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THE LAST DAYS OF HITLERon other matters and, in particular, upon the Russianattitude towards the last days of Hitler.In September 1945 the circumstances of Hitler's deathor disappearance had been for five months dark andmysterious. Many versions of his death or escape hadbecome current. Some stated that he had been killedfighting in Berlin, others that he had been murdered byofficers in the Tiergarten. He was supposed by some tohave escaped, by air or submarine, and was alleged to beliving now in a mist-enshrouded island in the Baltic, nowin a Rhineland rock-fortress, sometimes in a Spanishmonastery, or on a South American ranch, or amongthe friendly bandits of mountainous Albania ; and theRussians, who were in the best position to illuminate thefacts, had they wished to do so, preferred to perpetuatethe obscurity. At one time they declared Hitler dead;at another they doubted their declaration ; later theyannounced that they had discovered the corpses of bothHitler and Eva Braun and had identified them by theteeth; later still they accused the British of concealingEva Braun and probably Hitler in the British Zone ofGermany. It was at this stage that the British Intelligenceauthorities in Germany, believing that such mystificationwas an unnecessary embarrassment, decided to collect allavailable evidence and to determine, if possible, the truth.I was appointed to carry out this task. I was given allnecessary facilities in the British Zone ; and the Americanauthorities at Frankfurt promptly and generously offeredto put all their material at my disposal, to allow me tointerrogate their prisoners, and to ensure the co-operationof their local counter-intelligence organisation, the C. I. C.What was the state of the evidence at this time ? Theultimate authority on which the report of Hitler's deathseemed to rest was a broadcast statement made byxii

INTRODUCTIONAdmiral Doenitz to the German people on the eveningof xst May I945· In this statement Doenitz had announced Hitler's death that afternoon, fighting at thehead of his troops in Berlin. This statement had beenaccepted as true at the time, at least for certain practicalpurposes: an obituary notice of Hitler had appeared inThe Times next day, Mr. de Valera had expressed his condolence to the German Ininister in Dublin, and Hitler'sname (unlike that of Bormann, about whose fate therehad been no such statement) had been excluded from thelist of war criminals to be tried at Nuremberg. On theother hand there was no more valid reason for believing Doenitz's statement than for accepting certain otherassertions. Doenitz's statement was indeed supported by acertain Dr. Karl Heinz Spaeth of Stuttgart, who deposedon oath during his holiday at lllertissen in Bavaria thathe had personally attended Hitler, when he was woundedin the lung by Russian shellfire at the Zoo Bunker on theafternoon of Ist May, and had pronounced him dead;but another authority, a Swiss woman journalist, CarmenMory, deposed at Hamburg with equal protestations ofveracity that Hitler, to her certain knowledge, was livingon an estate in Bavaria with Eva Braun, her sister Gretl,and Gretl's husband Hermann Fegelein. Carmen Moryoffered to investigate this matter herself, through numerous channels at her disposal (for having been imprisonedas a spy in a German concentration camp she was wellsupplied with means of information) ; but she warned theBritish authorities that any attempt to dispense with herservices would be fatal: at the approach of anyone inuniform, all four would infallibly cominit suicide. Sinceboth these stories could not possibly be true, it was clearthat mere affidavits could not be accepted as evidence inthis matter.xiii

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLERAnyone who undertakes an enquiry of such a kind issoon made aware of one important fact : the worthlessness of mere human testimony. It is a chastening thoughtto a historian to consider how much of history is writtenon the basis of statements no more reliable than thoseof Admiral Doenitz, Dr. Spaeth, and Carmen Mory. Ifsuch statements had been made and recorded with reference to the disputed death of the Czar Alexander I in1825, plenty of historians would have been ready to takethem seriously. Fortunately in this case they were madeby contemporaries, and it was possible to check them.The English historian James Spedding said that everyhistorian, when faced with a statement of fact, must askhimself the question : Who first said so, and what opportunities had he of knowing it ? Subjected to this test,much of historical evidence is found to dissolve. Insearch of Dr. Karl Heinz Spaeth I went to the addresswhich he had given in Stuttgart. I found that it wasnot a private house but the Technical High School.His name was unknown there, nor did it occur in anyStuttgart directory. It was clear that he had given a falsename and address ; and since his affidavit was mendacious on this subject, there was no reason to credit itin other matters where ignorance would have been moreexcusable. As for Carmen Mory, her whole saga dissolvedat the mere touch of criticism : she had never seenHitler or spoken to anyone who could have known thefacts. The facts she gave were demonstrably wrong, andthe arguments whereby she connected them with herconclusions demonstrably illogical. Her whole statement,like that of Dr. Spaeth, was pure fantasy.Why did these people make these false affidavits?Human motives can never be confidently interpreted, butthey can sometimes be guessed. Carmen Mory, while in:xiv

