Johanna Ruf, the last surviving person to have witnessed the closing days of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler’s bunker, died aged 94 on June 21, the Berliner Zeitung claimed on Tuesday.
Ruf worked as an assistant in the bunker in Berlin the place Hitler and many major Nazi officials spent their very last times alive as Soviet forces highly developed on the city.
“Young persons, or however nearly young children want to support, boys as very well as girls. Johanna was 15 a long time old—and that was younger then, far more naive than currently, it seems to me,” Wieland Giebel, who worked with Ruf on her memoirs, told Newsweek.
Ruf worked with some 30 some others from the Federation of German Girls from April 27, 1945, and was a single of the last folks to see chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ 6 kids prior to they ended up murdered by their moms and dads.
According to the German newspaper the Berliner Zeitung, Ruf wrote down her observations in the bunker on slips of paper.
Berlin Tale Verlag/ Getty
In 2017, she printed her memoirs with the aid of journalist Wieland Giebel: A Slap for the Goebbels Kid: Berlin 1945 From the Diary of a 15-12 months-Outdated. The Previous and First Times
Giebel advised Newsweek that at 1st he was ambivalent about sharing Ruf’s account as he did not “want to boost Nazi propaganda” but he felt it was critical to portray activities as they had been at the time.
“I met Johanna Ruf in 2016 when a Television station took her to the bunker and had her inform the tale of the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker,” he explained to Newsweek by means of e-mail. “But that was so exhausting for her and went so rapid that she couldn’t even tell the whole story.
“It was not right until my next check out to her in the aged people’s dwelling that she dug out her diary from that time. The meaning was right away distinct to me. We place the textual content into condition together. By more dialogue, I explored the body story about her spouse and children and what occurred in her daily life following that.
“Now her ebook is a document about how younger people today grow up in a dictatorship, get concerned, but also about the simple fact that there have been extremely respectable officers among ‘the Russians’ at that time who shielded the youthful girls.”
Giebel mentioned the accounts from Ruf and some others who were in the bunker in the course of the past times of Nazi Germany definitively disproved conspiracy theories that Hitler someway survived and he praised her for disavowing Nazism and refusing to blame any one else for her involvement with the routine.
“Eventually, their statements are an important contribution in opposition to the unspeakable conspiracy theories that Hitler may perhaps have survived right after all,” he explained. “A physician tells the younger women that he is dead. Youthful troopers explain to of the burned corpses. She simply cannot pay a visit to him on May perhaps 1 since he no lengthier exists.
“That Johanna Ruf then transformed to the Christian religion, which gave her guidance, is not atypical. And a further point: As extensive as I have identified her, she has taken a obvious stand towards Countrywide Socialism and hardly ever shifted the accountability onto others, i.e. under no circumstances reported that she experienced been seduced or misled by Hitler.”
Hitler and Goebbels died by suicide prior to the bunker was captured by Soviet soldiers.
Nazi Germany would indicator its unconditional surrender on May perhaps 7, 1945, bringing an close to the conflict in Europe.
Imperial Japan would surrender on September 2 that yr following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
