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03.05.2005
Former Nurse Tells of Hitler's Last Days
A 93 year-old woman claiming to have been Adolf Hitler's nurse
in the final days of the Third Reich has spoken of her experiences in
the Berlin bunker for the first time in 60 years.
Many people have tried and failed to accurately portray or document
the final hours of Adolf Hitler. Acclaimed attempts such as the recent
successful German film "Der Untergang" (The Downfall) have made the
most of the knowledge which is available and have mixed established
facts and speculation to great effect.
But there have been very few corroborative first hand accounts that
have revealed the true inner workings of the Führer's bunker and his
mindset as his master plan came crashing down around him.
Until now, possibly. According to the Berlin-based daily Berliner
Zeitung, a survivor from Hitler's Berlin stronghold has decided to
break her silence over what she saw and heard in the final days of the
Third Reich.
Erna Flegel, a 93-year-old from the German capital, claims to have
been the Nazi leader's nurse at the end of World War II and to have
been in his bunker when Hitler took his own life.
Under the headline "I was Hitler's nurse", Flegel tells a fascinating
and tragic story of how she provided medical treatment to Hitler and
his inner circle from 1943 until the Nazi leadership gave up their
dogged resistance and hope in the face of the advancing Red Army and
Allied forces two years later.
Flegel's insight into the last days reveals that contemporary accounts
have been more or less accurate concerning the mental state of the
Führer.
Hitler paralyzed by paranoia in last days
The former nurse revealed in the interview that Hitler was almost
paralyzed with paranoia as the end neared, even fearing that the
cyanide capsules with which he was planning to take his own life had
been switched and filled with fake poison. "By the end, he didn't
trust anyone any more - not even the cyanide capsule he swallowed,"
she is quoted as saying in the paper.
Conflicting reports suggest that only Hitler's wife Eva took cyanide
while the Nazi leader himself died from a self-inflicted gunshot to
the head. Both bodies were allegedly burned by aides shortly after
being discovered.
After Hitler committed suicide, Flegel stayed in the bunker as the
Nazi regime crumbled around her. Flegel said that after Hitler's
suicide, Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, took over as
leader, but by then there was little sense of command and Goebbels was
ignored.
A witness to the desperate end of the Third Reich
She also revealed her desperate attempts to save Goebbels' six
children from Magda, their "merciless" mother, but was ultimately
powerless as she poisoned them. It was then that the Nazi hierarchy
within the bunker began to implode.
"(Hitler's) last subordinates shot themselves in succession," she
said. "And those who didn't shoot themselves tried to flee." Still
Flegel remained underground. "I had to look after the wounded," she
added.
Red Army approach heralded the final collapse
In the interview, she remembers the approach of the Soviet Army and
the realization that Hitler's brutal regime and his plans for world
domination were ending in the dust and rubble of Berlin above. "You
could feel that the Third Reich was coming to an end," she said. "The
radios stopped working and it was impossible to get information."
She recalled that the Russians treated her well and advised her to
remain where she was and to keep the door closed and locked. Flegel
stayed for several more days in the bunker and was one of the last to
leave. She was then interviewed by US secret service agents, the last
time that she spoke about her life as Hitler's nurse until now.
"I don't want to take my secret with me to the grave," she said.
Author DW staff (nda)
http://www.dw-world.de © Deutsche Welle
**
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30.04.2005
The Last Witness Recalls: I Saw Hitler Dead
Rochus Misch still remembers the sight as if it were
yesterday: 60 years ago on Saturday he looked through a doorway and
saw Adolf Hitler had committed suicide.
Misch, 88, is the only person still alive today to have seen the Nazi
leader and his wife Eva Braun dead in their bunker deep under the
shattered city of Berlin.
"Hitler was sitting at the table, slumped forward, and Eva Braun was
lying next to him. I saw that with my own eyes," Misch told AFP from
his home in the German capital. "But we had been expecting it. It
didn't come out of the blue. We had been waiting for the end."
On April 30, 1945, with Soviet forces just 300 meters (yards) from the
bunker and his armies beaten, Hitler bade farewell to his staff and
went into his private rooms. There, the man who had plunged the world
into conflict and sent millions of Jews to their deaths in the
Holocaust poisoned a willing Braun and shot himself in the head.
Historians believe their bodies were then soaked with fuel and burned.
"My work room was opposite the entrance to Hitler's rooms," recalled
Misch, who was a 28-year-old staff sergeant in the Nazi SS with
responsibility for maintaining the telephone lines in the bunker.
Hitler's suicide no surprise
"I remember that he said goodbye in the corridor and went into the
rooms. He said he didn't want to be disturbed. I don't know how long
it took, maybe one hour, maybe two. I didn't hear the shots myself
because I was working on the telephones. But then I heard someone
shout 'Linge, Linge, I think it has happened.' (Heinz Linge was
Hitler's servant). We waited maybe 20 minutes. Then we opened the door
to his office and the one to the living room. Hitler was sitting at
the table, slumped forward, and Eva Braun was lying next to him. It
wasn't a surprise. The commanders had all wanted to evacuate Hitler,
but he said no, he was staying in Berlin."
Nine days later Germany surrendered and the guns of World War II fell
quiet in Europe.