INTRODUCTIONa German concentration camp, had become an agent ofthe Gestapo, selecting victims for its murders and experiments from among her fellow prisoners. This fact waswell known to them, and when the camp had been captured by the Allies and its occupants liberated, it couldonly be a matter of time before Carmen Mory was accusedof her crimes. Probably she thought that by inventing astory which she herself would be required to investigateshe might both delay retribution and acquire British supporters. If so, she thought wrongly : her assistance wasnot required, and shortly afterwards she was condemnedto death by a military tribunal, and forestalled executionby suicide.The motives of Dr. Spaeth seem to have been lessrational. The source of his story is clear. It is an amplification, with circumstantial detail and a personal partassigned to the narrator, of the broadcast statement byDoenitz. Doenitz had said that Hitler had been killedfighting at the head of his troops on the afternoon of I stMay : Dr. Spaeth had accepted and embellished thisminimum of apparent fact, had added local colour anddetail, and had introduced himself as a central figureHis motive was probably not rational but psychological :a delusion of vanity such as leads raconteurs to introducethemselves into the anecdotes they repeat, or convincedGeorge IV that he had personally led a cavalry chargeat the battle of Waterloo.For mythopoeia is a far more common characteristicof the human race (and perhaps especially of the Germanrace) than veracity; and the evidence for this statementhas increased formidably since these incidents made itobvious to me. Even in December I 94 7 a German airman calling himself Baumgart deposed in Warsaw that hehad flown Hitler and Eva Braun to Denmark on 28th AprilXV

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER1945· The story is plainly fiction. One of my earlieststeps in the enquiry had been to trace Hitler's two pilots,S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Baur and S.S. Standartenfuehrer Beetz, and I had established that both of them hadleft the Bunker with Bormann on the night of rst May.Beetz had been last seen on the Weidendammer Bridge,and his wife and friends had never heard of him since.Baur had been captured by the Russians, and his wifehad shown me a message which had been conveyed fromhim in Poland to her in Bavaria in October 1945· Besides,we have Hitler's own signature on his will and marriagecertificate "given in Berlin on 2gth April", the day afterBaumgart claimed to have flown him to Denmark. Butreason is powerless against the obstinate love of fiction,and although Baumgart afterwards retired to a lunaticasylum in Poland, those who wish to believe him will nodoubt continue to do so.Of course not all legends are pure fabrication : thereare degrees of human invention, and some myths havea basis of fact or at least of wishful thinking. Such wasthe legend spread by Schellenberg after his surrender inSweden, and eagerly accepted by the credulous. Schellenberg maintained that Rimmler had poisoned Hitler. Buthow did he know ? Schellenberg had not seen Hitlersince 1942. His sole evidence was his own wish: hewished to believe that Rimmler had accepted his advice,and by a judicious and selective misinterpretation ofRimmler's remarks he had succeeded in persuading himselfthat he had done so. A few questions to Schellenberg,an examination of Rimmler's entourage, a reference to thecontemporary reports of Count Bernadotte, and Schellenberg's legend dissolved as completely as those of Spaethand Mory.Thus the evidence of Hitler's fate shrank on examinaxvi

