Chapter 198 Chapter Thirty-One Five Minutes After Midnight, or "The Captain Sinks with the Ship" (10)

Near noon on April 30, Soviet troops occupied the zoo.An advance force was reported to have occupied a street separated from the bunker.It is difficult to see what effect this news had on Hitler.At lunch he chatted with the two secretaries and the cook as if it were another meeting with his valets.He was poised, if anything, quieter than usual.In Traudel's view, "it was a death party under the mask of resignation and poise". However, this was no ordinary day.As soon as the three women were gone, Hitler called them back again.Baumann, the Goebbels, and several others came together.Bending over (more than before), he came out of the room with Eva.Eva is wearing her favorite black dress; her hair is neatly combed.Hitler began to shake hands with everyone one by one.He was pale, with tears in his eyes, and when he shook hands with Traudl, he looked straight at her without seeming to see; he murmured something, which she did not understand.She was in a daze, standing motionless, forgetting everything in the room.Eva Hitler, smiling sadly, put his arm around her, and she woke up a little. "Please, at least you have to get out of here too," she said, before she sobbed, "and say hello to Munich for me."

Hitler pulled Genscher aside and said that he had committed suicide with his wife and that he wanted their bodies to be burned. "After I died," he explained, "I didn't want the Russians to take me to a wax figure museum." Genscher hurriedly called Kempka, who lived in the bunker, for a drink and said he would come right away.Kempka knew something was wrong, because no one had thought of drinking these days.He fetched a bottle of cognac and waited for Gensher to arrive.the phone is ringing.It was Genscher calling again. "I want 200 liters of petrol, right away," he said hoarsely.Kempka thought he was joking and asked him what he wanted so much gasoline for.

Genscher couldn't tell him the purpose on the phone. "Bring it to the entrance to the Führer's bunker. Make sure to get it!" Kempka said. The rest of the gasoline - about 40,000 liters - was buried under the zoo, which was under heavy artillery fire. , There will be no pause in the shelling until 5 o'clock. "I can't wait an hour. See if I can suck some out of the wrecked car." Hitler was emotional as he bid farewell to his longtime private jet pilot.The two held hands tightly.Bauer persuaded him to fly to Argentina, or to Japan, or to some Arab country--because of Hitler's anti-Semitism, he became a loyal and strong friend of the Arabs.But the Führer would not listen. "One has to have the courage to face the consequences—I'm going to end it all here. Tomorrow, I know, thousands of people will curse me—it's fate." He praised Ball for his long service Expressed his gratitude and sent him a portrait of his beloved Frederick the Great as a gift. "I don't want this painting to be lost. I want to keep it for the future. It has great historical value."

Pohl said that he would only accept it if he was allowed to hand it over to a museum or painting academy in the future.Hitler insisted that it was for himself.Then, he smiled slightly and said, in the past, didn’t you, Pole, complain when you were transporting this large portrait from this headquarters to that headquarters?He squeezed Pol's hand tightly. "Pol," he said bitterly, "I want them to write this on my tombstone: 'He was the victim of his generals!'" In the bedroom, the Hitler couple sat on a couch.Behind them is the place where the portrait of Frederick the Great once hung.The first to commit suicide was Eva—suicide by taking poison.At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Hitler picked up his 7.65mm Wald pistol (the Wald pistol that Gilly used to commit suicide and Eva also used it in her suicide attempt).This pistol has been his companion for many years: in the early days of the founding of the party, he used it to defend against the attacks of the red elements;On several occasions when he was depressed, he threatened to use it to kill himself.This time, his thoughts of suicide were not fake at all.On one shelf were photographs of his mother when she was young.He pointed the pistol to his right temple and pulled the trigger.

To keep Goebbels' children from going downstairs, Traudel was telling them fairy tales.A gunshot rang out from inside the dank bunker.The young Helmu thought it was the enemy's bomb, and said: "It hit!" In the conference room, Goebbels, Bormann, Axmann, and Genscher hesitated after hearing the gunshots. After a while, under the leadership of Goebbels, he rushed into the living room of the head of state.Genscher saw the Führer lying face down on a low table.To his left lies Eva; she collapses on the armrest, her lips tightly shut behind her.Both of her nostrils had changed color due to the cyanamide she had taken.Her skirt was wet, but it wasn't blood.Presumably, when the Führer was shot and fell, he knocked over the pitcher on the little table and wet her skirt.Horrified, Genscher stumbled back to the conference room and ran into Kempka.

"For God's sake, Otto," the driver Kempka asked, "what happened! You told me to send someone to risk my life for 200 liters of gasoline, you must be crazy!" The door of the cloakroom is the same, close it tightly so that no one can come in.Afterwards, he closed the door to the Führer's bedroom, turned around, and stared wide-eyed. "The head of state is dead!" The cause of death that Kempka could think of was that Hitler had a heart attack.Genscher was speechless, although he saw the bullet hole in Hitler's right temple, which he inserted into his mouth, using his finger as a pistol.His panic-stricken gesture convinced many that Hitler committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth.

