Hitler's Last Witness (32 page)

The recipe was top secret and very successful – the magic word being lecithin. The Americans stationed in Berlin could not get enough of it, and my production hardly met the demand. The only problem was German law. Under the food regulations ‘butter' came from milk – an animal product. Peanut
butter
could therefore not be butter. There were difficulties with the ministries, and in the end the courts had to decide. The result was that I could continue turning out peanut butter providing I gave it another name. The business then began to get out of hand, taking up more and more of my time, competing with my shop. I had to choose between full automation, and having peanut ‘butter' as my primary occupation, or giving it all up. At a trade fair I saw a modern bottling plant, which I would have to buy to meet the rising demand. It cost a fortune. I decided in favour of my shop, or rather Gerda persuaded me. I would really have liked to have gone on with the peanut-butter production. Shame about that.

John F. Kennedy

On 26 June 1963, I worked again as the bodyguard to a head of state. Well, almost. All the same it was remarkable. In connection with the J. F. Kennedy visit to Berlin I was approached by the CIA. It was explained that they wanted to put around the Schöneberg municipal government centre a ring of alert civilians who would be prepared to keep their eyes open and report anything suspicious. My shop in Kolonnen-Strasse was about two kilometres as the crow flies from the municipal centre. I was to pay particular attention to a certain road junction, and I was given a telephone number to call if I felt that I ought to report something I had seen. I have no idea why the CIA chose me, how they knew I would be reliable and that I had experience as a bodyguard. I did not enquire and simply watched more keenly than usual. Thus, not twenty years after the war's end, I protected the highest representative of the former enemy. In the event, there was nothing to report and I made no use of the telephone number.

I followed Kennedy's speech with its notorious sentence ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
' (‘I am a doughnut' – the correct term is ‘
Ich bin Berliner
') from among the milling crowd. Another detail to cause a grin was the reward I received for my services: for a year the CIA paid me, Hitler's former telephonist, my telephone bill.

Prince Philip

My wife continued her career in politics. She was a district councillor at Neukölln, and in 1975 was elected to the Berlin House of Deputies for the SPD.
[8]
More than once I begged her: ‘Gerda, why don't you leave politics alone?' But it was in her blood, and I had no chance of deterring her. I just had to have some understanding. It was often difficult for me, as it must have been for her when I was in Hitler's service. It was not that I had problems with the aims and objectives that she represented; I simply did not like politics and politicians. And that has never changed. Reluctantly, I once again became an extra on the political stage. If there was an official event to which the marriage partner was invited to attend, obviously I would accompany my wife. I got to know the important names in the SPD, beginning with the Berlin senator Joachim Lipschitz,
[9]
with whom my wife had considerable contact during his time as district alderman of Neukölln; with the governing bürgermeisters Klaus Schütz
[10]
and Walter Momper;
[11]
even with Willy Brandt, who after being governing bürgermeister of West Berlin became federal chancellor, but I do not remember the date.

Nobody ever spoke to me about my past, but most knew. If I attended official functions there was a tacit agreement that I would never mention it. Thus, during the state visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1978, even Prince Philip was not aware with whom he was having such a lively conversation as he was led through the Charlottenburg exhibition. I might even suggest that the Duke of Edinburgh and I were in partnership that day: we were both the escort to our respective wives and made no secret of the fact that we had no enthusiasm for the collection of sculptures. Soon the small group surrounding the duke was agreed – we preferred the garden. The duke was grateful to be led out to be shown the parkland designed by Peter Joseph Lenné. He liked that much better.

Ghosts

For many years my past was buried. I had minimal contact with old colleagues. I met my former company commander Mohnke once on the occasion of a birthday reunion of Hitler's pilot Hans Baur. After that, Mohnke invited me on a number of occasions to visit Hamburg, but because of my business I could never get away, even though he lived to be ninety-six. Occasionally I met Helmuth Beermann, a colleague from the bodyguard. He lived near my relatives, and I was often able to make a detour to see him.

