Siegfried Page 14

  Later in the evening, with the four ladies of the secretariat and Miss Marzialy, the cook, we drank champagne in Hitler’s small sitting room. He himself drank tea. In the exclusive company of women, he seemed to relax a little. As we had heard countless times previously, he spoke again of his political struggle in the 1920s, while eating biscuits nonstop, but now a few tears came into his eyes, because through the treachery and faithlessness of his generals, everything was lost. Nothing was spared him, he complained, and I saw that he was meanwhile checking his pulse. “And you?” he said to Blondi with her five suckling puppies. “Are you going to betray me, too?” Later he was again troubled by his periodic stomach cramps, for which Morell gives him medicines every day, and which in my view causes them. His secretaries Traudl and Christa pushed a chair under his legs and took the opportunity to wish him good night. A little later I was alone with him.

  We looked at each other. He had biscuit crumbs in his mustache, and his breath smelled. In the past I would have done something that he needed me for; and I saw that he saw what I was thinking, because he always sees everything, but it was not spoken. That is over for good, like everything else.

  “Our little Siggi is dead, Adi,” I said. “Why?”

  Under the portrait of his mother, and opposite the portrait of Frederick the Great, he glanced at me as if trying to remember who it could be, as if he first had to check through the countless people he had had executed in the meantime. Tenderly he stroked Wolfie, his favorite puppy, whom he had put on his lap with trembling hands.

  “Because I got to hear that he was not racially pure.”

  “But that wasn’t true.”

  “I didn’t know that at the time.”

  “But he was Siggi, for God’s sake!”

  As he looked at me, his pale, waxy face became redder and redder, and suddenly he banged on the arm of his chair with a fist and yelled, “What do you think? That would have suited the Jews down to the ground! My son a Jewish bastard—a gift from heaven! I had had sexual relations with a non-Aryan! They would have laughed themselves silly. They actually said such things about me, as they did about Heydrich, but for some time past most of them haven’t been laughing anymore.”

  “But be that as it may, he was still your own child!”

  “Precisely. The admixture of Jewish blood had ruined my own proteins.”

  “But you could have simply let him stay Siegfried Falk, and no one would have been any the wiser.”

  “And one day it would have come out. Someone would have talked about it. Falk, for instance. And if I had had him and Julia shot, someone would have talked whom they had talked to. In the end everything comes out. The world will be amazed at all the things that will come out shortly.”

  I was alarmed at the glow that suddenly lit up his eyes, and I was glad that I at any rate would never know.

  “And what would have happened to me if it had been true?” When he did not answer, I ventured cautiously, “Couldn’t it be that the Gestapo—”

  “Be quiet!” he interrupted me. “I cannot believe that my faithful Heinrich would do such a thing.”

  “But who falsified those documents? And why?”

  “I don’t know. But perhaps I shall find out in the few days we have left.”

  Then he sent me away. He was tired. He suggested I have some more champagne with the secretaries.

  21.IV.45

  All day long the thunder of artillery bombardments, which no longer stop for a moment, and above us we can hear the proud Chancellery collapsing further and further, but you get used even to that. The worst thing for me is that I can no longer wash my clothes. I stink. Everyone who is left down here stinks. Adi, too.

  22.IV.45

  Morell has gone, too, thank God. At the invitation of the Führer, Goebbels and his family have moved into Morell’s apartment. The little cripple is obviously delighted that he finally belongs to Hitler’s innermost circle. They want to die with him. That is, Goebbels and his Magda want to—no one has asked their six small children. This afternoon I played with them and read to them from the “Max and Moritz” books. Helga, Holde, Hilde, Heide, Hedda, Helmut—in all those names there is an echo of “Hitler.” Magda is determined to poison them, because a life without the Führer is no longer worth anything.

  Adi was tied up all day in desperate discussions with Keitel and Jodl and other generals, while in the meantime he had raging telephone conversations with Dönitz and Himmler and heaven knows who else. In the evening I spoke to him briefly while he was sorting out his personal papers with a magnifying glass to have them burned in the garden. While it constantly creaked and pounded above our heads, I asked him what he thought of Magda’s intention of murdering her children. Trembling, he held on to the edge of the table, looked straight at me for a few seconds, and said:

  “That is her own free will; as far as I’m concerned, she can leave. But you should be glad Siggi is no longer alive. Otherwise you would have had to do the same with him in a little while. Or would you have preferred Stalin to put him on show in the Moscow Zoo?”

  23.IV.45

  It may be over any day, any hour now, but I don’t care as long as I am with my love. Scarcely spoke to him today. Wrote farewell letter to Gretl, who is on the point of giving birth. Assured her—groundlessly—that she will definitely see Fegelein again.

