THE last surviving member of Adolf Hitler’s devoted bodyguard — who witnessed
the Nazi dictator’s suicide in a Berlin bunker — has died at the age of 96.
Rochus Misch was a messenger and telephone operator in the Fuhrer’s bunker
from 1940 until the end of the war in May 1945.
He was in the next room when Hitler shot himself along with his wife Eva
Braun, and saw the couple’s bodies.
Misch fled the bunker but was captured by Soviet troops, tortured and sent to
a Labour camp for nine years.
He returned to Germany and led a quiet life running a decorating supplies shop
until he retired in 1985.
But until the end of his life the former SS staff sergeant remained proud of
his days spent at Hitler’s side and spoke warmly of the tyrant as a “normal
man”.
Misch was picked to be one of Hitler’s personal bodyguards and general
assistants after being wounded in battle in Poland in 1940.
He and his comrade Johannes Hentschel accompanied Hitler almost everywhere he
went — including his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden and his “Wolf’s Lair”
forward headquarters in Poland.
In his last interview in 2011 he told how he went “ice cold” with
terror before meeting the Fuhrer for the first time.
But he said: “He was not a monster or a superhuman. He stood across from
me like a completely normal man.”
Misch always insisted he was not a fanatical Nazi like the rest of Hitler’s
personal staff and never heard about the Holocaust when he worked answering
phones at the German leader’s HQ.
He said later: “I never had anything to do with the Nazi party. I was not
in the Hitler Youth and yet there I was in the innermost circle day and
night.
“Another 22 steps past me and you were in his bedroom.”
Misch — who affectionately called Hitler The Boss — witnessed the attempt to
assassinate him at the Wolf’s Lair in 1944 and was there in his final days
when he married lover Eva in the bunker.
He recalled: “He was a wonderful boss. I lived with him for five years.
We were the closest people who worked with him … we were always there.
Hitler was never without us day and night.”
Misch died following a short illness yesterday at a Berlin hospital just three
miles from Hitler’s bunker near the Brandenburg Gate
His 2008 memoir The Last Witness is reportedly being made into a Hollywood
film.