Walther Hewel

Until Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, Hewel remained in his inner circle. As one of the few people to remain near him until the end, he was said to have tried to cheer Hitler up. He was among the last people to have a personal conversation with Hitler before he died, in which Hitler had encouraged Hewel to commit suicide. Hitler warned Hewel that if he was captured by the Red Army, he would be tortured and "mounted in a waxworks". Hitler gave Hewel a cyanide capsule and a Walther 7.65 handgun, then had him take an oath to kill himself rather than be captured by the Soviets.

The group headed along the U-Bahn tunnels, but their route was blocked so they went above ground and later joined hundreds of other German civilians and military personnel who had sought refuge at the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer Brewery. Upon arriving at the holdout on 2 May 1945, Hewel made remarks to the effect that he planned to commit suicide. Despite the efforts of Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck – who attempted to talk him out of it in a long and wide-ranging conversation – Hewel killed himself in the manner that Professor Dr. Werner Haase had recommended to Hitler, biting down on a cyanide capsule while shooting himself in the head. According to Schenck, Hewel was emotionally and physically exhausted, which contributed to his actions.

When Gretl Braun, the sister of Hitler's mistress Eva Braun, became pregnant out of wedlock, Hitler took steps to try to find her a husband. Hewel, a shy bachelor, was considered to be one of the possibilities. Braun later married SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein of the Waffen-SS. A few weeks later, on 12 July 1944, Fegelein's good friend, Elizabeth "Blondie" Blanda – a Red Cross nurse who had previously tended to Hewel after he survived an airplane crash on 21 April 1944 in which General Hans-Valentin Hube was killed – married Hewel at Berchtesgaden.

Hewel was then appointed, in 1940, to the position of "Special Ambassador" and was Ribbentrop's direct liaison with Hitler. During this time, he resumed his earlier friendship with the dictator. He spent most of World War II without an official portfolio and once described himself as "an ambassador to nowhere". In the later years of the war, as Hitler became more estranged from Ribbentrop, Hewel acted as Hitler's senior adviser on foreign policy matters and a member of Hitler's inner circle. When Hitler moved from his "Wolf's Lair" headquarters in East Prussia to the Führerbunker under the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hewel joined him there with the rest of Hitler's entourage.

Hewel returned to Germany, and in 1937 became the Chief of the English Desk in Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's office, and in 1938 the head of Ribbentrop's personal staff. On 15 March 1939, he transcribed the conference between Hitler and Czech president Emil Hácha.

Hewel was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer on 12 July 1937, and Brigadeführer on 9 November 1942.

In March 1936, Hewel returned to Germany, where he was appointed the Chief of the East Asia Desk in the Foreign Section of the Party. He entered Germany's diplomatic service and was sent to Spain. Journalist James P. O'Donnell remarked that, during this time, Hewel "was almost certainly an agent of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris's Abwehr" counter-intelligence agency.

Hewel then served a commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg in 1926, following which he spent a year in England. From 1927, Hewel worked abroad for several years in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) as a planter and coffee salesman for a British firm . Hewel joined the Nazi Party there in June 1933 and helped to organise local branches with German expatriates as members. By 1937, the Nazi Party in Indonesia had established branches in Batavia, Bandung, Semarang, Surabaya, Medan, Padang, and Makassar.

Hewel graduated in 1923, moved to Munich in Bavaria, and attended the Technical University of Munich. The same year, as an 18 year old, he joined the Stosstrupp Hitler, a formation of the Nazi Party's SA "brownshirt" stormtroopers – his member number was in the low 200s – and took part in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch, carrying a swastika banner with 23-year-old Heinrich Himmler. After Hitler's subsequent conviction for treason, Hewel was in Landsberg prison with him for several months, where he served as Hitler's volunteer valet. He was released on 30 December 1924 because of his youth.

Walther Hewel (25 March 1904 – 2 May 1945) was a German diplomat before and during World War II, an early and active member of the Nazi Party, and one of German dictator Adolf Hitler's personal friends.

Hewel was born in 1904 to Anton and Elsa Hewel in Cologne in the Rhineland, where his father ran a cocoa factory. His father died in 1913, leaving Elsa to run the factory.