Johanna Ruf, the last survivor of Hitler’s bunker, dies at the age of 94

Johanna Ruf, the last surviving person to witness the final days of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler’s bunker, died at the age of 94 on June 21, confirmed journalist Wieland Giebel, who had worked with her in the his memories Newsweek.

Ruf worked as an aide in the Berlin bunker where Hitler and many high Nazi officials they spent their last days alive as Soviet forces advanced on the city.

“Young people, or still almost children, want to help, boys and girls. Johanna was 15, and that was younger then, more naive than today, I think,” Giebel said. Newsweek.

Ruf worked with about 30 other people from the Federation of German Girls from April 27, 1945, and was one of the last people to see the six children of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels before they were killed by their parents

According to the German newspaper the Berliner ZeitungRuf wrote his observations in the bunker on scraps of paper.

In 2017, he published his memoirs with the help of Giebel: A slap in the face for Goebbels’ boy: Berlin 1945 From the diary of a 15-year-old. The last and first days

said Gable Newsweek who was initially ambivalent about sharing Ruf’s account as he did not want to “promote Nazi propaganda”, but felt it was important to portray the events as they were at the time.

“I met Johanna Ruf in 2016 when a TV station took her to the bunker and had her tell the story of the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker,” he said. Newsweek by e-mail. “But this was so exhausting for her and it went so fast that she couldn’t even tell the whole story.

“It wasn’t until my second visit to the nursing home that he pulled out his journal from that time. The meaning was immediately clear to me. We put the text into shape. Through further conversation, I explore the framework of the story.about his family and what happened in his life after that.

“Now her book is a document about how young people grow up in a dictatorship, get involved, but also about the fact that there were very decent officers among ‘the Russians’ at that time who protected the girls.”

Giebel said the accounts of Ruf and others who were in the bunker during the last days of Nazi Germany definitively debunked conspiracy theories that Hitler somehow survived and praised her for denying Nazism and refusing to blame anyone else for their involvement with the regime.

“Finally, his statements are an important contribution against the untold conspiracy theories that Hitler might have survived after all,” he said. “A doctor tells the young women that he is dead. The young soldiers talk about the burnt corpses. She can’t visit him on May 1 because he no longer exists.

“That Johanna Ruf then converted to the Christian faith, which supported her, is not atypical. And another thing: for as long as I have known her, she has taken a clear stand against National Socialism and has never shifted the responsibility to others, that is to say she never said that she had been seduced or deceived by Hitler”.

Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide before the bunker was captured by Soviet soldiers.

Nazi Germany would sign its unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945, ending the conflict in Europe.

Imperial Japan would surrender on September 2 of that year after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.