Besides accompanying Hitler on all his travels, he was responsible for the accommodations; all the servants, mess orderlies, cooks, caterers and maids were "subordinate" to Linge.

[7][8] On 25 April, Hitler instructed Linge to ensure his body was burned to avoid falling into Soviet hands.

[9] On 30 April, Hitler elaborated his suicide plan to Linge, telling him to wrap his and Eva Braun's bodies in blankets, take them up to the garden and burn them.

[10] Linge later wrote that after Hitler and Braun were married, the dictator spent his final night lying awake and fully dressed on his bed.

[14] After the suicides of Hitler and Braun, their corpses were reportedly carried up the stairs to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit to the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were doused with petrol.

[15] After the first attempts to ignite the petrol did not work, Linge went back inside the bunker and returned with a thick roll of papers.

As the two corpses caught fire, a small group, including Bormann, Linge, Otto Günsche, Joseph Goebbels, Erich Kempka, Peter Högl, Ewald Lindloff, and Hans Reisser, raised their arms in salute as they stood just inside the bunker doorway.

[15][16] At around 16:15, Linge ordered SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Krüger and SS-Oberscharführer Werner Schwiedel to roll up the rug in Hitler's study to burn it.

[18] Linge later wrote that he burned other personal effects of Hitler's while an SS bodyguard oversaw the burial of the burnt bodies in a shell crater.

Several days later, after his identity was revealed, two Soviet officers escorted Linge by train to Moscow where he was thrown into the notorious Lubyanka Prison.

[21] The two shared a cell from mid-1948 to the end of 1949, during part of the time they provided details for a dossier edited by Soviet NKVD officers and presented to Joseph Stalin on 30 December 1949 (published in 2005 as The Hitler Book).

[24] Linge initially told the Soviets that he heard Hitler's suicide gunshot before explaining that he only said this to keep his account from appearing "frail" in light of "shadowy areas" of his memory.

[41][42] In light of theories that Hitler had survived, Linge asserted that the corpse was hidden in a "common grave", undiscovered somewhere about the Chancellery garden.

Despite the circumstances of the war, Linge's portrayal of the dictator has been described as "affectionate", although as a leader Hitler acted in an "unpredictable and demanding" manner.

In the 1971 Eastern Bloc co-production Liberation V: The Final Assault, he was portrayed by East German actor Otto Busse.