The Bunker: The History Of The Reich Chancellery Group – James P. O'Donnell, 1978 ★★★½

The Finality of Evil

Adolf Hitler wasn’t one for back-up plans. If he couldn’t conquer the world, he’d just as soon die in a stagnant hole with anyone he could pull down with him. The Bunker is an absorbing account of Hitler’s last days as seen by those who shared it with him in his Fuhrerbunker.

Author James P. O’Donnell, a Harvard man who liked to tout his classical education, pulls out a Nietzsche quote: “Many men die too late and some die too soon. Few manage to depart at just the right time.”

And in the case of Hitler, in the right place, too; just in case anyone was ever tempted to cast history’s most infamous despot in a heroic light:

The world is indeed fortunate that the stark facts of the bunker permit no myth to be born. It is a shuddering thought to imagine what a bogus, pseudo-tragic legend might have arisen had Hitler been assassinated either in his days of triumph or even as late as July 20, 1944, by that near-miss bomb in Rastenburg.

Adolf Hitler shakes hands with Hitler Youth soldier Alfred Czech on March 20, 1945, in a ceremony not far from the Fuhrerbunker that marked one of Hitler's last public appearances. Notes O'Donnell, "when the Russian campaigns bogged down in late 1941, he disappeared underground like a troglodyte." Image from https://spartacus-educational.com/ExamRHU13.htm.

The first thing O’Donnell gets across is the size of the Fuhrerbunker, a two-level reinforced basement under Berlin’s Reich Chancellery with Spartan accommodations and gunmetal-gray décor. A damp space with only two washrooms, it was a nexus for many unpleasant odors and vibrations, especially as Russian artillery drew closer. 

No one but Hitler, and maybe his lover Eva Braun, wanted to be there. Many in his entourage hoped he would decamp for Bavaria to face less vengeful invaders. Even while getting drunk and having kinky group sex on a dentist’s chair, they wore the mantle of the doomed.

A journalist for Newsweek, O’Donnell visited the bunker just over two months after Hitler’s death. In the prologue, he writes of bribing the Russian guards with cigarettes and being struck by its cramped nature.

Hitler and [Nazi architect Albert] Speer both saw themselves as modern men, freed from superstition. And so they planned their heaven-defying buildings of the future – the monster Berlin dome seven times the diameter of St. Peter’s. Now they were standing in a room that measured ten by fifteen feet.

The entrance to the Fuhrerbunker as it appeared in 1945, a squat building with a single door which led to a stairwell. Behind it is the Reich Chancellery. The jutting cone-like structure in front provided ventilation for the cramped bunker interior. Image from https://www.rbth.com/history/328769-hitler-death-red-army-berlin.

Who followed Hitler to his underground exile in the final year of World War II? They were a motley crew. All were fairly firm believers in Hitler; many faced execution for war crimes, if they didn’t manage to cheat the hangman by killing themselves first.

Not all were terrible people, but some were horrid enough to repel even those who admired Hitler himself.

Writes O’Donnell: “When Edmund Burke remarked that ‘ambition can creep as well as crawl,’ he was thinking of Robespierre, but he could have been describing Martin Bormann, out of the womb of time.” Bormann, a wormy intriguer assigned leadership of the Nazi Party, was so depraved he is recalled to O’Donnell copping a feel off Eva Braun as he lugged her corpse upstairs for cremation.

Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels might get top prize for repulsion, given he took his wife and six children to the grave with him. Walking outside the bunker with his wife to shoot themselves, their children already stiff and cold inside, he joked: “At least you good people will not have to lug our bodies up that long flight of stairs.”

Joseph Goebbels, in middle, took command of the Fuhrerbunker after Hitler's death on April 30, 1945. He committed suicide the next day. Image from http://ww2talk.com/index.php?media/joseph-goebbels-october-29-1897-may-1-1945-iwm-mh-20031.7337/

Of course, it’s hard to assign turpitude in a situation where everyone giving testimony was working for the Devil in some form or another.

O’Donnell notes at the outset that this is a book of journalism, not archival research. The focus is eyewitness accounts. Speer gave O’Donnell the most interviews, and figures prominently in The Bunker in a way that comes off self-serving. We watch him countermand Hitler’s “scorched-earth” orders so as to save postwar Germany.

At one point, O’Donnell records Speer contemplating gassing Hitler in order to end the war. O’Donnell gives this big play, numbering it among the major assassination attempts against Hitler even if it never got beyond one man’s quietest ruminations.

Another shaky tangent gets even bigger play: That an Allied spy, dubbed “Mata O’Hara,” was sexing out intelligence on Hitler’s last days from SS commander Heinrich Himmler’s representative in the bunker, Hermann Fegelein.

Hermann Fegelein, at left, with his wife Gretl Braun and Adolf Hitler, June 1944. When Hitler married Gretl's sister, he first had Fegelein executed for desertion. "The bridegroom clearly saw to it that Fegelein did not live to become his brother-in-law, a traitor in the bosom of the family," O'Donnell writes. Image from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hitler-had-groom-killed-months-after-wedding-89m32z8z6

O’Donnell recounts how this woman dodged police arrest in Fegelein’s apartment under the pretense of taking some glasses to the kitchen for washing. Then she snuck out a window. Upon learning of her escape, Bormann is recorded erupting at the arresting officer:

“Hoegl, you flatfooted idiot. Das Weib! das Weib! The woman! Why did you not grab her and escort her back here, instead of this damned valise? Fegelein is a traitor; this woman is British, an enemy agent. Fegelein went to bed with this spy and blabbered everything.”

