Guarding Hitler
Page 21
One man who had been at Hitler’s side since the old days was missing from the last act of the Nazi opera – the SS-Begleitkommando chief Bruno Gesche. Gesche, who had already been dismissed and reinstated following episodes of heavy drinking, managed to really foul things up for himself in December 1944. Once again, drunken shenanigans with a service pistol ended his career with Hitler. This time the Führer did not intervene on his behalf. Heinrich Himmler had Gesche demoted an astonishing nine ranks, dropping from a lieutenant-colonel all the way down to the junior rank of SS-Unterscharführer (corporal) and assigned to a penal unit, the infamous Dirlewanger Brigade on the Eastern Front.
The problem for Himmler was the very fact that the Dirlewanger Brigade was fighting the Soviets. Hitler had expressly forbidden any of his bodyguards to serve on the Eastern Front, a fact pointed out by two of Gesche’s powerful friends, Hermann Fegelein and SS-Obergruppenführer Maximilian von Herff. Instead, Gesche was assigned to the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division Reichsführer-SS where, in spite of everything that had happened to him, Gesche fought valiantly until surrendering to the US Army in Italy in May 1945.
One prominent bunker occupant who simply vanished without trace was the feared Gestapo chief, SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller. He was last seen in the bunker on 1 May 1945 and no trace has ever been found of the third most powerful man in the SS after Himmler and Reich Security Main Office chief Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Forty-five-year-old ‘Gestapo Müller’, as he was called by colleagues to differentiate him from another SS general with the exact same name, disappeared into thin air. There are four possible theories for the fate of Müller, all explored by historians and security services. Firstly, that he may have successfully escaped from Berlin and disappeared down one of the many ratlines to safety in South America or the Middle East. As head of the Gestapo, Müller certainly had access to the necessary people and documentation. Secondly, that he was killed in Berlin in May 1945 and his body was never found, one of thousands of decomposing corpses that were thrown into mass graves after the fighting ended. Thirdly, that he was captured by the Soviets and used as an intelligence asset. Or, fourthly, that he was captured by the Americans and secretly went to work for them. The Americans, British and Soviets all used Gestapo and SD officials during the early stages of the Cold War. We will probably never know.
Dr Werner Naumann made it into Western Germany before fleeing to Argentina where he worked as the editor of a Nazi newspaper. He returned to Germany in 1947 and became an apprentice bricklayer. Arrested by the British Army in 1953, Naumann was released after seven months detention and later became a director in a metal firm owned by his old boss Dr Goebbels’ stepson Harald Quandt. Naumann died in West Germany in 1982 aged 73.
SS-Oberscharführer Rochus Misch, the bunker telephone operator, was one of the last to flee on 2 May 1945. He was captured by the Soviets, released in 1954 and for many years was the last living witness to what happened in the bunker. He lived in Berlin for the rest of his life, just 3km from the ruined Führerbunker. Misch died in September 2013 aged 96.
Some members of Hitler’s personal squadron were able to fare better than those left behind in the Führerbunker. One group of pilots and ground crew gathered their families together just before the end, commandeered a Junkers 52/3m and flew it to neutral Sweden. Many other F.d.F crewmen were taken prisoner by the Soviets, British or Americans, the latter two nations processing and then releasing them soon after. No former members of the F.d.F., even though many of them were SS, were prosecuted for war crimes.
On 4 May 1945 SS troops at the Obersalzberg set fire to the bomb-damaged Berghof before they evacuated the complex. By now, Allied forces were close by. A few hours after the last SS had left, the first Allied soldiers reached Berchtesgaden: elements from the US 2nd Infantry Division and the French 2nd Armoured Division. The Americans were confused – they appeared to think that Berchtesgaden was the Obersalzberg. However, a French captain and his driver soon located Hitler’s still smouldering house. Pulling up outside in a jeep, they were joined shortly afterwards by a French tank crew and then by some American troops. Over the following few days the house was extensively looted, along with many of the other properties that made up the Obersalzberg complex.
On 8 May more American troops arrived at Berchtesgaden, namely Company C, 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. They had had to fight their way in, knocking out two German 88mm guns in the high mountains. These GIs soon joined in with the looting. Many of Hitler’s furnishings and other personal items ended up being hauled back to America as the spoils of war and continue to emerge today.
Hitler’s personal train was no longer needed after it had delivered the Führer to Berlin for the final time on 16 January 1945. The Führersonderzug was moved from Berlin before the Soviets encircled the city and was then sent south to Brück near Zell am See in Austria. Here the luxurious carriages were used by some of Hitler’s staff who had been flown south to prepare an ‘Alpine Redoubt’ headquarters, should Hitler have decided to join them. Later General der Gebirgstruppe August Winter and his staff, commanding mountain troops in the area, joined them at Hofgastein. The train was then moved into a mountain tunnel near Mallnitz to protect it from air attack.
Following the German surrender on 8 May 1945 the Führersonderzug was still in German hands. Hitler’s personal Pullman coach was blown up and destroyed by Nazi loyalists. The rest of the train then went to Saalfelden and remained there until the end of the month. It was then moved to Pullach near Munich and finally commandeered by the US Army.
