Inside Hitler's bunker Hideway.His authority was extraordinary.

 Inside Hitler's bunker Hideway.His authority was extraordinary. He was charming' - Hitler's nurse on his final hours. ( Extremely rare account).

Survivor of bunker tells of admiration for Goebbels' wife and hatred for Eva Braun

Read a transcript of the interview with Erna Flegel.

She is the last witness. For 60 years, Erna Flegal said nothing about her starring role in the Third Reich. Her family knew that in the last, desperate weeks of the second world war she had lived in Berlin. 

But she never spoke of her job as Hitler's nurse and of her time in the Führer's Berlin bunker.

Now, as the 60th ( year 2005) anniversary of the end of the war in Europe nears, Ms Flegel has spoken out for the first time about her experiences - of Hitler's final hours, of her friendship with the "brilliant" Magda Goebbels, and her jealous loathing for Eva Braun.

 Her testimony casts fresh light on the last days of the Nazi era and has never appeared in the countless books written about Hitler.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ms Flegel, now 93 ( in 2005)  and living in a nursing home in north Germany, yesterday described how she began working as a Red Cross nurse at the Reichschancellery in Berlin in January 1943. She had been transferred there from the eastern front.

"I was in the building and someone said, 'The Führer is here,'" she said. "The first time it didn't particularly affect me. 

He was away from Berlin for a long time before someone announced again, 'The Führer is back.' Hitler shook hands with all the people he hadn't greeted before. After that he talked to us regularly.

"His authority was extraordinary. He was always polite and charming. There was really nothing to object to."

As the Russians approached, and Berlin came under direct artillery fire, the mood in the bunker changed. "The circle got increasingly small. People were pushed together. Everyone became more unassuming." 

Ms Flegel's existence only emerged after the transcript of an interview she gave to American interrogators in November 1945 was declassified four years ago by the CIA.

 The Guardian discovered her insider's account of Hitler's final hours in a Washington vault and published it.

But her fate remained a mystery. Two months ago a Berlin-based newspaper, the BZ, tracked down her relatives via the German Red Cross and war archives. To the paper's astonishment, her family revealed that Ms Flegel was still alive.

She is the last surviving female witness to have been inside the bunker. Traudl Junge - Hitler's secretary, whose memoirs provided the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film Downfall, and who gave numerous interviews to journalists and historians - died in 2002. The only other survivor, 88-year-old Rochus Misch, Hitler's telephonist, refuses to talk.

Speaking at her nursing home, which has a picturesque river view, Ms Flegel yesterday said that as the Russians had drawn closer to Berlin, those inside the bunker began to live "outside reality".

In the middle of April 1945, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi's propaganda chief, his wife Magda and their six children moved in.

 Ms Flegel, whose original job had been to look after wounded SS soldiers, said she had got to know Magda Goebbels well. 

When it became clear that the situation was hopeless, she had tried to persuade her to send her children out of Berlin. 

In her original testimony, Ms Flegel also described how in the final days before his suicide on the afternoon of April 30 1945, Hitler had begun to crumble before her eyes. "When parts of Berlin were already occupied, and the Russians were coming closer and closer to the centre of the city, one could feel, almost physically, that the Third Reich was approaching its end," her statement said.

"Hitler required no care; I was exclusively there for the care of the wounded. To be sure, he had aged greatly in the last days; he now had a lot of grey hair, and gave the impression of a man at least 15 to 20 years older. 

He shook a good deal, walking was difficult for him, his right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life."

Yesterday Ms Flegel said that before his wedding to Eva Braun on the night of April 28 Hitler "sank into himself".

In her statement she gives a shrewish portrait of Eva Braun, whom she dismisses as "a completely colourless personality". She would not have been conspicuous among a crowd of stenographers, she said.

Hitler's decision to marry Braun made it "immediately clear to me that this signified the end of the Third Reich", she added, claiming that the death of Hitler's wolfhound Blondi "affected us more" than Braun's suicide.

Yesterday Ms Flegel made little effort to hide her dislike of a woman, who, she suggested, was little more than a Hitler groupie. "Oh dear God. She didn't have any importance. Nobody expected much of her. She was just a young girl, really," she said of Braun, who was only six months her junior. "She wasn't really his wife."

By April 29, the once mighty German Reich had been reduced to an area the size of a large football field, stretching between Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstrasse. Heavy fighting engulfed the city centre. Radio communications with the outside world ceased. Shock troops brought news of the latest Russian positions.

At 10.30pm that evening, Ms Flegel was summoned with the rest of the medical team to line up and take their leave of the Führer. "He came out of the side room, shook everyone's hand, and said a few friendly words. And that was it," she told the Guardian.

During her interrogation after the war she said: "At the end we were like a big family. The terrific dynamics of the fate which was unrolling held sway over all of us. We were Germany, and we were going through the end of the Third Reich and the war. Everything petty and external had fallen away."

At 10.30pm that evening, Ms Flegel was summoned with the rest of the medical team to line up and take their leave of the Führer. "He came out of the side room, shook everyone's hand, and said a few friendly words. And that was it," she told the Guardian. 

Ms Flegel insists that the Russians she had encountered treated her "very humanely", despite the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers elsewhere in the city. They had a "look round", discovered the bunker's underground supplies, and then left, she said, advising her to lock her front door.

The Red Army allowed her to continue work as a nurse for the next few months, treating wounded Russians, until she ended up in the hands of the US Strategic Services Unit, one of the precursors of the CIA. 

Ms Flegel said her "interrogation" by the Americans in November 1945 was little more than an informal chat over dinner. "They invited us to have dinner with them and treated us to six different courses in order to soften us up. It didn't work with me, though."

Ms Flegel's testimony - including her conviction that Hitler was dead, an important statement for the victorious allies - was deemed sufficiently important that it remained classified.

The interview went missing until 1981, when a Connecticut doctor and amateur historian stumbled on it in an army archive and sent it to Richard Helms, the US intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin and later CIA director. 

He wrote back saying: "It is probably one of the most accurate interviews obtained and has thus far never been quoted, as far as I know, in any of the massive books about Hitler's Germany.