INTRODUCTIONtion to the statement of Doenitz. But what opportunityhad Doenitz of knowing the facts? It was known thatDoenitz had left Berlin on 21st April, and had never seenHider since. His broadcast speech had been made fromPloen, 150 miles from the incident which it claimed todescribe. How then did he know ? The answer to thisquestion was easily discovered. When the so-called"Flensburg government" was arrested, all its paperswere also seized, and among these papers was a seriesof telegrams which had passed between Doenitz andHider's headquarters. The last in this series was a telegram from Goebbels to Doenitz 1 on 1st May. This telegram informed Doenitz that Hider had died "yesterday "-i.e. on 30th April - " at 15.30 hours ". Doenitz hadno other evidence, for none of those who had been withHitler at the end had been able to join him: the lasteye-witnesses who had reached him from the Bunkerwere Ritter von Greim and Hanna Reitsch, who hadleft nearly two days before the end. His statement thatHitler had died fighting at the head of his troops was pureinvention, and his statement that Hitler had died on 1stMay was unsupported by the only evidence at his disposal, which clearly stated that he had died on 30thApril. Thus Doenitz too joined Spaeth and Mory and theimaginative journalists as a worthless and rejected authority. The only evidence of Hitler's death was a telegramsigned by Goebbels, who could not be cross-examinedbecause he was dead, and his body, unlike Hitler's, hadbeen found by the Russians.There was, however, at least one other possible sourceof evidence. On gth June 1945 Marshal Zhukov, theRussian commanding general, had announced to thepress that before his death or disappearance Hitler had The text of this telegram is given on pp. 23Ht.xvii

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLERmarried Eva Braun. This startling fact (for Eva Braunhad hitherto scarcely been heard of even in Germany) wasrevealed, Zhukov said, by the diaries of adjutants whichthe Russians had found in the Bunker. These diaries, ifthey existed, would clearly be an important source ofevidence, and I therefore decided to ask the Russians foraccess to them ; but I decided first to collect such evidenceas I could find in the areas under British and Americancontrol, and to use this to elicit from the Russians boththe diaries and any other evidence that the Russiansmight be shown to possess. For if none of those who hadoffered information could survive the tests to which theyhad been subjected, there must be others who had reallybeen in a position to observe the events in Hitler's Bunkerbefore it was captured by the Russians.For certain facts could be established with certainty.There were in Allied custody several men who had beenwith Hitler until about 22nd April -including Doenitz,Keitel, Jodl, Speer, and several lesser figures- so thatup to that time there was no mystery. But on 22nd AprilHitler had held the famous staff-conference at which hisnerve had at last given way, and after which he hadordered his staff to leave while protesting that he wouldstay in Berlin. It was the period from 22nd April untilthe Russian occupation of the Chancellery on 2nd Maythat was the dark period of which no witnesses had comeforward. And yet there must have been witnesses. Thequestion was, Who were they ? The task was to findthem.Neither such a question nor such a task is reallydifficult. Those who remained with Hitler were simplythose of his customary entourage who had been with himbefore 22nd April and had not left on that day : generalsand politicians, civil servants and adjutants, secretaries,xviii

INTRODUCTIONguards, and soldiers. A list of those who customarilyattended Hitler in the Chancellery was not difficult todraw up : it only remained to find those who had lefton 22nd April, most of whom had been captured eitherin Flensburg or Berchtesgaden, and by cross-examiningthem to discover whom they had left behind them inBerlin. It was necessary to look for representatives of allclasses - for guards and typists were as likely to provegood witnesses as politicians and generals. I thereforebegan by locating as many of the fugitives as I could find,whatever their status, in accessible Allied captivity. Iwas soon rewarded. Politicians and generals were represented by the Flensburg prisoners Keitel, Jodi, Doenitz,and Speer. Two of Hitler's secretaries, who had left on22nd April, Fri. Wolf and Fri. Schroeder, were foundat Berchtesgaden. Hitler's detective-guard was calledReichssicherheitsdienst Dienststelle I ; about half of its members had been evacuated to Berchtesgaden on 22nd April,and captured there. I was able to interrogate them intheir camps at Ludwigsburg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.Hitler's S.S. Guard, the Fuehrerbegleitkommando, had remained behind in Berlin, but one officer from it, S.S.Hauptsturmfuehrer Bornholdt, had left on a special missionon 24th April and had not returned : in due course hehad become an Allied prisoner and I was able to questionhim about his comrades, at Neumunster in SchleswigHolstein. Thus from every stratum of society in Hitler'sBunker representative members were found who had lefton or about 22nd April ; and these, under cross-examination, were able to designate the comrades whom theyhad left behind in Berlin. From their answers it waspossible to construct a complete list of all those men andwomen, of whatever status, who had stayed behind inBerlin after the great exodus of 22nd April. These, ifxix