"Where is Eva?" Genscher pointed to Hitler's living room, breathed slowly, and said "with him".Genscher stammered for several minutes before he could make things clear. Ringe poked his head out of Hitler's living room, asking for petrol.Kempka said that he only has about 170 liters, which are in cans and are now placed at the entrance of the garden.Linge and Sturmfeeger wrapped Hitler's body in a dark brown army blanket and carried it out.The Führer's face was half hidden, his left arm drooped and wobbled.Bowman hugged Eva and followed behind.Her hair is disheveled.Seeing Bowman holding Eva, Kempka couldn't bear it.She had hated Bowman all her life.Kempka thought to himself, "Don't take another step!" He yelled to Genscher, "I'll hold Eva." After shouting, he snatched Eva from Bowman's arms.In this bunker, there are four staircases from bottom to top.When Kempka was halfway there, Eva's body nearly slipped.He stopped, unable to move on.Later, Gensher came to help.The two carried Eva's body to the garden.

Another bombardment by the Russians began, and the shells continued to explode in the rubble.All that remains of the Prime Minister's Office are ruined tiles and walls, and with the explosion of each shell, the canine-tooth-like walls are crumbling again.Through a cloud of dust, Kempka could see the Führer's body within ten feet of the entrance to the bunker.His trouser legs are rolled up; his right foot is turned inward—a typical posture for long-distance bus rides. Kempka and Genscher placed Eva's body on Hitler's right.Suddenly, the artillery fire intensified, forcing them to take shelter at the entrance of the bunker.Kempka waited for a few minutes, grabbed a can of gasoline, and ran to the two bodies.He moved Hitler's left arm to his side.This made it even more difficult for him to do a job he didn't want to do; he couldn't bear to pour gasoline on the Führer's body.Suddenly a gust of wind blew Hitler's hair up.Kempka opened the oil can.Just then a shell exploded, raining rubble and gravel on him, and a piece of shrapnel hissed over his head.He had no choice but to run back to escape.

Genscher, Kempka, and Ringer stayed at the entrance, waiting for a break in the shelling.The shelling stopped and the three ran back to the body.Shaking, Kempka poured petrol on the body, thinking: "I can't do this and I'm doing it." He could tell from the expressions on Ringo's and Genscher's faces; they reacted the same way when they poured gasoline.At the entrance, Goebbels, Bormann, and Stumpfegger watched all this furtively with terror and concern. The clothes on the corpse were completely soaked, and the strong wind blew, and the clothes did not move.The shelling began again; but the three of them continued to pour gasoline on the corpses, bottle after bottle, until the shallow depressions where the bodies lay were full of gasoline.Genscher suggested lighting the fire with a grenade, but Kempka refused.He caught a glimpse of a piece of rag next to the fire hose at the entrance, and pointed it out to Gensher.Gensher dipped a rag in gasoline.

Goebbels handed Kempka a box of matches.Kempka set the rag on fire and threw it over the body.In an instant, a ball of fire rolled in the air, forming a mushroom shape, followed by a large puff of thick black smoke.In a city full of flames, it was a small fire, but a creepy one.People were in a trance, watching the fire slowly engulfing Adolf and Eva.Genscher and Kempka staggered back to the entrance, and people poured gasoline on the corpse again; for the next three hours, they continued to pour gasoline on the burning corpse. Gensher was dizzy and slowly crawled back to the bunker.On the top floor of the bunker, he saw Traudl sitting on a stool with a bottle of Steinhagen brandy beside him.He took a sip; his large hands were still shaking. "I carried out the Führer's last order," he said softly. "His body was burned." She said nothing.When Genscher went to inspect the body again, she couldn't help but went to inspect Hitler's living room.The door is open.On the floor next to the couch, there was a copper pot of poison that looked like an empty lipstick pot.On the cushion to the right of the couch, she found blood—Hitler's blood.On an iron hanger hung the leash and his gray overcoat; above it hung his gold party cap and light buckskin gloves.She decided to take the gloves home as a souvenir—at least one, but something stopped her.She found a silver fox fur coat in the closet, the one that Eva had bequeathed her, but Traudl refused to take it.What's the use of that thing?All she needs is a vial of poison.

The ashes of Hitler and Eva were swept onto a canvas that night, Genscher recalls, "into a bomb crater outside the entrance to the bunker, buried with soil, and tamped down firmly with stakes." He was buried in the rubble of failure; not in Munich, as he instructed the architect Giesler (“Here I was born, I started my movement, and my heart is here”).At his burial, which should have been present, Lang sang a poem by Baldu von Schirach based on the Führer's own words: troop of soldiers stand here; warriors in gray uniforms, A row of samples, can not see the edge. In the wind and rain, they scatter, scatter... It is possible that they abandoned me— But even alone, tottering, I want to raise our flag high too! my smiling lips, May speak mad words, But only I fall first, to bring down our flag, And turned into a shroud, Cover my dead body with pride! The flag fell where he fell; with him died National Socialism and a Third Reich that wanted to survive for a thousand years.Because of him, the Germany he loved lay in ruins. The driving force of his life—hate and fear of the Jews—was gone.This is the greatest irony.He originally planned to exterminate 6 million Jews as a gift to the world.However, this instead led to the establishment of a Jewish state.