Hitler's final days were portrayed in great detail in "The Downfall,"
a big-budget German film which came out in Germany last September and
has been a success worldwide. But despite having cooperated with the
director Oliver Hirschbiegel on the making of the film, Misch now says
it was riddled with inaccuracies.
Not like in the movies
"It was just operetta, dramatic operetta. That is how the Americans
wanted the death of Hitler to look," Misch said.
He said one of the biggest mistakes in reconstructions of the suicide
is to show Hitler's bunker as a giant complex of rooms.
"People confuse the Führer's bunker with the upper bunker or the
bunker at the Reichs Chancellery. In fact the bunker we were in was so
small. We were not a whole company, there were just five people. Only
five of us could have witnessed the death, no more."
The site stands today a few hundred meters from the glitzy shopping
center and office complex which now fills Potsdamer Platz in central
Berlin. There is no plaque to mark the location.
On May 10, a national monument to the victims of the Holocaust will
open just a few steps from the spot where Hitler ended his life.
Author DW staff / AFP (ncy)
http://www.dw-world.de © Deutsche Welle
**
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25.08.2004
Film Portrays Hitler in Human Light
Adolf Hitler spent his last days in an underground bunker in
Berlin amid a combination of fear and unreality. A new German film
captures the madness of his last days and resurrects the Führer as
never before.
He may be the subject of countless books and works around the world,
but there is little doubt that no other phase of Hitler's life arouses
as much morbid fascination as the final one.
Housed within the thick walls of his underground bunker in Berlin's
Wilhelm Strasse for the last two months of his life, the Nazi leader
lived what appears to be an unreal life marked by parties, protocol
and grandiose war plans even as the city's civilian population battled
for their lives above the ground.
The bizarre period is now the theme of a startlingly convincing new
film by German star producer Bernd Eichinger. Called "Downfall -
Hitler and the End of the Third Reich," the €13.5 million ($16.3
million) film, which boasts a star-studded cast, will open in German
cinemas on Sept. 16.
Eichinger and director Oliver Hirschbiegel drew on a best-selling
Hitler biography by Joachim Fest, an award-winning historian, and the
memoirs of the late Traudl Junge, Hitler's last personal secretary.
Junge's book, published just days before she died in late 2002, offers
hitherto unknown insights into life in the bunker in the spring of
1945.
Last 12 days of Hitler's life
The two and a half hour film describes the period from April 20,
Hitler's last birthday, until May 2, 1945. The Soviet Red Army was
fighting at the city gates to gain victory over the Nazi regime while
the Führer and his closest followers battled against fear of the Third
Reich's collapse in their bunker.
The film shows Hitler on his last birthday as a bent, ashen-faced man
holding a garbled speech in the garden of the old imperial chancellory
and a rare public kiss with Eva Braun, his girlfriend, after she
insists on staying by his side until the end.
Though the film is based on historical fact and eyewitness accounts,
some scenes and dialogues have been invented.
"Time is ripe for such a film"
What sets the film apart from past attempts at screen portrayals of
Hitler's last days is Eichinger's candid depiction of the Nazi leader
as not just a monster, but a tragic human being, marking a more
relaxed approach to Germany's past.
"The time is ripe for such a film," Eichinger said during a media
screening in Berlin this week. "It's important not just to shed light
on one's own history superficially, but rather to tell it from
within," he said.
Eichinger stressed that emotions should be consciously allowed when in
coming to terms with Hitler from a German perspective. "If you had
overall sympathy for Hitler, then the film has failed in its
intention. But to show sympathy in certain moments is, I believe,
quite fine," Eichinger said.
A more human Hitler
Veteran Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, who plays Hitler in the film,
explained that the Führer was a person who had earned the least
sympathy. "But I'm not ashamed of the fact that I could feel sympathy
for him during fleeting seconds," Ganz said in Berlin.
Historian Fest, who was consulted closely by Eichinger during the
making of the film, said, "Ganz is really Hitler: when you look at him
you feel a chill down your spine."
In the film, Ganz barks out orders far removed from reality --
ordering nonexistent units into battle -- during the last days in the
bunker. His shaking hand concealed behind his back, he holds
hate-filled monologues about the Jews, alleged betrayers and victory
that is assured in any case.
His angry outbursts at the inability of his army to stave off the
Soviet attack are interspersed with moments of friendliness towards
his female staff and towards Eva Braun, who he marries just a day
before their joint suicide.
"A real face to the drama"
There is little doubt that Eichinger is treading controversial ground
with his more humane treatment of Hitler in a country where displaying
Nazi emblems is banned and Germans are long used to be constantly
reminded in movies and books that Hitler was the 20th century's worst
war criminal.
The film has already generated hot debate in the German press, with
some critics fearing it could pander to neo-Nazis. "('Downfall')
prompts the question whether one should be allowed to feel sympathy
for Hitler," the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung weekly wrote.
Others have taken a more favorable view. Der Spiegel newsmagazine,
which devoted its cover story to the film this week, wrote that
Eichinger had managed what no one had before: "To give the absurd
drama in the bunker a real face."
Author DW staff (sp)
http://www.dw-world.de © Deutsche Welle
**
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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