The mood in the bunker now sank to zero-level. Despair was now written on everyone’s face. All knew it was only a matter of hours before Hitler killed himself, and wondered what the future held for them after his death.134 There was much talk of the best methods of committing suicide.135 Secretaries, adjutants, and any others who wanted them had by now been given the brass-cased ampoules containing prussic acid supplied by Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, the SS surgeon who had joined the ‘court’ the previous October.136 Hitler’s paranoia stretched now to doubts about the capsules. He had shown his alsatian bitch Blondi more affection in recent years than any human being, probably including even Eva Braun. Now, as the end approached, he had the poison tested on Blondi. Professor Werner Haase was summoned from his duties in the nearby public air-raid shelter beneath the new Reich Chancellery building nearby. Shortly before the afternoon briefing on 29 April, aided by Hitler’s dog-attendant, Sergeant Fritz Tornow, he forced open the dog’s jaws and crushed the prussic acid capsule with a pair of pliers. The dog slumped in an instant motionless to the ground. Hitler was not present. However, he entered the room immediately afterwards. He glanced for a few seconds at the dead dog. Then, his face like a mask, he left without saying anything and shut himself in his room.137
The bunker community had by this time dwindled still further. Three emissaries — Bormann’s adjutant, SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Zander, Hitler’s army adjutant Major Willi Johannmeier, and Acting Press Chief Heinz Lorenz — had left that morning as couriers on a perilous, and fruitless, mission to deliver copies of the Testament to Dönitz, Schörner, and the Nazi Party’s Headquarters, the ‘Brown House’ in Munich.138 By this time, normal telephone communications had finally broken down, though naval and Party telegraph wires remained usable, with difficulty, to the end.139 But dispatch runners brought reports that Soviet troops had brought up their lines to a mere 400–500 metres from the Reich Chancellery. The Berlin Commandant General Weidling informed Hitler that they had begun a concentrated attack on the ‘Citadel’; resistance could only be sustained for a short time.140 Three young officers, Major Bernd von Loringhoven (Krebs’s adjutant), his friend Gerhard Boldt (the Chief of Staff’s orderly), and Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf Weiß (General Burgdorf’s adjutant) decided to try a last chance to escape from their predestined tomb. They put it to Krebs that they should break out in the attempt to reach Wenck. He agreed; so, following the midday conference, did Hitler. As he shook hands wearily with them, he said: ‘Give my regards to Wenck. Tell him to hurry or it will be too late.’141
That afternoon, Below too, who had been a member of Hitler’s ‘household’ since 1937, decided to try his luck. He asked if Hitler would permit him to attempt to get through to the west. Hitler readily agreed. Below left late that night, bearing a letter from Hitler to Keitel which, from Below’s memory of it (the letter itself was destroyed), repeated his praise for the navy, his attribution of blame for the Luftwaffe’s failure exclusively to Göring, and his condemnation of the General Staff together with the disloyalty and betrayal which had for so long undermined his efforts. He could not believe, he said, that the sacrifices of the German people had been in vain. The aim had still to be the winning of territory in the East.142
By this time, Hitler had learned that Mussolini had been captured and executed by Italian partisans. Whether he was told the details — how Mussolini was hanged upside down in a square in Milan, together with his mistress Clara Petacci, and stoned by a mob — is uncertain. If he did learn the full gory tale, it could have done no more than confirm his anxiety to take his own life before it was too late, and to prevent his body from being seized by his enemies.143 During the late-evening briefing, General Weidling had told Hitler that the Russians would reach the Reich Chancellery no later than 1 May.144 There was little time remaining.
Nevertheless, Hitler undertook one last attempt to ascertain the possibilities of relief, even at this late hour. With nothing heard throughout the day of Wenck’s progress (or lack of it), he cabled five questions to Jodl in the most recent OKW headquarters in Dobbin at eleven o’clock that evening, asking in the tersest fashion where Wenck’s spearheads were, when the attack would come, where the 9th Army was, where Holste’s troops were, and when
