Heinz Linge (23 March 1913 – 9 March 1980) was a GermanSS officer who served as a valet for the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, and became known for his close personal proximity to historical events. Linge was present in the Führerbunker on 30 April 1945, when Hitler committed suicide. Linge's ten-year service to Hitler ended at that time. In the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe, Linge spent ten years in Soviet captivity.
On 24 January 1935, Linge was chosen to be a valet for Hitler. He was one of three valets at that time. In September 1939, Linge replaced Karl Wilhelm Krause as chief valet for Hitler.[4] Linge worked as a valet in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, at Hitler's residence near Berchtesgaden, and at Wolfsschanze in Rastenburg. He stated that his daily routine was to wake Hitler each day at 11:00 AM and provide morning newspapers and messages. Linge would then keep him stocked with writing materials and spectacles for his morning reading session in bed. Hitler would then dress himself to a stopwatch with Linge acting as a "referee". He would take a light breakfast of tea, biscuits and an apple and a vegetarian lunch at 2:30 PM. Dinner with only a few guests present was at 8.00pm.[5] As Hitler's valet, Linge was also a member of the Führerbegleitkommando which provided personal security protection for Hitler.[6] By 1944, he was also head of Hitler's personal service staff. Besides accompanying Hitler on all his travels, he was responsible for the accommodations; all the servants, mess orderlies, cooks, caterers and maids were "subordinate" to Linge.[4]
Berlin 1945
Linge was one of many soldiers, servants, secretaries, and officers who moved into the Reich Chancellery and Führerbunker in Berlin in 1945. There he continued as Hitler's chief valet and protocol officer and was one of those who closely witnessed the last days of Hitler's life during the Battle of Berlin. He was also Hitler's personal military orderly. Linge delivered messages to Hitler and escorted people in to meet with Hitler. In addition, after Hitler's personal physician Theodor Morell left Berlin on 23 April, Linge and Dr. Werner Haase administered to Hitler the prepared medicine which had been left behind.[7][8]
Two days before committing suicide on 30 April with Eva Braun, Hitler confided his suicide plan to Linge. He asked Linge to have their bodies wrapped in blankets and taken up to the garden to be cremated.[9] Following his marriage to Eva Braun, Hitler spent the last night of his life lying awake and fully clothed on his bed.[10]
On 30 April, Hitler had a last midday meal with his secretaries. After the meal, Linge spoke briefly with Eva Braun. He described her as looking pale and of having had little sleep. She thanked him for his service.[11] Hitler then said farewell to each of his servants and subordinates. Thereafter, Hitler retired to his study at 3:15 p.m.[11] There, Linge privately asked Hitler his orders. Hitler said that he was going to shoot himself and Linge knew what he had to do. "You must never allow my corpse to fall into the hands of the Russians", Hitler told Linge, "they would make a spectacle in Moscow out of my body and put it in waxworks".[12] Further, he had given the order to break-out; Linge was to join one of the groups and try to get to the west. Linge asked for what they should now fight and Hitler replied, "For the coming man". Linge then saluted and left.[13] In a 1974 episode of The World at War, Linge and Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, describe Hitler's last minutes in the bunker. Linge explains that Hitler and his wife committed suicide in Hitler's private room in the bunker. He recalled how he went into Hitler's private study after hearing a sudden bang and found that Hitler and Braun were dead. Hitler had shot himself in the right temple. Braun had taken what Linge concluded must have been cyanide poison.[14]
After the suicides of Hitler and Braun, their corpses were reportedly carried up the stairs to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit to the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were doused with petrol.[15] After the first attempts to ignite the petrol did not work, Linge went back inside the bunker and returned with a thick roll of papers. Martin Bormann lit the papers and threw the torch onto the bodies. As the two corpses caught fire, a small group, including Bormann, Linge, Otto Günsche, Joseph Goebbels, Erich Kempka, Peter Högl, Ewald Lindloff, and Hans Reisser, raised their arms in salute as they stood just inside the bunker doorway.[15][16]
