BERLIN
(AP) - He was Adolf Hitlers devoted bodyguard for most of World War
II and the last remaining witness to the Nazi leaders final hours in
his Berlin bunker. To the very end, SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch was
proud of it all.
For
years, he accompanied Hitler nearly everywhere he went, sticking by
the man he affectionately called "boss" until the dictator
and his wife, Eva Braun, killed themselves as defeat at the hands of
the Allies drew nearer. The loyal SS officer remained in what he
called the "coffin of concrete" for days after Hitlers
death, finally escaping as Berlin crumbled around him and the Soviets
swarmed the city.
Even
in his later years, during a 2005 interview with The Associated Press
in which he recounted Hitlers claustrophobic, chaotic final days,
Misch still cut the image of an SS man, with a rigid posture, broad
shoulders, neatly combed white hair and no apologies for his close
relationship with the most reviled man of the 20th century.
"He
was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman," Misch
said.
The
96-year-old Misch died Thursday, one of the last of a generation that
bears direct responsibility for German brutality during World War
II.
In
his interview with the AP, he stayed away from the central questions
of guilt and responsibility, saying he knew nothing of the murder of
6 million Jews and that Hitler never brought up the Final Solution in
his presence.
"That
was never a topic," he said emphatically. "Never."
He
appeared to have little empathy for those he did not directly know,
and even for some he did.
Misch
was moved nearly to tears when talking about Joseph and Magda
Goebbels decision to kill their six children in the Berlin bunker
before committing suicide themselves. But he was also able to guffaw
about a family friend, "a real lefty," being thrown into
the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin and noting upon
his release that "the paper shirts (at the camp) were
uncomfortable."
Born
July 29, 1917, in the tiny Silesian town of Alt Schalkowitz, in what
today is Poland, Misch was orphaned at an early age.
Against
the backdrop of the bloody Russian revolution and the rise of Stalin,
combined with the post-World War I popularity of the Communist Party
in Germany, Misch said he decided at 20 to join the SS, an
organization he saw as a counterweight to the threat from the left.
He
signed up for the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a Berlin-based unit
that originally was founded as the Fuehrers personal bodyguard. "It
was anti-communist, against Stalin, to protect Europe," Misch
said, noting that thousands of other Western Europeans served in the
Waffen SS. "I signed up in the war against Bolshevism, not for
Adolf Hitler."
But
when Hitlers armies invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Misch found
himself in the vanguard when his SS division was attached to a
regular army unit for the blitzkrieg attack. As German forces quickly
closed in on Warsaw, Misch, who spoke some Polish, was sent with a
party to negotiate the surrender of a fortress and was told by the
troops inside that they needed time to think about the offer.
"As
we were walking away they opened fire," Misch said at his home
in Berlin. "A bullet came through here and right out, two
centimeters from my heart."
After
his evacuation to Germany and convalescence, he was appointed in May
1940 to serve as one of two SS men who would serve as Hitlers
bodyguards and general assistants, doing everything from answering
the telephones to greeting dignitaries and once running flowers to
one of the Fuehrers favorite musicians who had just gotten engaged.
Misch
and SS comrade Johannes Hentschel accompanied Hitler almost
everywhere he went, including his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden and
his forward "Wolfs Lair" headquarters. He lived between
Hitlers apartments in the New Reich Chancellery and the home in a
working-class Berlin neighborhood that he kept until his death.
"He
was a wonderful boss," Misch said. "I lived with him for
five years. We were the closest people who worked with him ... we
were always there. Hitler was never without us day and night."
In
the last eight to 10 days of Hitlers life, Misch followed him to live
underground, protected by the so-called Fuehrerbunkers heavily
reinforced concrete ceilings and walls.
"Hentschel
ran the lights, air and water and I did the telephones, there was
nobody else," he said. "When someone would come downstairs
we couldnt even offer them a place to sit. It was far too small,
little cells of 10 or 12 square meters. It was no bunker to live in.
It was an air-raid bunker."
After
the Soviet assault began, Misch remembered generals and Nazi brass
coming and going as they tried desperately to cobble together a
defense of the capital with the ragtag remains of the German
military.
He
remembered that on April 22, two days before two Soviet armies
completed their encirclement of the city, Hitler said, "Thats
it. The war is lost. Everybody can go."
"Everyone
except those who still had jobs to do like us, we had to stay,"
Misch said. "The lights, water, telephone ... those had to be
kept going, but everybody else was allowed to go and almost all were
gone immediately."
