On the night of May 1, 1945, a handful of people climbed out of a concrete bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery and into a city the Red Army was tearing apart street by street. They were the last of Hitler’s inner circle, the few dozen who had not chosen to die underground, and as they scattered into the ruins of Berlin, the next decade of their lives was decided by a single question: Which army would reach them first? It mattered enormously which flag the first uniform carried. The ones who made it west, toward the Americans and the British, generally faced interrogation and then release.

The ones the Soviets caught disappeared into a different system entirely, one that did not let go for years. They had all come out of the same bunker on the same night, and yet the next ten years of their lives looked nothing alike. The bunker itself had held a strange mix of people in its final weeks. By late April 1945, it sheltered far more than soldiers.

There were Hitler’s secretaries, among them Traudl Junge, who days earlier had typed his last will and testament. There was his valet, Heinz Linge, and his SS adjutant, Otto Günsche. There was his personal cook, a young Austrian woman named Constanze Manziarly, still preparing his meals as the shells came down overhead. There was his pilot, Hans Baur, his chauffeur, Erich Kempka, a doctor named Ernst-Günther Schenck, the head of the Hitler Youth, Artur Axmann, and a telephone operator and bodyguard named Rochus Misch, who ran the switchboard almost to the last hour.

Not all of them intended to leave. When Hitler shot himself on April 30, 1945, the people around him split into two groups. One group chose to die there. Joseph and Magda Goebbels murdered their six children in the bunker and then killed themselves.

Two of Hitler’s generals, Hans Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf, shot themselves as well. A few made another choice entirely. The bunker’s chief machinist, Johannes Hentschel, stayed at his post to keep the water and ventilation running for the wounded still sheltering below, and simply waited there to surrender when the Soviets arrived. He was held until 1949.

But most of the rest decided to try to live. The ones who drew the worst card were the men the Red Army pulled out of the ruins. To the Soviets, these were not just captured staff. They were witnesses to a question the Soviet leadership was genuinely unsure about: whether Hitler was actually dead at all.

Stalin himself doubted it. The bodies had been burned in the Chancellery Garden and never cleanly identified at the time, and rumors that Hitler had slipped away to Spain or Argentina or onto a submarine circulated at the highest levels in Moscow. So the men who had been in that bunker were flown east and interrogated over and over by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who wanted to know exactly what had happened and where the body was. Soviet teams had in fact recovered charred remains and a fragment of jaw, and had quietly confirmed the identity through the staff of Hitler’s own dentist, who recognized the dental work.

But they kept that conclusion secret even from their own public and went on questioning the survivors as if the case were still wide open. Rochus Misch, the telephone operator, got the full weight of it. He fled the bunker on May 2, was captured, and was taken to Moscow, where he was interrogated at the Lubyanka, the NKVD’s notorious prison. He later said the torture was so unbearable that he wrote to the Soviet secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, asking simply to be shot.

He was not shot. Instead, he spent around nine years in Soviet captivity, released only in 1954. When he finally came home to Berlin, he did the most ordinary thing imaginable with the rest of his life: he opened a painting and wallpaper business and ran it until he retired in 1983. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, the man who had been at his side almost daily for a decade, followed nearly the same road.

Once the Soviets worked out who he was, they took him to Moscow and the Lubyanka, and he spent ten years in Soviet captivity before his release in 1955. Otto Günsche, the adjutant who had helped carry Hitler’s body up to the garden and burn it, was captured on May 2, flown to Moscow for interrogation, and not finally released until May 2, 1956—eleven years to the day after his capture, coming out through Bautzen prison in East Germany. The Soviets did not just imprison these men; they mined them. Over years of questioning, the accounts of Linge and Günsche in particular were compiled into a detailed secret dossier on Hitler’s life and death, prepared on Stalin’s own orders, because he wanted to understand the enemy he had beaten.

That document, later known as The Hitler Book, stayed locked in Soviet archives for decades. The men had survived, but almost everything they knew had been extracted and filed away in Moscow long before they were ever allowed home. Then there was Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, and the Soviets were especially interested in him for an obvious reason. If anyone had flown Hitler out of Berlin, it would have been Baur.

During the breakout, he was shot in the legs, badly enough that his right lower leg was amputated in June 1945. Captured while wounded, he endured ten years in the Soviet Union, insisting to his interrogators that he had flown Hitler nowhere because there had been nowhere left to fly. He was handed to the French in 1955 and not fully released until 1957. Even the bunker’s doctor, Ernst-Günther Schenck, taken in the same breakout, was held until 1953 before he saw West Germany again.

The pattern was hard to miss. For the men the Soviets caught, the war did not end in 1945. It ended in 1953 or 1954 or 1955 or 1956, after years in camps and cells, because Moscow could not quite bring itself to believe that the most wanted man in the world was really a pile of ash in a Berlin garden. The difference for the men who ended up in Western hands was stark.

Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, is the clearest example. Kempka was the one who, on Günsche’s order, had brought the roughly two hundred liters of petrol used to burn Hitler and Eva Braun’s bodies in the Chancellery Garden. He got out of Berlin and made his way south, and he was captured not by the Soviets but by American troops at Berchtesgaden. He was interrogated, he testified about the last days, and he was released from captivity in October 1947.

