to the forefront, with great hopes attached. I was especially impressed by a display of new aircraft on the airfield at Insterburg (today Chernyakhovsk, near FHQ Wolfsschanze). The pilots were introduced to Hitler in the presence of General Jodl
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and manufacturer Ernst Heinkel.
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Then the trio stationed themselves up on the hangar, while I stood with two colleagues near the apron. The display began with the six-engined Ju 390 and some four-engined Blohm & Voss machines. The Ju 390 had a range of more than 10,000 kilometres without refuelling.
[21]
The aircraft played their war games in the sky and were replaced by a couple of night-fighters. After that, two jet aircraft took off. Their flight path could only be followed briefly before the clouds swallowed them up.

Finally came the high point of the display – a rocket-fighter.
[22]
A major took his leave of Hitler and climbed into a capsule on a firing ramp. Hinged cockpit lid up, lid closed. My colleagues and I stared at the capsule, fascinated and expectant. Suddenly, we heard an explosion, a deafening noise and the capsule was on its way. For some time, nothing happened. Somewhere, there was a sound like thunder, but nothing could be seen in the direction from which it came. Long before the thunder, a large triangular object had swept past us slowly losing height. It rocked left and right like a gigantic bat. Not fifty metres from us, it set down on its skid and inclined slightly to one side. The capsule was not opened at once, but a tractor arrived to tow the machine with its occupant still inside into the hangar. I was impressed. Special warnings about secrecy were not issued, even on occasions like this.

Heilig Abend and Two Rendezvous

Around Christmas 1943, it was relatively quiet. Hitler was at FHQ Wehrwolf, while my duties kept me at the Reich Chancellery. On Heilig Abend (Christmas Eve) there were three of us on the telephone, and we were bored. There was little work, and we had received information that no Allied air raids were expected for the coming hours. We began to joke and fool around with the switchboard. Suddenly, Karl Weichelt seized the telephone directory: ‘I have a suitably festive idea.' The directory sailed over my head and landed on the table beyond me. ‘Just look for Heilig.'

‘What for?'

‘Look!'

Eagerly, he flicked through another directory. There were lots of subscribers called ‘Heilig'. Karl tapped his finger on another surname: ‘Abend'. We grinned. We needed to make a number of calls before the people rung announced their surnames together and we obtained the desired ‘Heilig Abend'. A man's voice first: ‘Here is Heilig.' Then a woman: ‘Abend'.

Herr Heilig reacted gruffly: ‘What do you want then?'

‘But you called me.'

‘Don't talk nonsense, you called me!'

At first the pair of them were quite indignant, but then the man began to suspect a prank. We listened in to the conversation discreetly and became the witnesses to a small telephone flirtation. Karl could not believe it: ‘Man, they're still talking.' The conversation went on for half an hour, and at the end of it they arranged to meet. Herr Heilig said he would bring along the provisions intended for his brother in France, and Frau Abend promised to bake a cake. Who had brought them together they had no idea. We decided we had done our good deed for the day. That it was strictly forbidden to set up private conversations was something overlooked by us that Christmas Eve.