But
that same day, Hitler clung to hope given by what turned out to be a
false report that the Western Allies had called upon Germany to hold
Berlin for two more weeks against the Soviets so that they could
battle communism together.
"He
still believed in a union between West and East," Misch said.
"Hitler liked England, except for (then-Prime Minister Winston)
Churchill, and didn t think that a people like the English would
bind themselves with the communists to crush Germany."
On
April 28, Misch saw the familiar figures of Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels and Hitler confidant Martin Bormann enter the bunker
with a man he had never seen before.
"I
asked who it was, and they said thats the civil magistrate who has
come to perform Hitler s marriage," Misch said.
That
night, Hitler and longtime mistress Eva Braun were married in a short
ceremony in which they both pledged they were of pure Aryan descent
before taking their vows and signing a registry book.
Two
days later, Misch saw Goebbels and Bormann again, this time talking
with Hitler and his adjutant, SS Maj. Otto Guensche, in the bunker s
corridor outside the telephone operators room.
"I
saw him go into his room ... and someone, Guensche, said that he
shouldnt be disturbed. And that meant Now its happening," Misch
said. "We all knew that it was happening. He said he wasnt going
to leave Berlin, he would stay here."
"We
heard no shot, we heard nothing, but one of those who was in the
hallway, I dont remember if it was Guensche or Bormann, said Linge,
Linge, I think its done," Misch said, referring to Hitlers valet
Heinz Linge.
"Then
everything was really quiet, everything was still ... who opened the
door I dont remember, Guensche or Linge. They opened the door, and I
naturally looked, and then there was a short pause and the second
door was opened... and I saw Hitler lying on the table like so,"
Misch said, putting his head down on his hands on his living-room
table.
"And
Eva lay like so on the sofa with knees up, her head to him. I dont
remember now if Hitler sat on the sofa or on a chair next to it."
Eva Braun had died of poisoning and Hitler had shot himself.
The
silence and anticipation then gave way to chaos, when Misch ran up to
the chancellery to tell his superior the news and then back
downstairs, where Hitlers corpse had been put on the floor with a
blanket over it.
"Then
they bundled Hitler up and said What do we do now?" Misch said.
"As they took Hitler out ... they walked by me about three or
four meters away, I saw his shoes sticking outside the sack."
After
the bodies were carried outside, an SS guard ran down the stairs and
tried to get Misch to join the spectacle outside as the two were
covered in gasoline and set alight.
"He
said The boss is being burned. Come on out," Misch recalled. But
instead Misch hastily retreated deeper into the bunker to talk with
comrade Hentschel.
"I
said Do you think we re going to be killed? and he said Why do
you think that?" Misch said. "I said I saw the Gestapo
upstairs in the ... chancellery and it could be that theyll want to
kill us as witnesses."
But
Misch stuck to his post, taking and directing telephone calls with
Goebbels as his new boss until May 2, when he was given permission to
flee.
"Everybody
was upstairs in the ... chancellery, there were things to eat and
drink there, downstairs in the bunker there was nothing. It was a
coffin of concrete," he said. "Then Goebbels finally came
down and said, You have a chance to live. You dont have to stay here
and die."
Misch
grabbed the rucksack he had packed and fled with a few others into
the rubble of Berlin. Working his way through cellars and subways,
Misch bumped into a large group of civilians seeking shelter in one
tunnel.
"Two
were playing music," he said, remembering how incongruous the
scene seemed to him. "I came out of the death bunker of
concrete, and here were two people playing music on guitar."
Misch
later heard German voices above through an air ventilation shaft and
climbed up to try his luck. But the voices came from about 300
soldiers who had been taken prisoner, and the Soviet guards grabbed
him as well.
Following
the German surrender May 7, Misch was taken to the Soviet Union,
where he spent the next nine years in prisoner of war camps before
being allowed to return to Berlin in 1954. He reunited with his wife
Gerda, whom he had married in 1942 and who died in 1997, and opened
up a shop.
In
2005, Sitting at his table next to a pile of mail from "fans"
to whom he sent autographed photographs of himself in full SS uniform
outside the Wolfs Lair, he leafed through his well-thumbed photo
album remembering his days with the most infamous people in recent
history.
"Here
is Hitler
my
boss
Eva,
a friend of Eva ...," he said. "Very normal. Not like what
is written."
He
turned the page to photos of Braun in the idyllic setting of the
Berghof, Hitlers Bavarian mountain residence, and lit up as he
remembered a moment from those days.
"This
small black dog comes running and gets under the fence, and Hitler
said, My God, what is this? Racial mixing?"
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