After the war, Misch was taken into custody by the Red Army; he spent nine years enduring torture in a Soviet prison camp and returned to Germany in 1954 (to the East) to find it a divided country with citizens confusingly “reeducated,” as he puts it, this being his code word for no longer worshipping der Führer. Since then he has lived an anonymous existence in the Berlin suburb of Rudow. Previously he and his wife ran a small home-decorating shop and together raised their daughter, Birgitta. Since his wife died in 1998 he has lived alone. His daughter put her children in a Jewish school in Frankfurt. She chooses not to see him anymore.

Before “Downfall” was released, Misch’s public persona was limited to solo visits to the site of Hitler’s bunker — and this is how I found him. I give walking tours of Berlin, which frequently take me to this windswept, out-of-the-way corner, frequented almost exclusively by English-language tour groups. (It’s a little too macabre for the Germans.) One day an old man was hanging around, and my lecture on the last days of Hitler was interrupted by the cry, “Hello! Hello! Don’t you know me? I’m Misch! I was there!”

He has also had an Internet presence, providing a “celebrity” endorsement for a mix CD of Bavarian music he allegedly helped put together, to benefit aging veterans of the Waffen-SS. (No government benefits for them.) I met with Misch for this interview in the little house he has lived in since 1942. He has a towering frame and broad shoulders even today; clearly he was a physically ideal member of the Waffen-SS. Repetitive and self-absorbed, he has a lonely old man’s slightly doddering conviviality and tends to repeat himself. Although I mentioned at the beginning of the interview that I was an American, he forgot this quickly in favor of his preferred nationality: British. The interior of his house seems to have been embalmed in the 1940s; likewise, Misch’s worldview.

I’ve translated the interview from the German. I asked Misch first about his memories of the death of Hitler:

I was standing in the hallway when Hitler took his own life. Because I wanted to go over to the Reichs Chancellery for lunch [the Reichs Chancellery was connected to the Führerbunker by a tunnel], and a colleague had already taken over for me in the telephone room. I was standing in the hallway, asking in the neighboring room if I should bring anything back with me. The other guy said, “No, no, I have everything already,” and it was then someone called, someone … [he searches for the name] ah, it was Linge, Linge, Hitler’s butler. He said, “I think it’s done.” He had heard it.

But of course we were always making mistakes. Our ears played tricks. Down there in the bunker, any loud noise echoing through the concrete sounded like a gunshot. There was so much suspense. We had been waiting, expecting it any minute, for hours. And yet we weren’t sure. Because of course, there was always the possibility of a miracle. The miracle would have been England. If England had said, it’s not Hitler that’s our biggest enemy, rather Bolshevism, they could have rolled right by Berlin all the way to Moscow. Churchill himself said later, “We slaughtered the wrong pig.”

And after you realized Hitler was dead?

Well, there was perfect silence. We waited. We waited maybe 20 minutes. But Linge was curious. I was curious. I still don’t remember whether it was Linge or Günsche who first opened the door to Hitler’s rooms, but one of the two. I was really curious and came forward a few steps. Then somebody opened the second door — I still don’t know who it was, probably Linge. And it was then, as the second door opened, I saw Hitler, dead, lying on a chair. Eva [Braun] on the couch completely clothed. In a dark dress and white, white skin. She was lying back.

So then I said to them, “I’m going to run over and report to the commanding officer.” And they said, annoyed, “Well, come right back.” So I told them, “Yeah, sure. I’m just saying: I’m a soldier. I have a command to carry out.” Then I was on my way over to the Reichs Chancellery, already in the passageway, but I had an uncanny feeling, very scared and uncertain, so I turned around. When I got back they already had Hitler down on the floor. I watched them packing him up, in a blanket. Well, so it went. Then they carried him out, and I went away finally and made the communication to the commanding officer. A little later, one of my comrades said, “If you want, go on up outside, the boss is getting burned.” You know, just as planned. And I said, “No, I’m not going up. You go up!” But he said, “No, I’m not going up either, I’m getting out of here.” So neither of us went to the cremation.

