Minute by panic-filled minute, as madness and terror engulfed the Fuhrer's bunker

[superbeets]

[h=1]Hitler's last 24 hours: New book mesmerisingly recreates the minute by panic-filled minute, as madness and terror engulfed the Fuhrer's bunker[/h]

• Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute tells amazing story of tyrant's final fall
• Finally marries mistress of 14 years Eva Braun as Berlin crumbles above
• Barks orders and final twisted 'political testament' while Russian guns rage
• Agony of Joseph Goebbels' wife as they prepare to kill their six children

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[superbeets]

12.01am, Sunday, April 29, 1945
Nearly 30ft underground, Eva Braun is preparing for her wedding. Right now, she’s in her bedroom in the Fuhrerbunker, having her peroxided hair styled by her maid.
Soon, her long fringe has been carefully pinned up on the right, just the way she likes it. In deference to her fiance, Adolf Hitler, who dislikes make-up, she has carefully made herself up to look natural.
She has already chosen what she’s going to wear: a long black silk taffeta dress, black suede Ferragamo shoes, a gold bracelet set with pink tourmaline gems, a topaz necklace and her favourite diamond watch. Tonight, 14 years after the start of their secret affair, she will at last be marrying the man she loves.


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Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun, whom he finally married after 14 years in his bunker beneath Berlin





Of course, she never imagined her wedding would take place in the Fuhrerbunker, which lies under the garden of the old Reich Chancellery in Berlin. But Russian army tanks are now pouring into the centre, so it’s no longer safe to be above ground.
The Fuhrerbunker, which is protected by a 10ft-thick concrete roof, is linked by a staircase to an older bunker higher up, and also by a passageway to the Chancellery cellar, where there is an emergency hospital, garages and a network of rooms for secretaries and officers. At least there’s a little room for Eva to move around.
She has been here since January and has the most comfortable room, furnished with pieces designed specially for her by the bunker’s architect, Albert Speer. As well as her dressing table and chair, there is a wardrobe, a single bed and a straight-backed sofa upholstered in a floral fabric.
All the furniture, as well as her clothes, jewellery and silver-backed brushes, is marked with her monogram, also designed by Speer — a four-leaf clover created from a curved E facing a curved B.
As she completes her late-night toilette, Eva can hear explosions from the heavy Russian artillery bombardment.

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The entrance to Hitler's bunker in the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The Fuhrer spent his final hours cowering below ground beneath a 10ft-thick concrete roof as the Russian army swept through the city




Twenty-eight feet above her head, gravediggers have braved the firestorms currently illuminating the sky. At this very moment, they are heaving the body of her brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, into a shallow grave. He was executed just half an hour ago, under the orders of Eva’s fiance.
For the sake of her younger sister Gretl, who is expecting Fegelein’s child, Eva had pleaded for his life. But Hitler was furious at her intervention. Fegelein, a cavalry officer attached to the bunker, was picked up last week after making a run for it; on top of that, he was caught with money, jewellery and a woman who wasn’t his wife.
In the end, Eva had bowed to the inevitable, saying: ‘You are the Fuhrer.’
In the Fuhrerbunker switchboard office, the telephonist, Rochus Misch, is listening to Hans Hofbeck of the Reich Security Service describing Fegelein’s execution.
Hofbeck acts out what he has just witnessed: raising an imaginary machine gun, he takes aim at shoulder height and shouts: ‘Ratatatata!’

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[superbeets]

12.10am
Adolf Hitler is standing in the conference room of the Fuhrerbunker, leaning on the empty map table. He is dictating his ‘political testament’ to Traudl Junge, one of his two remaining secretaries, who is taking his words down in shorthand.
At first, Junge is excited. Is she going to be the first to hear why the Germans are losing the war? But as Hitler drones on in a flat monotone, she feels increasingly disappointed.
There are no revelations, no justifications nor expressions of guilt — just the same old accusations against the Jews that she has heard so many times before.
Hitler then launches into a long list of new Nazi appointments. Even Junge can see that this is pointless. Then, after a brief pause, he starts dictating his will.

