Nurse ends silence on paranoid Hitler's end

ADOLF Hitler was so paranoid towards the end of his life that he did not even trust the cyanide in his suicide pill, believing it had been replaced with harmless powder by Russian secret agents, according to the nurse who treated him in the Berlin bunker during the Reich’s final days.

He also married a "boring" woman in Eva Braun, continued to take fatherly delight in the children of his propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, and looked 20 years older.

Erna Flegel, now 93, kept silent for 60 years, not even letting on to her family about her role in the Reich.

But as the film Downfall, about Hitler’s last days, draws huge crowds across the world, her testimony as the last female survivor of the bunker makes for gripping reading.

It is the first time she has spoken about the events she witnessed since she was debriefed by United States intelligence agents at the end of the Second World War.

Mrs Flegel was the senior nursing sister of a university clinic in Berlin that counted Hitler and other senior Nazi ministers, such as Goebbels and Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, as patients.

Mrs Flegel said: "As early as 1943 I had visited the bunker. I thought that it was a grim place then. It wasn’t until the last days that I was ordered there permanently to attend to Hitler and the others.

"Towards the end Hitler trusted nobody, not even the cyanide that he had ready for suicide. He feared Russian agents had tampered with it."

Every meal he ate was tested by two SS men for poison.

Mrs Flegel went on: "I treated senior SS men who said one thing and the radio said another. Red Army shells began falling on Berlin, so we knew that the end could not be far away. It was unbelievable.

"We were like a big family at the end. Hitler was very fond of the Goebbels children in particular. They gave him a great deal of pleasure; even in the last days he invited them for chocolate, which made them very happy.

"But Hitler 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 on his life in July 1944, he always shook hands with us with his left hand, but toward the end, he was using his right hand again.

"I realised the Third Reich was at an end on April 28, when I heard that Hitler would marry Eva Braun. He would never have taken this step if it had been possible to carry on.

"Eva Braun was a completely colourless personality, boring. When she was with a crowd of stenographers she was in no way conspicuous among them. The fact that Hitler had poisoned his dog Blondi somehow affected us more."

On 29 April, 1945, she and other bunker personnel were lined up to say farewell to the Fhrer on the eve of his planned suicide.

Mrs Flegel said: "A woman cried, ‘Fhrer, we believe in you and in a good outcome,’ to which Hitler replied: ‘Each one must stand in his place and hold out, and if fate requires it, there he must fall!’."

Each day, as a nurse, Mrs Flegel had asked one of the doctors, an SS man called Werner Haase, whether Hitler was still alive. Each day he had replied "Yes", until 30 April, when he gave no reply, and the nurse knew what it meant.

Hitler had shot himself in the head and Braun had poisoned herself.

The bodies were burnt in the chancellery garden. Mrs Flegel stayed and witnessed the deaths of the Goebbels family.