In Norse mythology, Erna was the mother of eleven sons by Jarl, the ancestors of the race of warriors in Norse society. Her father was Hersir, a tribal chief.

Erna Flegel (11 July 1911 – 16 February 2006), born in Kiel in 1911, was a German nurse. In late April 1945 she worked at the emergency casualty station at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. She was captured there by Soviet Red Army troops on 2 May 1945.

From January 1943 until the end of World War II, Flegel served as a nurse for Hitler's entourage and during the Battle of Berlin. She worked alongside one of Hitler's physicians, Dr. Werner Haase, as a nurse at Humboldt University Hospital and was transferred by the Red Cross to the Reich Chancellery in late April 1945. She worked in an emergency casualty station located in the large Reich Chancellery cellar, near the Vorbunker and Führerbunker. During her time in the Führerbunker she befriended Magda Goebbels and sometimes acted as a nanny to the Goebbels children until their deaths. She met Hitler once when he wanted to thank her, Dr. Haase and Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck for their emergency medical services.

Flegel returned to work at the emergency casualty station where she remained until taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army on 2 May. Dr. Haase, Helmut Kunz and a fellow nurse, Liselotte Chervinska were captured with her at that time. Upon capture, Soviet troops advised her to remain in the bunker complex where it was safer.^{[citation needed]} Later interrogated by the Americans, Flegel then lived a life of anonymity until 1977 when documents including her interrogation were declassified. The media later tracked her down to her residence, a nursing home in Germany.

Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.