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Hitler (right) jokes with his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as they share a meal in the Führerbunker





When he gets to the part about marrying Eva, Junge is shocked. Until now, her boss has always insisted he’ll never marry — because women have a destructive influence on great men.
He continues: ‘I and my wife choose death in order to escape the shame of deposal and surrender. It is our will that our bodies be burned immediately.’
After a pause, Hitler moves away from the table. ‘Type that out for me in triplicate, then bring it in to me.’
The conference room is being prepared for the ceremony. Five chairs are positioned at the large map table. Walther Wagner, a magistrate, arrives in the bunker clutching the required paperwork. Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, reckons that Wagner is as excited as the bride.

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[superbeets]

About 12.15am
Robert Ritter von Greim has just had a meeting with Hitler. Right now, hampered by unfamiliar crutches, he is struggling to negotiate the steps out of the bunker.
Just a few hours ago, the plane that flew him into Berlin was raked by Russian gunfire and he was seriously wounded. Still, there’s a consolation: Hitler has just made him the new head of the Luftwaffe.
The decision to elevate Von Greim was taken four days ago. That’s when Hitler learnt the Luftwaffe had done nothing to stop the Russians reaching the Berlin suburbs.

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A diagram of Hitler's underground lair bunker. For the final few weeks of his life he seldom left the stuffy confines of his concrete tomb with its inadequate communications and cramped quarters





For half an hour he ranted without pause, screaming about failure, lies, corruption and betrayal.
Then he collapsed sobbing into an armchair, sacked the then head of the Luftwaffe — and declared that the war was lost. It was the first time he had actually admitted it.
Hitler has now ordered Von Greim to launch a counter-attack by the German air force. The new Luftwaffe chief has also been entrusted with Eva’s final letter to her pregnant sister Gretl, who is staying with their parents in Hitler’s mountain home in Obersalzberg.
The letter makes no mention of the death of Gretl’s husband. (Gretl will give birth on May 5, and name her baby after her sister. In 1971, Eva’s namesake will commit suicide at the age of 27, following the death of her boyfriend in a car crash.)







Magda, the wife of propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, is dressing in her bedroom in the upper bunker. The room is small, with concrete walls and minimal furnishings: a single bed, a chest of drawers and only a bare bulb for light.
Proudly, she pins the golden party badge that Hitler gave her two days ago to the front of her dress. It’s his personal badge, marked with the number 1, which he has worn on his uniform for the past 12 years.
This gift, Magda feels, not only represents the greatest honour of her life but also confirms her status. After all, she has often stood in as an unofficial first lady, accompanying the Fuhrer on formal occasions while Eva Braun remained hidden away.
For a fervent Nazi, Magda has an unconventional past.

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A soldier of the US Occupation Forces photographed in Hitler's bedroom in the tyrant's bunker. While the Fuhrer lay in the early hours of April 29, 1945, the Russian bombardment of Berlin intensified





Her mother was an unmarried chambermaid who went on to have a long-term relationship with a Jewish hotel manager, Richard Friedlander.
So the future Mrs Goebbels attended a Jewish school and celebrated Jewish festivals.
Friedlander, who later died at Buchenwald concentration camp, was not invited to her wedding to Joseph Goebbels in 1931.
Later, Magda’s husband — a very short, thin man with a deformed foot — spearheaded the exclusion of all Jews from Berlin..

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The couple now have six children — Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide, aged between four and 12 — all asleep in the three bunk beds in the room next door. Goebbels has his own bedroom in the Fuhrerbunker.
When the children arrived here a week ago, they were told that Germany was on the verge of winning the war and they would soon be joining in the victory celebrations.
They have no inkling that their parents have brought them here because defeat is imminent. Or that they plan to kill them all and end their own lives.
Magda, who suffers from angina, has spent much of the past week in bed. She can bear to see the children only for brief periods, so the secretaries and orderlies have been looking after them. To other women in the bunker, she has confided that she is terrified that she will be too weak to bring herself to kill her beloved offspring.






Hitler is in his study — where he spends most of his time — with his valet Heinz Linge. It is a small room with a very low ceiling, containing a desk, a side table, a stiff upright sofa upholstered in blue-and-white linen and another table where the Fuhrer eats his meals with the secretaries.
The study opens out onto a concrete corridor lined with comfortable armchairs in which Hitler’s generals often drink and sleep. Across the corridor is a droning diesel generator that fills the Fuhrerbunker with the stench of fuel.
Hitler turns to his valet. ‘I’d like to let you return to your family,’ he says. Linge replies: ‘Mein Fuhrer, I’ve been with you in good times, and I want to stay with you in the bad.’ Now 32, the valet is a former bricklayer with a large, round face and pale blue eyes. He is devoted to the Fuhrer and often tells people: ‘I couldn’t have a better master.’

