Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven

Mar 29 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, soldier; born February 6, 1914, died February 27, 2007

HE WAS one of the last men to touch the living flesh of Adolf Hitler and, as he felt the limp, damp handshake, he looked into the once mesmerising blue eyes of the broken Fuehrer and spotted a glint of envy.

It was a macabre scene in Hitler’s bunker, concealed beneath eight metres of concrete in Berlin. Shrapnel was falling on the chancellery gardens. The Russian advance was inexorable.

Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven was one of the few Wehrmacht staff officers witnessing this Wagnerian twilight.

Although never a Nazi himself, he had been there in the times of triumph, with the First Panzer Division, sweeping through the Low Countries and France. Then in Russia he served with General Heinz Guderian, a man who seemed to represent all that was finest in the Aryan.

But in common with other aristocratic Germans, Freytag looked down on the bourgeois ex-corporal Hitler, believing that he had stolen the thunder from the soldiers for the German successes.

But von Loringhoven was a loyal soldier, and in 1942 he became a squadron commander in the Second Panzer Division and was then promoted to major, taking part in tank battles against the USSR.

With the war turning against Germany, Guderian found his friend a task which took him away from the collapse at Stalingrad.

Von Loringhoven traced his ancestry to Teutonic knights and was in every way a military man, but nothing could have prepared him for the madness of the bunker, where he was employed as a military aide.

“I had the image of a very strong, vital person with charisma,” von Loringhoven said of Hitler, “but he was a sick old man . . . his head was sunk into his shoulders. I felt nothing, the eyes were pale and without expression any more.”