Rochus Misch

Rochus Misch ( Alt-Schalkowitz , Upper Silesia , 29 of July of 1917 - Berlin , 5 of September of 2013 ) ¹ was a noncommissioned officer with the rankOberscharführer of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler assigned personnel SS dependent on Hitler ( SS-Begleitkommando des Führers ) At the Führerbunkerin Berlin , Germany .

It was probably the last survivor of staff of Adolf Hitler , and the last soldier left the bunker on 2 of maypole of 1945 , when the Red Army took the capital of the Third Reich in ruins.

Biography

Born in 1917 . In 1937 he joined the Verfügungstruppe of the SS. It participated in the invasion of Poland of 1939 , next to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler where it was badly wounded. The head of his company recommended it to the personal guard SS called Begleitkommando SS des Führers in 1940 , composed only of 20 SS men specially selected for personal service, remaining in this position from 1940 until the end of the war. He served as messenger, liaison, radio operator (mainly), and Hitler’s bodyguard in the bunker.

In this position, he was in the bunker in the Reichstag underground in Berlin from the beginning of 1940 , until Hitler took his life in 1945. Misch came to know very well the personality of the Fuhrer coinciding in many of his appreciations with which he published His secretary, Traudl Junge .

This twenty-seven-year-old SS officer was the last man to speak to Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels a few minutes before he committed suicide with Magda Goebbels ; Saw the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in the office where they committed suicide and refused to help the incineration of these bodies. ²

He was captured by the Soviets and in the first instance sentenced to death in 1949 for supporting the Hitler regime; Sentence that was commuted to forced labor for 25 years and was subsequently reduced to 10 years, effectively remaining 9 years of captivity.

Misch stated that in spite of transferring all kinds of messages to the different estates of the regime never got to know of what was happening to the Jews in the conquered or connational countries. He learned only when he was in captivity of the horrors of the Holocaust .

Between 1945 and 1954 he was imprisoned in Soviet jails in Kazakhstan and Siberia . In 1955 he returned to Berlin with his family and founded a painting company. During the last years of life he lived on the rights of his books Ich war Hitlers Leibwächter (I was Hitler’s bodyguard), published in 2006 and Der letzte Zeuge (The Last Witness), published in 2008 and lecturing on what he lived Along with Hitler.

With the deaths of Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven on 27 February 2007, Armin Lehmann on 10 October 2008 and Siegfried Knappe on 1 December 2008, Rochus Misch became the last survivor of the bunker and the last living person to He personally knew Hitler.

He died in Berlin on September 5, 2013, at the age of 96, after living in the German Empire , Weimar Republic , Nazi Germany , Allied Occupation of Germany , German Democratic Republic and present-day Germany .

References