The "Adolf Hitler Flag Guard" Panzer Division is the first elite combat division in the German SS, which can be called the "Black Royal Forest Army" of the Third Reich, from the Polish Campaign in 1939 to the Battle of Berlin in 1945, the "Guard Flag Team" has a combat trajectory throughout the East and West, and has created impressive records in many major battles, emerging such as Joseph Dietrich, Kurt Meier, Joachim Piper, Michael Wittmann and other well-known figures.
However, in addition to charging at the front, the "Guard Flag Team" always played the role of the Führer's guard unit, maintaining a left-behind unit in Berlin and participating in the final battle to guard the Chancellery, and the members of Hitler's personal guard "Führer's Guard" were mostly from the "Guard Flag Corps", although they were not as famous as the front-line generals, they were the "people around" of the Führer, with a unique experience that ordinary people could not reach, including SS Sergeant Roger Mich, who served in the Führer's headquarters for more than four years. And he was a witness to Hitler's death and the last to leave the Führer's bunker.
■ In December 1935, Hitler, accompanied by Dietrich, inspected the "Guard Flag Corps".
Born on 29 July 1917 in Arte-Sarkowitz, Silesian province, Misch had a very unfortunate childhood, his father was drafted into the army as a construction worker and died of serious injuries, his mother died of influenza when he was two and a half years old, and his brother Bruno drowned in swimming in 1922, raised by his grandparents.
Miasch was forced to drop out of school at the age of 8 to earn a living as an apprentice painter, and in 1935 entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Cologne as a skilled painter. In July 1938, Misch met his future wife, Gerda, and the two married in 1942 on New Year's Day, and married a daughter.
In 1937, Müsch, like many young Germans of his time, was attracted by the elite image of the SS, signed up for the SS Special Task Force, the predecessor of the Waffen-SS, and was later selected to Hitler's guard unit "Guard Flag" along with 11 other SS members, and by August 1939, on the eve of the outbreak of war, Mish had been promoted to the upper class and served in the 3rd Company of the 2nd Battalion of the Guard Flag Corps, and the company commander was Captain Wilhelm Munch, who later commanded the defense of the Chancellery in the Battle of Berlin.
■ Mish joined the SS in 1937 with his military uniform on the left and his wedding photo with his wife Gerda on New Year's Day 1942 on the right.
On September 1, 1939, the Polish Campaign began, and Miesch went to the front as a member of the "Guard Flag" task force. On 24 September, the Germans besieged the Polish fortress of Modlin, and company commander Munch selected four soldiers, including Misch, to accompany him to the Polish positions to negotiate surrender, and Misch was chosen because he spoke Polish, although not fluently.
The negotiations did not succeed, the Polish army refused to surrender, so Munch led people back to their positions, but a group of people out of the 80 meters of the battle broke out again, too late to dodge Mishi was hit by several bullets, immediately fell to the ground, unconscious, was saved by his companions in the line of fire, sent to the rear for emergency treatment, and revived.
Misty was treated in two hospitals and spent six weeks recovering, and he was awarded the Iron Cross Ii and the War Wounds Medal ii for this operation. After learning that Misty was the only surviving member of his family, Munch recommended him to serve in the Führer's Guard, thus avoiding being sent to fight on the front line again.
■ Mishi's wartime photographs clearly show the Iron Cross Belt of the Second Class at the second button of his uniform, the Black Medal of War Wounds on his left chest, and the National Sports Medal.
In early May 1940, Miesch was transferred to the Führer's Guard, a unit responsible for Hitler's personal protection, whose members were carefully selected from the Guard Flag Corps and who were absolutely loyal to Hitler.
The members of the Guard were the only people around Hitler who were allowed to carry weapons, and they would not surrender their weapons or be searched under any circumstances. During guard duties, the convoy's bodyguards usually carried a 7.65mm Walter PPK pistol, and Misch later recalled that he expressed concern about whether the weapon could handle sudden emergencies.
In addition to their duty of protection, the members of the guard were also Hitler's personal attendants, such as telephone operators, couriers, messengers, male servants and waiters, taking care of his daily life and assisting in his daily work. Miesch spent the rest of the war with Hitler, between Führer's headquarters such as the Eagle's Lair and the Wolf's Lair.
■ In the winter of 1941, Hitler took a group photo with the personal guards of the Führer's Guard at the "Wolf's Den" base camp.
On 16 January 1945, the same day that the Germans were finally defeated at the Battle of the Salient, Hitler, his cronies and his staff moved to the Führer's bunker in the back garden of the Chancellery and began a life of dwelling that lasted for the last few months.
The last commander of the Führer's Guard, Lieutenant Colonel Franz Sedler, assigned mees the job of being a telephone operator, in the telephone exchange room on the ground floor of the bunker, responsible for all telephone contact with the outside world.
