'His authority was extraordinary. He was charming' - Hitler's nurse on his final hours

The Guardian (U.K.) ^ | May 2, 2005 | Luke Harding

[Stoat]

'His authority was extraordinary. He was charming' - Hitler's nurse on his final hours

Survivor of bunker tells of admiration for Goebbels' wife and hatred for Eva Braun

Luke Harding in Berlin
Monday May 2, 2005
The Guardian

She is the last witness. For 60 years, Erna Flegal said nothing about her starring role in the Third Reich. Her family knew that in the last, desperate weeks of the second world war she had lived in Berlin. But she never spoke of her job as Hitler's nurse and of her time in the Führer's Berlin bunker.

Now, as the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe nears, Ms Flegel has spoken out for the first time about her experiences - of Hitler's final hours, of her friendship with the "brilliant" Magda Goebbels, and her jealous loathing for Eva Braun. Her testimony casts fresh light on the last days of the Nazi era and has never appeared in the countless books written about Hitler.

 

 

In an interview with the Guardian, Ms Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in north Germany, yesterday described how she began working as a Red Cross nurse at the Reichschancellery in Berlin in January 1943. She had been transferred there from the eastern front.

As the German army collapsed, Hitler stayed in Berlin continuously from November 1944, eventually retreating into the bunker with his entourage. From then on, Ms Flegal saw him frequently.

"I was in the building and someone said, 'The Führer is here,'" she said. "The first time it didn't particularly affect me. He was away from Berlin for a long time before someone announced again, 'The Führer is back.' Hitler shook hands with all the people he hadn't greeted before. After that he talked to us regularly.

"His authority was extraordinary. He was always polite and charming. There was really nothing to object to."

As the Russians approached, and Berlin came under direct artillery fire, the mood in the bunker changed. "The circle got increasingly small. People were pushed together. Everyone became more unassuming."

Ms Flegel's existence only emerged after the transcript of an interview she gave to American interrogators in November 1945 was declassified four years ago by the CIA. The Guardian discovered her insider's account of Hitler's final hours in a Washington vault and published it.

But her fate remained a mystery. Two months ago a Berlin-based newspaper, the BZ, tracked down her relatives via the German Red Cross and war archives. To the paper's astonishment, her family revealed that Ms Flegel was still alive.

She is the last surviving female witness to have been inside the bunker. Traudl Junge - Hitler's secretary, whose memoirs provided the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film Downfall, and who gave numerous interviews to journalists and historians - died in 2002. The only other survivor, 88-year-old Rochus Misch, Hitler's telephonist, refuses to talk.

Speaking at her nursing home, which has a picturesque river view, Ms Flegel yesterday said that as the Russians had drawn closer to Berlin, those inside the bunker began to live "outside reality".

In the middle of April 1945, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi's propaganda chief, his wife Magda and their six children moved in. Ms Flegel, whose original job had been to look after wounded SS soldiers, said she had got to know Magda Goebbels well. When it became clear that the situation was hopeless, she had tried to persuade her to send her children out of Berlin.

"She was a brilliant woman, on a far higher level than most people," Ms Flegel told the Guardian. "I wanted her to take at least one or two of them out of the city. But Mrs Goebbels simply said, 'I belong to my husband. And the children belong to me.'

"One evening she told me, 'I have to go to the dentist and can't be with them. I would like you to say goodnight to the children.' I said, 'Of course. I'll do it. Don't worry.'"

Ms Flegel, then 33, sang the children to sleep. "The children were charming. They would have delighted anybody. They played with each other in the bunker," she said. "They should have been allowed to live. They had nothing to do with what was going on around them. Not to spare the children was madness, dreadful."

Hitler was fond of them, she added, and drank hot chocolate with them and allowed them to use his bathtub.

Magda Goebbels, meanwhile, tolerated her husband's frequent and well-known infidelities. "She didn't say anything. Nobody liked Goebbels. There were always people who hung around him, of course. They included many women who were young and pretty, who had an easier time of it than the rest of us. I don't know the details. It was all gossip and trash."

In her original testimony, Ms Flegel also described how in the final days before his suicide on the afternoon of April 30 1945, Hitler had begun to crumble before her eyes. "When parts of Berlin were already occupied, and the Russians were coming closer and closer to the centre of the city, one could feel, almost physically, that the Third Reich was approaching its end," her statement said.

"Hitler required no care; I was exclusively there for the care of the wounded. To be sure, he had aged greatly in the last days; he now had a lot of grey hair, and gave the impression of a man at least 15 to 20 years older. He shook a good deal, walking was difficult for him, his right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life."

