History Hit: w/ Emma Craigie on Hitler’s Last 48 Hours (Transcript)

Hitler learns of this through the BBC. He hears a radio report that Himmler’s making overtures to the West. He’s furious with him and is also sending out orders for his execution and is about to expel both these men from the Nazi Party.

DAN SNOW: Defeat is now inevitable. The glue holding these eccentric lunatics together is falling apart. What is the general vibe elsewhere in the bunker among these generals, military staff, typists, communications people? They all know the reality, right? They all know that the Soviets are closing in.

Life in the Bunker

EMMA CRAIGIE: There are a few different positions. So on the one hand there’s a very small number of people, which includes Goebbels and his family, who are, “Whatever you do, Hitler, we’re with you.” Eva Braun is very much at the center of that. And Hitler’s view is he’s never going to surrender. That would be shameful. And so that small group of people are all kind of prepared to die with Hitler and, unbeknownst to them, Goebbels’ children are included in that group.

There’s a very small group of people who are actually thinking quite clearly and who want to survive. And these are young military officers who are looking for a way of getting out of the bunker and getting out through the Russian encirclement whilst it’s at all possible.

But the huge majority of people, the military in the bunker, but also very much people in the hospital above—the doctors, the nurses—are in this crazy state of denial where they’re not really facing what’s going on, but they’re coping by drinking. Generals like Krebs, who will become quite important in this story, starts drinking the minute he wakes up. So does Martin Bormann.

So there’s huge amounts of drinking up in the cellars under the Reich Chancellery. On the one hand you’ve got doctors working non-stop, nurses treating the wounded and similarly in the bunker, the cooks, telecommunications men. There are people working really hard, burying themselves, if you like, in the work.

But around them there’s music playing, there are orgies, there’s crazy drinking and dancing and sort of doomsday euphoria. So a mix of reactions, a real mix.

DAN SNOW: Before we get into the minute by minute, how do we know about what’s going on down there? Diaries? Is it well known?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Quite a lot of people survive. About half the people will survive. And just about everybody who survives either writes a memoir or gives interviews. In some cases they’re arrested and there are witness testimonies. But yeah, we’ve got a lot of different, sometimes conflicting sources.

Midnight, April 29th: Hitler’s Last Will

DAN SNOW: Okay, it’s midnight, one minute past midnight on the 29th of April. What’s Hitler up to? What’s his state of mind? What’s he up to?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, he’s in very bad health. He’s on a heavy regime of medication. He’s very shaky, he’s very shuffly. His sleep patterns, which have long been disordered, are now kind of minimal. And here at midnight, he’s up and he is preparing his last will and testament.

So he’s joined by one of his secretaries, Traudl Junge, in the conference room and she starts taking down in triplicate his dictation of this final testament. And she’s hoping that he’s going to make sense for her of the kind of chaos they find themselves in. And she’s going to see the big vision. There’s going to be some kind of resolution that this man who has always had all the answers to everything has.

But she quickly realizes that she’s just hearing the same old narrative about the country having been ruined by Jews. It’s clear to her that the end is coming. That’s what Hitler’s facing. And yet he’s making dozens of appointments. So this feeling that he’s not thinking clearly.

DAN SNOW: So he’s making plans for his own death. What does he envision for the leadership of Germany after he dies?

EMMA CRAIGIE: In this document, he expels both Göring and Himmler from the Nazi Party. And for the first time he announces that Admiral Dönitz, the head of the Navy, will be his successor.

DAN SNOW: Surprise choice.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Surprise choice. And it will come as a surprise to Dönitz himself. He also announces his intention to marry his long-term mistress, Eva Braun. She has been unknown to the German people. She has had this secret life for the last 15 years. Arrangements are being made for them to marry this very night.

DAN SNOW: He’s a man who’s engulfed in a gigantic mental breakdown, physical breakdown. He just sounds like a broken man.

EMMA CRAIGIE: I think he’s a broken man. During this last 48 hours in the bunker, it’s becoming increasingly obvious to him that there is no hope. But he’s sort of slightly behind everybody else. There’s a sort of fantasy as he asks for reports from different generals. He keeps thinking that one of them are going to break through a route out of Berlin or whatever, when everybody else knows it’s way too late for that. They’re running out of ammunition. And as you mentioned earlier, there are 14-year-olds defending Berlin.

The Goebbels Children

DAN SNOW: We’ve got 00:15. So 15 minutes into the new day, fascinating and deeply tragic plot about the Goebbels family that you mentioned. So we’ve got Goebbels, Hitler’s loyal sidekick, Minister of Propaganda, his wife Magda, and their children. And around this time big decisions are made.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Goebbels’ children have been in the bunker for just over a week. There are six of them aged between 12 and four. They have been told that they’re coming into the bunker to celebrate the final victory. And for most of the children it’s quite fun. They talk about it as a cave.

They are absolutely delighted that there are huge amounts of food because Goebbels’ parents have during the war been quite austere and have made it a point of principle that their children are not over-privileged and that they only eat—the whole family only eats—the rations that the German people are eating. But here there’s endless supplies of butter and jam and there’s one bakery still working in Berlin and that sends daily consignments of loaves. So they’re enjoying the food.

Their parents are not in a good state. Their mother spends most of the time in bed. This is really how we know so much about what this experience was like for them. Because Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge spends a lot of time looking after them and she writes a really significant memoir which is a major source of our information afterwards.

DAN SNOW: And the mother in bed makes a big decision at quarter past midnight.

EMMA CRAIGIE: What Magda is doing is writing to her older son. So she was divorced when she married Goebbels and she had a son from her first marriage who is a prisoner of war in England. Both Magda and Joseph write to him from these bunkers and their letters are absolutely fascinating. And they’re at the back of this book, Chocolate Cake with Hitler, for that reason, because they give us such an insight into the kind of thinking that’s going on.

So Magda says to her son that they have gone into the bunker to die beside their leader, that they cannot see a life beyond National Socialism and that the children are too good for a world beyond National Socialism.