The Führersonderzug, minus Hitler’s Pullman coach, was used by the US and British military occupation authorities for several years after the war, with different coaches being sent to different parts of West Germany. These carriages were returned to West German ownership between 1950 and 1953. One of the carriages from Hitler’s train was returned by the British Army in 1953 and was used by the first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenaur, ironically for a visit to Moscow two years later. The carriage also visited East Germany in 1970, carrying Chancellor Willy Brandt. Hitler’s dining carriage was finally taken out of German service in 1990 and is now in a museum in Neuenmarkt in Bavaria.
Those F.d.F. aircraft that had survived the fighting now also fell into Allied hands. When the British captured Flensburg airfield on the German-Danish border in May 1945 shortly after the final capitulation of Karl Dönitz’s government, they found four intact Condors. Fw 200C-4/U1 (TKzCV) had been used as one of Hitler’s support aircraft, but was unserviceable when seized. Another, Fw 200C-4/U2 (GCzSJ) ‘Albatros III’ had been assigned to Dönitz as his personal transport aircraft since 1943. He had used it to fly to Flensburg and set up a government as the last Reich President. The nose of the aircraft was emblazoned with a U-Boat war badge, though its crew was drawn from the Luftwaffe. Seized as a war prize by the RAF it was flown to Farnborough, making three round trips between England and Germany in July and August 1945. Handed over to the Danish airline DDL it was wrecked following a takeoff accident at Schleswig on 28 February 1946 and subsequently scrapped. The British also captured Fw 200C-4 ‘Thuringen’, an aircraft belonging to Lufthansa. This plane was also flown to Farnborough, was given to DDL and eventually cannibalised for spares in August 1947. The final Condor captured at Flensburg was Fw 200C-4/U1 GCzAE, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s personal aircraft. Flown to Farnborough for evaluation in July 1945, it was subsequently placed on public display during October and November. The RAF scrapped Himmler’s aircraft on 15 December 1946. Unbelievably, none of these very significant planes was given to a museum as a war prize.
The Battle for Berlin lasted for twelve days. When Berlin surrendered on 2 May 1945 it ‘was a corpse of a city. All that was left were ruins, craters, burned-out tanks, smashed guns, tramcars riddled with holes, half-demolished trenches, litters of spent shells, fresh graves, corpses still awaiting burial, masses of white flags and crowds of glum and hungry inhabitants.’30 A hun
t had already begun for one corpse in particular. Adolf Hitler, the man so many tried to guard and protect for decades, and who survived so many assassination attempts, was missing. To many it seemed as if Hitler had simply vanished in ruined and battered Berlin in 1945. Certainly his most loyal guards accorded him what they could by way of a funeral in the garden of the Reich Chancellery before they themselves attempted to flee his concrete bolthole beneath the city. But many unanswered questions remain to this day, and perhaps the most important is what actually happened to Hitler’s body?
Lindloff and Reisser reported to Otto Günsche that they had covered over the thoroughly burnt remains of Hitler and his wife in the shallow shell crater at around 6.30pm on 30 April 1945. The German people were informed of Hitler’s death in a radio broadcast by Reich President Dönitz on 1 May. Although fighting would continue in other parts of Europe for a further seven days, the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker were captured in the early hours of 2 May. At this point Generals der Infanterie Burgdorf and Krebs shot themselves deep in the bunker to avoid capture.31 The only people who were still alive in the bunker when the Soviets stormed in were Feldwebel Fritz Tornow, Hitler’s army dog handler, and Johannes Hentschel, the bunker’s master electro-mechanic.
A Red Army SMERSH intelligence unit that was under orders to discover what had happened to Hitler was able to interrogate several members of Hitler’s staff who had been captured trying to flee Berlin. They soon excavated the area where Hitler and his wife had been cremated, discovering two unrecognizable bodies, as well as the body of Hitler’s dog Blondi and her puppy Wulf. These remains were placed inside two ammunition crates and taken to a pathology lab on the outskirts of Berlin, along with the bodies of Krebs, Goebbels and his wife and their six children. The body believed to be Hitler’s was identified as such from a dental chart drawn from memory by his captured dental assistant Kaethe Heussermann, as Dr Morell had taken all of Hitler’s medical records with him when he had flown south to Berchtesgaden several days before.
SMERSH decided to relocate to a large house in Magdeburg and took the remains with them, packed into five wooden boxes. Each time they stopped they buried them, and then exhumed them the next morning. The remains were finally interred beneath a paved front courtyard at the house on 21 February 1946. Some body parts were kept as trophies and taken back to Moscow, including Hitler’s supposed lower jaw and part of his skull with a bullet hole through it. These would rest undisturbed in an archive until the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In 1970 it was decided that the house in Magdeburg, now used by the KGB, would be turned over to the East German government. Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, decreed that the human remains must be exhumed and destroyed to prevent the building becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.32 Accordingly, in great secrecy on 4 April 1970 the five boxes were dug up and examined. They contained the badly decomposed remains of ten or eleven people. They were put through a local crematorium oven and the bones were then carefully crushed. Then the entire quantity of ash was unceremoniously dumped into the Biederitz River, a tributary of the Elbe.