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The ventilating tower of Hitler's underground shelter lies in ruins (right) after the Russians took Berlin





After a pause, Hitler tells Linge that he has a job for him.
‘You should put two blankets in my bedroom and get hold of enough petrol for two cremations,’ he says.
‘I’m going to shoot myself here, together with Eva Braun. You will wrap our bodies in woollen blankets, carry them up to the garden and burn them there.’
Linge is trembling. He stutters: ‘Jawohl, mein Fuhrer!’ and leaves the study.

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[superbeets]

12.45am
Following Hitler’s instructions, Linge puts through a call to Hitler’s driver, Erich Kempka, in the underground car park to ask him to find 200 litres of petrol — which is now desperately scarce. ‘A mere 200 litres?’ Kempka replies sarcastically. ‘Is this a joke? What are you going to do with 200 litres of petrol?’
‘Believe me, Erich, this is not a joke. Do whatever you need to do to get hold of it.’
Kempka orders an assistant to syphon off whatever petrol he can find in the cars in the underground garages, whose concrete roofs have fallen in.


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[superbeets]

1am
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler emerge from their rooms, her arm through his.
She is wearing her black dress, decorated around the neck with sequins. Hitler hasn’t changed out of his usual black trousers and grey military jacket.
Walther Wagner, the magistrate, greets them nervously as they take their seats on one side of the empty map table.
There are 23 years between Hitler and Eva, who met in October 1929 when she was a 17-year-old assistant in a Munich photographic studio. One day, he came into the studio just as she was climbing a ladder to reach some files from a top shelf. Eva was embarrassed because she could tell that the man with the ‘funny moustache’ was looking at her legs.

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The Reichstag after Berlin's fall. Hitler ranted and raved when he heard the Luftwaffe had done nothing to stop the Russians reaching the city's suburbs





Within two years, Hitler had started inviting Eva to cafes, the opera and eventually to stay with him. But the first four years of their relationship were very difficult for her, because he rarely called and frequently let her down.
Twice she attempted suicide. It was after the second attempt in May 1935, when an overdose sent her into a coma, that Hitler decided to accept her as his official mistress.
Although their relationship was always hidden from the public, he bought her a house in Munich and had a suite of rooms refurbished for her in the Berghof, his mountain home in Obersalzberg.
Eva has always known that her job is to keep him relaxed, and she has been good at it.
Hitler tells people: ‘She keeps my mind off things I don’t want to think about.’
His nickname for her isn’t very complimentary: he calls her ‘Tschapperl’, which translates as ‘wench, bumpkin or idiot’, while she calls him ‘the Chief’.
Apart from becoming Mrs Hitler, Eva’s dream is to become a Hollywood actress. ‘When the Chief has won the war, I can play my own part in the film of our life story,’ she says.
At least they are finally getting married. The magistrate asks both bride and groom to confirm that they are of ‘pure Aryan descent and free of any hereditary diseases that would exclude them from marriage’.

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Hitler and Eva Braun had separate bedrooms in the bunker. In the past, she complained the Fuhrer only loved her when they were in bed together






Both give satisfactory responses.
(Is Hitler lying? Later, it will be reported that Hitler had two forms of genital abnormality: an undescended testicle and a rare condition called penile hypospadias, in which the urethra opens on the underside of the penis or, in some cases, on the perineum. It’s possible that the popular British Army marching song which began ‘Hitler has only got one ball / The other is in the Albert Hall’ didn’t even tell half the story.)
It’s time for the exchange of gold rings — both of which have been filched from the bodies of murdered Gestapo prisoners. Unfortunately, they are too big. Then Wagner declares: ‘This marriage is legal before the law.’
The witnesses are the only other senior Nazis who have remained in the bunker: Goebbels and Martin Bormann, private secretary and gatekeeper to the Fuhrer.
Ruthlessly ambitious, they have been locked in a battle for primacy of position since 1933, when Hitler swept to power as Chancellor. Their final reward is witnessing Hitler’s marriage — and facing death at his side.


