Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II by Best Nicholas

Author:Best, Nicholas [Best, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

15

HITLER GOES TO VALHALLA

AT THE CHANCELLERY, they were having a party. While Hitler retired to his room to kill himself, the soldiers in the upstairs canteen were drinking and dancing, enjoying a frenzied release of tension as they waited for him to die. There had been a series of increasingly frantic drinking sessions in the past few days as the Russians tightened their grip and the Chancellery staff abandoned all hope of escape. Shedding their inhibitions, some men had gotten married in a hurry, while others had taken to the bottle or sought distraction in sex. With the Chancellery full of secretaries and female refugees from the surrounding streets, there had been no shortage of sex for those who wanted it. Ernst-Günther Schenck, an SS doctor at the Chancellery, was an eyewitness:

There was a kind of contagious mass-hysteria seeking a group outlet. Many of the same wild, red-eyed women who had fled their Berlin apartments, in terror of rape by Red Army soldiers, now threw themselves into the arms, and bed rolls, of the nearest German soldiers they could find. And the soldiers were not averse. Still, it came as a bit of a shock to me to see a German general chasing some half-naked signalwoman between and over the cots. The more discreet retired to Dr Kunz’s dentist chair upstairs in the Chancellery. That chair seemed to have had a special erotic attraction. The wilder women enjoyed being strapped in and made love to in a variety of novel positions.

I was sceptical as that story made the rounds. But then one of the women involved, drunk and hysterical, gave me the clinical details. I dosed her with sedatives. She told me she had been twice raped before fleeing to the Chancellery, took to drinking, could not hold her liquor. Towards the end, she lost all inhibitions. Another diversion was group sex, usually off in the dark corners.1

Traudl Junge shared Schenck’s bemusement: “An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies entwined in crude sexual embraces. The women had abandoned all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.”2

But they had lost the appetite for exposing themselves as they waited for Hitler to die. Instead, music blared out from the canteen: “Tipperary,” “The Lambeth Walk,” American swing, all the “Jewish jungle music” that Hitler despised. It was so loud that Otto Günsche, standing guard outside Hitler’s room, ordered Rochus Misch to ring the canteen and tell them to be quiet while the Führer was trying to kill himself. Misch rang several times, but got no answer. “They probably couldn’t even hear the phone. So I told the orderly to run up and tell them, but I’m sure he was too late.”3

* * *

THE MUSIC was still playing when Traudl Junge decided she couldn’t bear the tension any longer. “When that door closed behind Hitler and Eva, all I wanted was to get out. I felt I was suffocating. I craved quiet and sleep.

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