That may have been the end of the story of Adolf Hitler had it not been for the fall of communism in 1991. In 2009 scientists were able to conduct DNA tests on the piece of Hitler’s skull that SMERSH had kept in 1945. It was discovered that it was that of a woman less than forty years old.33 In a final historical twist, perhaps the Führer’s loyal bodyguards had succeeded in concealing their master’s body from the Soviets after all?
Appendix 1
German Commissioned Ranks
This rank would also carry a branch of service designation, e.g. General der Infanterie (General of Infantry). The branches were: Cavalry, Armoured Troops, Infantry, Mountain Troops, Artillery, Engineers, Signals.
Rittmeister (‘Riding Master’) was the equivalent rank for Cavalry officers.
Appendix 2
Present in the Führerbunker 30 April 1945
Personal Protection
RSD
SS-Gruppenführer Johann Rattenhuber (Commander)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Peter Högl (Deputy Commander)
SS-Begleitkommando
SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Scha¨dle (Commander)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Heinz Linge (Hitler’s valet)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Kempka (Hitler’s chief driver)
SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Krüger
SS-Hauptscharführer Heinrich Doose (driver)
SS-Oberscharführer Rochus Misch (Telephonist)
SS-Oberscharführer Werner Schwiedel
Führer Squadron
SS-Gruppenführer Hans Baur (Commander)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Betz (Deputy Commander)
Senior Military Officers
General der Infanterie Hans Krebs (Chief of the Army General Staff (OKH))
General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling (Commander Berlin Defence Area)
Generalleutnant Wilhelm Burgdorf (Chief of the Army Personnel Office and Chief Army Adjutant to the Führer)
SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke (Commander of Defence Sector ‘Z’)
Adjutants
Oberst Theodor von Dufving (Weidling’s ‘Military’ Chief of Staff)
Oberst Hans Refior (Weidling’s ‘Civil’ Chief of Staff)
Major Siegfried Knappe (Army Staff Officer)
Major Willi Johannmeyer (Wehrmacht Adjutant)
SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein (Senior SS Adjutant)
SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Gunsche (Personal SS Adjutant)
NSKK-Oberführer Alwin-Broder Albrecht (Adjutant)
Oberst Nicolaus von Below (Luftwaffe Adjutant)
Vizeadmiral Hans-Erich Voss (Kriegsmarine Liaison Officer)
Secretarial
Reichsleiter Martin Bormann (Private Secretary to the Führer)
SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Zander (Bormann’s Adjutant)
Else Krüger (Bormann’s Secretary)
Gertraud “Traudl” Junge (Hitler’s Secretary)
Gerda Christian (Hitler’s Secretary)
Medical
SS-Standartenführer Dr Ernst-Gunther Schenk (Physician)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Prof. Dr Werner Haase (Physician)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger (Physician)
SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Kunz (Dentist)
Erna Flegel (Red Cross nurse)
Others
Eva Braun
Reichsminister Dr Josef Goebbels (Propaganda Minister)
Magda Goebbels and her six children
SS-Hauptsturmführer Gunther Schwa¨germann (Goebbels’ Adjutant)
Gerhard Schach (Chief of Goebbels’ Gauleiter Staff & Propaganda Ministry liaison)
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Head of the Gestapo)
SS-Brigadeführer Werner Naumann (State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry)
Walter Hewel (Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop’s representative)
Artur Axmann (Leader of the Hitler Youth)
SS-Obersturmführer Josef Ochs (Kriminalpolizei)
Constanze Manziarly (Hitler’s cook and dietician)
Feldwebel Fritz Tornow (Hitler’s dog handler)
Johannes Hentschel (Master Electro-engineer)
Armin Lehmann (Hitler Youth courier)
Notes
Chapter 1: Time of Struggle
1. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), pp. 59–60.
2. Peter Hoffmann, Hitler’s Personal Security: Protecting the Führer, 1921–1945 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 1.
3. Roger Moorhouse, Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots to Kill the Führer (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 15.
4. Peter Hoffmann, op. cit., p.2.
5. Ibid, p.3.
6. Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 508.
7. Peter Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 16.
8. Bruce Campbell, The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism (Lexington:
Kentucky University Press, 1998), pp. 19–20.
9. Murdering Hitler: The Failed Attacks on Hitler’s Life, www.valkyrie.greyfalcon.us (accessed 1 August 2013).
10. Ibid.
11. Ian
Kershaw, op. cit., p. 313.
12. Third Reich in Ruins, www.thirdreichruins.com (accessed 18 May 2013).
Chapter 2: Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer!
1. Murdering Hitler: The Failed Attacks on Hitler’s Life, www.valkyrie.greyfalcon.us (accessed 4 August 2013).
2. Ronald Pawly, Hitler’s Chancellery: A Palace to Last a Thousand Years (Ramsbury: The Crowood Press Ltd, 2009), p. 9.
3. Murdering Hitler, op. cit.
4. Peter Hoffmann, Hitler’s Personal Security: Protecting the Führer, 1921–1945 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 32.