WITNESS TO HISTORY – HITLER’S BODYGUARD SPEAKS

            Until the last few years of his long life, Rochus Misch, was just another typical, hard-working German shop-keeper, selling art supplies to a small and specialized market, standing perhaps a few centimeters taller than most men, but otherwise worthy of no special attention in post-war Germany. He had always been known as a quiet, unassuming and very private person, whose wife Gerda, a prominent mid-level political figure and government employee was by far the better-known. The task of being “invisible” was made easier inasmuch as he hadn’t returned to “modern-day” West Germany until 1953 when he was finally released by the Russians after nine years of torture and imprisonment in that country’s infamous Gulag.

            There were a number of good reasons for Misch’s anonymity: not only had he worn the uniform of the Waffen-SS after first being badly wounded in Poland as a Wehrmacht soldier in the first months of war, but had thereafter been assigned as a member of Hitler’s personal Bodyguard. Beyond that, only a few knew he had been one of the last survivors to emerge from the underground Führerbunker, and perhaps the only person still living to have personally seen Hitler before he and his new bride, Eva Braun died by suicide.  (After 1953, and upon the death of one other, he was without question the only survivor.) Once that fact circled the globe, he was barraged by phone calls, visitors and the media looking for interviews and personal accounts. Forced to do what he had vowed never to do, he wrote a memoir of his experiences which was published in German in 2008. With the help of a highly-qualified team of translators and historians, the English language version emerged just months after his death in 2014.(*) To the translated version of the original manuscript, the English language team added a wealth of footnotes and explanations, indicating they had gone to extremes in an effort to coordinate the author’s claims with actual historic fact, and – here and there – some facts that couldn’t be verified in every minute detail; and details are everywhere in Misch’s account. For one who was not a scholar, and who was in no position to make notes, his memory is extraordinary.

            If I had the space in this article, I could easily expend 2000 words in explaining why I find the author and his story to be of extreme credibility; more accurate than the work of a host of more famous and even “storied” historical writers whose books line several shelves in my extensive WWII library.

For one thing he had the innate ability to be present without “being present”. He stood at Hitler’s side almost wherever the man he called “his boss” went, and with whomever among the world’s most famous or infamous figures he might be meeting. Misch was entirely apolitical, was never a party member, and while faultlessly loyal to Germany and its leader, never saw his role to either question or judge the world-shaking events going on around him (although he “knew” the war was lost before most of his comrades”.)

            Despite his official need to “be silent, do everything you’re told, and never question anything ‘the boss’ says”, Misch was a meticulous observer of human behavior. Among the more interesting of his long-term observations is the assertion that everyone’s favorite member of the Führer household was Eva Braun. Always cheerful, infectiously happy and glowing, perfectly dressed and proud of her bearing, she was devoted to Hitler, who twice sent her out of the bunker to save her from capture. She returned on her own.

            One member of the Hitler inner circle much-maligned by all of us in the “Allied World” but uniformly liked and trusted by staff and servants was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reichminister of propaganda and an insider since the Munich days.  His love for and comradeship with his six children lent a homelike sense of “family” to bunker life. (It was Goebbels’ wife Magda who insisted on taking them with her in suicide.)  On the other hand, no one among the guard detail and immediate staff employees liked or trusted Heinrich Himmler or Martin Borman, nor could they figure how Albert Speer had managed to insinuate himself so close to the Führer as to be almost his shadow.

            While Rochus Misch, an orphan from Silesia never held a rank higher than Obersharführer (Sgt.), his intimate and detailed memoir of his five years at Hitler’s side is an illuminating insight into Adolph Hitler’s last days in the claustrophobic underground Berlin Bunker where the Third Reich came to an end.

  Although a soldier of modest rank, Obersharführer Rochus Mish took pride in his tailor-made uniforms and turnout gear. At the end, he alone handled all of Hitler’s phone communications.

(*)   HITLER’S LAST WITNESS   Frontline Books, London 

A DAY OF PHEASANTS AND FUNERALS

            For several square miles outside the trip flare-studded barbed concertina wire circling our base camp on Korea’s 38^th parallel, we regularly patrolled the former farming country which was designated as a “military zone” in which civilians traveled at their own risk. It was a “free fire zone”, but a handful of Korean Nationals still tended rice paddies there during the day. Most of them were technically North Koreans – not because of ideology so much as geography – and were friendly with us. It was a region still tied to Korea’s ancient farming practices and cultural traditions, and we were under orders always to respect these itinerant villagers. For me this was not difficult, since in so many ways they were much like the descendants of the pioneer heritage of those I had known in “old” New England.

            The spring and summer of 1953 saw some of the most vicious fighting of the war now in its third year, and with peace talks underway, the enemy was intent on extending their territory as far south as possible. Along the 38^th, there was really no such thing as a “safe zone”. It was against this uncertainty that a buddy from Illinois with whom I shared a rare day off, suggested we go pheasant hunting in that very countryside. We borrowed two shotguns from our armory and with our M-1 carbines still slung across our shoulders “just in case”, set out and began a stealthy browse through that still-beautiful countryside, enjoying the sense of freedom which made us think of a different time and place. I actually doubted my friend’s assurance that game birds survived in that fought-over area – not least because he was a Chicago-boy; how would he know.

