A Wardrobe of Trophies

All was not quiet, but quiet enough for Johannes Hentschel to leave the bunker that had so oppressively trapped him.  The machine guns’ mimicry of woodpeckers and the brief bellows of artillery languished in the distance, almost a lullaby for the weary technician compared to the constant quaking of Soviet artillery which had been unrelentingly pervasive to his senses for straight days.  This ambience, Hentschel could become accustomed to.

The ground outside was expectedly shelled and laden with indiscriminate rubble and bodies.  Wisps of smoke rose from a crater blacker than the others.  From it, Hentschel could make out what appeared to be charred clothes, skull fragments, shattered vertebrae, and simply ash.  As far as he could grimly assume, he had finally seen them for himself: the Führer and his wife, partially cremated and obliterated.  So it is, Hentschel thought, and he looked away.

A short walk away lay two bodies that were crudely cremated as well, though they were left intact.  They were burnt to the bone, and what flesh remained was black and stiff.  Hentschel knew that these were the bodies of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, and his wife Magda.  Magda, presumably the smaller body, tightly clasped her chest and clenched her teeth.  Her limbs were almost totally reduced to bones.  Joseph was soldered into such a position that he appeared to be weakly clawing the air.  A patch of his uniform stuck to his leg.  Memories of Joseph Goebbels’ time in the Führer’s court of confidants could not run through Hentschel’s mind, for all he saw in that wide-opened mouth with no lips and no tongue was the fact that death lay before him.

Returning to the bunker, Hentschel was met with yet another display of death: a dead officer.  He could only briefly take note of the white cloth napkin draped over the officer’s head in an attempt for discretion, one that was futile considering the ejected blood and brain matter that stained the wall.  He diverted his eyes away from the body and looked forward when he heard, of all the things he could hear in this lonesome bunker, people.  As unbelievable as it was, these peculiar resonations had to be the sound of women shopping in a busy marketplace—Russian women, to be precise.  Indeed, a band of female medics in the next room down the corridor were rummaging through abandoned items.  They picked up bottles of champagne, officers’ hats, intricate glass cups, and fine silverware only to set these trophies down out of disinterest or to retrieve them at the end of their tour.  Their presence did not frighten Hentschel; he was alone and waiting to be taken prisoner, after all.

Hentschel could only make a few steps forward before the medic in the front saw him.  She flinched and shouted indistinctly, placing her hand over her holster.  Whether it was Russian, German, or simply an instinctive exclamation did not matter.  Hentschel stopped in his tracks and raised his open hands.  The medics sauntered towards him, soon giving him enough confidence to lower them.  They looked at him with expressions of curiosity and confidence but not a hint of apprehension.

“Where is Adolf Hitler?” the medic in the front sternly demanded in broken German.

“Adolf Hitler is dead,” Hentschel responded plainly, coming closer with a face as austere as the concrete walls in the bunker.  “He shot himself and was burned.”  The medic merely nodded; so it was.

“Where is Hitler’s wife?” the tall medic beside her continued in a more amicable tone.

“She’s also dead.  Poison.”

“Where are the dresses?” the medic in the front asked after a second of thought, for if they could not have the bonded bodies of Hitler and his wife at their discretion, they would have the late lady's clothes—to wear, to sell, perhaps to keep at the ends of their clothing racks as trophies.  Hentschel knew that the victors of both sexes assumed the right to plunder.  Where men of war stole watches, the women of war took dresses.  If Eva Braun’s clothes would bring joy to these women, he would help them.  He nodded.

“I’ll show you.”  As he spun around, he saw a medic opening the metal door to the room on his left and stopped.  “Not there.”  The medic looked at Hentschel with her mouth slightly agape, surprised with his sudden tone of urgency.  She carefully shut it and meekly looked away; the light in the room did not even break through before she reacted.  Hentschel had yet to check every room in the bunker that day, but he had already heard what took place behind that door.  The other medics spoke amongst themselves, wondering whether or not they should listen to him.  The medic in the front, however, gave Hentschel a dead-eyed look and proceeded to the room, pushing the door aside and stepping in before he could warn her again.  A few others, even the medic who was first at the door, followed.

Though Hentschel himself did not come into the room, he had heard enough then and now to know what happened.  One medic gasped, but like the others who could at least peek into the room, she could not look away from the scene—a mortally wretched discovery for these future mothers.  Those who were not frozen in shock muttered in confusion while the medic in the front observed each bunk bed from the center of the room.  The Goebbels children were dead, tucked in with their blankets pulled over their faces and past their feet and ankles.  When she counted six bodies, she shoved her way out of the room.

She confronted Hentschel with no words.  He would not make it his best guess that the bruises on the children’s feet and ankles were a result of cyanide poisoning, nor would the medic even inform him of the bruises and ask him for their cause.  He would not tell the medic that the children’s mother, in a final effort to “protect” them from a world without national socialism, poisoned them herself in their sleep with a glass ampoule of cyanide crushed between each of their molars; nor would the medic ask him who was responsible for the children’s deaths.  Such exchanges were purposeless, Hentschel believed, as the medic had likely already inferred filicidal euthanasia.  In every room of this bunker at this time, suicide was the common theme.

“Come,” Hentschel went on.

The medics cheered as they tossed articles of clothing into the air and as high as the ceiling would allow.  Scrambling to take any clothes they could, they hardly left any space to walk in Eva Braun’s bedroom.

Against every implication of the situation, from the assumption that he was a prisoner of war the moment the medics saw him to the fact that this free shopping spree was best defined as plundering, Hentschel smiled.  None of the medics saw him, but the corners of his lips lifted ever so gently.  The deep, sudden rumbles of nearby artillery strikes were over, as were the sounds of officers in argument and the deranged rantings of a dictator.  There were no longer any discussions of the surest suicide methods, nor were there any pleas for that dictator to leave Berlin for the sake of his own life.

For once, happiness proliferated in the bunker not out of denial or drunkenness, but out of pure, sober spirit.  The dresses had become plunder; so they were.  The sound of joy was enough for Hentschel.