He escaped Hitler's bunker just 24 hours before the dictator shot himself

Götterdämmerung

Tuesday, 26 April, 2005

Bernd Freytag von Löringhoven, 91, is one of the last living eyewitnesses to Hitler's final days

He escaped Hitler's bunker just 24 hours before the dictator shot himself.

As an aide to army chiefs he had had daily contact with Hitler.

A German army officer responsible for drafting battle front maps for Adolf Hitler's daily briefings said that a week before the Nazi dictator killed himself they were relying on "enemy" news for Germany's defence.

Bernd Freytag von Löringhoven, one of a few surviving eyewitnesses from Hitler's bunker, said he had to improvise to keep the Nazi leader informed after the army's 400-man communications battalion fled en masse on April 23, 1945.

With the Soviet army closing in on Berlin and Hitler demanding reports on the fronts, Freytag von Löringhoven quietly began using news bulletins from Reuters and the BBC monitored in the bunker in order to piece together his briefings and maps.

"Our communications system had been excellent but after the battalion abruptly disappeared I knew I'd have to get news from elsewhere," said Freytag von Löringhoven, 91, in an interview at his home in Munich.

A decorated tank commander, Major Freytag von Löringhoven had a ringside seat to history - seeing Hitler at briefings for several hours a day between July 1944 and April 1945 as adjutant for General Heinz Guderian and later General Hans Krebs.

"The deputy press attache in the bunker Heinz Lorenz monitored Reuters on the BBC. After our own communications were lost, he started giving me their news reports. They contained useful information that we no longer had about the geographical locations of Allied advances in Germany and throughout Europe."

To supplement that intelligence for their maps, he and a deputy picked random names from a Berlin telephone book and rang up ordinary residents - as well as their own friends - living in outlying districts to ask if they had seen the Soviet army.

"I had to know what was happening and the Reuters dispatches were useful," Freytag von Löringhoven said. "I found I could trust them. They were concise and helped for the maps and military analyses. There was also some propaganda of course, but that was easy enough to ignore. I had seen more than enough of (Josef) Göbbels's propaganda to know what lies looked like."

As Germany readies to mark the 60th anniversary of World War Two's end on May 8, the insights from Freytag von Löringhoven offer a new glimpse into the army's communications breakdown and Hitler's remarkable reliance on foreign news accounts.

Baron Freytag von Löringhoven, a tall and elegant man with a razor sharp memory who after 1956 held top posts in the West German Bundeswehr as a three-star general, laughs easily 60 years later at the irony of relying on reports from news organisations based in Britain to keep Hitler informed.

But when asked if Hitler himself was aware that Reuters and the BBC were the sources of news from the front during the final week of his life, the smile disappears - because to listen to broadcasts from the enemy was flirting with treason.

"No I didn't mention that," he said. "But Krebs knew and he trusted me."

He said the BBC's German language service read out almost hourly reports quoting Reuters accounts from the front lines.

While Germans have been critically examining their country's past for decades, the reflection accompanying this year's anniversaries is different - partly because generations actively involved in the war are at least 80 or no longer alive.

That may explain why Freytag von Löringhoven, an articulate aristocrat, has become an important eyewitness often included in German documentaries. He also served as an adviser for the film Der Untergang (Downfall), and recently co-authored a best-selling book about his experiences in the bunker published in France: "Dans le Bunker de Hitler.

He is by and large full of praise for the accuracy of the film, a box-office success in Germany, and defends it from criticism over its disputed portrayal of Hitler's human side.

"Hitler had many different faces," Freytag von Löringhoven. "He could be kind. The Austrian charm would sometimes come through. He was always asking people about their health.

"But he was mostly ice cold and deeply distrustful of everyone," he added, recalling how he endured daily full-body searches in the bunker.

"He was especially cruel to army officers. He blamed them for everything."

With the Soviets just a few hundred metres away from the bunker on April 29, Freytag von Loringhoven managed to escape with two other aides through western Berlin and later reached his family in Leipzig.

He got Hitler's permission for a plan to try to get through the Soviet encirclement to reach German army generals west of Berlin. He said Hitler was fascinated by the plan, using a small boat on the Havel River, and bizarrely offered advice on getting a boat with an electric motor.

