World War Two veteran shares astonishing item of Hitler’s property he kept after finding it during search of Nazi furher’s private office

A World War Two veteran from Kansas took some of Hitler’s personal letterhead back to the U.S. after spending the night in the führer’s private office. 

It was April 1945 when Charles Staubus found himself in Germany after senior Nazi party officials had begun to flee and Hitler had just committed suicide. 

As the German war effort was fast-crumbling, Staubus found himself in Berchtesgaden, Germany, the home of Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.

Nearby was Hitler’s other office known as the Little Reich Chancellery, with Hans Lammers at the helm. 

The officer was essentially the second seat of government of Nazi Germany.

In April 1945 he spent a night in an office used by top Nazi Party officials and found some of Hitler’s personal letterhead which he used to write a letter to his father 

Staubus had earlier arrived in Europe with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division along with 160,000 Allied troops in June 1944

After Hitler’s demise and with German soldiers rushing to escape, it was then Staubus found himself staying in Lammers’ office overnight after the complex was heavily bombed by the Allies and was captured by American forces. 

‘I picked the lock on his desk. The one thing he had left on his desk was this, a seating diagram for all the top Nazis,’ Staubus explained to KDAF.

Aside from the seating plan, Staubus also uncovered a stash of Hitler’s personal stationery with ‘Der Führer’ inked on.

‘I lifted this lid. It was like a hope chest. There it was half-full. There were only two sheets of that. 

‘One of them, I kept for my copies, and the other one I wrote my dad a letter on and told them the war was over.’

In a letter, dated May 8, 1945, Staubus wrote to his father using Hitler’s letterhead. 

‘Dear Dad, Well this is it, V.E. Day,’ the first words read. Staubus, who will be 100 this September, has kept the letterhead and the 1938 seating plan ever since. 

He never told the U.S. Army about what he took home as a souvenir, or as he liked to  describe it, ‘liberated’. 

‘They didn’t know a thing about it,’ he said with a cheeky smile.

The town of Berchtesgaden, Germany was the home of Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. Nearby was Hitler’s other office known as the Little Reich Chancellery, with Hans Lammers at the helm

Staubus, who will be 100 in September, has kept the letterhead and the 1938 seating plan ever since and still has it at his assisted living facility in Lenexa, Kansas

There were only two sheets of letterhead remaining. Staubus kept one blank and used the other to write a letter to his dad

The notepaper is in remarkably good condition consider it is more than 80 years old

A seating diagram for all the top Nazi Party officials was also in the desk and Staubus took that as well

He had earlier arrived in Europe with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division along with 160,000 Allied troops in June 1944.  

‘When I first got to France, they took me to a large tent full of uniforms and said the people who had these are all dead. Any that you, like you, can have it,’ Staubus said to KDAF as he recalled the D-Day invasion on its 80th anniversary. 

D-Day commemorates the day Allied forces launched a massive invasion of Nazi-occupied Normandy, France, as part of Operation Overlord which took place on June 6, 1944.

Thousands of US and Allied paratroopers landed around Normandy Beach ahead of the largest armada of thousands of ships ever assembled carrying enormous numbers of Allied troops across the English Channel to fight Nazi control. 

It would become the largest air, land and sea assault in history, the beginning of the end of Hitler’s seize of Europe.

Thousands of Americans and Allied troops died on D-Day and in the fighting that followed.

The successful invasion marked a major turning point in the war as it was the beginning of the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi control.