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April 30, 1945
The capital of the thousand year Reich, Berlin, was in ruins, after only twelve years of the Nazi regime. For months, it had been pounded from the air by Allied bombers, and now it was being pounded relentlessly by Soviet artillery, bombers, and tanks. Berlin was completely circled by its enemies, who even now were advancing to within artillery range of the Reichstag itself, lobbing shells that were exploding close enough to shake the building. Remnants of the German forces fought a desperate, last ditch defense, even though they were outnumbered and outgunned, with no hope of doing anything more than slowing down the inevitable onslaught by a few days or hours.
Adolf Hitler's dream of creating a Reich that would endure for a thousand years, obtaining Lebensraum in the East for Germans to expand into, enslaving the "inferior" Slavs of that land, and destroying Bolshevism, a dream that had plunged the world into war and led to the deaths of millions, both in combat and in the planned slaughter of six million Jews that later became known as the Holocaust, had backfired spectacularly, plunging Germany into nightmare. Not only had he failed to destroy Bolshevism, his gamble in launching a two-front war had led to the destruction of Germany, the deaths of hundreds of thousands German civilians and soldiers, and the mass rape of German women in the East by soldiers in the advancing Red Army. His most hated enemy had allied itself with nations that he had only half-heartedly gone to war with, Britain and the United States, and the combination was too much to overcome. Although Hitler could not know it at the time, his folly had not only delivered the eastern half of Germany into the hands of his most hated enemies, but that domination would last 45 years, nearly four times as long as the Third Reich had endured.
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There were actually two bunkers which were connected - the older Vorbunker and the newer Führerbunker. The Führerbunker was located about 17 meters beneath the garden of the old Reich Chancellery building at Wilhelmstrasse 77, about 120 meters north of the new Chancellery building, which had the address Vossstrasse 6. The Vorbunker was located beneath the large hall behind the old Chancellery, which was connected to the new Chancellery. The Führerbunker was located somewhat lower than the Vorbunker and west (or rather west/south-west) of it. The map above shows the approximate locations of the two bunkers. The two bunkers were connected via sets of stairs set at right angles (not spiral as some believe).
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In the bunker below the Reichstag, it was becoming increasingly obvious that it would not be very long at all before the Russians would reach the grounds of the Reichstag itself; within days, if not hours. In the days and weeks leading up to April 30, the mood in the bunker had become increasingly surreal. Hitler issued orders for counterattacks and attempts at breaking the stranglehold the Soviets were developing on Berlin to armies that no longer existed. He pondered models of the intended postwar rebuilding of his hometown of Linz, to which he said that he wished to retire after the war. When news of Frankin D. Roosevelt's death reached the bunker on April 12, Hitler had become jubilant, seeing the death of his enemy as a sign that the Reich's deliverance was at hand, that his enemies would collapse. It wasn't.
On April 20, Hitler's 56th birthday was celebrated, but the atmosphere was more funereal than celebratory. Hitler clearly saw the celebration of his birthday with his enemy well into the maneuver of completing its encirclement of Berlin as profoundly embarrassing, as did the few remaining loyalists in the bunker. Hitler did emerge from the bunker, climbing the stairs to the Reich Chancellery park. Greeting him with the raised arm "Heil Hitler" salute were soldiers from the SS-Division "Berlin" and twenty boys from the Hitler Youth who had distinguished themselves in combat. The whole scene reinforced the hopelessness of the situation. The defense of the Reich capital, relying on boys? However, it was a natural consequence of Hitler's all-or-nothing thinking. To him, it would be either victory or utter destruction, and if that meant throwing boys into combat against battle-hardened Soviet troops with vastly superior firepower, so be it. As he had raged before, if Germany failed then to him it deserved utter destruction. Two days later, at a briefing, Hitler learned that Soviet troops had broken through the inner defenses and were now moving through Berlin's northern suburbs. Hitler was told that an ordered counterattack had never taken place at all. At this news, the reality of the situation finally seemed to sink in, and Hitler snapped. Hitler screamed that he had been betrayed by all whom he had trusted, railing against the treachery of the army and claiming that the SS was lying to him. The troops refused to fight, and all defenses were down.
