Ultimately Misch was in charge of the switchboard in the Berlin “Führerbunker”, where Hitler and members of his inner circle met their grisly ends as the Red Army closed in, in 1945. The bodyguard was the last person to leave the bunker, and was a key witness to the macabre events dramatised in Der Untergang (“Downfall”, 2006), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s extraordinary film about the end of the Third Reich.
He recalled how, on April 30 1945, Hitler locked himself in his room with his bride-of-a-day Eva Braun: “Everyone was waiting for the shot. We were expecting it. I had just said to the technicians: 'I’m going over [to Hitler’s office], can I fetch you anything?’ And they said no. Then came the shot. Linge [Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet] took me to one side and we went in. I saw Hitler slumped by the table. I didn’t see any blood on his head. And I saw Eva with her knees drawn up lying next to him on the sofa – wearing a white and blue blouse, with a little collar: just a little thing.”
Misch was also a witness to the grimmest of bunker stories — the murder by Magda Goebbels of her six children. “The children were prepared for their deaths in my work room,” he recalled. “Their mother combed their hair — they were all dressed in white nightshirts — and then she went up with the children. Dr Nauman told me that Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger would give the kids 'candy water’. I realised what was going to happen immediately. I had seen Dr Stumpfegger successfully test poison on Blondi, the Führer’s dog.” Frau Goebbels returned an hour or two later, and without saying a word went to her husband’s room. There, she laid out a game of patience.
Misch then helped to establish a direct line from the Reich Chancellery to Soviet lines, while General Krebs tried to negotiate an armistice. But the Russians demanded unconditional surrender. When the news was brought to the surviving inmates of the bunker, they assembled for a meeting at which Goebbels reminisced about the triumphant early days of Nazism, but made no reference to his family, dead upstairs. “Magda Goebbels just sat there,” Misch recalled, “saying little, head high. She was chain-smoking and sipping champagne.” » | Friday, September 06, 2013
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