Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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A week passes. Russian troops advance street by street, slowly taking control of the city. The outmanned young boys and old men enlisted as a last line of German defense now tear off their uniforms and armbands, frantically changing back into civilian clothing to avoid being murdered. Those who choose to stand and fight are now retreating into the heart of the city. An attempt to blow up vital bridges to stall the Russian advance ends in tragedy when an underground railway tunnel is mistakenly detonated. Inside are thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers trying to avoid the aboveground artillery. They drown as the four-mile-long tunnel floods with water.1

Nazi leaflets litter the city, dropped from one of the few remaining Luftwaffe aircraft. “Persevere!” they read. “General Wenck and General Steiner are coming to the aid of Berlin.”

Wenck is certainly trying, although not in the way that Nazi officials had hoped. He has turned the Twelfth Army back toward Berlin, surprising Russian forces near the suburb of Potsdam. But the Germans are vastly outnumbered and can soon go no farther. Rather than fight onward, Wenck orders his troops to open a corridor from the city that will allow refugees and elements of the German Ninth Army to follow him back to the safety of the American lines. “It’s not about Berlin anymore,” he tells his army as they turn their backs on the German capital. “It’s not about the Reich anymore.” In time, Wenck will lead hundreds of thousands of German civilians and soldiers westward across the Elbe, where he will surrender to American troops.2 The Russians chase Wenck’s long columns of civilians and soldiers all the way to the American lines, shooting at them right up until the moment they cross the Elbe.

But even if General Wenck had succeeded in reaching Central Berlin, there would have been no stopping the Russians. Berlin is a city with 248 bridges, and only 120 have been destroyed as the Soviets penetrate closer and closer to the Führerbunker. With every new block they capture, the Russians pause and take what they believe to be theirs. The stories of their savagery will become legendary: the two Russian soldiers who rip a nursing infant from his mother’s breast, calmly place the child in his carriage, and then take turns raping the mother; the soldiers who silence an eighty-year-old woman by stuffing a stick of butter in her mouth before violating her. Incredibly, countless women in maternity wards throughout Berlin, some about to go into labor and some who have just given birth, are raped. Horrified screams echo up and down hospital corridors as heartless Russians have their way.

Everywhere, there are suicides: the mother so ashamed by her rape that she ties two shopping satchels full of bricks to her arms, hugs her two infant children, and jumps into the Havel River with them clutched in her grasp; the woman gang-raped all night long who staggers home in the morning to find that her own mother has hanged her three children to protect them, and then hanged herself; the distraught woman sees no other choice but to slash her own wrists.

“The Germans were worse than this in Russia,” a German woman is told when she complains about the atrocities to a Russian officer. “This is simply revenge.”

* * *

The date is April 30, shortly before 2:00 p.m. The Führer is saying farewell. His staff lines up in the corridor outside his bedroom. Wearing a dark gray uniform jacket and creased black pants, Hitler shakes each hand and whispers a personal message to the two dozen secretaries, soldiers, and doctors who have tended to him during his three months in the bunker. They have all sworn an oath of loyalty to the Führer, but he now releases them from that bond, giving them permission to leave the bunker immediately and flee to the American lines, should they choose.

All the while, Eva Braun stands at the Führer’s side wearing a black dress with pink roses framing the square neckline. She has chosen this dress specifically, for it is Hitler’s favorite. Her blond hair is washed and perfectly coiffed.

After the Führer speaks with Traudl Junge, Eva pulls the secretary close and whispers in her ear, “Please do try to get out. You may yet make it through.”

Eva Braun, of course, is not leaving. She has just sworn the ultimate loyalty oath to the Führer: yesterday they were married. These same servants gathered to celebrate the wedding of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Glasses of champagne were filled; only the Führer did not partake. The mood was outwardly joyous, but there was a somber tone to the proceedings. Marriage is normally a time of hope for the future. But everyone assembled knew that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun would soon kill themselves.

Gen. Walther Wenck and his Twelfth Army will never save Berlin. The Soviet army is close by. Their advance units are just five hundred yards away from the Führerbunker, and they now shell the compound from their positions in the Tiergarten, the sprawling park in the heart of the city where Eva Braun once delighted in afternoons of target practice with her pistol. Many of the trees are now mere splinters. Yet those still standing bear the first blooms of spring—signs of life that contrast sharply with the nearby Reichstag building and Kroll Opera House, both battered and pocked by artillery.