And then he stopped. He slumped in a chair and cried. The great dictator, the man responsible for starting a world war and who had callously ordered the murder of millions of innocents, sobbed. The man who had expressed no concern over the suffering of his people, and whose "scorched earth" war orders designed to resist at all costs and destroy infrastructure rather than let it be used by the Soviets (some of which had been secretly undermined by Albert Speer and various industrialists, who did not want to increase the suffering of the German people more) cried. He sobbed that the war was over. He vowed that he would stay in Berlin and lead the defense of the city. Then, rather than allow himself to be captured he would at the end kill himself. All urged himself to change his mind, to make an attempt to break out and retreat to his mountain redoubt of Berchtesgaden, there to continue to lead the resistance. His apocalyptic Wagnerian vision of Goötterdamerung would be fulfilled.
The situation continued to deteriorate, and several in the bunker left, preferring to take their chances trying to escape capture or to die in the open, rather than being trapped in the bunker. When Hitler learned on April 28 that one of his most trusted deputees, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, had made peace overtures, it was the final straw, and Hitler went into one more monumental rage. On April 29, Adolf Hitler had married Eva Braun, exchanging vows in a simple ceremony. She had vowed to stay in the bunker with him, and would soon die with him. His last will read:
As I did not consider that I could take responsibility, during the years of struggle, of contracting a marriage, I have now decided, before the closing of my earthly career, to take as my wife that girl who, after many years of faithful friendship, entered, of her own free will, the practically besieged town in order to share her destiny with me. At her own desire she goes as my wife with me into death. It will compensate us for what we both lost through my work in the service of my people.
What I possess belongs - in so far as it has any value - to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State; should the State also be destroyed, no further decision of mine is necessary.
My pictures, in the collections which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my home town of Linz on Donau.
It is my most sincere wish that this bequest may be duly executed.
I nominate as my Executor my most faithful Party comrade,
Martin Bormann
He is given full legal authority to make all decisions. He is permitted to take out everything that has a sentimental value or is necessary for the maintenance of a modest simple life, for my brothers and sisters, also above all for the mother of my wife and my faithful co-workers who are well known to him, principally my old Secretaries Frau Winter etc. who have for many years aided me by their work.
I myself and my wife - in order to escape the disgrace of deposition or capitulation - choose death. It is our wish to be burnt immediately on the spot where I have carried out the greatest part of my daily work in the course of a twelve years' service to my people.
Given in Berlin, 29th April 1945, 4:00 a.m.
[Signed] A. Hitler
In another document, his last political testament, he dictated to his young secretary, Traudl Junge:
It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or who worked for Jewish interests. . .Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and cultureal monuments the hatred will ever renew itself against those ultimately responsible whom we have to thank for everything, international Jewry and its helpers.
Regarding the Holocaust, he obliquely but chillingly wrote:
I also left no doubt that, if the nations of Europe are again to be regarded as mere blocks of shares of these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is really guilty of this murderous struggle will be called to account: Jewry! I further left no one in doubt that this time millions of grown men would not suffer death, and hundreds of thousands of women and children not be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real culprit haivng to atone for his guilt, even by more humane means.
The remainder of his testament was devoted to ramblings about a "renaissance" of National Socialism and the charade of nominating a successor government. His final charge to the successor government:
Above all, I charge the leadership of the nation and their subjects with the meticulous observation of the race laws and the merciless resistance to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.
[Source: Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw]
Even there, at the end, he could not release his hatred and wanted his successors to continue his persecution of the Jews.
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During the Irving vs. Lipstadt trial Hitler's Final Political Testament might have been invoked as evidence against his personally having sanctioned the liquidation of European Jewry. (We are told by the Lipstadts of this world that European Jewry -- and German Jewry in particular -- was all but exterminated by the end of the war.)
Yet, dictating his testament prior to suicide, Hitler does not urge his political successors to complete his own almost fully successful extermination of the Jews. Instead, he states:
"Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and their followers to uphold the racial laws meticulously and to resist mercilessly the universal poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry."
In a letter Traudl Junge [Hitler's private secretary, who took his dictation of this document] some years ago, stated that Hitler's voice remained as monotone at this point as it had throughout the rest of the dictation of his testament. No hysterically raised voice, no boast about having implemented 'die Endlösung'.
