She didn’t answer. She just looked at him with an expression that seemed neither fear nor pleading. It seemed judgmental.
Then another explosion shook the building. The girl jumped up and ran toward a collapsed doorway. Richter gritted his teeth and kept going, but now with the first real crack of the day open inside his chest.
When he reached Wilhelmplatz, the city became a death trap. Soldiers without unit were running in all directions. An SS officer tried to stop him to requisition the vehicle. Richter ran him over. He didn’t have time to think whether the man was dead or not. He only heard the thud of the body hitting the fender and kept driving.
As evening fell, he managed to get out of the worst of the damage, but the car was already starting to give him trouble. The extra fuel was still intact, but a shard had pierced the radiator. The temperature gauge was rising. He couldn’t go on like that for many more hours.
He found temporary refuge in a half-collapsed industrial building north of the city. He parked the Mercedes between two burned-out trucks and waited in silence, listening to the distant echo of artillery fire. He took the black diary from the back seat, lit a cloth-wrapped flashlight, and wrote:
“April 30, 1945. Berlin closes behind me like a mouth. The Führer, if he is still alive, must already be dead in spirit. I will not die for him. I have served too long men who feed on the obedience of others. Now I serve only myself.”
He stopped. He hesitated. Then he added:
“If anyone finds this, they’ll know I wasn’t a coward. I was a practical man in a world of fanatics.”
He closed the notebook.