What I find so interesting about those letters is there’s this terrible message in them, but in language that everybody could relate to if they’re making a difficult decision. So they uphold virtues of loyalty, doing the courageous thing, doing the right thing, behaving honorably. They don’t see themselves as bad people in any way. They see themselves as upright people making the ultimate sacrifice.

DAN SNOW: And that will involve killing their children.

EMMA CRAIGIE: And that will involve killing their children.

DAN SNOW: Hitler’s making his arrangements, his last will and testament. Is he talking about his own end at that point? Is he making any arrangements?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yes, absolutely. So one of the people who’s again been with Hitler for a long time is his valet Linger. And he’s giving Linger instructions about what he wants done with his body and the body of Eva Braun. So he’s planning that they’ll die together and he’s very concerned that their bodies are burnt.

So he has heard of the death of Mussolini and he knows that Mussolini’s body has been desecrated, strung up for a lamppost. People have shot at it, throwing tomatoes at it and so on. And he doesn’t want that. He also says he doesn’t want to end up as a waxwork in a Moscow museum. So he doesn’t want anybody to get at his body so he’s making arrangements to have it burnt.

That’s not easy. There’s a massive shortage of petrol and it’s Linger’s job to work out how they’re going to get the petrol to carry this out.

DAN SNOW: Is there a doctor in attendance still giving him a mixture of amphetamines and painkillers?

EMMA CRAIGIE: He’ll have a few hours sleep and then when he wakes up he has cocaine drops in his right eye because his right eye is weeping all the time. He has amphetamine injections. He’s got stomach disorders so he takes these kind of anti-gas pills.

There are doctors in attendance. The doctors from the chancery hospital come down and visit him. One of those, Schenke, believes that Hitler has Parkinson’s and that may be true, but there are other theories that he’s actually just taking so much medication, he’s poisoned by his own pill.

DAN SNOW: Okay, let’s come through to 1 a.m. A big moment in most people’s lives. A marriage.

The Wedding in the Bunker

EMMA CRAIGIE: A marriage. A civil magistrate has been brought in and they carry out the Nazi version of a wedding ceremony in which both parties must confirm that they are of Aryan descent and that they have no physical disabilities at this stage.

DAN SNOW: Hitler had innumerable physical disabilities.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Hitler has innumerable physical disabilities. The identity of his paternal grandfather is unknown. So his heritage is kind of uncertain as well. They marry with rings which have come from the Gestapo treasury. So in other words, these are rings that have been taken from people who’ve been killed by the Gestapo. They don’t fit them. They can’t even wear them. They’re too big for them.

DAN SNOW: Is there any pretense at celebration?

EMMA CRAIGIE: They have a glass, yes. Most of them have champagne. Hitler, who is generally teetotal, has a glass of Hungarian wine sweetened by sugar. There’s a little reception for the Goebbels, for Martin Bormann. There’s actually a genuine moment of happiness. For Eva Braun, this is something that she has longed for.

DAN SNOW: So Eva, against this appalling backdrop, finds a moment of happiness. This is her dream come true.

EMMA CRAIGIE: In a sad way, it is. So they first met when Hitler was 40 and she was 17. She was a young woman who kind of dreamt of Hollywood. She got a job working in a photographic studio. Hitler was the best customer because he was constantly having kind of propaganda type photographs taken of himself.

And she spoke of remembering their first meeting where he came into the shop whilst she was on a kind of ladder, reaching something from a high shelf. And that very day she had taken up her skirt to make it kind of shorter and more fashionable. And she was very aware of him looking at her legs and she was worried that the hem was uneven.

They started a relationship which initially was completely secret, unacknowledged in any way at all. She soon became miserable with that. On two occasions she took overdoses. And this is all in the aftermath of Hitler’s niece, with whom he’s had a very intense relationship, having taken her own life as well.

So we’re a couple of years after that. After Eva’s second attempt, Hitler decides to make her his official mistress, which means she’s still living in secret, but the people immediately around him know about her. She is acknowledged by people like Magda Goebbels and the other leaders’ wives. But he’s very keen that the German people feel that he’s married to them.

DAN SNOW: So they spend the next few hours in this very strange wedding reception. What’s the next big point that we reach?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, Traudel Junger goes back to kind of finish typing up Hitler’s testament and Joseph Goebbels bursts in on her in tears. Hitler has told him to leave the bunker, find a route of escape and be one of the people that creates some future government.

And Goebbels says he has to refuse to do this because he has to die with the Führer. He can’t imagine life without him. And so it’s reinforcing what Magda was saying to her son. They have made this decision.

DAN SNOW: So his propaganda was so effective, it really worked on himself.

EMMA CRAIGIE: He was madly, kind of in love with Hitler.

DAN SNOW: The party comes to an end. Hitler and his wife, Frau Hitler, do they retire? They go for some privacy. What happens now?

EMMA CRAIGIE: They do retire, but they retire to their separate bedrooms. So their sex life has always been fueled by huge amounts of medication. She’s taken medication to suppress her periods so that she’s always available for him. And he has had bovine injections.

DAN SNOW: Do they work?

EMMA CRAIGIE: I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. He’s now way past that. He actually can’t bear physical contact. He will shake hands with people, which is often described as shaking hands with a wet fish. That’s the only physical contact he’ll have while Hitler’s sleeping.

The Allies Close In

DAN SNOW: Let’s just check in on the rest of the war. Mussolini, the puppet leader of the Italian state in northern Italy, the fascist state, has been killed, as you mentioned. He’s been strung up, his body’s been abused. That’s the end of Hitler’s great Axis ally. What’s happening? The Allies advancing from the west.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Allies are advancing from the west. George Orwell is with one of the American battalions as a journalist for the Observer, and he’s very struck by how the Germans are very, very keen to get into the Allied territories, particularly the Americans and the British.

So he says that your average German, they just plain don’t like the French, but they’re really scared of the Russians. And so there’s this across the whole of Germany, millions of people are moving west, and there’s very little confidence that the Western alliance will hold, because when the Americans get somewhere, they put up an American flag. When the British get somewhere, they put up a British flag.

So the German people are really suspicious that the whole country is going to be divided between these countries.

