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Hitler's Last Courier
Victory of the Allies was no longer in doubt. Russian forces had reached Berlin. Yet, Hitler ordered his troops to keep on fighting. Among the last who defended his headquarters, an underground bunker in the Reich Chancellery garden, were boy soldiers, 13 to 17 years old, members of the Hitler Youth Volkssturm (home defence force). The dictator had reached the point where he wanted the earth scorched. Facing total defeat, he now was willing to sacrifice everything and everybody, including the German people, even the youngest. Lehmann was a witness to what happened in the Fuehrerbunker. He was the runner who carried some of the last orders issued by the dictator, right up to his suicide. Many details as described in this book have never before been disclosed. This is a gripping story of survival - and later of redemption - a story of endurance amidst the horrors and brutalities, a first-hand historical account, already highly acclaimed by leading historians.
536 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2000
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About the author
Armin D. Lehmann
5 booksArmin Dieter Lehmann was a Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker towards the end of Adolf Hitler's life, leaving shortly after Hitler committed suicide. He spent his post-war life in travel, tourism, and writing as a peace activist.
From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_D...
From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_D...
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January 29, 2022A very interesting and important book: it enlightens the reader as to how a person, and a nation, can come under the power of an evil mind. Everyone in the US, Democrat, Republican or Independent, should read this book and draw a comparison to Donald J. Trump!
January 12, 2020
An interesting contrast with Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood. Both contrast growing up knowing only Nazi world of totalitarianism, state controlled media and arts and mandatory schooling in the Third Reich. One as a boy and another as a girl passing there 4th and 3rd birthdays in 1933. The blind devotion to the Fuhrer becomes depressingly understandable and a lesson for us all. In addition this book gives us close insight into the structure of and the people involved in creating the monoculture which created the Nazi catastrophe.
December 29, 2014
Memoir written in the early 2000s by someone who as a sixteen-year-old had acted as a messenger boy in and around the Führerbunker in the period from April 20 to 30, 1945. After the war, the man, who had been a committed member of the Hitlerjugend, entirely changed his "world view" and became a committed pacifist and anti-nuclear war activist. I've read a number of such memoirs written long after the fact by people who were "bit players" in Hitler's entourage, and naturally they can't help but be influenced by revisionist re-evaluation of their attitudes at the time. In this book, while the author's subsequent change of heart is noted occasionally, his sentiments at the time (loyalty to and faith in HItler) seem to be unvarnished. Nothing is said of anti-Semitism at the time, and the author claims to have known nothing about actions against Jews and notes a few times that because of his young age, he hadn't been ordered to commit any wrongs, which he says he would have been if he'd continued to serve in the Waffen-SS (into which he was transferred at the last minute). At the end he says that he rejects the notion of collective guilt, and implicitly absolves himself of any wrongdoing. Apparently, he's of the "hey, I didn't do anything, it was somebody else's fault" school.
As for the actual story, the author was from Breslau in Silesia, and the memoir has a large introductory section (about half the book) on his early youth. As a member of the Hitlerjugend he was enrolled in a combat unit of "boys" that was deployed to defend the city against the approaching Russians in the spring of 1945. In his first deployment, he acted bravely and was wounded. After a long recovery, he was taken to Berlin to be presented to Hitler on his 56th birthday (April 20). After the presentation (apparently, the many images of Hitler reviewing members of the Hitler Youth outside his bunker actual record a similar review a month earlier), the author was kept in Berlin to act as the messenger boy for Artur Axmann, who was the head of the Hitler Youth organization. (As already noted, the author was to be inducted into the Waffen-SS, but continued to act as a member of the HJ until the end.) Axmann was leading units of HJ members that were defending Berlin in the final days of the Soviet attack on the city, and so the author would go on missions to take dispatches to and from Axmann's headquarters near that bunker (and at times the bunker itself) on the one hand and various units. The author took part in the attempted breakout that took place right after Hitler's suicide. He was knocked unconscious during it, and eventually wound up escaping to western Germany.
I'm always a bit dubious about memoirs written long after the fact, finding it unlikely that people can have accurate and detailed recollections of events from long ago (something like sixty years in this case). In particular, the author presents exact wording in conversations. Surely nobody can recall even the exact content of such matters, much less the precise words exchanged. This is all the more likely to be so during tumultuous events like the assault on Berlin. Oddly, at one point (before the assignment to Berlin) the author says he read a newspaper version of the speech Hitler gave on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor (Jan. 30, 1945, the last address he made to the nation). Several longish excerpts from the speech are given, and a check against the original shows that while they're substantively intact, the wording has been changed. Did the author think he writes better than Hitler? Anyway, it makes one uneasy if even historically attested words printed in quotation marks are actually not accurate.
