Seventy years have passed since the end of the Third Reich. With each passing year the number of people who actually participated in the Second World War dwindles, and even those who were young children during the war are now in their seventies at a minimum. Luckily, some of the Germans who witnessed the events of history first hand left behind memoirs, spurred on by a variety of motives. Money was clearly an important motivation for all or nearly all of them, particularly in the immediate post-war years, when Germany was literally a shell of itself and survival was already an achievement. Many wanted to understand how they found themselves caught up in the course of history. Some wanted to defend their reputations, others sought to expiate their sins.

The books that I read were varied. Der Letzte Zeuge, by Rochus Misch, is the story of the bodyguard, courier and telephone operator who accompanied the Führer for years and carried his corpse out of the bunker for cremation in the garden behind the New Reich Chancellery, risking Soviet artillery fire to do so. He only left his post a few days later when Goebbels relieved him formally of his vows of loyalty. Bis zum Letzten Stunde, by Traudl Junge, is the memoir of one of Hitler’s secretaries (and the one who arguably milked her association with the Third Reich more than any other eyewitnesses). She only worked as Hitler’s secretary from 1942 to 1945, but she had the dubious honor of typing up his political last will and testament, a rambling screed of delusional self-deception. Finally, I read Der Untergang by Joachim Fest, which chronicled the last days in the Führerbunker. His book served as the basis for the movie of the same name.

Each of the books contained an obligatory preface that consisted of little more than the tired self-flagellation on the part of the publisher’s chosen representative, justifying the book’s publication (and subsequent monetary gain of the publisher). After all, the publisher dared to release a memoir concerning Hitler that dared to show him as a human being, capable of kindness as well as cruelty. Somehow, the historical value of the books was not self-evident, or rather, the publisher feared that the reader would not see that the books would be valuable for generations of historians and psychotherapists. The fear of appearing to be an apologist is apparently still quite real in Germany, it would seem.

To be sure, reading all three books in quick succession was a bit surreal. They dragged me through the looking-glass and into the nihilistic destructiveness of the Nazi regime. I became familiar with the layout of the New Reich Chancellery and its cyclopean proportions, as well as the fact that only two guards stood at any one entrance, and rarely did any patrol inside. Hitler lived in the Old Chancellery next door, and Rochus Misch noted that if someone were to approach the gate, ask one guard to fetch an acquaintance and then quickly overpower the remaining guard, that person could be in Hitler’s private apartments and kill him within about 30-45 seconds. No one ever tried.

I learned the precise layout of the bunker and realized that it was not exactly as depicted in the movie Der Untergang. The ventilation system had not been finished, so the walls acquired perspiration and were constantly damp. As time went on, the smell of human sweat and urine, mixed with the gasoline used to power the generators, became overpowering, and after particularly strong barrages of artillery fire smoke and dust would fill the rooms somewhat as well. The resulting effect on the human psyche must have been oppressive on its own, so when combined with the knowledge that the Soviet Army was relentlessly fighting its way to the bunker (though they mistakenly thought the Reichstag had some significance, perhaps because of the famous 1934 fire), it’s not surprising that suicide seemed like a reasonable choice to make for so many of the top Nazis inside.

The various memoirs differed regarding some key details. Frau Junge thought she heard the gunshot that ended Hitler’s life, but Misch, who was sitting at the phone operator’s bank just two rooms away, said that due to the heavy metal doors and the constant sound of the generator, he didn’t hear the gunshot, nor could Junge have possibly heard it, being one floor and several rooms away in the Vorbunker, and not the Führerbunker proper. Misch also disparagingly noted that Junge was never Hitler’s first choice for dictation and only used if one of his preferred secretaries was not available. He declared that Christa Schroeder’s memoir, Er War Mein Chef, was more accurate, but I had already read Junge’s memoir by the time I got around to reading Misch’s. He also praised Heinz Linge’s Bis zum Untergang. He hated the film version of Fest’s book. He was incensed to see the actor portraying him, who never spoke a word in the movie, react with horror at seeing Generals Krebs and Burgdorf had blown their brains out. In reality, Misch noted, they took poison and he at first thought both had nodded off.

Junge described Hitler’s home in Berchtesgaden in far more detail than Misch did, and seemed to have been present at more of the endless teas and breakfasts where Hitler would engage in monologues that would last for hours while all listened to him. On the other hand, Misch took copious photos there which miraculously survived the war and were included in the book. They show him being far closer to the “inner circle”.

On that note, all three books stressed that the people who were closest to Hitler on a day-to-day basis knew the least about what was going on in Nazi Germany. The news they received, with the exception of certain military cables that Misch had to pass on, was heavily filtered to avoid upsetting the Führer. Information about the death camps in particular was shielded from people like Misch and Junge, whose reactions were not to be taken for granted. The most sensitive meetings were held on a one-on-one basis behind closed doors with no stenographers or secretaries to leave behind incriminating information regarding the decisions taken. It may be that they selectively chose to forget certain events, but I tend to believe them when they protest that they didn’t know anything.

What does become clear, particularly from Fest’s book, is that Hitler seemed to have expected to lose. The nature of the Nazi regime was Weltgroßmacht oder Niedergang – world power or defeat. From the very beginning, Hitler sought to raise the stakes ever higher to see if anything could stop him. When it did, he reveled in what to him was a beautifully scripted and romantically tragic defeat. He particularly loved the end scene of Aida, and he enjoyed the story of Wagner’s Rienzi so much that he took the original manuscript of the opera with him into the Bunker, and it was subsequently lost, such that no “proper” staging of the opera is possible to this day (apparently no full copies had been made). Rienzi tells the story of Cola di Rienzi, the simple Roman who tried to resurrect the greatness of Rome in medieval Italy after the Popes had moved to Avignon. The opera ends with him and his followers burning in the Capitol in Rome, defeated but unrepentant. Hitler first saw the opera in 1906 and supposedly remained entranced by it his whole life.

The impression that was left with me was one in which the everyday mixed with the surreal and horrific. Misch refused to leave his post out of an extreme sense of duty, long after I would assume almost anyone else would have deserted. Devotion to his principles marked him from the start, and it was mentioned in a footnote that the parish priest for the Obersalzberg said that while Hitler was at the Berghof, only three people attended Mass regularly – Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, Eva Braun and Rochus Misch. Junge seemed to be under Hitler’s spell, entranced by his charm and deluded by his ramblings until the very end. Others became more cynical, but the fact that no one seemed to even think of trying to stop Magda Goebbels from murdering her children shows the way that everyone was caught in a closed circuit of thought, almost like hostages who experience the Stockholm syndrome.

Hitler had committed suicide on April 30, and a few days later everyone had scattered and tried to make their way to safety. Junge was briefly interred but then released and made her way back to Munich. Misch was sent to Moscow, tortured in the Lubyanka and then POW camps in the Soviet Union for years before getting back to East Germany and then escaping to the West. Most of the major decision-makers in the Bunker, however, were dead by Victory Day.

I recommend the books mentioned above to anyone interested in the history of Nazi Germany. Albert Speer’s Spandauer Tagebücher is the one that I didn’t get around to reading and which I probably will read at a later date. After all, after three books on the subject further reading would have been psychologically unhealthy.