DAN SNOW: It’ll be partitioned. And meanwhile, the Soviets in Berlin are fighting room to room, house to house, committing atrocities as they go. I mean, it must have just been a horrific battlefield raging above Hitler as he slept.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, absolutely. Bombs going off the whole time. They’re in tanks coming over enormous amounts of rubble. The city is absolutely devastated. The Russians have really got two aims. So one is to find Hitler and arrest him. Stalin is very keen that Hitler be taken alive.

And then the other, and it kind of seems very modern, is to get a photo opportunity. And that photo opportunity is to get the Russian flag on top of the German parliament, the Reichstag. It’s a major mission. And those who are defending Berlin are well aware of this. Of these very few defenders left, 5,000 of them are in the Reichstag trying to prevent the Russians from getting their moment with the flag on top of the building.

DAN SNOW: Their viral moment.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Ideally, Stalin would like to see that flag in time for May Day.

April 29th: The Final Day Begins

DAN SNOW: All right, Emma, it’s mid-morning. What kind of time does Hitler wake up?

EMMA CRAIGIE: He gets up about 11. He’s kind of got a routine of getting dressed, kind of little game that he plays every day with his valet where they do it to a stopwatch. But this morning the valet can see immediately that Hitler has actually slept in his clothes. So there’s not much getting dressed to be done.

His barber comes in and trims his moustache. He’s very self-conscious about his unusually large nostrils, which is apparently the reason for the covering. He takes his medications.

Just before he’s woken up, the bunker has heard from a Hitler Youth courier that the Russians are now only 500 yards away. General Krebs is on the telephone when the line suddenly goes dead. And the radio and telephone communications have been provided up to this point by a hot air balloon. And that’s just been shot down.

So from now on the bunker’s only communication with the outside world is by telegram and courier.

DAN SNOW: Hitler’s getting dressed. What’s the next move?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Hitler has always loved dogs and he had a dog with him in the trenches in the First World War called Foxl. And his Alsatian in the bunker with him, Blondie, has just had six puppies, one of whom is called Foxl and that’s his favourite puppy. And he calls for this new little Foxl to come so he can play with him.

Up in the upper bunker, the Goebbels children are playing in the corridor. It’s about this time I think, that Traudel Junger observed this difference between the children. So the five youngest children are completely happy. They totally accept their parents’ story that there’s about to be victory. It’s all very exciting.

But Junge says, “But sometimes I thought that Helga, the oldest, had this deep sad expression in her eyes and that she alone of the children knew what was going on.”

DAN SNOW: So Hitler’s playing with his dog. What’s going on elsewhere?

EMMA CRAIGIE: I mentioned earlier that some of the younger officers were kind of really taking on board the situation and wondering how they could get out alive. And three of these officers, their names are Boldt, Weiss and von Loringhoven, worked out a plan to escape from the bunker.

They’re very nervous about proposing it because if it goes wrong, they know they could be called out as traitors and shot. They first of all suggest to Krebs, and it goes up the line. And they get the yes, that they go and support General Wenck, who is supposedly maintaining a route in and out of Berlin right through the Russian encirclement.

The reality is that Wenck’s line is collapsing. It’s all beyond hope, and they know that, really. But Hitler, he’s got this double thing going on. On the one hand, he’s there to die. He knows it’s the end, but on the other hand, he grasps at straws of hope.

So they say, “We could be more use to Wenck, you know, we could go fight with him.” And they’re absolutely delighted that this plan is accepted.

The Liberation of Dachau

DAN SNOW: So we’re about midday now on the 29th. Interestingly, in Dachau, one of the most notorious and one of the earliest, I think, concentration camps, something remarkable is happening. Let’s just quickly whiz across there. On the other side of Germany, what’s happening there?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, so it’s not the first discovery of the death camps. Both Auschwitz and Buchenwald have already been discovered. But it actually is on this day that the Americans reach Dachau. And it’s completely horrific. The soldiers who get there can’t believe it. They’re hideous sights.

They come across a train with 39 carriages in which just under 5,000 people were sent from Buchenwald. They were sent in a dying state. They were given no provisions, no water. And now I think there are about 800 survivors. So these carriages are piled with bodies emerging from them and from the camp itself, you know, people on the verge of death.

There’s also a group of SS officers. We know that some of the Americans reacted to this horror by shooting them, which was illegal. You know, they were meant to take them prisoner. And there’s a commander, Felix Sparks, who realizes that his men are shooting people and brings a halt to it.

DAN SNOW: Let’s swoop back into the bunker mid-afternoon. What’s on Hitler’s mind?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Hitler is having lunch with Eva and with the secretaries. And ever since the Battle of Stalingrad, he has had lunch every day with only women. When things were going well, from Germany’s point of view, he loved a lunch, you know, with kind of male military personnel or fellow Nazis. He could talk about how well everything was going.

But since the news has been grim from his perspective, he wants to switch off at lunchtime. And women, for him, kind of mean switching off. The idea is that he likes to have light conversation. The reality is these women are all subordinate to him and he can just talk and talk and talk.

Traudl Junger, from whom we hear this, she’s been devoted to Hitler. He’s a really good boss, he remembers her, but he’s so boring. And he talks about painters, painters he loves, degenerate art, the future coming, the legacy beyond this disaster, how in the long term they’ll all be appreciated. But he just drones on and on and on.

Everyone’s smoking like mad. So the women are just longing for a cigarette. They’re just dying to get away.

DAN SNOW: So he’s haranguing them with lots of boring subjects.

The Final Lunch: Discussing Death

EMMA CRAIGIE: He’s haranguing them with lots of boring subjects. But that actually is a serious conversation at this particular lunch. And that is about the best way to kill yourself.

What Hitler says on this occasion is that there are two good methods. One is to take a cyanide tablet, crush it between your teeth, and the other is to shoot yourself in the mouth. Eva Braun says she’d much rather take a cyanide tablet because she wants to be a beautiful corpse.

Secretaries ask if he has any tablets they could have. He gives them each a tablet and apologizes that he can’t give them a better farewell gift.

DAN SNOW: What are Hitler’s plans after lunch?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Actually, quite a practical thing, which is they’re testing out the cyanide and they’re doing this on Hitler’s Alsatian, Blondi.