Yesterday Ms Flegel said that before his wedding to Eva Braun on the night of April 28 Hitler "sank into himself".

In her statement she gives a shrewish portrait of Eva Braun, whom she dismisses as "a completely colourless personality". She would not have been conspicuous among a crowd of stenographers, she said.

Hitler's decision to marry Braun made it "immediately clear to me that this signified the end of the Third Reich", she added, claiming that the death of Hitler's wolfhound Blondi "affected us more" than Braun's suicide.

Yesterday Ms Flegel made little effort to hide her dislike of a woman, who, she suggested, was little more than a Hitler groupie. "Oh dear God. She didn't have any importance. Nobody expected much of her. She was just a young girl, really," she said of Braun, who was only six months her junior. "She wasn't really his wife."

By April 29, the once mighty German Reich had been reduced to an area the size of a large football field, stretching between Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstrasse. Heavy fighting engulfed the city centre. Radio communications with the outside world ceased. Shock troops brought news of the latest Russian positions.

At 10.30pm that evening, Ms Flegel was summoned with the rest of the medical team to line up and take their leave of the Führer. "He came out of the side room, shook everyone's hand, and said a few friendly words. And that was it," she told the Guardian.

During her interrogation after the war she said: "At the end we were like a big family. The terrific dynamics of the fate which was unrolling held sway over all of us. We were Germany, and we were going through the end of the Third Reich and the war. Everything petty and external had fallen away."

The next afternoon Hitler shot himself. Braun took prussic acid. "There were a few people who heard it [the shot]. Others didn't," Ms Flegel said yesterday. "The remaining staff then had to decide whether to stay or not stay. I knew that Hitler was dead because there were suddenly more doctors in the bunker. I didn't see his body. But it was taken up to the chancellery garden and burned."

The next morning the survivors were told that they were released from their oath of loyalty and some, including Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, joined an ill-fated attempt to fight their way out to the west. Others shot themselves. Ms Flegel said she had been convinced there was no way that Bormann, "an older man", could have survived.

Ms Flegel stayed and witnessed the deaths of the Goebbels family. Dr Helmut Kunz, a dentist, had injected the children aged four to 12 with poison, she said. Later the same evening their parents killed themselves.

Until Hitler's death Ms Flegel had not even considered survival, she said. "We simply didn't think about it," she told the Guardian. "We knew naturally, who was in charge, and until he was gone, we couldn't talk about it. The soldiers gradually left. Then they were suddenly gone. Many people tried to reach the U-Bahn in the hope that they could escape the Russians. Everybody was trying as bravely as they could to get out of this bedlam intact."

On the morning of May 2, 60 years ago today, Russians soldiers poked their head round the bunker's entrance.

"By this stage there were only six or seven of us left in the bunker," Ms Flegel said. "We knew the Russians were approaching. A [nursing] sister phoned up and said, 'The Russians are coming.'

"Then they turned up in the Reichschancellery. It was a huge building complex. The Germans were transported away."

Ms Flegel insists that the Russians she had encountered treated her "very humanely", despite the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers elsewhere in the city. They had a "look round", discovered the bunker's underground supplies, and then left, she said, advising her to lock her front door.

The Red Army allowed her to continue work as a nurse for the next few months, treating wounded Russians, until she ended up in the hands of the US Strategic Services Unit, one of the precursors of the CIA.

Ms Flegel said her "interrogation" by the Americans in November 1945 was little more than an informal chat over dinner. "They invited us to have dinner with them and treated us to six different courses in order to soften us up. It didn't work with me, though."

Ms Flegel's testimony - including her conviction that Hitler was dead, an important statement for the victorious allies - was deemed sufficiently important that it remained classified.

The interview went missing until 1981, when a Connecticut doctor and amateur historian stumbled on it in an army archive and sent it to Richard Helms, the US intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin and later CIA director. He wrote back saying: "It is probably one of the most accurate interviews obtained and has thus far never been quoted, as far as I know, in any of the massive books about Hitler's Germany."

Yesterday Ms Flegel was evasive about her own attitude to the Nazi era and her role in it. Asked why she had kept quiet for so long about her job as Hitler's nurse, she replied: "After 1945 people started pointing fingers at each other. A great many people didn't say anything. Later it was still a source of controversy. I didn't discuss it."

She had never been tempted to write her memoirs. "I didn't want to make myself important."

