Free Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany by Emma Craigie, Jonathan Mayo Page A

my self-respect together with the respect of my fellow citizens.
    ‘For this reason, together with my wife, and on behalf of my children, who are too young to speak for themselves, but who would unreservedly agree with this decision if they were old enough, I express an unalterable resolution not to leave the Reich capital, even if it falls, but rather, at the side of the Führer, to end a life which will have no further value to me if I cannot spend it in the service of the Führer, and by his side.’
    Joseph Goebbels asks for three copies to be sent as addenda with Hitler’s political and private testaments.
    Traudl Junge starts typing and concentrates on typing as fast as she can without making errors. She is longing to go to bed. She has spent most of the last week looking after the Goebbelschildren, reading them fairy tales, playing forfeits. The thought of them brings a lump to her throat but she feels like an automaton. She keeps typing, trying to get these last three documents word perfect.
4.30am
    Hanna Reitsch has commandeered a car at Lübeck airfield and is driving von Greim towards Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters in Plön Castle near the Baltic. Robert Ritter von Greim is feeling very unwell. His leg wound is becoming increasingly painful as infection sets in. Every jolt of the car on the rutted road makes it worse. Their vehicle is under constant bombardment from Russian planes.
5.00am
    Adolf and Eva Hitler retire to their bedrooms. In the past, she had complained that he only loved her when they were in bed together. He would prepare for sex with injections of bovine testosterone and she would take medication to stop her periods when she stayed with him. But those days are over. He gets himself ready for bed. He doesn’t like help; he doesn’t like to be touched. He washes carefully; he has always been fastidious about cleanliness. He changes into a white cotton nightshirt, and hangs his clothes carefully on a clothes horse. Liesl is waiting for Eva in her bedroom and helps her into an Italian blue silk nightgown. In the quiet of their beds they can hear the rumble of the Russian guns. The enemy are now only a few hundred yards from the bunker. The guns have been firing all night, but as dawn approaches the bombardment intensifies.
5.30am
    Traudl Junge has finished typing Joseph Goebbels’ testament. He almost tears the last sheet from her typewriter, checks and signs it and then retires to his room. Junge finds a spare camp bed and falls into an exhausted sleep as dawn is breaking over Berlin. Many buildings in the centre of the city are ablaze. The nearby Gestapo headquarters are under heavy artillery and howitzer attack. Following a massacre of the prisoners by the Gestapo guards on 23rd April, there are only seven inmates left inside.
    Martin Bormann is in his room in the Reich Chancellery cellar. He needs very little sleep and keeps the same hours as the Führer, habitually staying up until the early hours. Tonight, before he settles down to sleep, he writes a diary entry:
    ‘Sunday 29th April. The second day which has started with a hurricane of fire. During the night of 28th–29th April, the foreign press wrote about Himmler’s offer of capitulation. The wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. Führer dictates his political and private wills. Traitors Jodl, Himmler and the generals abandon us to the Bolsheviks. Hurricane fire again. According to the information of enemy, the Americans have broken into Munich.’
    American intelligence scouts are indeed entering Munich as Bormann writes his diary.
5.50am
    In Padua, New Zealander Major Geoffrey Cox wakes up in the back of his intelligence truck after only three hours’ sleep. On a wall above him is a large map of Italy, with little flagsshowing the enemy divisions. The truck also contains captured German maps and scores of aerial photographs showing the German positions.
    The sky is grey and Cox can still hear the sound of gunfire in the streets. He