The breakout from the bunker

On the night of 1–2 May 1945 the headquarters of the Third Reich in Berlin ceased to exist. At around 11 p.m. the first groups set out from the cellars of the Reich Chancellery – people who for the past few weeks had been living in the Führerbunker and the shelters around it: officers, SS guards, secretaries, doctors, drivers and party dignitaries. They wanted to break through the Soviet ring and reach the north-west – the remnants of the German forces, or the Elbe and the Americans and British. Few succeeded. The two generals who stayed behind in the bunker – the Chief of the Army General Staff, Hans Krebs, and Hitler’s chief adjutant, Wilhelm Burgdorf – shot themselves after midnight. Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Secretary to the Führer, died a few hours later on the railway tracks near the Lehrter Bahnhof station. On the morning of 2 May the Red Army occupied the Reich Chancellery and the bunker.

The statement sometimes encountered that Krebs, Bormann and Burgdorf committed suicide together that night needs correcting. Krebs and Burgdorf did indeed take their own lives in the bunker. Bormann, however, died outside it, during the breakout; according to findings made in 1972–1973 and confirmed by DNA testing in 1998, he most probably bit into a cyanide ampoule when he realised that he would not get out of the encirclement. No one, though, saw him die, and for more than a quarter of a century his fate remained one of the greatest mysteries of the end of the war.

After Hitler’s death

Adolf Hitler took his own life on the afternoon of 30 April. In his political testament of 29 April he had named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz Reich President, Joseph Goebbels Chancellor and Bormann “Party Minister”. Dönitz was at Plön in Schleswig-Holstein, hundreds of kilometres from Berlin, so in the bunker power was exercised by Goebbels and Bormann. Bormann was at that time one of the most powerful men in the state. Since 1941, after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain, he had headed the Party Chancellery, and from 1943, as Secretary to the Führer, he had controlled access to Hitler, his correspondence and personnel decisions. His power, however, depended entirely on the person of the dictator; after Hitler’s death it meant nothing.

In the early hours of 1 May General Krebs, who spoke Russian, crossed the front line to the headquarters of General Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army, with a letter from Goebbels and Bormann. He informed the Russians of Hitler’s death and asked for a ceasefire and recognition of the new Reich government. The Soviet side demanded unconditional surrender, to which Goebbels was unwilling to agree. The talks collapsed in the afternoon. In the evening Goebbels and his wife Magda killed their six children and took their own lives in the Chancellery garden.

Those remaining in the bunker had to choose between death, captivity and an attempt to escape. General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the defence of Berlin, had obtained Hitler’s permission on 30 April for an attempt to break out of the city in small groups, on condition that no one surrendered. On the evening of 1 May he decided that units which wished to could make the attempt; he himself was already preparing for surrender talks.

The breakout groups

The breakout from the Chancellery area was organised by SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke, commander of the defence of the government quarter, known as Sector “Z” or the “Citadel”. The people from the bunker and the nearby shelters were divided into several groups – up to ten, according to participants – which were to set out one after another at intervals. The plan was to pass through the underground railway tunnels beneath streets held by the Russians to Friedrichstraße station, cross the Spree and march on northwards, towards districts where the Germans were supposedly still holding out.

Mohnke led the first group himself. With him went Hitler’s secretaries Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, Bormann’s secretary Else Krüger, Hitler’s cook Constanze Manziarly, the SS doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck and the Foreign Ministry’s representative to Hitler, Walter Hewel. The group avoided the Weidendammer Bridge, which the main wave of escapers was to use, and crossed the Spree by a footbridge. Further on, amid the ruins and fires, some of the party became separated. Mohnke and his companions reached the Schultheiss brewery on the Prinzenallee, where hundreds of soldiers and civilians had taken refuge. There, on 2 May, they learned of the surrender order. Mohnke gave himself up to the Russians; Hewel shot himself, and Constanze Manziarly disappeared without trace. Junge, Christian and Krüger managed to get further west.

The second wave included Bormann, the state secretary at the propaganda ministry Werner Naumann, the Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, the SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger and Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur. Bormann was carrying a copy of Hitler’s testament; he wanted to reach Dönitz and take up the office entrusted to him. The group went through the tunnel to Friedrichstraße station and came up to the surface by the Weidendammer Bridge. There the Germans made several attempts to force their way across the bridge, sheltering behind tanks and armoured vehicles. According to Axmann’s account, the Tiger tank behind which they were advancing was hit, and Bormann and Stumpfegger were knocked down by the blast. Only at the third attempt, at around 1 a.m., did part of the group get across to the other bank.

Beyond the bridge the escapers split up. Bormann, Stumpfegger and Axmann walked along the railway tracks towards the Lehrter Bahnhof. There Axmann decided to go in a different direction from his two companions. When he ran into a Soviet patrol he turned back – and on the bridge at Invalidenstraße, near the marshalling yard, he saw in the moonlight two bodies, which he recognised as those of Bormann and Stumpfegger. He had no time to check how they had died. Baur, wounded in the legs, was taken prisoner – in June, in Poznań, his lower leg was amputated, and he spent ten years in Soviet prisons and camps. Axmann and Naumann were the only members of the group to get out of Berlin and reach the west.

Separately, Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche and his valet Heinz Linge – both witnesses to the burning of Hitler’s body, and both soon captured – tried to escape, as did the chauffeur Erich Kempka, who managed to slip away from the Russians; the Americans detained him only on 20 June in Bavaria. At the same time larger units tried to break out from other points in the city centre. The remnants of the SS division “Nordland” under SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg were thrown back and scattered, and an attempt to get out northwards along the Schönhauser Allee failed. In the west a column of tanks, soldiers and thousands of civilians passed through the Tiergarten and, under heavy fire, forced the bridge over the Havel at Spandau. Some of the escapers later reached the Elbe, but most were killed or captured. No one counted the dead of that night.

