Lieut Gen Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven: Lieut Gen Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, who has died aged 93, was one of the handful of Wehrmacht staff officers who stayed with Hitler in the bunker deep under the chancellery in Berlin until the final hours of the Nazi regime. He was one of the last to leave, and was probably the last survivor of the 1945 "bitter-enders".
The extraordinary twilight scenes of the "thousand-year reich" were vividly described in The Last Days of Hitler(1947) by Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British historian and wartime intelligence officer who was assigned to establish the facts about Hitler's death in Berlin on April 30th, 1945. As "Major Oughton" he debriefed Loringhoven, a key witness to some of the final events.
The Red Army had opened its final assault on the city centre and shrapnel was falling in the chancellery garden. Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, designated as Hitler's successor, had fled to the far north of Germany, where the Wehrmacht supreme command had taken refuge, to form a new "government".
At noon on April 29th, three officers were sent out of the bunker, each bearing a signed copy of Hitler's political and personal testament for Dönitz. The midday situation conference took place as usual.
By this time the bunker's last link with the outside world had been broken when the balloon carrying the radio telephone aerial was shot down. This left the small group of staff officers still present with nothing to do.
After the conference three of them asked permission to leave the bunker with the aim of getting through the Russian lines to Gen Wenck's residual 12th army, which was supposed to counter-attack from the north to save Berlin. The group included Maj Freytag von Loringhoven, adjutant to Gen Hans Krebs, army chief of staff. Only one other officer left the bunker after this trio and before Hitler committed suicide. All were captured by the allies.
Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven was descended from the German aristocracy that derived from the Teutonic knights, who seized territory on the northeastern Baltic in the Middle Ages. His family had migrated there from the Rhineland in the 15th century, and he was born at the ancestral home on the Estonian island of Osel (now Saaremaa). The family left Estonia after the 1918 redistribution of land at the establishment of the country's independence.
Loringhoven went to a school for refugees from the Baltic states. He wanted to become a lawyer, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933 it became necessary to join the party to enter the professions. Instead, he became an officer cadet in the small army left to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, where party membership was not required.
By the time the Second World War began, Loringhoven was on the staff of the First Panzer Division. He observed the triumphs of blitzkrieg armoured warfare both there and in the swift campaign that overran the Low Countries and northern France in May 1940. He was on the staff of the Second Panzer Army commanded by Gen Heinz Guderian, the leading German tank strategist who became his patron, for the invasion of Russia in June 1941.
Early in 1942 Loringhoven went into the frontline as a squadron commander in the Second Panzer Regiment. He was soon promoted to major and given charge of a battalion that took part in the great summer tank battles which saw the Russians begin to get the upper hand on the German eastern front. Late in 1942, Guderian sent him on a special mission, a task that ensured he was not caught up in the surrender after the battle of Stalingrad.
After the unsuccessful bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, Guderian became chief of the general staff, and made Loringhoven his adjutant. When Guderian was succeeded by Gen Krebs, Loringhoven stayed on.
Detained by the Americans at the end of the war, he was eventually able to prove that he had never been a Nazi and was released in January 1948. He found work in the publishing industry until West Germany joined Nato in 1955, and the Bundeswehr was formed. He then went back into uniform, serving in various West German army posts and Nato staff appointments, retiring as a lieutenant general.
His first wife, Renate, died young, as did their son. His second wife, Ilse-Verna, also predeceased him, but their son, Arndt, is a senior German diplomat.
Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, born February 6th, 1914; died February 27th, 2007.