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THE SMART NEWS SOURCE | Feb 10 2010 01:40 | LAST UPDATED Feb 10 2010 01:40 |
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Rochus Misch still remembers the sight as if it were yesterday: 60 years ago on Saturday he looked through a doorway and saw Adolf Hitler had committed suicide. Misch (88) is the only person still alive today to have seen the Nazi leader and his wife Eva Braun dead in their bunker deep under the shattered city of Berlin. "Hitler was sitting at the table, slumped forward, and Eva Braun was lying next to him. I saw that with my own eyes," Misch told French news agency AFP on Thursday from his home in the German capital. "But we had been expecting it. It didn't come out of the blue. We had been waiting for the end." On April 30, 1945, with Soviet forces just 300m from the bunker and his armies beaten, Hitler bade farewell to his staff and went into his private rooms. There the man who had plunged the world into conflict and sent millions of Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust poisoned a willing Braun and shot himself in the head. "My work room was opposite the entrance to Hitler's rooms," recalled Misch, who was a 28-year-old telephone engineer in the bunker at the time. "I remember that he said goodbye in the corridor and went into the rooms. I don't know how long it took, maybe one hour, maybe two. I didn't hear the shots myself because I was working on the telephones. "But then I heard someone shout 'Linge, Linge, I think it has happened.' (Heinz Linge was Hitler's servant). "We waited maybe 20 minutes. Then we opened the door to his office and the one to the living room. "Hitler was sitting at the table, slumped forward, and Eva Braun was lying next to him.  CONTINUES BELOW "It wasn't a surprise. The commanders had all wanted to evacuate Hitler, but he said no, he was staying in Berlin." Nine days later Germany surrendered and the guns of World War II fell quiet in Europe. Hitler's final days were portrayed in great detail in The Downfall, a big-budget German film which came out in Germany last September and has been a success worldwide. But despite having cooperated with the director Oliver Hirschbiegel on the making of the film, Misch now says it was riddled with inaccuracies. "It was just operetta, dramatic operetta. That is how the Americans wanted the death of Hitler to look," Misch said. He said one of the biggest mistakes in reconstructions of the suicide is to show Hitler's bunker as a giant complex of rooms. "People confuse the Fuehrer's bunker with the upper bunker or the bunker at the Reichs Chancellery. "In fact the bunker we were in was so small. We were not a whole company, there were just five people. Only five of us could have witnessed the death, no more." The site stands today a few hundred metres from the glitzy shopping centre and office complex which now fills Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin. There is no plaque to mark the location. On May 10, a national monument to the victims of the Holocaust will open just a few steps from the spot where the Fuehrer ended his life. – Sapa-AFP
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