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLERthey could be found, would be the witnesses of the darkperiod.How could they be found ? Here again the problemis less difficult than may appear. They were all describedas " missing " ; but in fact people do not disappear orevaporate, even in a period of catastrophe. They eitherperish or remain alive: there is no third possibility. Theword " missing " applies not to them but to the evidence.If they are dead, their value as witnesses is over; if theyare alive, they are either prisoners or free. If they areprisoners, they can be found in prison camps - at leastif they are prisoners of the Western Powers ; if they arefree they must be sought elsewhere, and most probablyin their own home districts, where friends and localknowledge will enable them to survive, but also whereenemies (and German enmities are strong) may easilybetray them. In collecting the names of possible witnesses I was therefore careful to obtain all possibleinformation about their homes, and if their names didnot occur in the registers of Allied prison camps, theywere sought and sometimes found in their homes. Bythese methods seven witnesses of the dark period, fromdifferent and independent groups, had been located andinterrogated, and other relevant material had been dis·covered and centralised, by 1st November 1945, whenthe report of my conclusions was due. The seven witnesses were Hermann Karnau, a policeman from thedetective guard who was imprisoned at Nienburg andhad been examined by Canadian and British authoritiesbefore he was cross-examined by me ; Erich Mansfeldand Hilco Poppen, two other policemen, who were detained at Bremen and Fallingbostel; Fri. Else Krueger,Bormann's secretary, who was detained at Ploen inSchleswig - Holstein and interrogated by me ; Erich

INTRODUCTIONKempka, Hitler's transport-officer, who had been captured at Berchtesgaden and was interrogated both byAmerican officers and by myself at Moosburg ; HannaReitsch, the test pilot, who was detained in Austria andwas interrogated by American officers ; and the Baronessvon Varo, a casual visitor in Hitler's Bunker, who hadbeen discovered by a British journalist in Berlin, and whowas traced and interrogated by me in her mother's homeat Bueckeburg. Other relevant material included thediary of General Koller, since published, 1 the diary ofCount Schwerin von Krosigk, captured with its author atFlensburg, and the papers of Admiral Doenitz and his" government ". Based on evidence from these sources,my report was submitted by the Intelligence Division inBerlin to the British government and to the QuadripartiteIntelligence Committee in Berlin. At the end of the reportI suggested certain other sources of evidence which mightstill become available : in particular I mentioned thatHitler's pilot Hans Baur and the head of the Reichssicherheitsdienst Brigadefuehrer Rattenhuber, who had orderedthe burial of Hitler's body, were reported captured by theRussians in an official Russian communique, and thatcertain other important witnesses might have been takenat the same time ; and I asked for access to the capturedadjutants' diaries which had been cited by Marshal Zhukovas his authority for the marriage of Hitler and Eva Braun.The Russians noted these requests but never answered them.At the same time an abbreviated version of the reportwas issued to the press.zThe evidence for Hitler's last days increased considerably between the issue of the report of 1st November' Karl Koller, Dw letzte Monat (Mannheim, 1949). The text of this press report is given in William L. Shirer, End of a BwlinDiary (New York, 1947). It is summarised in the British and American apers of ll Nov. 1945·xxi

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER1945 and the writing of my book in the summer of 1946,but since it did not alter the conclusions except in twotrifling details, 1 I shall pause at this stage to answercertain questions or criticisms which were made at thetime of its presentation.For the report of 1st November 1945, it must beadmitted, was not equally popular in all quarters, andthat not entirely because of any defects of logic orlucidity which may have disfigured it. Throughout thesummer and autumn of 1945 many resourceful journalistshad been pursuing phantoms of Hitler with energy andenthusiasm, and the pleasant lakes of the Swiss frontierand the romantic Tyrolean Alps and the comfortableresorts of Upper Austria were frequently visited by devotedinvestigators whose scrupulous consciences forbade themto ignore even the most

ISBN 978-1-349-04068-1 978-1-349-04066-7 (eBook) THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER . HITLER AND RIMMLER (Captured photograph from SS. Hauptamt) CONTENTS PAGE FoREWORD By Marshal of the R.A.F. LoRD TEDDER ix . Therefore-apart from trivial corrections such as occur in any reprint-I see no