  Speer has suddenly reappeared in the citadel, and around midnight we drank a bottle of champagne in my room. He could not bear having left on Adi’s birthday without saying good-bye. He called Hitler a “magnet.” At the risk of life and limb, he flew through enemy fire in a small plane and landed on the Siegesallee near the Brandenburg Gate. He has no fear; in that he is definitely Adi’s superior. I heard from him that this afternoon a telegram arrived from Göring in which he proposes taking over power when Hitler has ceased to be responsible for his actions. Bormann convinced the Führer that it was an attempted coup, whereupon Adolf relieved Göring of all his duties and issued an arrest warrant against him. But in reality, said Speer, it was more a coup by Bormann, eliminating his old rival from the succession to Hitler. With tears in his eyes, Adi seems to have shouted that now even his old comrade Göring had betrayed him and this was the end. I have no words to express how sorry I feel for him.

  Tonight Speer left again. I hope he makes it.

  24.IV.45

  Today Adi suddenly appeared in my room and said without preamble, “Suppose it had been true and we had won the war and Siggi had become my successor—that would have been the ultimate coup by Jewry: Jewish blood would have had world domination and would have destroyed human civilization, because that is what the Jew, always and everywhere, is out for.”

  “The Jew, the Jew . . .” I repeated. “He would have been only one-eighth Jewish.”

  “An eighth!” he shouted contemptuously. “An eighth! Birdbrain! Why don’t you read a book occasionally instead of just fashion magazines? Then you would know that every new generation throws up a full Jew according to Mendel’s principles.”

  “But he wasn’t even an eighth Jewish. He was a full-blooded Aryan.” I gathered all my courage and said, “Someone deceived you, Adi.”

  When he turned around, he wobbled and had to hold on for support. Without another word he dragged himself out of the room. But I was left with a glad feeling: I was frightened that he had forgotten, because of all his concerns. However could I think that? He never forgets a thing.

  Magda has to stay in bed. She has developed heart trouble at the prospect of having to poison her children. Yes, I count myself lucky that Siggi is no longer alive.

  25.IV.45

  I remember the enormous maps on the table in front of the window at the Berghof: Russia, Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa. Now all that is lying on the map table is a map of Berlin. The Russians are already less than a mile away, in the Tiergarten, they are advancing toward us down every street and metro tunnel. A few more days and a plan of our bunker is all they’ll ne
ed.

  This afternoon ate lunch alone with him briefly, but I did not dare to bring up the subject of Siggi’s execution again. Anyway, what’s the point? As Adi downed his thin oat gruel, Linge brought the message that an armada of hundreds of heavy bombers had bombed the Obersalzberg, destroying everything, including the Berghof. It gave me a jolt: so now that part of my life had gone, too. But Adolf showed no emotion.

  “Excellent,” he said, nodding between mouthfuls. “Otherwise I would have had to do it myself.”

  26.IV.45

  Problems with my brother-in-law. In the evening Hitler, Goebbels, Magda, and I were sitting together, the children were asleep, and the two men were talking about the moment when it had all gone wrong. I tried to cheer them up with memories of the parties we had had at the Berghof, but it was as if death were hanging in black curtains around the room. Suddenly I was called to the telephone by an orderly. I thought it might be my parents, but it was Fegelein. I asked where he was, but he did not answer. He said I must leave the Führer and immediately flee Berlin with him; in a few hours’ time it would be too late. He was getting out, there was no point in dying an absurd death here for a hopeless cause, and I must not do that either. Horrified, I said that he should come straight back to the citadel, as the Führer knew no mercy with deserters. Then he hung up without saying good-bye. I said nothing about the conversation to Adi, but of course the line had been tapped, and he was told of it a little later. He gave orders that Fegelein should be tracked down and arrested.

  Why did he phone me? Surely he knew they would listen in to the conversation. Was it perhaps a desperate effort to benefit from the official pass that I have? Poor Gretl. I just hope it turns out all right.

  27.IV.45

  I have not been outside for over a week, I know I shall never see the sun again, but I’ve resigned myself to that. I have lived for thirty-three years and got almost everything I longed for—why should I survive to the year 2000 as a woman of eighty-eight, in a bestial world left to run wild by the Bolsheviks? No, I am glad with all my heart that I can die here by my lover’s side. In these days between life and death, I am often reminded of the first times I saw him, without knowing who he was. I was seventeen and had just started working as an assistant to Hoffmann, whom I was sometimes allowed to help in the darkroom. I liked it there in that mysterious red light, which gave me the feeling of being on another planet—and I can still see his face looming up out of shiny nothingness in the developing tray like an apparition. Perhaps he enchanted me even then with those eyes of his.

  Hermann arrested this afternoon. He was in his flat on the Bleibtreu-Strasse and was about to leave, in civilian clothes, with a bag full of money and precious items and accompanied by his mistress, the wife of an interned Hungarian diplomat, with whom he was going to flee to Switzerland. She was able to escape. Oh, how I hate that double traitor. I had the impression that Adi wanted him executed today, but with an appeal to Gretl’s pregnancy, I managed to persuade the Chief just to demote and imprison him.

  This afternoon Bormann asked me suspiciously whatever I was writing the whole time. He can’t stand it if he doesn’t know something, the brute. Farewell letters to my sisters and girlfriends, I said. Whenever I fill a sheet I hide it in the ventilation grill.