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[superbeets]

1.25am
Robert Ritter von Greim, pale with pain, has landed safely at Rechlin airfield, just under 100 miles north of Berlin.
As the new head of the Luftwaffe, he now addresses the handful of staff still there, ordering all aircraft to head straight for Berlin.
His words are pointless. The airport has been devastated by Allied bombing, and the few planes that remain won’t make any difference to their assault on the German capital.
(Captured by the Americans on May 9, Von Greim will commit suicide by taking cyanide two weeks later after learning that he is about to be handed over to the Russians.)

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[superbeets]

1.30am
After the ceremony, the newlyweds go back to their private rooms for champagne, tea and sandwiches with senior staff.
Most unusually, as Hitler is all but teetotal, he accepts a small glass of Hungarian wine, sweetened with sugar. Eva is knocking back champagne, while General Krebs, the monocle-wearing army chief of staff, and chief army adjutant General Burgdorf are on cognac.
The magistrate has a glass of champagne and a liver sausage, then heads back to his post as a Home Guard soldier in a wine cellar.
He will be shot in the head two days later, caught in the crossfire of a street battle.
Hitler’s valet is struck by Eva’s composure. He congratulates her as ‘Frau Hitler’ and sees her eyes light up.
For a moment, she lays her hand on his forearm and smiles.
Hitler’s mind is still on his work: he sends both Bormann and Goebbels away from the party to add more names to the list of new appointments that Junge is still typing. She is getting very frustrated by the constant changes.

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[superbeets]

About 4.15am
Joseph Goebbels bursts in on Junge as she makes final corrections on Hitler’s testament and will. He is weeping and shaking.
‘The Fuhrer wants me to leave Berlin, Frau Junge!’ he chokes out.
‘He has ordered me to take a leading post in the new government. But I can’t. I can’t leave Berlin. I can’t leave the Fuhrer’s side! I can’t see the point of carrying on living if the Fuhrer is dead.’
He asks her to take down his own final testament. As she picks up her shorthand pad, he starts to dictate.

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Authors Emma Craigie and Jonathan Mayo have meticulously recreated every detail of Hitler's last day






‘For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Fuhrer. My wife and children join me in this refusal,’ he begins.
He ends with a vow ‘to end a life which will have no further value to me if I cannot spend it in the service of the Fuhrer, and by his side.’
As Junge starts typing, she has a lump in her throat. For most of the past week she has been helping to look after the Goebbels children, reading them fairy tales and playing forfeits.

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[superbeets]

5am
Adolf and Eva Hitler have retired to their separate bedrooms.
In the past, she has complained that he only loves her when they’re in bed together.
He would prepare for sex with injections of bovine testosterone, and she would take medication to stop her periods whenever she stayed with him. But those days are over.
Hitler is alone, getting himself ready for bed. He doesn’t like help; indeed, he doesn’t like being touched. Always fastidious about cleanliness, he washes himself carefully, changes into a white cotton nightshirt and hangs his clothes carefully on a clothes horse.
Her maid Liesl Ostertag, who is waiting for Eva in her bedroom, helps her into an Italian blue silk nightgown.
Sleep is elusive. As dawn approaches, the Russian bombardment of the city intensifies. Many buildings are ablaze — and the Russians are now only a few hundred yards from the bunker.
But as we shall see on Monday, as doomsday approached, those cloistered in the bunker descended into an orgy of drunkeness and debauchery before death claimed them.

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[superbeets]

7am, Sunday, April 29, 1945
The people of Berlin are emerging from their overcrowded underground bunkers in search of food. Armin Lehmann, 16, working as a Hitler Youth courier, is horrified by the desperation of ordinary citizens, many of whom are starving. Recently, he saw two men hacking with a knife at a horse. It had been injured by shrapnel, but was still alive.

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[superbeets]

10am

Another Hitler Youth runner appears in the upper bunker to report that Russian tanks are now about 500m from the Reich Chancellery. [Both the upper and lower bunkers, where Hitler and a few staff have been living since January, are below the Reich Chancellery. The Fuhrer spends most of his time in the lower one — known as the Fuhrerbunker — which is protected by a 10ft-deep concrete roof.]

