The private side to a very public figure

Rochus Misch, Hitler's bodyguard, telephonist and messenger, was the last person to escape alive from the bunker where the Nazi leader spent his final days.

Now aged 90 and no longer able to handle the many interview requests that come his way, Misch has decided to publish his story. Der Letzte Zeuge (The Last Witness) is mainly motivated by his desire to set straight details that he says were misrepresented in reconstructions such as the 2004 movie Der Untergang (The Downfall) starring Bruno Ganz.

Misch's perspective on "the boss," as he and his colleagues referred to Hitler, is not the historical one of a racist monster bent on world domination and the extermination of an entire people.

He gives us the private Hitler, with minutiae of what he ate (gruel, because of persistent stomach problems), his small acts of kindness towards his staff, his insistence on a hot-water bottle for his feet at night and his affection for his dog Blondi.

There are episodes when Misch's account seems historically irrelevant for those reasons. He was not privy to the meetings that shaped world events: When Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited Berlin in November 1940 to seek assurances Germany would not post troops in Finland, Misch remembers the weather. "I brought a blanket to his limousine because he wanted it to wrap around his legs," he writes. "It was extremely cold."

Tall, athletic and handsome, Misch had little interest in politics. He was drafted into Hitler's "Begleitkommando" in 1940. Proud at being entrusted with such proximity, he became a hard-working team member – so much so, that he was based in the Fuehrerbunker until the very end, even after the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun had burned to cinders.

He was finally released on May 2, 1945, to be caught and imprisoned for nine years.