GERMANY: An elderly woman who served as a nurse in Hitler's bunker has broken her silence about the last days of the war, 60 years after Berlin fell to the Red Army.
Berlin tabloid BZ splashed the story yesterday under the headline: "I was Hitler's Nurse - She served the devil and escaped his hell."
Ms Erna Flegel, a Red Cross nurse in Berlin, was first called to the bunker near the Brandenburg Gate during air raids in January 1943. By the last months of the war she was working full-time in the bunker, tending to more than 500 wounded SS men.
Ms Flegel joins a long line of bunker survivors to tell her tale, including Hitler's personal doctor, his butler, his masseuse and, most recently, one of his private secretaries.
She never told her story to anyone, not even her family, until BZ journalists contacted her, having found her file as well as a US interrogation transcript from November 1945. "I didn't want to take my secret with me to my grave," she told BZ yesterday.
Ms Flegel says she had regular contact with the Nazi dictator, although she never treated him.
"When Hitler was in the room he filled it entirely with his personality - you saw only him, aside from him nothing else existed," she had said in her interrogation transcript.
"The fascinating thing about him was his eyes; up to the end, it was impossible to turn away from his eyes."
When she heard of the marriage of Hitler to Eva Braun, she said she knew it was the end of the Third Reich. By that time she remembers how the dictator, who had prematurely aged, was constantly shaking.
She remembers Eva Braun as "a completely colourless personality".
"When she as in a crowd of stenographers, she was in no way conspicuous," said Ms Flegel.
She recalled that Hitler was very fond of the six children of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, giving them chocolate and allowing them use his bath, the only one in the bunker.
She describes Goebbels as a "hen-pecked husband. His wife, Magda, wore the trousers in that house".
Ms Flegel was one of the bunker staff members in the notorious line-up before Hitler killed himself. She remembers another woman saying: "Führer, we believe in you and in a good outcome."
Hitler replied: "Everyone must stand in his place and hold out and, if fate requires it, there he must fall."
Flegel said later: "I had a feeling that for Hitler we were the forum of the German people to which he was presenting himself once more since he had no more extensive [ forum]."
She heard indirectly of the dictator's suicide. "He didn't trust anyone at the end, not even the cyanide he swallowed," she said of Hitler's decision to swallow poison and shoot himself simultaneously.
After his suicide, most of the bunker staff fled the approaching Russian army, but Ms Flegel was one of just six people who stayed.