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[superbeets]

10.30am
In his office in the upper bunker, the monocled General Krebs is on the phone to army HQ in Berlin. He’s told the German defence is collapsing on all fronts. Then the line suddenly goes dead: the balloon that supports radio-telephone communications has been shot down.
All telephone contact between Berlin and the outside world has just ended. From now on, the Hitler Youth runners will have to risk their lives several times a day as they dodge across Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin’s central street, taking messages between army HQ and the Fuhrerbunker.
‘It was a nightmare . . . a game of Russian Roulette,’ 16-year-old Armin Lehmann recalled. ‘Those who stepped out from cover were taking their life in their hands.
‘At best, they’d get a mouthful of the constant cloud of phosphorus smoke and poisonous petrol from the incendiaries; at worst, they’d be sliced down by a Russian rocket. Wilhelmstrasse stank with the smell of scorched bodies.’
Boys who refuse to follow orders are strung up as an example to others. Only a couple of days ago, Lehmann was briefly arrested for staring at the body of a boy — ‘he can’t have been more than 13’ — who’d been hanged from a post with a length of clothes-line.

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[superbeets]

11am

Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, knocks on the door of his master’s small bedroom. For the past six years, it’s been part of Linge’s job to help him get dressed.
The routine’s always the same. Linge holds a stopwatch to time the process, which begins when Hitler shouts ‘Los!’ (‘on your marks’). In the early days, the faster he got dressed, the better the Fuhrer’s mood.
This morning, however, Hitler is lying on his bed fully clothed. Except for his tie. There’s a special ritual for the tie. Hitler stands in front of the mirror, with his eyes closed, and counts the seconds as Linge does it up. Then he opens his eyes and checks the tie in the mirror.
A few seconds later, Hitler’s barber, August Wollenhaupt, comes into the bedroom to give his hair and moustache their fortnightly trim.
Hitler’s moustache is designed to cover his unusually large nostrils. The style originated in America, where it’s known as the toothbrush moustache and sported by Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney. In Bavaria, it’s known as a Rotzbremse — or ‘snot brake’.
Linge now administers cocaine drops to Hitler’s right eye, which has been causing intense pain for the past few days, and gives him a packet of pastilles to suck through the day. These are the ‘anti-gas pills’ that his master takes for stomach cramps and flatulence.
For the first time in nine years, Hitler has no personal doctor. A week ago, he furiously dismissed Dr Theodor Morell, after accusing the doctor of trying to sedate him in order to whisk him out of Berlin.
Morell has left behind a cabinet full of medicines, including glucose and amphetamine injections, which he used daily to boost the Fuhrer’s energy. At one point, Hitler was having 28 different pills and injections every day.
The Fuhrer has long been a hypochondriac, but he’s now suffering from Parkinson’s disease and a heart problem, as well as from numerous stress-related conditions.
Before dismissing Linge this morning, Hitler asks him to get Wulf, his favourite puppy among those born in the bunker to his Alsatian, Blondi.
The Fuhrer is particularly attached to Blondi, who sometimes provides a whole evening’s entertainment. She barks on command and howls when he orders her to sing.

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He’s most proud of the fact that when he tells her to ‘sing like Zarah Leander’ — a Swedish singer famed for her deep voice — Blondi gives a deeper howl.

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[superbeets]

11.05am
General Burgdorf, a commander in the army, drops round to see if General Krebs fancies a drink. He’s closely followed by Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, who’s also ready to hit the bottle.
Along with the two generals, he’s been spending most of his time sitting in the bunker corridors, drinking schnapps.
From time to time, all three cruise over to the Reich Chancellery, where a kind of mass hysteria, fuelled by an endless supply of alcohol in the cellars, has led to a relaxing of sexual inhibitions.
Bormann’s philandering has the support of his wife Gerda, the mother of his ten children. Just over a year ago, he wrote to her with the proud news that he’d succeeded in seducing the well-known actress Manja Behrens.
Gerda wrote straight back, congratulating him and offering to welcome Manja into their household. They should arrange a system of motherhood by shifts, she said, ‘so that you always have a wife who is usable’.


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[superbeets]

11.45am
The six children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels are playing in the corridor of the upper bunker.
Most of them are excited to be here — they call the bunker a ‘cave’ and have made several friends. Rochus Misch, the gentle giant at the switchboard, is a particular favourite. They’ve made up a rhyme about him which the four-year-old, Heide, sings every time they see him: ‘Misch, Misch du bist ein Fisch!’ [Misch, Misch, you’re a fish!]
They’re charming and well brought-up children, according to Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, who’s been helping to look after them, and know nothing of the fate that awaits them
‘Only the oldest, Helga, sometimes had a sad, knowing expression in her big brown eyes,’ Junge will write later. ‘She was the quietest, and sometimes I think, with horror, that in her heart that child saw through the pretence of the grown-ups.’