He went on to live quietly in West Germany, worked, wrote a memoir about his years driving Hitler, and died in 1975. Two and a half years in custody, not ten. His account of pouring the petrol and watching the bodies burn became one of the key Western sources on how Hitler actually died, at a time when the Soviets were saying almost nothing in public. Artur Axmann, the head of the Hitler Youth, took a different route out, and for a while it worked.

He escaped the bunker, was presumed dead, and lived under a false name: Erich Siewert. But Axmann had not actually given up on the cause. He got involved in organizing an underground Nazi network, and in December 1945, American counterintelligence uncovered the plot and arrested him. He was eventually put through denazification, fined, and released, and he lived all the way until 1996.

And then there was Traudl Junge, the young secretary. She left the bunker in the breakout on May 1, and unable to reach the western lines, ended up back in Berlin, where the Soviets arrested her in June 1945. She was living under the name Gerda Alt, but Junge was low on the list of people the Soviets cared about: a woman in her twenties who had typed letters, rather than a general or an adjutant. By December 1945, she had been released.

She settled in West Germany and worked for years as a secretary at a magazine. For decades, she said very little about what she had seen. The contrast with the men in the Soviet camps could not be sharper. Kempka, who had physically helped burn the bodies, was a free man in 1947.

Junge, who had typed the dictator’s final testament, was home by Christmas of 1945. What decided their far lighter fate was not really what they had done inside the bunker. It was the direction they ran when they came out of it, and the flag on the uniform of whoever stopped them. Not every fate here has an ending anyone can point to.

Constanze Manziarly was Hitler’s cook, a young Austrian dietitian who had spent the final months preparing the plain vegetarian meals he insisted on, right up to his last full day alive. She left the bunker in the same breakout as the others on May 1. And then the record simply stops. According to Traudl Junge, who was with her for part of the escape, Manziarly was stopped by two Red Army soldiers and led away.

Junge never saw her again. She was in her early twenties. There is no confirmed record of her death, no grave, no release, no memoir, nothing. She is officially listed only as having disappeared in Berlin in May 1945.

Whatever happened to her happened in the chaos of those first days, unrecorded, and it was never resolved. For every survivor who lived to give interviews sixty years later, there was someone like Constanze Manziarly who walked out of the bunker and straight out of the historical record entirely. For the ones who did live, something strange happened as the decades passed. They got older, the world around them changed, and one by one the other people who had been in that bunker died, until each remaining survivor was carrying a piece of history that almost no one else on earth could still confirm.

They had been in the room, and as the years went by, that made them valuable, and it made them haunted. Traudl Junge is the clearest case of the long silence finally breaking. For most of her life, she said little in public about her years as Hitler’s secretary. Then, near the end of her life, she spoke at length in a book and in a documentary film released in 2002, describing the bunker, the last days, and above all her own slow reckoning with the fact that she had worked as a young woman for one of the worst criminals in history.

She died of cancer in Munich in February 2002 at the age of eighty-one, just as that testimony reached the public. Her account became one of the most cited first-hand records of the bunker’s final days, and it later shaped the film that most people now picture when they imagine those rooms. Rochus Misch, the telephone operator turned paint shop owner, carried the role even further. In his later years, he became something of a public figure: the last living man who had been in the bunker with Hitler, giving interviews to journalists and historians from around the world.

He talked about the switchboard, the last hours, and seeing Hitler’s body. He never expressed the kind of reckoning Junge did, which unsettled many of the people who spoke to him, but he answered the questions again and again because he was the only one left who could. Not all of them chose to talk. Otto Günsche, the adjutant who had helped burn the body, came home to West Germany in 1956, went into business, and largely refused to discuss the bunker for the rest of his life.

He died in 2003, taking most of what he knew with him. The survivors never agreed on how to carry it. Some spoke, some stayed silent, and some, like Günsche, seemed to want only to be left alone with the thing they had seen. And then, on September 5, 2013, Rochus Misch died in Berlin at the age of ninety-six.

With him, the last person who had been inside the Führerbunker in those final days was gone. Everyone who had stood in that concrete corridor at the end of the Third Reich—the secretaries, the adjutant, the valet, the cook, the pilot, the doctor, the chauffeur—was now dead. The room passed out of living memory and into history for good. So what happened to the survivors of Hitler’s bunker?

The short answer is that they lived, most of them for a very long time, and their lives afterward were shaped less by what they had witnessed than by who captured them in the ruins of Berlin. The men the Soviets took paid for it with a decade of their lives in camps and cells, because Moscow could not be sure the man they had all served was really dead. The ones the West caught were often home within a couple of years. One vanished without a trace.

And a few lived long enough to become the final voices of the whole story, pressed until the end of their lives to describe the days that no one else was left to remember. There is something fitting in how it closed. The Third Reich had been built on noise—on rallies and radio and endless promises of a thousand-year future.

It ended in a buried concrete room, and the handful of people who were there carried its last secrets quietly for decades, until the very last of them took his to the grave in 2013.