I had an attack of the horrors one day on account of a totally unexpected meeting. I was with my wife in a restaurant. When the waiter arrived to take our order, I recognised him as Hatchet Schmidt, the co-prisoner from the camp at Sverdlovsk who had chopped off the head of the traitor Kruse. It was apparent that he recognised me at once. This was not a story for my wife, and I did not want to burden her with it, and so I acted as if the waiter were a stranger to me, and nothing in his tone made my wife think that Hatchet Schmidt was anything more than a waiter. However, I slipped him my address surreptitiously, and soon afterwards he visited my shop. Once he got back to the Federal Republic he had gone on trial for the business at the camp but had been acquitted.

Until the death of my wife in 1998, out of regard for her political involvement I kept in the shadows, gave very few interviews and never broached the subject of my past. For many years there was no special, or in any case no public, and certainly not a German, interest in my experiences. In the 1970s, I gave the American historian and journalist James O'Donnell a long interview. He wrote a book about the bunker experiences, although a lot of it did not seem to me to conform with how I had related it.
[12]

The books and documentaries known to me about the last days in the Führerbunker are all contradictory and excessive in number. There were really very few of us down below. If one counts up today how many have since ‘inveigled' themselves into the bunker, there must have been a military company present. All of these had something to say. Supposedly, a hundred or so people were still living down there just before the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels. The fact is that nobody, absolutely nobody, spent time in the bunker who had not been expressly told to report there. Certainly, officers came down for the situation conferences, but then went up again as soon as they finished. My own commander, Schädle, never went down there, nor did RSD chief Rattenhuber. I cannot recall ever having seen Hitler's pilot Baur in the bunker. I cannot insist that he was never there, but I certainly never saw him for myself.

People had to make themselves greater or lesser in importance to justify their presence. Otto Günsche, one of the few who really had something worthwhile to say, finally had enough of it and gave out no more information. He even withdrew from me because I gave his telephone number to somebody I considered trustworthy who then became very oppressive and unpleasant. Otto did not want to talk. I also stepped back out of the limelight under the weight of enquiries. In 1982, I gave an Australian film crew my first television interview, and after that I got some peace at last.

I managed my shop for interior decorators' requisites until my sixty-eighth year, when I sold it to a former co-worker. My wife had to be cared for by me in the last five years of her life. It was difficult for me to watch my clever Gerda fall victim to Alzheimer's. The onset was harmless enough – she just started to slur the end syllables of longer words. Later she began to be anxious about public speaking. ‘Rochus, I stand at the dais, and suddenly there is nothing there. Just emptiness.' At first I tried to play it down, but Gerda was too much of a realist not to notice that this was no normal ageing process she was undergoing. I cared for my wife at home until the last day of her life.

Rochus III

Now I live alone in the house of my parents-in-law. Over the years, unfortunately, I was never able to mend the relationship with my daughter. Those ten missing years could never be made good. The greater part of her childhood lay behind her when one day I returned, bringing into her life not only her father but Hitler too. The latter stood like a wall between us. Gitta became an architect, and one of her major assignments has been the restoration of synagogues. She is certain that she has Jewish forebears on her mother's side. My daughter bore two sons relatively late in life – Rochus and Alexander.

Since the death of my wife, I have faced the questions of the press and public. Many young researchers write to me, often with a whole catalogue of questions. A surprising number of enquiries reach me from eastern Europe and Russia.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is: when did I realise that the war was lost? I then write back – often only months later – and I never forget to point out that war is the worst thing men can do to each other. War is nothing but mass murder. It was the worst then, it is the worst today. Everything, absolutely everything, happening in the world today can be watched from an armchair in the living room. No dictator can fool the people any longer. Everybody can keep himself informed. Yet people still fail to understand what war is. Will we never have good sense?