Adolf Hitler has been talking of suicide for the last ten days, pragmatically stating that the only other option is to become a Russian prisoner—and for the Führer, that grisly fate is no option at all. Eva Braun, of course, would be a similar trophy if the Russians took her alive, so she, too, must die by her own hand. Earlier today she chose not to have a dentist examine a sore tooth, laughing that it soon wouldn’t matter anyway. And she surprised Traudl Junge just a few hours ago by giving her a silver-fox fur coat. Eva’s initials were sewn onto the lining, inside the well-known symbol of good luck: a four-leaf clover.

Hitler plans to kill himself with a cyanide pill. Until recently he was frightened that it would not work. So he ordered that a similar pill be tested on his beloved dog Blondi, the German shepherd who has been by his side for almost the entire war. Sgt. Fritz Tornow, the Führer’s dog handler, pried open her jaws. Then Dr. Werner Haase, the professor who devised Hitler’s own unique suicide technique, used a pair of pliers to place a pill of prussic acid3 in the dog’s mouth.

Blondi is a large dog, originally chosen by the Führer as a symbol of German pride because she closely resembled a wolf. She trusts her master, and was docile as she allowed Haase to press the jaws of the pliers together, breaking the capsule and spilling the acid onto her tongue.

Blondi died instantly.

Dr. Haase immediately called for Hitler, so that he might see for himself the pill’s effectiveness. The Führer was speechless at the sight of Blondi lying motionless on the floor. He took one look and went directly to his bedroom.

Now it’s his turn.

After dismissing the staff, Hitler and Eva retire to his sitting room and close the door. Eva Braun sits down on one end of the blue-and-white couch in the corner, still wearing her black dress with roses framing the neckline. She rests her head on the couch’s arm and curls her legs up under her, as if lying down to take a nap.

The solemnity of the moment is broken by a frantic banging on the room’s steel door. A sobbing Magda Goebbels, wife of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, demands to see the Führer and begs him not to end his life. Magda and her husband recently moved into the bunker’s top floor with their six children. Only three days ago, Hitler gave her his own Golden Party Badge4 as a thank-you for her years of fervent support. Now Hitler allows Magda into his sitting room one last time, says a few quiet words of good-bye, then forces her to leave, closing the metal door behind her. He does not lock it, however, for the Führer has given strict instructions about what must be done with his body once he is gone. “Wait ten minutes,” he orders SS major Otto Günsche, his military adjutant.

Hitler has been carrying his Walther 7.65 mm pistol for the past few weeks, and now he chambers a round. History does not record the final words between him and Eva Braun. They have known each other for sixteen years. She has seen him rise to power, just as she more recently has witnessed his physical decline.

Eva is curled up like a cat on the right side of the sofa. Adolf Hitler takes a seat on the other end, pistol in hand. Eva’s own revolver rests on a nearby table, next to a vase of flowers.

She goes first, sliding the cyanide pill out of the small brass lipstick-size vial and placing it between her teeth. She rests her head on the armrest and bites down on the capsule.

To prevent the possibility of failure, Eva is now meant to place her small handgun to her temple and finish the job. This is the policy outlined by the suicide professor Dr. Werner Haase. But Eva has already made it clear she will not shoot herself: “I want to be a beautiful corpse,” she insisted to Hitler.

The bunker sitting room immediately smells of almonds, a scent commonly associated with hydrocyanic acid. Eva Braun’s body loses the ability to absorb oxygen. Her heart and brain, the two organs that need air the most, shut down in an instant. Sadly, it is a death far quicker than that suffered by the millions of Jews her new husband sent to the gas chambers. For the Zyklon B gas that was used in the death camps is also a form of hydrocyanic acid.

Seconds later, still curled in the fetal position, Eva Braun is dead.

The Führer then places his capsule between his teeth. At the same time, he points the business end of the Walther at his right temple. He bites down on the capsule and pulls the Walther’s trigger a split second later.

His body sags to the side, until his torso hangs limp against Eva Braun’s. The Führer’s pistol drops to the floor next to his foot. Blood pours from his shattered skull, dripping off the couch and forming a great crimson puddle on the floor.

Ten minutes pass. Major Günsche enters. The bodies are wrapped in blankets and taken aboveground. Hitler’s dying fear was that his corpse might become an exhibit in a Russian museum, so the bodies are doused with forty gallons of gasoline and incinerated.5

Adolf Hitler, the man who murdered millions, has claimed his last victim.