DAN SNOW: His beloved dog.

EMMA CRAIGIE: His beloved dog. If he has to die, his animals have to die. They crush a cyanide tablet in her mouth, just as is meant to happen. She drops dead immediately. So they know the cyanide works.

And then Tornow takes the puppies up to the garden, the Reich Chancellery garden, so right up to the upper level and outside, and he shoots the puppies in the garden so they don’t want to waste more cyanide.

DAN SNOW: And Hitler knows about this?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Hitler knows about this. This is under Hitler’s instructions.

A Party for the Hitler Youth

DAN SNOW: So, mid-afternoon, 3 p.m., what’s coming now?

EMMA CRAIGIE: The Goebbels family all go to a party up in the Chancellery for the Hitler Youth. And there’s lots of singing of old traditional, not that old, Nazi traditional songs. And again we find Goebbels in tears. He’s so moved by the music and the singing.

His children take part in the singing. Until this point, they have been singing to Hitler every day since they arrived at tea time. Because Hitler also loves the good old Nazi songs.

DAN SNOW: Soviet tanks 500 meters away and they’re having a big old party in the smashed Reich in the parts of the government offices.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah. So this is a party where children are included, cakes, sandwiches. But wilder parties are kind of going on all the time.

DAN SNOW: There’s a children’s party going, but down below, there could be people just gorging on champagne, having sex with each other.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Totally.

The Battle for Berlin Intensifies

DAN SNOW: It’s intense. Let’s quickly zoom out to the rest of the world. What’s happening in the battle for Berlin?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Soviets getting closer and closer and closer. And there’s one unit, particularly an intelligence unit, tasked with finding Hitler, and they have a young female Jewish translator, Yelena Rzhevskaya, who has been stopping people in the street and seeing if they’ve got any information about the whereabouts of Hitler.

They’ve had no leads so far, but it’s right now that they get a break. So they stop a woman in a nurse’s uniform, interrogate her. She tells Rzhevskaya that she has been working in the hospital, in the Chancellery cellars, and that rumor has it that Hitler is in a bunker below.

They take that seriously and on the basis of that interview, they start trying to make their way to the Reich Chancellery. I should emphasize that their progress is incredibly slow. They’re only a few hundred yards away, but it’s very hard to make progress because the streets are just netted with broken buildings.

DAN SNOW: Still some fanatical defenders as well. Huge casualties. Still a very active war zone. Appalling place for the civilian population.

EMMA CRAIGIE: There’s a teenage girl in East Berlin whose diary we have, Liselotte, and she writes about how many people are taking their own lives in the face of the terror of the Russians coming. There are terrible stories of the Russians.

She says that she herself would definitely have an abortion if she became pregnant. She says, there’s no way I would have a Russian child. Of course, huge numbers of German women will have Russian children.

So you’ve got people terrified of the Russians, and that’s one cause. But the other is there are Nazis realizing that the game is up and that they are going to be facing one kind of court and execution or another, whoever they’re captured by.

DAN SNOW: So Hitler’s empire, generally just absolute, in the final stages of collapse. Churchill hears that night, doesn’t he, that the German army in Italy has surrendered.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Churchill’s another person who’s in bed a lot of the time, but he’s in bed working, surrounded by his papers and secretaries in the room, taking everything down.

April 30th, 1945: The Final Day Begins

DAN SNOW: Right, Emma, let’s scooch forward now, past midnight. We’re into the 30th of April 1945. What’s going on?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah. So Hitler, who’s got very little kind of regard for conventional timekeeping, summons a whole load of people from the Chancellery cellars to say goodbye to. So these are kind of more junior military people and so on. He tells them to try and escape to the West.

So, like, as we’ve said earlier, the people in Germany generally, he views it as much safer to get into the hands of the Western Allies rather than the Russians.

DAN SNOW: It’s good he’s doing that now when he’s consistently refused to sort of open the gates, if you like, to the Western Allies up to this point.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, brutal. I know. That’s what he tells them. And then he summons a number of doctors. And this is where we hear from the doctor we talked about earlier, Schenck.

He has this vivid description of Hitler’s eyes as being like kind of wet gray porcelain. He describes them as filmy, like the skin of grapes. And he notices that Hitler is talking, but he’s not really talking to anyone. And I think that’s very Hitler. So Hitler loves a kind of remote audience. He was at his best when he was traveling around Germany talking to huge crowds, but really just sort of talking to himself.

DAN SNOW: So he’s encouraging his junior officers at this point just to try and escape these particular people. Yes.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yes.

Hitler Turns on His Inner Circle

DAN SNOW: 3 o’clock in the morning, Hitler’s still up, still making decisions and still getting news.

EMMA CRAIGIE: And there’s been bad news coming through the switchboard. Wenck’s 12th Army, which he hoped would have this route through the encirclement, has been completely cut off. There’s another group, the 9th Army, which has itself become encircled by the Russians. So it’s a little circle outside the main circle of Berlin.

DAN SNOW: No good news coming in at this point of the war, nor has there been for months or even years. All military hope is completely lost.

EMMA CRAIGIE: It’s looking hopeless. And Hitler’s reaction to this is to send a message to Dönitz to tell him to execute Himmler.

DAN SNOW: All right, blame someone else.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Blame someone else and make sure that Himmler doesn’t start getting involved with the West and making his own kind of arrangements with them.

DAN SNOW: So in the final hours of Hitler’s life, he turns on the people that have been his closest allies. Göring, he’s had him arrested. Himmler, he’s getting him executed. This is fascinating, isn’t it?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that people who are there with him and still with him, they live in a state of kind of terror that he could turn. We know this from the switchboard operator Misch, who writes about the constant fear that the Gestapo will come in and take out anybody who’s got any whiff of disloyalty.

The Russians Close In

DAN SNOW: So Hitler goes to bed 4:30 in the morning. What’s going on in the rest of the city?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, just as it’s kind of, we’re getting towards Hitler’s bedtime, in fact even before he’s gone to bed, he’s heading for bed. It’s the beginning of the Russians’ day. They’re now about 600 yards from the Reichstag, the parliament building where they want to put up their flag.