On to the content. The author gives a very detailed account of his first battle outside Breslau and talks about his recovery at length. Oddly, the part of the book that would be most interesting, namely the final days in Berlin, is comparatively sketchy. He mentions four "close encounters" with Hitler (including the birthday reception), and other run-ins with Himmler (miffed that the author wore a HJ uniform to the reception if he'd been inducted into the SS), Eva Braun (nice to him one day when he rushed disheveled into the bunker), and Bormann (not nice). It's all rather cursory (Hitler didn't look well). The only person to receive much detail is Axmann (loyal to the end).
Interesting enough as an account of a young man's experiences at the end of the war, but given the privileged seat he received to observe the Götterdämmerung of Nazi Germany, he doesn't seem to have gotten much from the experience.
As for the actual story, the author was from Breslau in Silesia, and the memoir has a large introductory section (about half the book) on his early youth. As a member of the Hitlerjugend he was enrolled in a combat unit of "boys" that was deployed to defend the city against the approaching Russians in the spring of 1945. In his first deployment, he acted bravely and was wounded. After a long recovery, he was taken to Berlin to be presented to Hitler on his 56th birthday (April 20). After the presentation (apparently, the many images of Hitler reviewing members of the Hitler Youth outside his bunker actual record a similar review a month earlier), the author was kept in Berlin to act as the messenger boy for Artur Axmann, who was the head of the Hitler Youth organization. (As already noted, the author was to be inducted into the Waffen-SS, but continued to act as a member of the HJ until the end.) Axmann was leading units of HJ members that were defending Berlin in the final days of the Soviet attack on the city, and so the author would go on missions to take dispatches to and from Axmann's headquarters near that bunker (and at times the bunker itself) on the one hand and various units. The author took part in the attempted breakout that took place right after Hitler's suicide. He was knocked unconscious during it, and eventually wound up escaping to western Germany.
I'm always a bit dubious about memoirs written long after the fact, finding it unlikely that people can have accurate and detailed recollections of events from long ago (something like sixty years in this case). In particular, the author presents exact wording in conversations. Surely nobody can recall even the exact content of such matters, much less the precise words exchanged. This is all the more likely to be so during tumultuous events like the assault on Berlin. Oddly, at one point (before the assignment to Berlin) the author says he read a newspaper version of the speech Hitler gave on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor (Jan. 30, 1945, the last address he made to the nation). Several longish excerpts from the speech are given, and a check against the original shows that while they're substantively intact, the wording has been changed. Did the author think he writes better than Hitler? Anyway, it makes one uneasy if even historically attested words printed in quotation marks are actually not accurate.
On to the content. The author gives a very detailed account of his first battle outside Breslau and talks about his recovery at length. Oddly, the part of the book that would be most interesting, namely the final days in Berlin, is comparatively sketchy. He mentions four "close encounters" with Hitler (including the birthday reception), and other run-ins with Himmler (miffed that the author wore a HJ uniform to the reception if he'd been inducted into the SS), Eva Braun (nice to him one day when he rushed disheveled into the bunker), and Bormann (not nice). It's all rather cursory (Hitler didn't look well). The only person to receive much detail is Axmann (loyal to the end).
Interesting enough as an account of a young man's experiences at the end of the war, but given the privileged seat he received to observe the Götterdämmerung of Nazi Germany, he doesn't seem to have gotten much from the experience.
January 25, 2015
Armin D. Lehmann was born in 1929 in Weimar Germany. Among his first memories are Hitler’s rising to power. Both his grandfather and his father were followers of and believers in Hitler’s movement. “As a young boy, I witnessed, with a great excitement, the first rally and torchlight procession of storm-trooper units.” He joined the Hitler Youth at ten. Throughout Hitler’s Last Courier, Lehmann does an amazing job of resurrecting his boyhood mindset, long since abandoned, from his first experience at four to the final days of Hitler’s government. The book begins with fragments of memories of the early years of Hitler’s government, and ends in a frantic portrayal of life in Berlin and in the infamous bunker in the very last days of that government.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews