Hitler's Last Witness by Rochus Misch Page A

man, perhaps sixteen years old, provided accompaniment with his accordion. A crowd of civilians, staff and wounded stood around them. I understood: this was the manner and way in which the Goebbels family took their leave – a last opportunity to demonstrate the unity of the family. Unsuspecting and well brought up, the Goebbels children concentrated on their song – I could not bear to watch this activity any longer and was suddenly in a hurry to return to the Führerbunker.
    Events followed one after another in the next few hours. Towards evening, we sent a telex to Jodl. There were five questions:
    1. Where are Wenck’s spearheads?
2. When will they attack?
3. Where is the Ninth Army?
4. Where will the Ninth Army break through?
5. Where are the spearheads of von Holste? [15]
    Some time towards 2300 hrs, the report was received that Italian partisans had shot dead Mussolini and his companion Clara Petacci and apparently hanged them up by the feet. Somebody said there were even pictures of it. Had Hitler needed a final shove in order to make his own suicide a reality, that was probably it.
    I was almost totally exhausted, but I kept working at the switchboard. I wanted to listen to everything, know everything, miss nothing. But it was a hard battle to fend off sleep. My forehead fell forward against the junction box. Senseless, senseless, senseless. Nothing else went through my head.
    1 The BBC used the opening bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in A minor, opus 67 as its recognition melody (‘V for Victory’); by the Verordnung über ausserordentliche Rundfunkmassnahmen listening to enemy radio stations was punishable by imprisonment.
    2 SS-Lieutenant General Felix Steiner had instructions to assemble northeast of the city a troop that would relieve the siege of Berlin. No such troop was formed by Steiner.
    3 The machine crashed near the village of Börnersdorf near Pirna/Dresden. There was probably only one survivor. He did not know the other passengers, and this created problems of identification because the bodies were so badly charred. Thus initially it was suspected wrongly that the secretaries Christa Schroeder and Else Krüger had been on board. Christa Schroeder, He Was My Chief , London 2009, p. 180. It remains unclear when exactly the plane crashed and if important documents, which according to Flight Captain Hans Baur had been entrusted to the safekeeping of Arndt by Hitler, were lost. The mystery surrounding these missing files provoked the ‘Hitler-diaries’ farce in 1983.
    4 In an opening telegram, Göring had requested Hitler’s agreement to take over the leadership of the Reich as from 2200 hrs. In a second telegram Göring had ordered Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to Berchtesgaden for the succession. This convinced Hitler that Martin Bormann was right when he said that Göring’s request to Hitler had actually been an ultimatum.
    5 Misch recollects that, when he enquired, Albert Bormann replied that he had brought Traudl Junge from the Munich Party Chancellery as a conscript for essential service. She says in her memoir: ‘My sister Inge was then making a living in Berlin as a dancer at the Deutsche Tanzbühne. One of her colleagues was related to Albert Bormann and through him one fine day I received an offer to go to the Führer’s Chancellery in Berlin . . . I accepted and went there . . . I often asked myself why they had sent for a secretary expressly from Munich and even conscripted her for essential service.’ See Traudl Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde – Hitlers Sekretärin erzählt ihr Leben , Munich 2002, p. 37. In an interview with André Heller, Junge said she had asked a female friend with links to Albert Bormann to solicit from him a position for herself. See the documentation in André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer, Im toten Winkel , DVD 2002.
    6 Today, Strasse des 17 Juni.
    7 Hanna Reitsch had the Iron Cross,