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[superbeets]

2pm
Hitler is lunching with Eva Braun — whom he married a few hours ago — and his two remaining secretaries. He’s been sharing his meals with secretaries since autumn 1942, shortly after the start of the Battle of Stalingrad.

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Hitler told his valet to wrap up and burn his and Eva's bodies once they had shot themselves





Until then, he’d always eaten with his adjutants, but their conversation about what was turning out to be the bloodiest single battle in history was putting him off his food.
The secretaries have a rota to make sure someone’s with him for every meal, including tea in the early morning hours. They’ve been instructed not to bring difficult issues into the conversation.
Today, however, it’s Hitler who raises a difficult subject. ‘I’ll never fall into the enemy’s hands, dead or alive,’ he tells them. ‘I’m leaving orders for my body to be burned so no one can ever find it.’
Traudl Junge eats mechanically as the conversation turns to the best method of suicide.
Hitler says, matter-of-factly: ‘The best way is to shoot yourself in the mouth. Your skull is shattered and you don’t notice anything. Death is instantaneous.’
Eva is horrified. ‘I want to be a beautiful corpse . . . I’m going to take poison,’ she says. She shows the secretaries a little brass box containing a phial of cyanide, which she keeps in the pocket of her dress. ‘I wonder if it hurts very much,’ she says. ‘I’m so frightened of suffering for a long time . . . I’m ready to die heroically, but at least I want it to be painless.’
Hitler reassures her: ‘The nervous and respiratory systems are paralysed within seconds.’
Junge and Gerda Christian exchange glances, then turn in unison to the Fuhrer. ‘Do you have any phials we could use?’ Neither woman is keen to commit suicide, but poison could be preferable to capture by the Russians.
The Fuhrer says he’ll make sure they each get one. ‘I’m very sorry I can’t give you a better farewell present.’

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[superbeets]

About 3pm
In the loos opposite the switchboard, the Fuhrer’s beloved Alsatian, Blondi, is trembling as her handler, Sergeant Fritz Tornow, holds her nose and forces her jaw open.
One of the Reich Chancellery doctors, Werner Haase, crushes a cyanide capsule inside her mouth with a pair of pliers. Blondi falls sideways ‘as if struck by lightning’.
Hitler comes by to inspect the body. He wants to see for himself that the cyanide capsules actually work.
The smell of bitter almonds — from the cyanide — overwhelms Misch, the telephonist, who rushes out of the switchboard room to get away from it.

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A picture of Adolf Hitler taken by the Russians in his Berlin bunker on April 30th,1945 after he had shot himself




Tornow carries Blondi’s body up to the Chancellery gardens, where he buries it. Then he returns for Wulf and the four other puppies, takes them to the garden to be shot and buries them with their mother.



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[superbeets]

4pm
In the Reich Chancellery’s green room, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and his family are at a farewell party for some Hitler Youth. About 40 people have gathered, including staff and patients from the emergency hospital that’s been set up in the Chancellery cellar.
The Goebbels children are passed from lap to lap. After a meal of pea soup, Goebbels asks the Hitler Youth to sing some of the old Nazi fighting songs. He listens with tears running down his cheeks.
His children then gather around the table and start singing German folk songs and lullabies, to the accompaniment of a young soldier playing an accordion.

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[superbeets]

About 10pm
Hitler is sitting at the table in the Fuhrerbunker conference room, reading the transcript of a broadcast about the death of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was shot and then strung up by his ankles.
Heinz Linge is standing behind him. Part of his duty is to ensure the Fuhrer has access at all times to pencils, spectacles, magnifying glasses, atlases and compasses.
On this occasion, Hitler needs neither spectacles nor a magnifying glass as the transcript has been typed in extra-large ‘Fuhrer’ font. He does, however, require a pencil, which he uses to underline three words ‘hanging upside down’.
Even now, he hasn’t completely given up hope that Berlin can be relieved. He orders a radio message to be sent to the German forces, asking when and where their attacks will be taking place.
His questions reflect his complete disconnection from the military realities. None of his commanders believes in the possibility of saving Berlin any more.

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