This was the end. It was time for final preparations — on the sole remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53a.m., a telegram for Dönitz arrived in Plön: ‘Testament in force. I’ll come to you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from publication. Bormann.’7 Earlier that morning, more than nine hours after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker.8 Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in a further telegram — the last to leave the bunker — dictated by Goebbels and arriving at Plön at 3.18p.m. that afternoon.9 Neither the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler’s death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a broadcast at 10.26p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon — it was the previous day — and that his death had taken place in combat ‘at his post in the Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism’. In his proclamation to the Wehrmacht, Dönitz spoke of the Führer’s ‘heroic death’. The Wehrmacht’s report stated that he had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital’.10 The delay in informing Dönitz had plainly been to allow Bormann and Goebbels the final opportunity of a negotiated surrender to the Red Army without consulting the new head of state. The untruth relayed by Dönitz to the Wehrmacht and German people was to prevent a predictable response by the troops, had they been aware of Hitler’s suicide, that the Führer had deserted them at the last.11 This was, in fact, precisely the message which General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander in Berlin, conveyed to his troops when ordering them, in the early hours of 2 May, to cease fighting. ‘On 30.4.45 the Führer took his own life and thereby abandoned those who had sworn him loyalty,’ ran the order. ‘At the Führer’s command you believe that you must still fight for Berlin, although the lack of heavy weaponry and munitions, and the overall situation shows the struggle to be pointless… In agreement with the High Command of the Soviet troops, I therefore demand you end the fighting immediately.’12
By then, the drama in the bunker was finally over. Most of those still entombed below the Reich Chancellery had spent the afternoon and evening of 1 May planning their break-out. Goebbels was not among them. Along with his wife, Magda, he was now making arrangements for their own suicides — and for taking the lives of their six children. In the early evening, Magda summoned Helmut Gustav Kunz, adjutant to the head doctor in the SS medical administration
Later that evening, as Wilhelm Mohnke, commandant of the ‘Citadel’, gave orders for the mass break-out from the bunker, Goebbels instructed his adjutant, Günther Schwägermann, to take care of the burning of his and Magda’s bodies. He gave him the silver-framed signed photograph of Hitler that for so many years had stood on his desk as a memento. Then he and his wife, after saying their brief farewells, climbed the stairs to the Chancellery garden, and bit on the prussic acid capsules. An SS orderly fired two shots into the bodies to make sure.13 Far less petrol was available for the unceremonious cremation than had been saved for burning the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops had little difficulty in identifying the corpses when they entered the Chancellery garden next day.14
