Hitler

little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them with his foot. Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6 p.m. Karnau had shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable bodies. Günsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Führer Escort Squad (
Führerbegleitkommando
), Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff and Obersturmführer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already thoroughly burnt and were in a ‘shocking state’, torn open – Günsche presumed – in the heavy bombardment of the garden. Reisser’s involvement was not needed. Günsche told him, an hour and a half after givinghim the order, that Lindloff had already carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30 p.m. on 30 April.
    There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery garden.
    When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke, since 1938, part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the other as Eva Braun’s. The lower jaw-bone, too, was Hitler’s. These earthly remains of the once all-powerful ruler of Germany were subsequently taken to Moscow and kept in a cigar-box. Part of a skull with a bullet-hole in it, thought to be Hitler’s, was discovered in 1946 and also found its way to Moscow. The other presumed remains of Hitler and Eva Braun – what, exactly, the Soviets found is still unclear – were deposited initially in an unmarked grave in a forest far to the west of Berlin, reburied in 1946 in a plot of land in Magdeburg, then finally exhumed and burnt in 1970.
    II
    The bunker inmates were finally free to think of their own survival. Even while the bodies still burned in the Chancellery garden above, they had forgotten their vows of self-immolation alongside their leader and were agreeing to do what he had always and explicitly ruled out: seek a last-minute arrangement with the Soviet Union. An emissary was sent out under a white flag to try to engineer a meeting of General Krebs (who, as a former military attaché in Moscow, had the advantage of speaking fluent Russian) with Marshal Zhukov. At 10 p.m. that evening, Krebs went over the Soviet lines bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann.
    It was an anxious night for those incarcerated in the bunker. And when Krebs returned around 6 a.m. next morning it was only to report that the Soviet side insisted upon unconditional surrender and demanded a declaration to that effect by 4 p.m. that afternoon, 1 May.
    This was the end. It was time for final preparations – on the sole remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53 a.m., a telegram for Dönitz arrived in Plön: ‘Testament in force. I’ll come to you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from publication. Bormann.’ Earlier that morning, more than nine hours after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand-Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker. Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in a further telegram – the last to leave the bunker – dictated by Goebbels and arriving at Plön at 3.18 p.m. that afternoon. Neither the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler’s death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a broadcast at 10.26 p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon – it was the previous