The film Downfall, which she watched in her nursing home, gave an accurate portrayal of the Third Reich and its final hours, she said. "They got a few small details wrong. But generally it was correct," she said, adding: "I even recognised myself as a nursing sister."

After the war, Ms Flegel continued her career as a nurse, and also worked as a youth social worker and travelled to remote regions including Ladakh and Tibet. She never married. At the age of 90 she visited Crimea where she had worked as a nurse during the war before her transfer to Berlin.

At 93, she is still mobile and lucid. She has few visitors. The only memento in her tiny room of her time at Hitler's side is a Reichschancellery tablecloth.

Who's who
 

Adolf Hitler

Shot himself in the head on the afternoon of April 30 1945. His body was burned

Eva Braun

Hitler's mistress, who married him in the bunker and later committed suicide with him. Her body was burned next to his

Traudl Junge

Hitler's secretary, whose memoirs provided the inspiration for the film Downfall. She died in 2002

Goebbels and his wife Magda

Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, and his wife killed themselves on May 1 1945

Martin Bormann

Hitler's personal secretary fled the bunker after Hitler's death and was almost certainly shot dead by Russians but his body was never found

Rochus Misch

Hitler's telephone operator. The only other survivor from the bunker still alive. Now 88, he lives in Berlin


The end of the war
03.05.1945: Goebbels dead
02.05.1945: Death of Hitler in the Berlin Chancellery
30.04.1945: Rough Justice
23.04.1945: City Under Ceaseless Shellfire

Full coverage
Special report: the second world war
Focus: D-day
Focus: the Holocaust

[Stoat]

Guardian Unlimited Special reports Interview Erna Flegel

Interview: Erna Flegel

Transcript of an interview between the Guardian's Luke Harding and Erna Flegel, German Red Cross nurse who was with Hitler in his Berlin bunker during the final weeks of the second world war

Monday May 2, 2005

Guardian: Frau Flegel, you were in Hitler's bunker at the end of the second world war?

Flegel: Yes. I was in the bunker when the war ended in 1945. I was working at the university clinic (in Berlin's Ziegelstrasse) and was transported from the clinic by car to the Reichs Chancellery. Towards the end we were always there. We lived there.

Guardian: How did you get the job?

Flegel: I was working as a nurse on the eastern front. One day an order came through...and the head sister said would I be interested, there was a post free in the Reichs Chancellery. I said yes. We were used, when there was an order, to carry it out. If I did the opposite, well...I thought I could do something in the Reichs Chancellery. I went there and had a look. It was beautiful. And that how I ended up there. Later I had my own apartment. It was very agreeable. But then (as the Russians approached) the circle got increasingly smaller. People were pushed together and lived more unassumingly. I was sharing a room with another nurse.

 

Guardian: You met Magda Goebbels, the wife of the Nazi propaganda minister, in the bunker. What did you think of her?

Flegel: She was a very clever woman, on a higher level than most people...She was married before and decided one day that it wasn't working, that it had become boring, and so she separated from her first husband. Then came the second marriage. It's hard to say from the outside that it was happier (than the first). Goebbels enjoyed many affairs to the full. I don't know details. That was all gossip and trash.

Guardian: What were the Goebbels children like?

Flegel: The Goebbels children were charming. Each one of them was absolutely delightful. That she (Magda Goebbels) killed them cannot be forgiven.

Guardian: Did you try and persuade Frau Goebbels not to kill her own children?

Flegel: You have to understand that we were living outside normal reality. I wanted her to at least take one or two children out of Berlin. But Frau Goebbels told me: 'The children belong to me. Everything belongs to me.' But I still didn't understand how she could kill six children. Generally, Frau Goebbels looked after the children. But one evening she said to me: 'I have to go to the dentist and can't be with them, and I would like you to say good night to them. I said: 'Of course. I'll do it. Don't worry.' In the room where the Goebbels children were sleeping there were two bunk beds, one on top of another. The children had a piece of string attached to their beds, and if they wanted something they just had to pull it. The kids were so charming. They played with each other. They should have been allowed to live. They had nothing to do with what was going on. It was impossible. But she (Frau Goebbels) didn't want it. She said: 'I belong to my husband and the children belong to me.' Not to spare one or two of the children was madness, dreadful.

Guardian: What did you think of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, who moved with his family into the bunker on April 20 1945?

Flegel: I didn't like him. Nobody liked him. There always people who hung around him, of course, relatives and so on, but they were only there because they wanted to help their careers. There were also lots of women there who were young and pretty. They used to hang round his ministry. They had easier time of it than the rest of us, for whom things were more difficult.