            The landscape in which we found ourselves was in sharp contrast to the rice paddy country near our compound, with rounded and grassy hillocks alternating with shallow valleys. Here and there we would come across hand-made Korean grave stones – usually shaped by nature but graven with epitaphs unreadable to us, but no less eloquent for that. (We had been told that the distance of burial between the valley and the hilltop was indicative of the status that person had attained in life.)

            I can’t recall how long we had been afield when we began to hear voices raised in some kind of chant. Rounding a ridge top, we found ourselves looking down on a strange sight. A group of a dozen or more Koreans dressed in white – the traditional mourning color – circled around a newly-dug grave singing a dirge-like song while hurling shovelfuls of earth into the excavated rectangle, after which three or four of them would climb down onto the fresh soil and begin jumping up and down in time with the singing, repetitively. Reforming the circle, a bottle would be passed around, its’ obvious contents helping to explain the increasing pleasure which seemed to mark the ceremony before the shoveling would resume.

            Airman Cook and I, unseen but grandly entertained put some distance between ourselves and the farm people, and proceeded on the hunt, certain that the Korean method of saying “goodbye” was far more sensible than the American way.

             Heading back the way we had come, we separated so that the hill line was safely between us. Moments after my friend’s shotgun blast broke the silence, a pheasant on my side took off nearly from under foot, and we knew the gods who had been called down by the 2000-year-old reenactment we had witnessed, had rewarded our silent attendance with an unexpected “Thank You!”

            That evening the two of us sat down to orange-glazed pheasant breast (actually three of us including the co-conspiring Mess Sergeant) while our envious compatriots dined on SOS!

            In a time and place where happy experiences were not exactly an everyday event, my memory of that strange day of pheasants and funerals creeps into some two A.M. hour of wakefulness and I am a young warrior again.

“SMUDGIE” AND THE GOLD BEAD

            Allowing for the difference in average life span, it is said that it is possible for a caring human being to share their time on earth with a succession of nine cats. For me there have only been two; the one who more recently passed away after sharing his home with me for 18 loyal years, and the one who preceded him and lived for a much shorter span.

            That other cat was named Smudgie, in honor of another Siamese adopted by my mother when I was but a small boy, and whose image he reflected to a remarkable degree. My Smudgie was not what one would call a social animal; he tolerated other people without much enthusiasm. He chose friends with intimidating discrimination, treating many with undisguised disdain. But for reasons which could only be explained by animal psychologists, (and possibly not even by them,) he loved me with a devotion unusual to that highly independent and self-contained breed. He was a constant and forgiving companion in whose eyes I could do no wrong. His affection was total and without condition.

            We kept Smudgie’s feed and water dishes beside the refrigerator in our kitchen, and like all cats, this particular place together with the feeding accessories became his property, and he viewed them with a cat-hearted propriortorialness. At about the same time, one of our young sons was working his way through the ranks of the Cub Scouts one assignment of which was to construct a lanyard by weaving gold beads on a blue cord. A surplus bead became first a plaything, and then a possession of our cat. In time we noticed something unusual. Whenever Smudgie’s food dish was empty and in need of a refill, we would find the gold bead resting there – all by itself. We might lose track of where the bead might end up after a day of “cativities” – under a sofa, chair or some neglected corner of the room - but sooner or later it would have mysteriously found its way back to the empty cat food dish, carefully carried and placed there by mouth. We never saw him do it, but it became an article of faith in his routine. And in ours.

            In what should have been the prime of his cat life, Smudgie developed an inner ear infection which became cancerous. Despite all our efforts, including a radical and seldom-performed surgical oblation, the quality of his life deteriorated to a point where our only recourse became painfully apparent. The kindly veterinarian who had become a personal friend, suggested that he perform the final procedure out of my presence. “It will be easier that way”, he assured me. But that just didn’t seem right. I owed Smudgie more than that in return for the years of unmitigated devotion he had shown me. In the end, he died peacefully in my arms.

            I buried Smudgie the cat in our front yard at the base of a scrub oak which had been his favorite haunt. And with him, I buried the gold bead.

            All of that happened more than twenty years ago, and my tender feelings have had all those gently falling years in which to heal. Until our final weeks in the home we left behind to move south. We had decided to replace the worn carpet in our kitchen and nearby stairway with a more trendy and practical floor covering. “After all”, my wife kept telling me, “the new owners will appreciate it.”

            When I returned home from my office the day she and a grandson had removed the old carpet she said, “guess what we found, hidden under the edge of the carpet?” She was holding in her hand a familiar gold bead. Until then I had forgotten all about Smudgie’s “backup” bead, the one he always kept hidden somewhere, for use when he couldn’t locate the first one.

            In the days following that serendipitous discovery, it all came flooding back, into my mind and into my heart, as if it had all happened just yesterday. And in those mystical moments when such thoughts are allowed to intrude on a more ordered and prosaic world, I am still left to wonder if Smudgie intentionally planted that shiny gold bead knowing that at some future time in my own cascading years, I would need to be reminded of the eternal nature of love.