They’ve set up a big kind of soup kitchen except what is cooking is porridge. And we have reports that this porridge for huge numbers was undercooked. So they’re eating this very early, rather disgusting breakfast, getting ready to storm the Reichstag.

DAN SNOW: So everything is just building towards this terrible crescendo. Hitler’s going to bed. What’s going on in the rest of the bunker?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Orgies up in the Chancellery cellars. So as well as there being a hospital there, there was a dental surgery and there’s a well-known story of the dentist chair being used in sex parties.

And the kind of bit of that that people are always interested in is the sort of the sex angle of that. But what strikes me actually is the fact that the dentist chair had straps. And the reason the dentist chair has got straps is because they’re extracting teeth and doing all the things dentists do. The dentist is being used by day and they’re strapping people into the chair and pulling out their teeth or whatever. And then by night, the parties.

DAN SNOW: I just don’t know how to react.

EMMA CRAIGIE: What to, how to react.

DAN SNOW: I don’t know how to react to that. This is a bizarre story. What time does Hitler get up?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, I’m not sure he gets a lot of sleep on this particular night because he seems to be up until about 4:30 and then he’s asking for more information about the military situation at 6 a.m.

DAN SNOW: And presumably the military situation is extremely bad. I’m guessing that the Soviets have only got closer.

EMMA CRAIGIE: They’re about 250 yards away, perhaps less. He’s told they’ve probably got 24 more hours. That’s the kind of the pace of getting through Berlin.

DAN SNOW: That’s extraordinary. That’s actually, given they’re so close, that seems like a long time. I know as the sun comes up, presumably that assault on the Reichstag really, really heats up.

EMMA CRAIGIE: It’s very violent. It’s the thing that the Germans are defending. So about 5,000 troops there, there’s Hitler Youth, there’s SS, they’ve brought in sailors, there are snipers on the roof. When the Russians actually get to the building, it’s going to be a very, very fierce battle.

DAN SNOW: So in a way, this fight for the Reichstag has become the totemic fight for Berlin.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Absolutely.

Eva Braun’s Last Glimpse of the Sun

DAN SNOW: What’s going on? What’s the picture?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, Eva wakes up and she’s probably the most steadfast person, I’d say, in the bunker. She’s so clear about what she’s doing. There are no reports about her having kind of last-minute panic, second thoughts, desperate hopes.

But she decides that she wants to see the sun one last time. She knows she’s going to die today. So she goes up the stairs to the Reich Chancellery garden and very briefly looks out at this devastated site. The Chancellery buildings have been very badly bombed and shelled and the garden is pitted with craters. The battle is raging all around them. Constant artillery bombardment.

So she has this brief moment where she hardly does see the sun, comes back downstairs and then Hitler decides to follow her example, which in itself is a kind of real turnaround of what their relationship has been like. And he goes up the stairs, but when he gets to the top of the stairs, the sound of the bombs is so loud that he doesn’t even open the door and he comes back down.

DAN SNOW: Extraordinary moment. Like as Hitler and Eva have been at the heart, in a way, at the center of the greatest war in human history. And this is the first time they’ve experienced direct fire themselves. It’s fascinating, isn’t it?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, absolutely.

DAN SNOW: What’s everyone else doing in the bunker?

EMMA CRAIGIE: First thing in the morning, Goebbels’ children are having breakfast. Traudl Junge is on duty again.

DAN SNOW: They’re loving their bread and jam.

EMMA CRAIGIE: They’re loving their bread.

DAN SNOW: It’s too painful to talk about these kids, I know.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Their mother has actually spent a lot of the war in sanatoriums like Himmler is now. A lot of leading Nazis make a lot of use of kind of wellness clinics. And she has been suffering from stress and she has a heart condition and now she just spends most of her time lying in bed.

DAN SNOW: What else should we be aware of in the wider Allied or war effort?

The Final Hours in the Bunker

EMMA CRAIGIE: We mentioned earlier, Churchill is doing a lot of work from his bed and he’s sitting in bed surrounded by papers, giving dictation. Secretary in the room and smoking a cigar. And the secretary, suddenly, she’s typing away, looks up and realizes that the ash from his cigar has set fire to his lapel. And actually the smoke from it is so bad, another secretary, John Peck, actually comes into the room from the corridor. You can smell it out in the corridor.

They say, “Oh, did you know I need to—you’re on fire. I need to put the fire out.” And Churchill is fine, fine, but he hasn’t even noticed. And so just a marvelously telling moment about how Churchill operated.

Such an interesting contrast between these two leaders, that Churchill is a person who is respected by those who work for him, but they find him quite difficult. You know, he loses his temper, he’s kind of—you can’t get through to him, and then he suddenly sort of shouting about something or whatever.

Hitler, by contrast, is famous for his tempers, but he very rarely loses his temper with his subordinates. So people who are high up in the military or in the Nazi Party, they can be a threat. He can be very angry with them. There’s this pattern where he adores dogs, he adores animals and he adores women who for him are in a kind of slightly different, similar categories to the animals.

He adores children, he loves the Goebbels children being there, you know, they cheer him up every day. And in return, the people that work for him all adore him. And I think that is one of the kind of strangest things. But he is personally very kind and considerate to those people that he knows firmly he is in control. He’s very kind to his dogs.

Whereas Churchill’s operating more like a person who hasn’t got some kind of warped agenda. He’s just doing his job and finding it difficult. Whereas, yeah, Hitler’s so comfortable and he’s in control of people.

DAN SNOW: Midday on the 30th, Berlin’s on fire. It sounds like Churchill is on fire as well, in more ways than one. What is going on in the bunker? What’s going with Hitler?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, there’s more bad news coming. One of Hitler’s generals, he’s very nervous about this, but he makes the suggestion that they allow soldiers, if they can get out, to get out. It’s a sign of the kind of despair at the time, actually agrees to this. People can escape, but they mustn’t surrender.

So, yes, Berlin is going to fall to the Russians. He’s accepting that. But there must not be a formal surrender. Eva Braun is getting dressed, taking great care with her final outfit, the outfit she’ll die in, having her hair done. And Hitler tells Bormann, after lunch, Eva and I are going to take our lives and we’re going to do it together.