Guardian: And did Frau Goebbels object to his numerous affairs?

Flegel: She didn't say anything.

Guardian: What did you think of Eva Braun? In the interview you gave to US interrogators after the war you dismiss her as a 'completely colourless personality'. You also say that when Hitler agreed to marry Eva Braun it was 'immediately clear to you that this signified the end of the Third Reich'. What was she like?

Flegel: Oh dear God. She didn't have any importance. Nobody expected much of her. She wasn't really Hitler's wife.

Guardian: There were rumours at the time that Eva Braun was pregnant, and that the father of the child wasn't Hitler?

Flegel: I didn't hear anything about this and I don't believe it. It's true that in the Reichs Chancellery next to the room where the Führer slept there was accommodation where Eva Braun also stayed. She was really nothing. She was a young girl back.

Guardian: When did you first meet Hitler, who stayed in Berlin from November 1944? What was your impression of him?

Flegel: I was in the house (the Reichs Chancellery) and then someone said: 'The Führer is here.' Well, please. It didn't particularly affect me then. That was the first time. Then the Führer was away for a long time from Berlin. Suddenly, he was back. Someone said: 'The Führer is in the building.' That was an experience. Everyone was discussing it. Hitler then shook hands with all the people he hadn't greeted before. It was very interesting. Obviously this wasn't a (formal) meeting. After this he talked to us regularly, and not just about the weather. They were very interesting discussions but not in a substantial sense.

Guardian: Can you describe the mood in the Bunker in the days leading up to Hitler's death?

Flegel: In the last few days Hitler sank into himself. Everybody has their own style, either negative or positive.

Guardian: In your interrogation you describe how Hitler said farewell to his medical staff on the evening of April 29 1945, just before his suicide. What happened?

Flegel: He came out of the side-room, shook everyone's hand, and said a few friendly words. And that was it. There were a few people who then heard it (the shot, when Hitler killed himself the next afternoon) and there were others who didn't. The Führer suddenly wasn't there any more. The staff then decided whether to stay or not stay. I knew that the Führer was dead. Suddenly there were more doctors in the bunker, including Professor (Werner) Haase (one of Hitler's doctors). I didn't see Hitler's body. It was taken up to the garden. The Führer had such an authority that when he was there you knew it. It felt so extraordinary. He was so informal. He would talk to you quite normally.

Guardian: What happened next?

Flegel: Word spread that Hitler was dead. That meant that people no longer had to follow the oath of loyalty they had sworn to him.

Guardian: Did you think you would leave the Bunker alive?

Flegel: We simply didn't think about it. We knew, naturally, who had the say, who was in charge, and couldn't talk about it. The soldiers gradually left. Suddenly they were gone. Afterwards many of us went to the U-Bahn in the hope that when they got there they could escape even if they met the Russians. Everybody was trying as bravely as they could to get out of this bedlam intact. And then it was finished.

Guardian: After Hitler's death most of the SS officers tried to break out. You stayed behind. What happened?

Flegel: We knew the Russians were approaching. As we were in the bunker a (nursing) sister phoned up and said: 'The Russians are coming'. Then they turned up in the Reichs Chancellery. It was a huge building complex. The Germans were transported away and we were left. The Russians treated us very humanely. They came to the entrance and we negotiated with them. First of all they sent someone to talk to us and to have a look round. By this stage there were only six or seven of us left, not more. They looked here and there. They (the Russians) were selected personnel and they behaved quite decently. They found everything stored downstairs. Anyone who needed anything went downstairs. The Russians respected this. The Germans were no longer responsible for anything. It worked. I stayed in the bunker for another six to ten days.

Guardian: After the war, in November 1945, US intelligence officers interviewed you about your time in the bunker. Do you remember much about the interview?

Flegel: They invited us to have dinner with them and treated us to six different courses in order to soften us up. It didn't work with me, though. They tried to soften us up with exquisite food. I did have a couple of meals with them.

Guardian: Why did you choose to remain silent for 60 years about your experiences?

Flegel: It was because after 1945 people started pointing fingers at each other and suggested that so and so was infected (ie a Nazi). There were a great many people who didn't say anything. And after that it remained a source of controversy. I didn't discuss it with my family. While I was in the bunker I had no idea whether my parents were alive or dead. In fact, they both survived the war. We were just glad to have survived.

Guardian: You recently saw Downfall, the Oscar-nominated film about the bunker and Hitler's final days. What did you think of it?