As the end of the Third Reich approached, he remained in this post almost exclusively, leaving only once. It was on April 22, when Schindler called Misch to tell him that the last plane out of Berlin had reserved a seat for his wife and children, and That Mist had hired a temporary shift to pick up his family to the airport, but Gerda refused to leave her husband and parents behind and insisted on staying in Berlin.
When Miesch returned to the Chancellery, he learned that Hitler had allowed most of his staff to leave on their own, that the Soviets had invaded the city of Berlin, and that Propaganda Minister Goebbels, with his wife Magda and six children, had moved into the Führer's bunker to accompany Hitler. The Goebbels' house was next door to the telephone exchange, and Mish often saw his lovely children playing in the hallways.
■ A 3D cross-sectional view of the Führer's bunker in the garden of the Berlin Chancellery, divided into two parts, the right side is called the front bunker, and the left part protected by a thick concrete wall is the real Führer bunker.
On April 30, less than 500 meters from the Chancellery, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide less than 40 hours after announcing their marriage. Miesch was one of Hitler's witnesses in his last moments, and he followed the Führer aide-de-camp Otto Guncher and the chief close attendant Heinz Linger into the Führer's living room, and after entering the door, Mish only had time to glance at it, and he saw Eva reclining on the side of the sofa, her legs crossed, her eyes open, but no longer breathing, and Hitler was also slumped in an armchair, his head slightly tilted forward, apparently dead.
Misch then exited the door and reported the situation to Stahler, and when he returned to the living room door again, the bodies of Hitler and Eva had been removed and wrapped in a carpet, and several people carried the bodies past Misch. After reporting to Sidler again, Mich returned to his post, when Corporal Retzbach said to him, "It looks like they're going to burn the boss now!" He asked Misch if he planned to go up there to see the cremation site for himself, but Misch refused. After a while, Kyoshe returned to the bunker and told Mishch that the bodies of Hitler and Eva had been burned in the garden.
■ The entrance and exit of the Führer's bunker in the garden of the Chancellery, photographed after the war, where the bodies of Hitler and Eva were burned.
On the day after Hitler's suicide, on May 1, 1945, Miesch witnessed the tragedy of the Goebbels' poisoning of six children and then committing suicide, and for Mish, Goebbels's cold-blooded behavior made him extremely uneasy, and many years later he still said that it was the most painful thing he experienced in the bunker.
Goebbels relieved Misch of his duties before committing suicide, allowing him to find his own way. Mish and electrician Johannes Henzel were the last to remain in the bunker, exchanging home addresses with each other before leaving so that they could be informed of their families if they had an accident.
Mich and Henzel left the bunker, walked through the basement of the Chancellery, and made a final report to Steyler. Mishi said that Goebbels had allowed them to leave, and Scheler pointed out to the two men a possible escape from the Soviet encirclement, and then committed suicide with a bullet. In the early hours of 2 May, When Misch left the Prime Minister's Office a few hours before the Soviets arrived, he joined a group of defeated troops and tried to cross the line north, but was soon captured by the Soviets.
Inside the prisoner-of-war camp, Misch's identity was revealed, and he was subsequently imprisoned in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, where he was tortured by Ministry of Internal Affairs officers in an attempt to obtain detailed information from him about Hitler's last day, stalin expressed a strong interest in the ultimate fate of his enemy and whether he was really dead, and Misch spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp.
■ Miasch's wartime armor, his experience working with Hitler, bought him eight years in prison after the war.
On December 31, 1953, Miesch was released by the Soviet Union and returned to West Berlin to be reunited with his family. After his release, Misch worked a lot, and after receiving a grant, bought a studio to work in the interior decoration industry, and thanks to his experience as a painter in his youth, he ran the business well until his retirement in 1985.
Throughout his life, Miesch remained loyal to Hitler and devoted himself to defending the Nazis, describing Hitler this way: "He is not a beast, he is not a monster, he is not a superman,...... He is a great owner. ”
After the release of the 2004 German film "The Destruction of the Reich," which reflected Hitler's last days, Miesch commented in an interview that the film was too "American", and although it accurately expressed important facts at the time, it was obvious that the details were exaggerated for the sake of dramatic effect, such as the people in the bunker in the film often screamed with exhaustion, but he recalled that most people were calm at the time.
He also listened to a recording of Hitler's 1942 conversation with Field Marshal Mannerheim of Finland, the only surviving unofficial recording of Hitler, and admitted that he sounded much like Hitler, but with a somewhat different tone and tone, suspecting that someone had imitated Hitler.
By 2008, Miesch was the last survivor to survive the Führer's bunker, and in the same year he published his memoir, The Last Witness. When Misch died in Berlin on September 5, 2013 at the age of 96, he was thought to have taken many secrets about Hitler to his grave.
■ Cover of Misch's memoirs The Last Eyewitness of Hitler (left) and Misch (right) in The Destruction of the Reich.
■ In his later years, Misch took a picture of Hitler, and he did not change his loyalty to Hitler until his death.