As I have discovered, my ancestor Paul Misch was a soldier in Wallenstein's army in the seventeenth century. My father and I were soldiers who served at the front in the world wars of the twentieth century: he died of his wounds; and I landed in Hitler's bunker and the Moscow torture chambers. For my grandchildren, the young Rochus and his brother, and to their generation, I wish nothing more than that they recognise what an uncommonly valuable challenge they have in today's democracy: to be able to go the way they choose. In my day I had no choice but to be a soldier.

1
At Fürstenwalde, the former barrack camp for POWs and ‘foreign workers' had been converted in 1946 into a camp for displaced people. The reception of former POWs had been intended to occur here.

2
Where the demarcation lines of the British, American and Soviet zones of occupation intercepted, on 26 September 1946 the British had set up a collection centre at Friedland near Göttingen in which refugees of the immediate post-war period were accepted, fed and registered. In 1952, the German authorities took over the camp, which became the returners' camp in the West for POWs released from the Soviet Union.

3
Ernst Reuter (1889–1953) was responsible for political affairs in West Berlin from 1946; in 1948 was Oberbürgermeister of the three Western sectors; and from 1951 until his death was the governing Bürgermeister of West Berlin.

4
Jakob Werlin, later chairman of Daimler-Benz AG, had a friendly relationship with Hitler. For getting him released from Landsberg on 20 December 1924, Werlin, as the Benz & Cie AG representative in Munich, placed a vehicle at his disposal. In the National Socialist period he became an SS-Oberführer and inspector-general for road traffic.

5
After the Second World War, Helene Elisabeth Princess von Isenburg (1900–1974) became the first president of the association Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte (Silent Help for Prisoners of War and Internees).

6
Kaspar Seibold (1914–1995), CSU deputy and member of the Parliamentary Council.

7
The CSU politician Fritz Schäffer (1888–1967) was in Konrad Adenauer's cabinet as federal finance minister, from 1949 to 1957, then federal justice minister until 1961.

8
Gerda Misch was a member of the Berlin House of Deputies 1975–8.

9
Joachim Lipschitz (1918–1961) was a municipal councillor for the Berlin district of Neukölln, and from 1955 an interior senator, first in the Senate of the governing bürgermeister Otto Suhr and then under Willy Brandt. Lipschitz founded the action Unbesungene Helden (Unsung Heroes) which publicly honoured citizens who had provided refuge for people from Nazi persecution.

10
Klaus Schütz (b. 1926) was an SPD politician; 1967–77, governing bürgermeister of Berlin.

11
Walter Momper (b. 1945) was an SPD politician; 1989–91 governing bürgermeister of Berlin.

12
Uwe Bahnsen and James P. O'Donnell,
Die Katakombe – Das Ende in der Reichskanzlei
, Stuttgart 1975.

Short Biographies

Amann, Max (1891–1957)

1914–18 war service as NCO; 1921 joined NSDAP; 1921–3 NSDAP business leader; 1923 involved in Munich Putsch, imprisoned with Hitler; 1922–45 business leader and director, Franz-Eher Verlag (central NSDAP publishing house producing
Völkischer Beobachter
and SS journal
Das Schwarze Korps
); 1933–45 president Reich press chamber, Hitler's personal banker; ensured that publishing houses classified as Jewish, and those in the possession of the SPD and KPD, went to the Franz-Eher-Verlag; with the so-called Amann decrees, the regional NSDAP publishing organs were largely deprived of power; 1948, in denazification trials, sentenced to ten years in work camp; released 1953.

Antonescu, Ion (1882–1946)

WWI, head of operational section, Romanian general staff; 1937–8 war minister; 1940 nominated head of government by King Carol II; headed a dictatorial system and engineered Romania's entry into the Axis pact; 1941 Romania allied with Germany to attack the Soviet Union; 1944 after secret negotiations with Antonescu's enemies by Michael I, successor to King Carol II, Antonescu was overthrown on 23 August 1944 and sentenced to death by the Romanian People's Court at Bucharest as a war criminal.