Flegel: It was good. They got a few small details wrong but generally it was right. I even recognised myself as a nurse.

Guardian: Do you regret your role in the Third Reich? Or was this an exciting period for you?

Flegel: It's difficult when you have a society (the Nazis) and it's discussed afterwards by the left or the right. Often it's seen wrongly. Everyone has their own opinion.


Read the CIA's original interview with Erna Flegel

Related article
02.05.2005: 'His authority was extraordinary. He was charming' - Hitler's nurse on his final hours

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[Stoat]

Giving credit where it's due....I found this article because it was linked at Orbusmax

Orbusmax ™ Northwest News - 'Around The World In 80K'

[franksolich]

You know, the German culture and society is far unlike the culture and the society from which I came, and of course the time of Hitler was far before my own time, but I could never understand his "personal appeal," this "charisma" stuff.

Looking at old Time and Life magazines from the 1930s, and old black-and-white news-reels, it seems to me the guy should have been utterly repulsive to just about everybody--whether German or not, whether of the era or not.

Despite having read God only knows how many biographies of Hitler, I still have yet to find a scintilla, a sliver, of his so-called "charm" and "charisma."

So one has to reasonably conclude that the entire German people (Germans still in Germany, not those of German descent in other parts of the world) were, as they are today, too easily duped by con-men, shams, counterfeits, fakes, buncombe artists, and fairy tales.

[HiTech RedNeck]

well this guy was so charming

[Steve Van Doorn]

Many feel Clinton was a charmer

[RVN Airplane Driver]

Remember...how many folks who voted for John Kerry????

[franksolich]

Uh-huh, and this is what bothers me; I remember how many people voted for that fabulously wealthy, effete, elite, private-school, winters-in-Switzerland, palacially-housed, minimally-tax-paying, candidate; far too many.

And that still confuses me; what is it about people who look at people as they wish they were, rather than as they actually are?

Whoever "marketed" John Kerry, even though John Kerry lost, did one Hades of a job; the guy should have never even gotten 10 million votes, much less circa 59 million.

[Skooz]

BUMP for later

[gop_gene]

Nah Kerry truly does have the charisma and personal appeal of a bag of rocks . . . that is to say, none, nada, zip, zilch, zero. Most of those people were likely voting against Bush, not for Kerry.

[durasell]

He gave desperate people hope. For a clue to what the Germans saw in him (and themselves) watch Triumph of the Will.

[SkyPilot]

Interesting--thanks.

[whershey]

You need to remember that he didn't even win a majority of the vote when he was elected. He stole power after that and a combination of good propaganda and the SS took care of anyone who doubted what a wonderful man Hitler was.

[zip]

Great find.

[I still care]

You are right on the mark.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make is that they never weigh a person's actions. Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them." I also had a friend who always said, "Watch what they do, not what they say."

So many troubles of this world, in so many areas of life, would be be avoided if people did this.

[I still care]

By the way, can't resist pointing out the misleading headline again.

"Survivor of bunker tells of admiration for Goebbels' wife and hatred for Eva Braun"

On Goebbel's wife all she said was that she was an intelligent woman. She also says she can't be forgiven for murdering her children.

And of Eva, she does't sound like she hates her. She calls her a "groupie", which sounds fairly apt to me.

[John Lenin]

Charming ? Only if someone poured gasoline on him and lit a match.

[varon]

So one has to reasonably conclude that the entire German people (Germans still in Germany, not those of German descent in other parts of the world) were, as they are today, too easily duped by con-men, shams, counterfeits, fakes, buncombe artists, and fairy tales.

I'm not certain the German people are alone in being duped by con-men etc.

We, Americans, were also duped by a slick con-man by the name of William Jefferson Clinton for whom "I still have yet to find a scintilla, a sliver, of his so-called "charm" and "charisma." .

[Grut]

Despite having read God only knows how many biographies of Hitler, I still have yet to find a scintilla, a sliver, of his so-called "charm" and "charisma."

Try the various books about the Third Reich by David Irving for a sympathetic portrait of Hitler et. al. Irving certainly finds him fascinating; in the jacket photo on his biography of Goering, Irving is shown complete with forelock, mustache and sullen glare.

[leadpenny]

Ping

[Prophet in the wilderness]

Well... some people who heard him in person use to say that while he spoke, be became possessed by something.
About the charm appeal, I don't think we can use the same meaning of charm here as a man would charm a lady off her feet.
The kind of charm they maybe talking about here, is like the charm people like i.e. Jim Jones, Louis Farrakhan, your cult leaders would have.