DAN SNOW: So into the last few hours now, last few minutes almost, of Hitler and his wife’s life.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, yeah.

DAN SNOW: So Hitler’s made his decision. What’s involved in that, what preparations required?

Preparations for Death

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, they need petrol and petrol’s in short supply. So one of his adjutants, Günther, goes down to an underground car park and siphons petrol from the cars that he finds there to get enough petrol to create a good fire to destroy the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. As he’s been instructed, Hitler himself takes lunch with the secretaries.

Eva doesn’t join them, she doesn’t have an appetite and she’s still as mentioned, you know, getting ready into the outfit in which she’s going to die. And she’s chosen a dress which she thinks is Hitler’s favorite. It’s a black dress with kind of white roses around the neck.

Hitler sits down for this last meal. He’s got this very delicate stomach and this final meal is plain spaghetti and a salad made of cabbage and raisins. As is typical, he’s banging on from the sexist point of view and he’s talking about the world to come. And as he sees it, there will be a period in which people say terrible things about them all, but in the long run their greatness will be recognized. So the kind of long-term legacy will be of appreciation and they will return to the heroic status that they see themselves to have.

DAN SNOW: That day is yet to dawn, thankfully.

EMMA CRAIGIE: We luckily haven’t got there.

DAN SNOW: Sit there having lunch. Are any of instructions being actually carried out, the ones he’s been giving over the last few hours?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yes. So he’d instructed Dönitz to arrest Himmler. So Dönitz calls Himmler to come and visit him. Himmler’s kind of thinking, how do I play my cards right here? On the one hand, he recognizes that this could be a very dangerous moment, that Dönitz could have instructions to kill him. On the other hand, he’s thinking, Hitler’s over, you know, Dönitz could be the man of the future. I want to be in with him.

So he doesn’t know shall I stay or shall I go? He goes, but he goes surrounded by SS. And Dönitz says to him, you know, there are these reports in the BBC that you’ve been talking to Western allies, trying to negotiate a peace. And Himmler says, “Absolutely not at all. No. I’ve just been busy having my massages.” Dönitz chooses to just accept that at face value because it’s a standoff he doesn’t want to have.

DAN SNOW: Right, so Dönitz’s first act as leader of the Third Reich, not super, not super heroic. So it’s 2:45 p.m. in the bunker. Hitler’s what, just finishing having lunch. What’s going on now?

The Final Goodbyes

EMMA CRAIGIE: After lunch, he calls everybody who’s kind of connected to the Führer bunker, the closest people to say his final goodbyes. Eva Braun is with him. She says goodbye to Traudl Junge, the secretary, and she advises her same message, get to the west, she says, to give my best to Bavaria. She’s very composed and this is in contrast to Magda Goebbels.

So Magda Goebbels has been this very powerful woman in Germany. Hitler, the apparent bachelor, has often kind of taken Magda as his sort of companion to open things or give speeches or whatever, whilst Eva’s been sort of hidden.

DAN SNOW: So she’s sort of unofficial first lady.

EMMA CRAIGIE: She’s been like an unofficial first lady. And the power dynamic between her and Eva Braun has been very much—Magda is older and Eva’s this kind of nervous little girl, but here it swaps and Eva’s completely calm and Magda has this panic.

And when Eva and Hitler withdraw to Hitler’s study for the final time, Magda suddenly has a sort of breakdown, knocks on the door, begs to be allowed in, and she’s allowed in for one final time. And she has a last go at persuading Hitler to escape. And she says, which is probably not true at all, you know, it would still be possible to get to Obersalzberg, to get you to get to your mountain retreat, to get to safety.

And of course, if he does that, then she and the children can do that too, in her mind. Now, Hitler has been very clear with them, they should go. You know, he instructed Joseph Goebbels to go. He hasn’t asked them to stay with him to kill the children, but he’s very clear what he’s doing and he’s not going to be seen to be running away.

DAN SNOW: So Magda Goebbels is the last person to have a conversation with Hitler. That door closes. What kind of time?

EMMA CRAIGIE: It’s about quarter past three at this moment. Traudl Junge, who’s been so kind of rather like Eva, has been very, very solid, very kind of just doing her job, looking after the children, keeping very steady. She just has this urge to kind of get out of the Führer bunker.

So she runs up, up the stairs to the upper bunker and there she finds the Goebbels children. And nobody has remembered to feed them. So she gets some food. We actually know that she gave them bread and butter and a jar of preserved cherries. And they sit around a table eating and she talks to them about what games they’re going to play that afternoon.

And then they hear a gunshot. And Helmut, the only boy of these six children, says, “Bullseye,” but he has no idea what that gunshot is. But Traudl Junge knows what that means.

DAN SNOW: So it’s 3:30 in the afternoon of the 30th of April. A gunshot has been heard. What has happened down below them?

Hitler’s Death

EMMA CRAIGIE: This is subject to some controversy, but what we think has happened is that Hitler and Eva, they’ve gone into the bunker with a cyanide pill each and two pistols, a second pistol in case the first one jams. Eva doesn’t want to be shot. She wants to be a beautiful corpse. Hitler wants kind of belt and braces.

What we think happens is they both take the cyanide, they each take the cyanide pill. Hitler was very keen that they do it simultaneously. And at the same time he has shot himself in the temple. In 2017, French scientists finally had access to Hitler’s teeth, which had been held in Russia ever since. And they found that the teeth had traces of cyanide on them but no sign of gunshot. What we think is, yeah, that he shot himself in the temple.

DAN SNOW: So Hitler and his wife are dead. Do people give them some time before going in or is it sort of instantly when they hear the gunshot?

EMMA CRAIGIE: So the valet, he waits a little bit after the gunshot and then he goes in and they find the two bodies. Eva Braun has got her leg tucked up on the sofa, shoes off. The little box the cyanide capsule had been in was on the table. And he describes her face as contorted by the poison.

