Here is a subject that I forgot to post about last week. But it was so unusual and unexpected, that I figured that it was something that I would want to post.
Hitler's bodyguard, courier, and telephone operator, for most of the war in his capacity as SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch, and the last living witness to Hitler's final hours before he committed suicide, died on Thursday, September 5th. He was 96 years old.
He remembered that on April 22, 1945, as the Soviets were about to complete encircling the city of Berlin, where Hitler and other prominent Nazis had been holed up in the infamous underground bunker (where Misch operated the telephones) and remembers when Hitler finally said, “That’s it. The war is lost. Everybody can go.”
Misch called the underground bunker, a "coffin of concrete".
Misch was captured by the Soviets shortly thereafter, and spent nine years at a prisoner of war camp, before returning to Germany in 1954, and reuniting with his wife, Gerda, whom he had been married to since 1942. She died in 1997.
I vaguely remember other prominent Nazis dying, here and there. Some wanted guards of concentration camps, who are still captured and then put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But I also vaguely remember the death of Rudolph Hess in 1987, although I was still a bit too young to understand who he was, or what his role in the Nazi regime had been (again, it had been fairly prominent, before his ill-fated trip to Britain to try and secure a peace that he apparently thought he could win on his own, as Germany's representative. Hitler never forgave him for that. Also, more recently, I remember Leni Riefenstahl dying some years ago. She was a prominent filmmaker who's works include "Triumph of the Will", from which many of the enduring images of Nazi propaganda and German troops goose-stepping, were taken. She was apologetic about her role afterwards, and at least claimed to have been so horrified by some of what was going on later in the Nazi regime days, that she actually confronted Hitler about it.
Misch's death surely has to be at least one of the last times that a prominent Nazi will make actual modern news headlines. Here was a man, after all, that was with Hitler all of the time for much of his rule over German. He was with him in Berlin during the seeming days of triumph, as well as his mountain retreat of Berchtesgaden, and in infamous "Wolf's Lair" war headquarters, and finally, of course, in "The Bunker", during Hitler and Nazi Germany's final demise, in the last days of the European war. He was definitely the last living witness of the final days of the Nazi regime from the infamous bunker.
Through the years, he had been unapologetic about his role as a fairly prominent Nazi, being trusted to be at the Nazi leader's side for so many years. He rejected arguments that portrayed Hitler as a monster, they way most consider him in the present day. Misch claimed Hitler was "a very normal man... he was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman", and that his days serving as Hitler's bodyguard was "the happiest time in his life." He had this to say about Hitler, specifically:
" 'He was a wonderful boss,' Misch said. 'I lived with him for five years. We were the closest people who worked with him ... we were always there. Hitler was never without us day and night.' "
Misch also denied knowing anything about the Holocaust. In an interview with the BBC in 2009, he said:
"I knew about Dachau camp and about concentration camps in general. ... But I had no idea of the scale. It wasn't part of our conversations. The Nuremberg Trial dealt with crimes committed by the Germans. But you must remember there was never a war when crimes weren't committed, and there never will be."
Misch authored a book about his experiences, "The Last Witness", which is due to be published in English this October (next month). In his forward, he wrote that things were different back then, and he simply never questioned orders that he was given.
I got most of the information that I used on this blog from the following sources:
"Last Hitler bodyguard Rochus Misch die" BBC, September 7, 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23989454
"Hitler's bodyguard says his boss was 'no monster'" By David Rising, Associated Press / September 7, 2013
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0907/Hitler-s-bodyguard-says-his-boss-was-no-monster
"Hitler's bodyguard, proud of role to the end, dies at age 96" 7:58 PM, September 6, 2013
http://www.freep.com/article/20130906/NEWS07/309060144
"Hitler's Last Bodyguard Dies; Was With The Fuhrer In Bunker" by Mark Memmott of NPR, September 06, 201312:02 PM
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/06/219655868/hitlers-last-bodyguard-dies-was-with-the-fuhrer-in-bunker
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