Rochus Misch was also the last remainding witness to the Nazi leader's final hours in his Berlin bunker. He died on Thursday in Berlin after a short-lived illness, Bukhard Nachtigall, the person who helped him ghostwrite the 2008 memoir told the Associated Press on Friday.
Misch remained proud to the end about the years he spent with Hitler, whom he also affectionately called his "boss". In an interview in 2005 with the Associated Press, Misch recalled Hitler as a "very normal man" and gave him a very riveting account of the German dictator's last day before he and his wife Eva Braun killed themselves as the Soviet Red Army closed in around their bunker in Berlin.
"He was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman," said Misch. He was born on July 29, 1917 in the tiny Silesian town of Alt Schalkowitz, now more popularly known as Poland. He was orphaned at an early age. At 20 years old, he decided to join the SS - an organization that he saw as a counterweight to a rising threat from the left.
He signed up for the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a unit that was founded to serve as Hitler's personal protection. "It was anti-communist, against Stalin - to protect Europe," said Misch. "I signed up in the war against Bolshevism, not for Adolf Hitler."
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939, Misch found himself in the vanguard, as his SS division was attached to a regular army unit for the blitzkrieg attack. He was shot and nearly killed while trying to negotiate the surrender of a fortress near Warsaw and he was sent to Germany to recover.
