Throughout the last nine months of the Third Reich, from July 23, 1944, to April 29, 1945, Captain Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven-aide-de-camp to Adolf Hitler's last two army chiefs of staff, the generals Heinz Guderian and Hans Krebs-daily attended Hitler's military briefings with his highest-ranking officers. Daily, too, he maintained contact by telephone or radio with commanders at the front, and often he himself transmitted to them Hitler's orders and the latest intelligence from the bunker. He also watched-while recording his experiences in his private logs-as the gap increasingly widened between the reality of the war outside the bunker and Hitler's willful illusions of imminent victory in the face of absolute ruin.


In the last catastrophic week of Hitler's regime, Loringhoven, now holed up night and day in the bunker, saw the final hopes of officers and staff dissolve into drink and fade into suicidal despair. He saw, too, his chance to survive: On April 29, when all communications in the bunker broke down, he could no longer do his work, and with Hitler's unexpected blessing, he left. On April 30, Hitler was dead.


Those wartime logs by a young army officer who found that his duty as a soldier lay at the behest of a criminal have sixty years later become this book.


Near the end of World War II, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven was appointed aide-de-camp to Hitler's headquarters and finally to his bunker, where he experienced the last nine months of the Third Reich.