A great story, yes, but uncorroborated second-hand testimony, too.

Still, The Bunker remains a masterpiece of reconstructive narrative, capturing various people living at a high pitch with remarkable lucidity and a cold, deft wit. Much of what he writes is on the money, too.

For example, while Bormann’s final fate was debated for many decades, O’Donnell explains exactly what happened: Fleeing the Fuhrerbunker one step ahead of the Red Army, he found himself trapped on a bridge and took poison as he faced capture.

Even among Nazis, Martin Bormann (at left) was bad news. His own brother Alfred Bormann, one of Hitler's personal adjutants, hated him. O'Donnell calls Bormann the "take-charge guy" at the Fuhrerbunker in Hitler's last days. Image from https://www.monstersandcritics.com/tv/hunting-hitler-did-fuhrer-and-martin-bormann-flee-berlin-together-after-wwii/.

Published in 1978, The Bunker suffers from the information block caused by the Berlin Wall. But unlike later chroniclers, O’Donnell was able to draw on the memories of many Hitler’s intimates, from a 90-year-old ex-general to a young switchboard operator who, before he died in 2013, was the last living witness to Hitler’s suicide.

Hitler himself is often a background figure, seldom coming into focus. Speer describes him to O’Donnell as a Besserwisser, or know-it-all: “His mind was cluttered with minor information and misinformation about everything. I believe that one of the reasons he gathered so many flunkies around him was that his instinct told him that first-rate people couldn’t possibly stomach the outpourings.”

Other than shooting himself, Hitler gets two big moments in The Bunker. On April 22, he would blow up in a staff meeting and declare the war lost, a scene that decades later launched a million YouTube parody videos. O’Donnell notes how this episode destroyed morale inside the bunker. Discipline fell apart as people drank to forget.

A model on exhibit in Berlin shows how the Fuhrerbunker was laid out. Only Hitler and Eva Braun actually lived in the Fuhrerbunker; the rest of the staff had to dodge Allied bombers to get to work. Image from https://www.dw.com/en/exhibit-replica-of-hitlers-bunker-opens-in-berlin/a-36178824.

Hitler’s other highlight in the book is his wedding to Eva Braun the day before his death. O’Donnell notes how well-guarded a secret Eva was. Very few knew about Hitler’s mistress. O’Donnell describes how the couple was joined in matrimony by Walter Wagner, a notary who like the Hitlers, wouldn’t live through the next day. Wagner was shot in the head defending the city as part of a Volkssturm unit. [O’Donnell has him dying within an hour of leaving the ceremony.]

Otherwise, Hitler is a blank. He watches the romantic assignations of his male and female staff with the bemusement of a fond uncle. “Ah, if only my generals were as brave as my women,” he sighs. Yet his attitude toward sex is what you’d expect from a heartless control freak.

Hitler tells a bunker mechanic: “Follow my advice and you’ll never go wrong: trust no man, and no woman either, below the navel.”

Anthony Hopkins won an Emmy playing Hitler in a 1981 TV adaptation of the O'Donnell book. A good film, though not as much as the 2004 German take on Hitler's end, Downfall. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082114/mediaviewer/rm2770017024.

O’Donnell does play favorites in the Fuhrerbunker. Speer and Ernst-Günther Schenck, an SS doctor, get off many choice lines.

Regarding life in the Fuhrerbunker, the latter explains: “We had lost any sense of clock or calendar time. Even today I often remember, in turbulent dreams, a kind of spectral hourglass: the sand in the upper glass never empties; the bottom glass never fills. Life and death were then the only grim realities, not transient and deceptive time.”

In July 1945, the same month O'Donnell visited the Fuhrerbunker, Winston Churchill dropped in. Perhaps because Hitler forbade smoking in the facility, Churchill has his trademark cigar in mouth. Image from https://stampaday.wordpress.com/2018/04/29/eva-braun-the-fuhrerbunker-hitlers-marriage/

I do feel O’Donnell was constrained somewhat, both by the magnetism of those Nazis who deigned to talk with him as well as the “great-man” theory of history which was such a byproduct of the time. History is made by the multitudes, but for that generation of American historians like Barbara Tuchman, Theodore H. White, and O’Donnell, a chosen few pulled all the levers that mattered, and The Bunker is a tale of elites written by an elite. There is very little of the common-man view here.

You do get a sense of how awful the situation was for the average Berliner, in a city where O’Donnell writes, “one got inured to rubble.”

What is it about the bunker story that draws us in still? Is it the absolute finality of what its protagonists faced? Or schadenfreude given who they were?

A Red Army soldier poses in one of the cramped rooms in the liberated Fuhrerbunker. O'Donnell notes it was flooded by the time he entered it in July 1945. Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2263418/Pictured-Squalid-sofa-Hitler-Eva-Braun-killed-secret-bunker-spent-final-hours-revealed-time.html.

I think it may be the idea of life under extreme pressure, which The Bunker relates in drip-by-drip detail. “The human emotional system can take just so much duress and then it snaps,” Schenck tells O’Donnell.

Whatever black magic was at work, The Bunker is an absorbing read that’s hard to put down. It’s immersive, affecting, and quite disturbing, in part for the way it brings you so close to some of history’s greatest monsters that you begin to feel sorry for them.