  29.IV.45

  I’m Mrs. Hitler! This is the most wonderful day of my life: Eva Hitler! Eva Hitler! Mrs. Eva Hitler-Braun, wife of the Führer! The first lady of Germany! I’m the happiest person in the world! At the same time, it is the last day of my life, but what could be more beautiful than to die on one’s most wonderful day?

  The time has come. Last night at ten o’clock, I heard Adi suddenly roar like a wild beast, as I had never heard before, but I did not dare go to his rooms. Goebbels told me an hour later that the Führer had been presented with an intercepted report from a British news agency, revealing that Himmler had begun peace negotiations with the West via the Swedish Count Bernadotte. Himmler! After Göring, his most faithful follower and last remaining candidate for the succession, had finally also betrayed him. This was the worst thing that could have happened to him, said Goebbels, and it meant the end of us all.

  I had no idea of all the things that were happening in the citadel in the next few hours. Meanwhile Sunday had come, no one slept, most of us will never sleep again, and at one in the morning Adi was suddenly standing in my room, almost unrecognizable, his hair disheveled, unshaven, his face fill of red blotches. Shivering all over his body, he flopped onto my bed and rubbed his face with both hands. After he had composed himself a little, he told me what I already knew, and that he had given orders for Himmler to be arrested and shot. Without saying anything, I sat down next to him on the floor and took his beautiful, cold hand in mine. He looked at me and said, while his eyes became moist, “It’s all clear to me now, Tschapperl. Fifteen years ago, even before the takeover of power, I had an investigation carried out to check whether you and your family were pure Aryan. Perhaps you can appreciate that I could not take any chances in that respect. For some reason I had it done by Bormann and not by Himmler, who had already opened dossiers on everything and everyone—on you of course, and even on me, I suspect. Today I think that my intuition, which has never yet deceived me, was giving me the first signal that he was not 100 percent trustworthy. That investigation came up with nothing, and so for me the matter was closed. But not for Himmler. He felt passed over, which he had been, and from then on he waited for the moment when he could get even. Do you remember,” he suddenly asked, “that we were once sitting together on the terrace at the Berghof—you, Bormann, and I—and I said that I might found a dynasty, like Julius Caesar?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “But I remember as if it were yesterday. Julia was just putting coffee and cakes on the table—and I deliberately said it while she was there, so that she could get used to the fact that one day she might have to relinquish Siggi. At the time I was toying with the idea of marrying you after the final victory. That was to be the most dazzling wedding of all time here in Germania, with weeks of festivities in the whole Pan-German World Empire. On his twenty-first birthday, in 1959, Siegfried Hitler would succeed me as Augustus to my Caesar. You and I would retire to Linz, where I, as an old man of seventy, would devote myself exclusively to art and supervise with Speer the construction of my mausoleum on the Danube, that was to be many times larger than that of Napoleon’s in the Dôme des Invalides.”

  A powerful direct hit just above our heads made the bunker shake in the soft earth. Adi flinched and looked anxiously at a stream of mortar dust trickling down in the corner of the room.

  “That’s all over now,” I said.

  “Through treachery, incompetence, and lack of fanaticism.” He nodded. “Of course I should never have said that at the time, because you must never say anything if it is not strictly necessary, but I said it, and Bormann passed it on to his friend Fegelein, when he was half drunk, of course. He in turn should not have done that, but he did, and Fegelein passed it on to Himmler, whose liaison officer he was. Of course Himmler had known for a long time that we had a son; otherwise he would have been no good as a policeman. And then,” said Adi, “last summer, when everything was starting to go wrong and those treacherous swine tried to assassinate me, your brother-in-law went to Himmler and said he wanted to be rid of your pregnant sister. Divorce was naturally out of the question, because that marriage had been my wish, and I had even acted as a witness. And my treacherous chief of police had the answer. He had the papers in Geiselhöring falsified, so killing three birds with one stone: Fegelein would have his way, but what he was really after was that Siggi would not survive, because Siggi stood in the way of his aspirations to succeed me. And incidentally that old score with Bormann was settled.”

  Whatever possessed those men? I did not know what to say and asked, “How do you know all this?”

  “From Fegelein. When I heard about Himmler’s treachery I suspected at once that the aim of his
intended flight to Switzerland was to make contact from there with the Allies, and I immediately had him grilled.”

  “What will happen to him now?”

  He looked at me, and for a moment his eyes turned into two knives, or axes—I don’t know how to express it.

  “It’s already happened.”

  I looked down and thought of Gretl’s child, who would never know its father.

  “At the time,” Adi went on a little later, “I gave Bormann a dressing-down for having bungled things in 1930. I sent him to the Obersalzberg to order Falk to eliminate Siggi, and I think he already suspected that things did not add up but did not dare tell me, even after your father had shown that the documents had been falsified. Or perhaps he did not want to say because he also had the dream of succeeding me. But I shan’t ask him all that, because it no longer matters. I will have no successor; I was an idiot to think that National Socialism would survive me. And for a thousand years at that. Everyone has always underestimated me, but myself most of all. It began with me, and it will end with me. Dönitz can clear up the rubble, as far as I’m concerned; it leaves me cold. Instead of thinking about my successor, I have made another decision, Tschapperl. To make it up to you, I’m going to marry you right away.”