Freytag von Löringhoven saw the end was close a day earlier when Hitler was informed about a Swedish radio report that SS chief Heinrich Himmler was trying to pass word through a Swedish diplomat to the Western Allies that Germany was prepared to surrender. On the evening of April 28 press attache Lorenz showed a Reuters confirmation of that, Freytag von Loringhoven said.

"For Hitler, Himmler was always the most loyal and so when he saw that Himmler was sending feelers to capitulate it sent him over the edge," Freytag von Loringhoven said.

"If loyal Heinrich would betray him, Hitler knew it would be over within hours."

Two days later, on April 30, Hitler was dead and Freytag von Löringhoven, posing as a forced labourer from Luxembourg, was on his way to Leipzig. Later captured, he spent two years in a British prisoner of war camp before taking a publishing industry job in Munich.

"There were times I thought I wouldn't get out of the bunker alive," he said. "I've had a lot of good fortune in my life."

He describes the order to join his boss Gen Krebs in Hitler's bunker, just over a week before the dictator's suicide, as a death sentence.

He had already survived the fighting on the Russian front and was one of a few to escape from Stalingrad.
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He met Hitler for the first time in July 1944. His predecessor had been executed for his part in the bomb plot against Hitler.
The young Major Freytag von Löringhoven, who was not a Nazi party supporter, says he was "completely flabbergasted" when he saw Hitler just days after the blast.
"I had the image of a very strong, vital person with charisma, but what I saw was a sick old man. His right arm was injured by the attempt and his figure had changed, his head was sunk into his shoulders.
"His left hand was very weak and his left foot dragged behind him."
As for reports that Hitler had had a charismatic spell, he says: "I felt nothing, the eyes were pale and without any expression anymore."
He said he was surprised that was in the hands of such a "sick prematurely old man".
Dying days
Inside the bunker he describes wild mood swings. There would be a temporary explosion of hope and then confidence would collapse again. The main topic of conversation was suicide - whether they should take cyanide pills or shoot themselves in the head when the Russians arrived.
He also recalls the drunkenness in the bunker, but not the orgies that some accounts speak of. He says he was too busy preparing for situation conferences.
When he met Hitler's mistress Eva Braun - soon to be the Führer's wife - he had no idea who she was. The Nazi elite had been very discreet.
Just days before the end, Magda Göbbels, the wife of Hitler's Propaganda Minister Josef Göbbels, arrived with her six children.
They would later be poisoned by their parents in the bunker with the help of an SS doctor.
He recalls their pale faces peering out in fear from inside their dark coats.
"When I saw these poor children it pressed my heart," he says.
He feared there was no chance of getting out.
News that his trusted SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had made peace feelers to the Allies had a devastating affect on Hitler in the final days.
"This was like a bomb. Hitler called it treason," the former major says.
'Ice cold'
But with his work done, just 24 hours before Hitler's suicide, Major Freytag von Löringhoven was given permission to break out.
He said he had no wish to die "like a rat in the bunker". He took his leave from Hitler with one last meeting which lasted around 20 minutes.
"I personally got the impression that he was a bit envious," he says. "We were 29 or 30 years old and we had a chance to get out because we were sound and young and he had no chance because he was a wreck."
He disputes portrayals of Hitler as raving and foaming at the mouth in the final days.
"I was present at these rages but they were not so excessive," he says.
He never saw him screaming with anger but says he could be "ice cold in his expressions and very aggressive, especially towards the generals".
Hitler was by the end resigned to his fate. His Reich, which was to have lasted 1,000 years, was in ruins.
But looking back, one thing still puzzles him. Hitler, he says, "was still so quiet and realistic just 24 hours before he shot himself".
The young officer escaped, was captured by the western Allies and held as a prisoner of war. He re-joined the army in 1956 and later served in Nato.
He maintains that the divide between the army and the Nazi elite was very real and that although there were rumours, no one discussed the fate of the Jews in top military circles. It was "taboo" he says.

Asked for his abiding memory of Hitler 60 years on? He pauses at first, then says simply: "He was a terrible creation. Yes, a being, but a being full of evil and cruelty... he was a monster."