After nine months in Adolf Hitler's bunker, with Berlin about to fall, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven was allowed to leave.

'As Hitler shook my hand and wished me luck, I saw a glint of envy in his eye,' says the 91-year-old former Wehrmacht aide-de-camp. A day later, on 30 April 1945, Hitler was dead and the terrified soldier was in a canoe on Havel River, dodging Soviet shelling, trying to reach the last German-held position in Berlin. Sixty years on, he believes a 'legion of guardian angels' spared him death at the hands of the Soviets, of fanatical Nazis and of 'primitive sentries' who tortured him in a British prisoner-of-war camp.

Today Baron Freytag von Loringhoven is the only survivor among the close advisers of the Führer - who he says was probably a drug addict. For many years a Germany steeped in guilt did not want to hear his story. Now it has taken a French publisher, Perrin, to release Dans le Bunker de Hitler - his unique account of the days leading up to the suicide of the Führer and his wife Eva Braun. The baron also helped the makers of the film Downfall, which charts Hitler's end and opens in British cinemas on Friday.

A nobleman from the Baltic states, Freytag von Loringhoven was viewed with suspicion by the Nazis 'who loathed education, real culture and tradition'. Unlike Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, whose memoirs were published before her death two years ago, he claims he never fell under the Führer's spell and insists the distinction between the professional Wehrmacht and politicised Waffen-SS was real. 'After the war I had the unpleasant feeling of having served as a combustible, as heating wood, for the adventures of a charlatan,' he says. 'I had served a criminal regime while remaining loyal to my military convictions.'

It was only as a prisoner of war that he realised the Nazis had murdered Jews 'on an industrial scale', he says. ' We didn't even know the names of the concentration camps.'

In the bunker, Freytag von Loringhoven observed Hitler divide and rule among sycophants and soldiers. 'He created parallel command structures that competed for resources and he appointed political officers to spy on military professionals. Right until the end, he kept all the cards in his hand.

'Hitler's only military experience had been as a corporal during the First World War. He knew only one thing - the ' fanatischer Widerstand ' (fanatical resistance), and I can still hear him say the words. Blitzkrieg was not devised by him but by military strategists whom he later sidelined. As soon as we suffered the first setbacks he became deaf to calls to switch to modern, mobile defence techniques. He saw them as defeatist since they sometimes required giving up territory.

'Hitler could be very aggressive but towards the end he was very controlled. He could be pleasant and even warm. He could be very charming - he was a real Austrian. People were impressed when he asked them questions about their lives. It was a way of controlling them. He played with people.'