Hitler's last 24 hours: I want to be a beautiful corpse, said Eva amid a frenzy of sex and drinking

A mesmerizing new book gives a minute-by-minute account of Hitler’s last day in his Berlin bunker exactly 70 years ago. On Saturday, in our first extract, we revealed how he toasted his wedding to Eva Braun before preparing for death. Today, we tell how an orgy of drunkenness and debauchery broke out among his henchmen as the Russians closed in.

7am, Sunday, April 29, 1945

The people of Berlin are emerging from their overcrowded underground bunkers in search of food. Armin Lehmann, 16, working as a Hitler Youth courier, is horrified by the desperation of ordinary citizens, many of whom are starving. Recently, he saw two men hacking with a knife at a horse. It had been injured by shrapnel, but was still alive.

10am

Another Hitler Youth runner appears in the upper bunker to report that Russian tanks are now about 500m from the Reich Chancellery. [Both the upper and lower bunkers, where Hitler and a few staff have been living since January, are below the Reich Chancellery. The Fuhrer spends most of his time in the lower one — known as the Fuhrerbunker — which is protected by a 10ft-deep concrete roof.]

10.30am

In his office in the upper bunker, the monocled General Krebs is on the phone to army HQ in Berlin. He’s told the German defense is collapsing on all fronts. Then the line suddenly goes dead: the balloon that supports radio-telephone communications has been shot down.

All telephone contact between Berlin and the outside world has just ended. From now on, the Hitler Youth runners will have to risk their lives several times a day as they dodge across Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin’s central street, taking messages between army HQ and the Fuhrerbunker.

‘It was a nightmare . . . a game of Russian Roulette,’ 16-year-old Armin Lehmann recalled. ‘Those who stepped out from cover were taking their life in their hands.

‘At best, they’d get a mouthful of the constant cloud of phosphorus smoke and poisonous petrol from the incendiaries; at worst, they’d be sliced down by a Russian rocket. Wilhelmstrasse stank with the smell of scorched bodies.’

Boys who refuse to follow orders are strung up as an example to others. Only a couple of days ago, Lehmann was briefly arrested for staring at the body of a boy — ‘he can’t have been more than 13’ — who’d been hanged from a post with a length of clothes-line.

Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute

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