https://x.com/IImpartialTruth/status/1851641234407772217

The Impartial Truth

@IImpartialTruth

📸 "Hitler was no monster" Hitler's bodyguard is defiant to the end as he passes away at age 96.

The last of the Fuhrer's loyal bodyguards, who witnessed Adolf's final hours was SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch, who accompanied Hitler from 1940 until his passing in 1945. Misch remained proud of his relationship with Hitler in the final days, still referring to him as "boss".

"He was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman."

Misch was moved nearly to tears when talking about Joseph and Magda Goebbels' being forced to kill their six children in the Berlin bunker before committing suicide themselves.

"He was a wonderful boss," Misch said. "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."

In the last eight to 10 days of Hitler's life, Misch followed him to live underground, protected by the Fuhrerbunker's heavily reinforced concrete ceilings and walls.

"Hentschel ran the lights, air and water and I did the telephones - there was nobody else," he said.

"When someone would come downstairs we couldn't even offer them a place to sit. It was far too small - little cells of 10 or 12 square meters. It was no bunker to live in. It was an air-raid bunker."

He remembered that on April 22, two days before two Soviet armies completed their encirclement of the city, Hitler said, "That's it. The war is lost. Everybody can go."

"Everyone except those who still had jobs to do like us - we had to stay. The lights, water, telephone ... those had to be kept going, but everybody else was allowed to go and almost all were gone immediately."

Hitler clung to hope given by what turned out to be a false report that the Western Allies had called upon Germany to hold Berlin for two more weeks against the Soviets so that they could battle communism together.

"He still believed in a union between West and East," Misch said. "Hitler liked England - except for Churchill - and didn't think that a people like the English would bind themselves with the communists to crush Germany."

"Then everything was really quiet, everything was still ... who opened the door I don't remember, Guensche or Linge. They opened the door, and I naturally looked, and then there was a short pause and the second door was opened... and I saw Hitler lying on the table like so,"

"And Eva lay like so on the sofa with knees up, her head to him. I don't remember now if Hitler sat on the sofa or on a chair next to it."

"He said 'The boss is being burned. Come on out," Misch recalled.

But Misch stuck to his post - taking and directing telephone calls with Goebbels as his new boss until May 2, when he was given permission to flee.

"Everybody was upstairs in the ... chancellery, there were things to eat and drink there, downstairs in the bunker there was nothing. It was a coffin of concrete. Then Goebbels finally came down and said, 'You have a chance to live.' You don't have to stay here and die."

Misch grabbed the rucksack he had packed and fled with a few others into the rubble of Berlin. Working his way through cellars and subways, Misch bumped into a large group of civilians seeking shelter in one tunnel.

"Two were playing music - I came out of the death bunker of concrete, and here were two people playing music on guitar."

Post-War

Following the German surrender May 7, Misch was taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent the next nine years in prisoner-of-war camps before being allowed to return to Berlin in 1954. He reunited with his wife Gerda, whom he had married in 1942 and who died in 1997.

Misch continued to receive fan mail into his old age, and he sent autographed photographs of himself in full SS uniform outside the Wolf's Lair to those who wrote to him.

He also still flicked through a photo album he had with pictures of his infamous boss.

"Here is Hitler - my boss - Eva, a friend of Eva ...,"

"Very normal. Not like what is written."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5621141&forum_id=2#48259272)