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By Anders Anglesey
U.S. News Reporter
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Johanna Ruf, the last surviving person to have witnessed the final days of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler's bunker, died aged 94 on June 21, journalist Wieland Giebel, who had worked with her on her memoirs, confirmed to Newsweek.
Ruf worked as an assistant in the bunker in Berlin where Hitler and many top Nazi officials spent their last days alive as Soviet forces advanced on the city.
"Young people, or still almost children want to help, boys as well as girls. Johanna was 15 years old—and that was younger then, more naive than today, it seems to me," Giebel told Newsweek.
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Ruf worked with some 30 others from the Federation of German Girls from April 27, 1945, and was one of the last people to see chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels' six children before they were murdered by their parents.
According to the German newspaper the Berliner Zeitung, Ruf wrote down her observations in the bunker on slips of paper.
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In 2017, she published her memoirs with Giebel's help: A Slap for the Goebbels Kid: Berlin 1945 From the Diary of a 15-Year-Old. The Last and First Days
Giebel told Newsweek that at first he was ambivalent about sharing Ruf's account as he did not "want to promote Nazi propaganda" but he felt it was important to portray 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 told Newsweek via email. "But that was so exhausting for her and went so fast that she couldn't even tell the whole story.
"It was not until my second visit to her in the old people's home that she dug out her diary from that time. The meaning was immediately clear to me. We put the text into shape together. Through further conversation, I explored the frame story about her family and what happened in her 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 young girls."
Giebel said the accounts from Ruf and others who were in the bunker during the last days of Nazi Germany definitively disproved conspiracy theories that Hitler somehow survived and he praised her for disavowing Nazism and refusing to blame anyone else for her involvement with the regime.
"Finally, their statements are an important contribution against the unspeakable conspiracy theories that Hitler may have survived after all," he said. "A doctor tells the young women that he is dead. Young soldiers tell of the burned corpses. She cannot visit him on May 1 because he no longer exists.
"That Johanna Ruf then converted to the Christian faith, which gave her support, is not atypical. And another thing: As long as I have known her, she has taken a clear stand against National Socialism and never shifted the responsibility onto others, i.e. never said that she had been seduced or misled by Hitler."
Hitler and Goebbels died by suicide before the bunker was captured by Soviet soldiers.
Nazi Germany would sign its unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945, bringing an end to the conflict in Europe.
Imperial Japan would surrender on September 2 that year following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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