Heinz Linge

Heinz Linge
On 24 January 1935, Linge was selected for the Führer's personal service and initially completed training at a hotel management school. From September 1939, he became "Chief of Personal Services", First Servant and Hitler's personal valet, and at the same time a formal member of the Führer's Escort Command.
Birth date	23 March 1913(1913-03-23)
Place of birth	Bremen, German Empire
Death date	9 March 1980 (aged 66)
Place of death	Hamburg, West Germany
Allegiance	National Socialist Germany
Service/branch	SS
Years of service	1933–45
Rank	SS-Sturmbannführer, other sources state SS-Obersturmbannführer
Unit	1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler; Führer-Begleit-Kommando
Commands held	Chef des Persönlichen Dienstes beim Führer
Battles/wars	World War II Battle of Berlin

Heinz Linge (23 March 1913 – 9 March 1980) was a SS officer and a member of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. Linge was one of Adolf Hitler's valets. At the end of the war, he became a Soviet prisoner. He was released in 1955.

Life

Linge was born in Bremen and was employed as a bricklayer prior to joining the SS on 17 March 1933. He served in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH), Hitler's guard regiment. In 1934, when he was part of No. 1 Guard to Hitler's residence on the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, Linge was selected to serve at the Reich Chancellery. On 24 January 1935, Linge was chosen to be a valet for Hitler. He was one of three valets at that time.

Linge worked as a valet in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, at Hitler's residence near Berchtesgaden, and at the Führerhauptquartier "Wolfsschanze" in Rastenburg. He stated that his daily routine was to wake Hitler each day at 11.00am and provide morning newspapers and dispatches. 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 2.30pm. Dinner with only a few guests present was at 8.00pm. As Hitler's valet, Linge was also a member of the Führer's Escort Command (Führer-Begleit-Kommando), albeit only formally, which provided personal security protection for Hitler.

World War II

In September 1939, Linge replaced Karl Wilhelm Krause as chief valet for Hitler and was responsible for all aspects of Hitler's household. 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.

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 ordinance officer. Linge delivered messages to Hitler and escorted people in to meet with Hitler.

In his memoirs, Linge stated that Hitler, two days before his suicide on 30 April with Eva Hitler, had confided his suicide plan and asked Linge to have their bodies wrapped in blankets and taken up to the garden to be cremated. He said that following his marriage to Eva, Hitler spent the last night of his life lying awake and fully clothed on his bed.

In the 1974 video documentary The Two Deaths of Adolf Hitler, part of The World at War collection, Linge, along with Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, narrates Hitler's very last moments in the bunker. He tells with vivid details how the Führer said farewell to each of his servants and subordinates. He explains that Hitler and his wife committed suicide in Hitler's private room in the bunker. He tells how he went into Hitler's private study after hearing a sudden bang and found both Hitler and wife Eva dead.

Thereafter, the two bodies were carried up the stairs to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit to the bombed-out garden behind the Reich Chancellery where they were doused with petrol. After the first attempts to ignite the petrol didn't work, Linge went back inside the bunker and then 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, Peter Högl, Ewald Lindloff, Hans Reisser and Joseph Goebbels raised their arms in National socialist salute as they stood just inside the bunker doorway, thus attempting to keep Hitler’s corpse from being captured by the Soviet Red Army; as the Führer had commanded.

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. Linge later noted the fire did not completely destroy the remains, as the corpses were being burned in the open, where the distribution of heat varies.

Linge was one of the last to leave the Führerbunker in the early morning hours of 1 May 1945. He teamed up with SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Kempka. Linge was later captured near See-Strasse. On 2 May, the badly burned remains of Hitler, Eva, and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and her offspring Wulf) were discovered in a shell crater by a unit of SMERSH. On 5 May, they secretly removed the remains. Several days later, after his identity was revealed, two Russian officers escorted Linge by train to Moscow where he was thrown into the notorious Lubjanka Prison.

Later life

Linge, together with Otto Günsche, was torturously interrogated by the Soviet NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB) about the circumstances of Hitler's death. 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). Unlike Linge, Günsche hated working on the project and begrudgingly gave the Soviets truthful information. He spent ten years in Soviet captivity and was released in 1955. In 1956, Linge provided testimony in a West German court investigating Hitler's death. 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.

Death

He died in Hamburg in West Germany in 1980. His memoir, With Hitler to the End, was published by Frontline Books-Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. (London) in July 2009 with an introduction by Roger Moorhouse, author of Killing Hitler.

Film portrayals

Linge was portrayed by actor Thomas Limpinsel in Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 German film Downfall. In Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler – ein Film aus Deutschland (1978) [1], he is played by Hellmut Lange. In the 1971 Eastern Bloc co-production Liberation V: The Final Assault, he was portrayed by East German actor Otto Busse.

Awards and decorations (excerpt)

• German Reich Sport Badge (Deutsches Reichssportabzeichen) in Bronze
• SA Sports Badge (SA-Sportabzeichen) in Bronze
• Golden Party Badge

Sources

• Joachimsthaler, Anton [1995] (1999). The Last Days of Hitler: The Legends, The Evidence, The Truth. Brockhampton Press. ISBN 978-1-86019-902-8. 
• Linge, Heinz (2009). With Hitler to the End. Frontline Books–Skyhorse Publishing. ISBN 978-1-60239-804-7. 
• (2005) Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. Chaucer Press. ISBN 978-1-904449-13-3.