| During
the last ten days of Hitler's
Berlin, thirty thousand German teenagers perished defending their
beloved
Fuhrer in the Allied onslaught. Armin Lehmann was one of the few boy
soldiers
who escaped the bloodbath. Like every other member of the Hitler Youth,
Lehmann would have gladly given his life for his leader. But he was not
to be sacrificed to the enemy at the gate. Instead, he was chosen to
serve
in the German High Command's bunker complex. It was a stroke of fate
that
brought him into the company of the most notorious and bizarre Nazis of
Hitler's hated Reich: Bormann, Himmler, Göbbels, and, of
course, the
Führer himself.
When
Hitler greeted Lehmann with
a friendly tug on the cheek, the sixteen-year-old boy knew he had been
granted a unique part in history. And as Germany braced itself for a
bloody
Gotterdammerung, a horrific drama of Wagnerian proportions unfolded
before
his young eyes. In
Hitler's Bunker is a fascinating
vision of the
Nazi apocalypse that combines Lehmann's eyewitness account with what is
known to have occurred. It is also the story of how his unquestioning
fanaticism
won him that role in the final act of the Third Reich.
|
In Hitler's
Bunker
A
Boy Soldier's Eyewitness
Account of the Fuhrer's Last Days
by
Armin D. Lehmann
with Tim Carroll
The
Lyons Press, 2005.
Order
a copy.
|
