Det er ofte noko patetisk over slutten til store tyrannar. Brått går det
opp for dei at "verket" ikkje var liv laga likevel, at dei berre er små
menneske som alle andre, og at dei ikkje kan tyrannisere seg ut av det.
I nokre høve blir det spunne mytar og fortald løgner om heroisk livskamp
og mot. I røyndomen finst ingenting av dette. Berre ussel og feig venting
der dei går i ring for å vinne litt av den tida som aldri kjem att.
Oddmund Garvik
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,528697,00.html
<<<<<<<
The lost secrets of Hitler's final hours
Nurse's missing account paints picture of a trembling, broken Führer
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday July 28, 2001
The Guardian
Erna Flegel is hardly a well-known face from the Third Reich. No known
photographs remain and it is unclear what became of her after the war.
But, as a nurse in Hitler's Berlin bunker, she was an important witness to
the Führer's final desperate days.
Flegel's account of the last days of April 1945, hidden away in CIA vaults
until now, is all the more valuable because she was a faceless, loyal
underling who had nothing to prove or to hide when she was interrogated by
US intelligence officers soon after the war ended. Her story from the
bunker is full of sad delusions - she believed that "at the end we were
like a big family" - and petty observations, including a shrewish portrait
of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun.
Most of all, Frau Flegel was a true believer. She makes no attempt to hide
her admiration for Hitler, and provides a detailed, nurse's description of
the beaten Führer, grey-haired and shaking but still eerily fixated by
small children as his Reich collapsed in flames around him.
The only person she seems to have held in higher esteem was Magda
Goebbels, the wife of the Nazi propaganda chief.
The Flegel transcript finally surfaced in 1981, more or less by accident,
only to disappear again into the CIA's archives where it stayed until a
mass declassification of wartime documents over the past few months.
Nurse Flegel had been assigned to the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin since
January 1943. As the allies closed in, she looked on as the last diehard
Nazis gathered around their Führer. On April 20, Joseph Goebbels arrived
with his extensive and doomed family.
"Hitler was very fond of the Goebbels children," Flegel recalled. "They
gave him a great deal of pleasure; even in the last days he invited them
for chocolate, which made the children very happy. In Hitler's shelter
there was only one bathtub, which was naturally provided for him. He
allowed the Goebbels children to bathe in it, which likewise afforded them
great pleasure."
As it became clear that neither the Wehrmacht nor the SS would or could
arrive at the last hour to save him, the Führer began to crumble before
nurse Flegel's eyes.
She wrote: "To be sure, he had aged greatly in the last days; he now had a
lot of grey hair, and gave the impression of a man at least 15 or 20
years older. He shook a great deal, walking was difficult for him, his
right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his
life."
"In the period immediately after the attempt he always shook hands with us
with his left hand, but that had gone away again, and toward the end,
he was using his right hand."
Flegel said she finally realised the Third Reich was at an end on April 28
when she heard that Hitler would marry Eva Braun, a woman of whom Flegel
clearly thought very little. Hitler "would never have taken this step",
she reasoned, if it had been possible to carry on.
She said: "Eva Braun was a completely colourless personality. When she was
with a crowd of stenographers, she was in no way conspicuous among
them. For example, the fact that Hitler had poisoned his wolfhound somehow
affected us more."
The next evening, Flegel was summoned with the rest of the medical team,
to line up and take their leave of the Führer.
A woman Flegel described as a "brown sister" - probably an official from
the Munich party headquarters - blurted out: "Führer, we believe in you
and in a good outcome."
Hitler replied: "Each one must stand in his place and hold out, and if
fate requires it, there he must fall!"
Prussic acid
Each day, nurse Flegel had asked one of the doctors, Werner Haase, whether
Hitler was still alive. Each day he had replied "Yes", until April 30,
when he gave no reply, and the nurse knew what it meant. Earlier in the
afternoon, Hitler had shot himself in the head, and Eva Braun had taken
prussic acid. The bodies, as Erna Flegel confirms, were burnt in the
chancellery garden.
The next morning, the survivors were told they were released from their
oath of loyalty and some, including Martin Bormann, Hitler's private
secretary, left in an ill-fated attempt to fight their way to the west.
Flegel stayed and witnessed the deaths of the Goebbels family.
Joseph Goebbels's wife, Magda, had been his "guiding genius", she later
declared to her American interrogators.
"She was far superior to the average human being. It took a resolute
spirit to decide to sacrifice her own children; indeed it required more
resolution than for Hitler to take his life," Flegel writes.
"Where shall my children go?" Magda Goebbels asked her. "The shame of
being Goebbels's children will always rest upon them."
Flegel said that Magda Goebbels told her six children, aged from four to
12, that they would be in the shelter for a long time and would therefore
have to be inoculated.
Dr Helmut Kunz, described by Flegel as a dentist, injected them with
poison. Later the same evening, their parents killed themselves with
prussic acid.
Erna Flegel was taken prisoner by the Red Army when it arrived at the
bunker on May 2, but was allowed to continue working as a nurse for the
next few months, until she ended up in the hands of the US Strategic
Services Unit (SSU), one of the precursors to the CIA.
The interview with Flegel went missing until 1981, when a Connecticut
doctor and amateur historian stumbled on them in an army archive and sent
them straight to Richard Helms, the US intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin
and later CIA director.
He wrote back saying: "It is probably one of the most accurate interviews
obtained and has thus far never been quoted, as far as I know, in any of
the massive books about Hitler's Germany."
>>>>>>>
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