He will later say that he couldn’t bear to look at Hitler’s face. Looking forward, he’s going to be arrested by the Russians, held there for many years and tortured endlessly, kind of questioned. And the fact they didn’t look at Hitler’s face is something that bothers them a huge amount and leads to all this kind of speculation about was it really Hitler who was there? Because he can’t confirm that he saw the face. I mean, you know, I don’t know who else could have got in there.

They wrapped the bodies in blankets. The Russians also got obsessed with this and were there two blankets? And at one point, you know, being tortured in loads and loads of interrogations. At one point Linge said there was two blankets. At another point they say there was one blanket and that also is used.

But with the help of Hitler’s chauffeur and some officers, they carry the bodies up into the garden, pour on the petrol. Actually Joseph Goebbels lights the match and sets them on fire. There’s a big blaze and a period of time is left and then one of the officers is sent up to bury the bodies and when he does that, he finds that the bodies, they’ve both been very burnt, but they’ve also been hit by a bomb.

DAN SNOW: Really.

EMMA CRAIGIE: So there’s shells and there’s constant shelling and he buries them in a crater. What we think is by the time the Russians get there, all there is of Hitler is a bit of skull, a jaw, teeth.

DAN SNOW: So Goebbels puts the match. It’s about 3:50 in the afternoon. Is there any formality to the occasion?

EMMA CRAIGIE: It’s a very unsafe place to be, the Reich Chancellery garden, because, yeah, shelling is kind of happening the whole time. There’s a kind of conflagration and they withdraw immediately. Back inside on the staircase there’s a moment where they all do a Heil Hitler and that’s it, that’s the funeral back down below.

DAN SNOW: What’s being done in the aftermath of Hitler taking his own life?

Covering the Tracks

EMMA CRAIGIE: The valet Linge is still carrying out Hitler’s instructions and the next one is to clear evidence. So he gets rid of the blood-stained carpet and he’s clearing, screwing up documents, clothes, medicines, anything that he thinks might have a kind of, could have a negative impact on sort of Hitler’s reputation in the future.

DAN SNOW: Wow. So seconds after his death, already people are sort of airbrushing his reputation.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DAN SNOW: What about the decision makers? What’s happening now?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, so Goebbels and Bormann are in a meeting with various generals. Amongst these generals is Krebs, who was a military attaché in Moscow for many years. So very conveniently, he speaks Russian.

DAN SNOW: So what’s the upshot of the meeting?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, the upshot of the meeting is that they’re going to send Krebs as the Russian speaker to negotiate with the Russians. They want a ceasefire and safe passage. I’m sure they do, but Goebbels is absolutely adamant that they must not surrender.

Krebs will go for a meeting with the Russians, ask for this safe passage. The Russians are in touch with Stalin. Stalin says there’s no ceasefire without an unconditional surrender. Krebs can’t give an unconditional surrender because Goebbels said we mustn’t surrender. What that means is what little is left of Berlin, what little is standing, continues to be bombarded.

DAN SNOW: So that 5 o’clock meeting is very important. They decide collectively, effectively, that they will fulfill Hitler’s orders even after death, and they will fight till the very, very last.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah, and I think Goebbels is really instrumental in that. He is about to take his own life, as is his wife, and they’re going to kill their children.

DAN SNOW: But he wants to condemn everyone else to death as well.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Effectively. And just for context, we’re right in terms of the Reichstag. The Russians are now in the building and there’s hand to hand fighting inside the building. It’s nearly taken. Stalin has nearly got his photo opportunity and Goebbels is not recognizing that it’s all over.

DAN SNOW: So 5 o’clock-ish. While that meeting’s going on, how quickly does Donitz find out that he is now the Fuhrer, he’s the second Fuhrer of the Third Reich?

EMMA CRAIGIE: Following Hitler’s orders, he gets a telegram telling him “you’re now leader of Germany.” And he’s amazed. He hadn’t seen that coming.

DAN SNOW: So just after his meeting with Himmler, he finds out he’s the new leader.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yes.

DAN SNOW: What a thing to inherit.

EMMA CRAIGIE: I think he knows that there’s just one thing to be done, which is actually exactly what it doesn’t want to be done, which is surrender.

The Final Night in the Bunker

DAN SNOW: Unconditional surrender. So another night is upon us. It’s about 7:30. Hitler’s body, or the remains of it, has been buried with that of his wife. The Reichstag is in the process of being taken. What is going on in the bunker?

EMMA CRAIGIE: The Goebbels are putting their children to bed. And actually this is the final night that they’ll put the children to bed to sleep, because the following evening they’ll tell all the children that they need to have an inoculation. All the soldiers are having this inoculation and the children are going to have it too.

What they’re actually doing is injecting the children with morphine. They then give them all a hot chocolate and it’s not known whether there was any additional thing in the hot chocolate. But they all get a hot chocolate and then they go to bed.

A doctor called Stumpfegger comes down to administer a cyanide tablet to the dozing children and break one in the mouths of each child. She had a lot of trouble finding a doctor who would do this. Stumpfegger was the only person she could get to agree to it.

When the Russians come into the bunker, the children will all be in their bunker. I mentioned earlier that Traudl Junge thought that the oldest girl, Helga Goebbels, had an inkling of what was going on in a way that the younger ones didn’t. The Russian autopsy shows that her face was severely bruised, and so they think that when the cyanide tablet was administered, she was trying to fight it and had to be held down.

DAN SNOW: That is just the most harrowing story, a tragedy wrapped up within the wider tragedy for this night. There it’s sleeping in bed. Meanwhile, how’s things developing with this approach to the Soviets?

EMMA CRAIGIE: In the kitchens of the upper bunker, Hitler’s personal chef, Constanze Manzialy, is cooking what actually sounds like a much nicer meal of mashed potato and fried eggs, because they’re keeping up a pretence that Hitler is still alive, even to the kitchen orderlies.

So Manzialy herself knows that no one’s—well, Hitler’s not going to eat this meal, but her staff don’t. So it’s only a very small number of people who know that Hitler has died. They don’t want that to get out.

DAN SNOW: At this point, the Soviets complete the conquest of the Reichstag building.