At around 16:15, Linge ordered SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Krüger and SS-Oberscharführer Werner Schwiedel to roll up the rug in Hitler's study to burn it. The two men removed the blood-stained rug, carried it up the stairs and outside to the Chancellery garden. There the rug was placed on the ground and burned.[17] On and off during the afternoon, the Soviets shelled the area in and around the Reich Chancellery. SS guards brought over additional cans of petrol to further burn the corpses, which lasted from 16:00 to around 18:30.[18] Linge later wrote that he burned other personal effects of Hitler's while an SS bodyguard oversaw the burial of the burnt bodies in a shell crater.[19]
Linge was one of the last to leave the Führerbunker in the early morning hours of 1 May 1945. He teamed up with Erich Kempka. Linge was later captured near See-Strasse. Several days later, after his identity was revealed, two Soviet officers escorted Linge by train to Moscow where he was thrown into the notorious Lubyanka Prison.[20]
Linge spent ten years in Soviet captivity and was released in 1955.[2] Linge and Günsche were torturously interrogated by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD; later superseded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs; MVD) about the circumstances of Hitler's death, at times kept in solitary confinement.[21] The two shared a cell from mid-1948 to the end of 1949, during part of the time they provided details for a dossier edited by Soviet NKVD officers and presented to Joseph Stalin on 30 December 1949 (published in 2005 as The Hitler Book).[22][23] Unlike Linge, Günsche hated working on the project and begrudgingly gave the Soviets truthful information. Günsche reportedly tried to bring Linge around to his viewpoint and even leveraged threats to try and influence him.[24]
Linge initially told the Soviets that he heard Hitler's suicide gunshot before explaining that he only said this to keep his account from appearing "frail" in light of "shadowy areas" of his memory.[25] He also claimed to have learned of the suicide from the smell of gunpowder, despite being separated by several doors and Hitler's rooms being well ventilated.[26] Linge told the Soviets that he and Bormann could tell that Hitler and Braun were dead by looking at them, but did not explain why they did not summon Hitler's doctors to confirm the deaths.[27] He stated in 1946 that he saw a coin-sized wound to Hitler's right temple with no exit wound or other apparent damage to the skull.[28] Linge may have been one of only two witnesses to survive the war to make observations of Hitler's head wound in the aftermath of his suicide, the other being Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, who reported blood on both temples (but no clear entry wound).[29] Günsche reportedly told the Soviets that he only learned of Hitler's method of death from Linge,[30][31] but testified in 1956 that (like Linge) he saw an entry wound to the right temple, which convinced him that Hitler died by a suicide gunshot.[32] According to historian Mark Felton (who does not explain how he accessed the Soviet material), Linge reportedly told a Soviet agent—undercover as a captured German—that only he and Bormann knew the circumstances of Hitler's death; Linge repeatedly said he would not 'crack' to the Soviets and suggested that (from his apparently limited viewpoint) Hitler's temple wound seemed like it could have been painted on.[33][34]
In 1956, Linge provided testimony in a West German court investigating Hitler's death.[35][36] In light of theories that Hitler had survived, Linge asserted that the corpse was hidden in a "common grave", undiscovered somewhere about the Chancellery garden.[37]
In 1980, Linge died in Hamburg, West Germany. His memoir, originally published in German in 1980 as Bis zum Untergang (English: 'Until the Fall') was published in English in July 2009 as With Hitler to the End with an introduction by historian Roger Moorhouse, author of Killing Hitler. According to his memoir, "Linge was responsible for all aspects of Hitler's household". Despite the circumstances of the war, Linge's portrayal of the dictator has been described as "affectionate", although as a leader Hitler acted in an "unpredictable and demanding" manner.[38][39]
^Felton, Mark; Linge, Heinz (2023). "The Forgotten Theory". Find the Führer: The Secret Soviet Investigation. Episode 6. The Russians have never found Hitler's body. I know that because—uh... he uh, they never—they questioned me repeatedly about it.
