In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days

During the last ten days of Hitler’s Berlin, thirty thousand German teenagers perished defending their beloved Führer 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 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 the Fatherland braced itself for a bloody Götterdämmerung, 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. It takes us back to his boyhood and the brutal SA officer father who instilled the Nazi’s hateful creed in his son, and follows Lehmann’s odyssey through the ranks of the Hitler Youth, joining when he was only ten and winning two Iron Crosses for his bravery in battle. It is the story of Lehmann’s gradual realization of the full horror of what he had been part of, and his quest for the truth that took him in the footsteps of Mahatma Ghandi and to a meeting with Albert Schweitzer. Above all, IN HITLER’S BUNKER is the story of how one man, instead of running away from his past, confronted it and found peace, at last.