EMMA CRAIGIE: The actual moment of that is another slight, shady thing. Stalin will say that it happens then. That’s the official time that it happens. We know that the photograph of the flag on top, the photograph that they’ve wanted, isn’t actually taken until the 2nd of May.

The Mass Escape

DAN SNOW: As Junge escapes that night, the entire population of bunker will start to try and save themselves. Hitler’s death just lifts the lid on it.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Almost everybody goes. After killing their children, Magda and Joseph take their lives, which, to make things easier for others, they do in the garden so that their bodies don’t have to be carried anywhere.

Virtually everybody else tries to escape. Fritz Tornow, who was the dog handler, completely loses his mind. And when the Russians come, he’s wandering around the bunker, delirious and alone. A few people remain in the chancery building, but almost everybody goes. And Krebs stays almost till the Russians get there, and then he shoots himself at the very last minute.

DAN SNOW: So with Hitler’s death and the hours that follow, the center of gravity, such as it is left of the Third Reich, moves to Donitz’s headquarters. He’s now the Fuhrer. Let’s finish up. Here’s what, one last meeting. It’s a dramatic meeting.

Donitz and Himmler’s Final Confrontation

EMMA CRAIGIE: Well, there’s so much tension between these two. We’ve seen that with Himmler coming to the previous meeting surrounded by SS, which he does again. They’re both incredibly nervous of each other. They don’t know how the power is going to play, who’s going to execute who, if anybody is.

Donitz would tell the story of having a pistol on his desk ready for this meeting with Himmler, papers on top of it, just so he can quickly grab it. And he said he’d never done anything like that. He’s very much a military leader of the sort that gives orders and does inspections and so on, and makes strategic decisions. Donitz is not a fighter. And so he’s got this secretly slightly concealed pistol on his desk.

Himmler makes a bid to be Donitz’s deputy, which is turned down, and he withdraws back to the spa. But within a month he will be arrested and he will have a cyanide tablet on him. And he takes it. Actually, he takes the cyanide tablet whilst he’s having a medical. And the doctor says to him, “Can I look inside your mouth?” And he has the cyanide tablet already there and he crushes it. And the doctor’s completely astonished. This guy just drops to the floor. So that is the end of Himmler.

Traudl Junge’s Escape and Reckoning

EMMA CRAIGIE: For all of this, one of our major sources is Traudl Junge. It’s at this point she hears others talking about how are they going to get out of the bunker before the Russians get there? And she asks a group if she can join them. She and actually Manzialy the cook, make this escape from the bunker. Manzialy is killed, but Traudl Junge gets out.

She’s 25 at the time. She immediately writes an account of everything that’s happened in the bunker. All her memories, it’s very detailed. She spends the next 15 years telling herself “I wasn’t to blame.” So as she learns more and more about the horrors of what has actually happened, she tells herself, “Well, I didn’t know about the death camps. How could I have known? I was only 25 or 22. I was just young.”

And then she has this transformative moment when she’s about 40 and she just happens to walk past a memorial to a woman called Sophie Scholl, who was one of the resistance fighters who was killed.

DAN SNOW: She spread leaflets around criticizing the Nazis on university campuses.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Exactly. And was killed for doing so. Sophie Scholl was born the same year as Traudl Junge. So she looks at this memorial and she realized, she takes on board for the first time that her youth isn’t really an excuse, that people did know that what was happening was wrong. And she could have known.

The next 40 years of her life, she writes and talks about coming to terms with that and coming to terms with her culpability. Her book, “Until the Final Hour,” is a major source for anybody researching this. It’s powerful because it’s from her that we get all the details about the children. Her view of the bunker is more human than most people’s, and she’s interested in people’s emotions, behavior, the details about how Magda Goebbels behaves, how Eva Braun sort of holds herself at the end. But that all comes from Traudl Junge.

The Search for Hitler’s Body

DAN SNOW: We should just quickly talk about what happened to Hitler’s body. And the Soviets and the controversies. They want Hitler’s body, don’t they? Stalin needs to see the body.

EMMA CRAIGIE: Yeah. He’s very disappointed that Hitler isn’t taken alive. This is quite an interesting moment for Yelena Rzhevskaya, the young Russian translator, a key figure in finding the bunker. She knows that as soon as any information gets officially into Russian hands, it’ll be shrouded in secrecy.

So she is there when the teeth are found. She puts them in a cigar box, which is lying around, and she finds Hitler’s dentist, or at least she finds two dental assistants in the Berlin dentists that Hitler used and gets it confirmed.

DAN SNOW: That she does that off her own back.

EMMA CRAIGIE: She does that off her own back because she wants to know for herself. She’s a really remarkable young woman whose memoirs were banned in Soviet Russia.

DAN SNOW: Following that, though, the teeth and the skull.

EMMA CRAIGIE: So they all get—they disappear into the Soviet archives. There’s so many rumors. Did they have more of Hitler’s body? What we do know is when Magda and Joseph Goebbels killed themselves, they also gave instructions that their bodies be burnt. But by now there really was very little petrol and the burning of their bodies was relatively ineffective.

So we know that the Russians took their bodies and they took the bodies of these six Goebbels children. And it’s understood that in 1970, Andropov, who would become the Russian leader, but was then head of the KGB, ordered these bodies that had been kept all this time to be cremated and the actual ashes thrown into the River Elbe.

There are stories that there were more remains of Hitler and Eva’s bodies and that that’s what happened to them. His concern was like, they’re keeping these bodies for years and years and years. What are they going to do with them? And if they do anything public with them, they could become a Nazi shrine. We’re not going to be able to answer that at the moment. Certainly we do know that the Russians did have, as I said, this bit of skull, jaw and Hitler’s teeth.

DAN SNOW: Emma, thanks very much for coming on the show and taking us through the last minutes of Hitler’s life. What an extraordinary and important and depressing and awful story. Your book is brilliant. “Hitler’s Last Day, Minute by Minute.” And also “Chocolate Cake for Hitler,” all about—if people are interested in the tragic story of those children. That’s a wonderful account and a story about them as well. If you have enjoyed this and you want to see more of our minute by minute videos here on the History Hit YouTube, we have got others available, so make sure you search. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

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