Do you remember your feelings when you realized Hitler was dead?

We were expecting it. It didn’t come as a surprise. We were living in another world at that point. We had so many feelings, fear, hope — I can’t describe it. We had habituated ourselves to the idea of the end. We had a feeling as if we were drunk. To put it bluntly, we didn’t give a damn, finally. Nothing made a hell of a lot of difference at that point.

Were you afraid of the future?

One of the guys said to me, “Maybe we’ll be shot?” I said, “Why in the world would we be shot?” He said, “The head of the Gestapo was here. He never comes here. Why was he here? Maybe they’ll shoot all the witnesses, everyone who knows the boss is dead.”

And you know, in fact, they did shoot people. During the burning, two civilians showed up out of nowhere. There was a wall — on the other side was the Foreign Office, and people were crawling around the city everywhere, running away from the Russians at the time. And those civilians were shot by the Gestapo. They had seen too much. However, in the end they turned out to be a couple of Poles.

The bodyguard also denied he had any knowledge of the Holocaust during his five years of service in the SS, insisting that Hitler never discussed the Final Solution in his presence.

“That was never a topic,” he said. “Never.”

Even after the war, Misch appeared to have little empathy for the victims of the Holocaust, yet in 2005 was nearly moved to tears when probed on Joseph and Magda Goebbels’s decision to kill their six children in the Berlin bunker, before committing suicide themselves.

Misch was present for the last ten days of Hitler’s life, and was one of the group who discovered the dictator’s body on 30 April 1945, having elected to follow him underground to the Berlin bunker, or – as he called it - the “coffin of concrete”.

He remembered that on 22 April - eight days before the Nazi leader’s suicide - Hitler’s despair at the news that two Soviet armies had completed their circumference of Berlin.

“That’s it,” Hitler reportedly said. “The war is lost. Everybody can go.“

But Misch stuck to his post even after Hitler was dead – taking and directing phone calls from Goebbels for days afterwards.

He eventually fled the bunker on 2 May and, following the German surrender, was taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent next nine years in prisoner of war camps.

In 1954 he was allowed to return to Berlin to be reunited with his wife Gerda, with whom he opened a shop.

Still resolutely defiant in 2005, he boasted of the large amount of mail he received from “fans”, saying he responded by sending a signed picture of himself in full SS uniform outside the famous “Wolf's Lair” complex on the eastern front.

Though Misch was probably a reliable witness to the facts, he showed none of the remorse or psychological insight that others exhibited when talking about the Nazi era. To Misch, Hitler remained the kind boss who joked with his staff, loved Charlie Chaplin, children and animals and was so considerate towards others that he married Eva Braun the day before their deaths “solely out of consideration for her parents”....

After the Goebbels met their deaths, Misch was finally free to make a break for home. He managed to make his way to the Friedrichstrasse station, where he ran into Heinz Linge. The two men felt their way through a tunnel under the river Spree: “Through a grating, we saw a group of German soldiers. We couldn’t believe it. We decided to go up and join them. That was it. The soldiers were Red Army prisoners.”

He returned to his two-storey home in the east Berlin suburb of Rudow and to his wife, Gerda, whom he had married in 1942. There he set up a wallpaper and paint business, which he ran until 1983.

Misch remained an uncomfortable reminder of attitudes which many Germans like to believe have been consigned to the history books. In 2005 he was accused of tainting the memories of Holocaust victims after calling for a plaque in memory of the Goebbels children to be placed next to a new Jewish memorial.

After the release of Der Untergang, he was rather pleased to find himself the object of worldwide media attention, and took every opportunity to show interviewers his snapshots of Hitler and Eva Braun in happier days at Berchtesgaden. “It was a good time with Hitler,” he reminisced. “I enjoyed it and I was proud to work for him.”