The last in the bunker

Krebs and Burgdorf did not attempt to escape. Krebs had conducted the talks with Chuikov on 1 May and knew that the Russians would agree to nothing short of unconditional surrender. Burgdorf, head of the Army Personnel Office, was the same general who in October 1944 had brought Field Marshal Erwin Rommel an ultimatum and poison and forced him to commit suicide. After midnight, on what was now 2 May, both generals shot themselves in the bunker. The Russians found their bodies a few hours later. The commander of Hitler’s SS escort, SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Schädle, who had been wounded in the leg and was unable to march, also shot himself.

A few members of the technical staff remained in the bunker to the end. The telephone operator of Hitler’s escort, Rochus Misch, had been released from duty by Goebbels before the minister’s death. He and the mechanic Johannes Hentschel, who ran the generators, exchanged letters to their wives in case they were killed. Early on the morning of 2 May Misch left the bunker and tried to get north through the underground railway tunnels, but was soon captured. At the Lubyanka in Moscow the NKVD officers interrogating him wanted above all to know what had happened to Hitler; he spent eight years in camps. He died in Berlin in 2013, the last surviving member of Hitler’s immediate entourage in the bunker. Hentschel did not flee: upstairs, in the cellars of the Chancellery, there was a field hospital with hundreds of wounded who needed electricity, water and ventilation. He stayed with the machines and on the morning of 2 May gave himself up to the Soviet soldiers who entered the bunker. He returned from captivity in 1949.

The Russians in the Reich Chancellery

On the morning of 2 May units of General Nikolai Berzarin’s Soviet 5th Shock Army occupied the building of the New Reich Chancellery (PL). The official Soviet version described a fierce assault across the Wilhelmplatz, with a gun blasting in the doors and a fight for every room, similar to the fighting for the Reichstag. The British historian Antony Beevor regards it as exaggerated: most of the German soldiers had left the Chancellery area during the night, and resistance must have been much weaker than at the Reichstag. That same day Weidling signed the order for the surrender of Berlin, and the fighting in the city died away.

Soldiers and officers of the military counter-intelligence service SMERSH entered the bunker. Joseph Stalin wanted to be certain that Hitler was dead. On 2 May the charred bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were found by the bunker exit, and the bodies of Krebs and Burgdorf inside the bunker; a day later the bodies of the Goebbels children were found. SMERSH recovered the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun from a shell crater in the Chancellery garden in the first days of May, and their identity was established from their teeth, thanks to the testimony of an assistant and a dental technician from the practice of Hitler’s personal dentist. For years Moscow kept this secret and spread contradictory versions of the dictator’s fate. Those from the bunker who ended up in Soviet captivity – Mohnke, Günsche, Linge, Baur, Misch – were interrogated many times; they returned to Germany between 1949 and 1956, most of them only in the mid-1950s. Junge, detained in June 1945, Kempka, Axmann and other witnesses who found themselves in the west gave statements to the British and Americans; from these accounts British intelligence reconstructed the course of Hitler’s last days.

The Bormann mystery

Because Bormann’s body had not been found and Axmann’s account was for a long time the only testimony to his death, rumours circulated for years that he had escaped – to South America, to Spain, even to Moscow. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL) tried him in absentia, as Article 12 of its charter allowed; in the autumn of 1945 notices were published in the press and broadcast on the radio summoning him to appear before the court. His court-appointed defence counsel, Friedrich Bergold, argued in vain that the defendant was dead. The prosecution pointed out that Bormann had helped to draft and had signed the regime’s anti-Jewish decrees and decisions on policy towards the populations of conquered countries. On 1 October 1946 the Tribunal acquitted him of conspiracy against peace, found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced him to death by hanging, with the proviso that if he were found, new facts could be taken into account.

The solution came only decades later. In 1963 a retired postal worker testified that in May 1945 the Russians had ordered him to bury two bodies found by the railway bridge near the Lehrter Bahnhof; Stumpfegger’s military pass had been found on one of them. A search in 1965 yielded nothing. On 7 December 1972, however, construction workers dug up two skeletons in the area, a dozen or so metres from the spot indicated. Fragments of glass – traces of cyanide ampoules – were found in the jaws of both. Identification from the teeth and the structure of the skulls allowed the West German government to declare Bormann dead in 1973. Any remaining doubts were finally dispelled in 1998 by DNA analysis, compared with genetic material from a relative. Bormann’s ashes were scattered over the Baltic in 1999. Today the site of the former Lehrter Bahnhof is occupied by Berlin’s main railway station, Berlin Hauptbahnhof.

Significance

The breakout from the bunker closed the story of Hitler’s Berlin headquarters. Of the men who under the dictator’s testament were to rule Germany after his death, Goebbels and Bormann died in Berlin; authority over what was left of the Reich passed to Dönitz, based from 3 May at Flensburg, who within the following week brought about the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht. The deaths of Krebs and Burgdorf and the dispersal of the last defenders of the government quarter meant that on 2 May there was no longer anyone in Berlin who could stop Weidling from surrendering.

The night of 1–2 May also had long-term consequences for the memory of the war. The testimony of witnesses who survived the breakout became the basis of what is known about Hitler’s last days, and at the same time – scattered between Soviet and Western investigators and long inaccessible – fed legends about the escape of the Third Reich’s leaders. The fate of Bormann, convicted at Nuremberg as one of the major war criminals but in reality dead since the night of the breakout, was cleared up only more than half a century after the war.