All of which is strange behaviour for someone alleged to have personally ordered, and been kept informed of, the destruction of the Jews. Instead, he exhorts his successors to uphold the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935, designed to make the social and political lives of Jews in Germany so untenable that they will emigrate. To an impartial observer, it would seem as though Hitler was unaware that his underlings had moved things on a bit, beginning in 1941.
His testament makes no bones about his hatred for the Jews -- so why does he talk as if unaware that they had been eradicated? With the Jews exterminated, what's the point of withering on about upholding the 'racial laws'? Hitler's final remarks upon Jewry do not bear out the idea that he personally supervised the organisation for the murder of six million of them.
Compared with what it is alleged that he personally knew, his final comments on the subject are stupendously mild.
Of course, the Lipstadt camp made every effort throughout the trial to attempt to make the trial all about alleged "holocaust denial", and not the fact that, David Irving as a historian, had posited the theory that Hitler personally had been unaware of the extent and methodology of the final solution. To say that very many Jews died most cruel deaths, but that the evidence does not show that the instigation for this emanated from Hitler personally, is a very different thing from 'denying the holocaust.' |
Finally, in the afternoon of April 30, after taking lunch as usual with his secretaries, Hitler retired to his study with Eva Braun. Hitler's followers waited. And waited. No one heard a shot. Finally, Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge, got up the courage to look inside the room, and found Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun dead, Hitler having shot himself as he bit on a cyanide capsul, and Braun having taken a cyanide capsule. His remaining followers carried the bodies into the courtyard of the Reichstag, doused them with gasoline, and set them ablaze. In the meantime, Magda Göbbels poisoned herself and her six children with the help of SS doctor Helmuth Kunz.
Thus ended the life of one of the scourges of the 20th century. Rumors that Hitler had never died continued for decades.
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All his life Hitler vacillated wildly between reality and fantasy. The evidence suggests that, by late 1944, somewhere in his psyche, and despite all his public protestations to the contrary, he recognised that he was going to lose his colossal gamble, and the war. If he could not achieve his ambition of world domination, he seemed almost as ready to embrace a cataclysmic finale which he deemed worthy of the Third Reich.
In this, he was wholly successful. Posterity has focused so much attention upon the horrors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that some historical realities are sometimes forgotten. First, the Germans resisted to the end in a fashion much more "fanatical" than the supposedly fanatical Japanese. In consequence, their homeland was far more comprehensively devastated than Japan.
Second, to this day many Germans claim that they fought to the end not for Hitler, but to protect their own people from the Soviets. This is an absurdity. If Germany had succumbed in 1944, as it could easily have done but for the brilliance of its commanders and the stubbornness of its soldiers, the country would have suffered vastly less than it did in 1945, not least from bombing.
Hitler's own end was squalid and grotesque, and continues to fascinate a huge public.
Even among tyrants, his egomania rendered him unique. Hitler possessed no sense of responsibility towards the German people. When he himself left the stage, in his own eyes German history ended.
There was a dramatic outburst in the bunker at the end of April 1945 when Hitler's chief adjutant, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, suddenly understood the nature of the monsters he had served. He shouted at Martin Bormann what had German soldiers died for? Now he, Burgdorf, perceived the answer: "they died for you . . . Millions of innocent human beings [were] sacrificed, while you, the leaders of the Party, enriched yourselves with the wealth of the people. You lived it up, amassed immense riches, stole Junker estates, indulged in luxury, deceived and oppressed the people. "You trampled our ideals into the mud, our morals, our beliefs, our soul. For you a human being was only a tool for your unquenchable hunger for power. You destroyed our centuries-old culture and the German people. This is your terrible burden of guilt."
For a moment after this outburst, which would have been magnificent had it not been so wretchedly belated; there was a stunned silence in the bunker. Then Bormann said coolly: "But, my dear man, there's no need to get personal. Even if others have all gotten rich, I'm free of guilt . . . Prost!" Burgdorf shot himself, like tens of thousands of other Germans, unable to contemplate the burden of surviving the passing of the Third Reich.
Most of Hitler's fellow gangsters - Göring and Himmler prominent among them - struggled to make terms for their own survival as Berlin was pounded to ruins. Only Göbbels remained loyal to the death. Self-pity predominated in the damp concrete tomb 33 ft below Germany's capital in which Hitler and his staff passed their final days. "Poor, poor Adolf," said Eva Braun emotionally, after the execution of her brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein for alleged treachery "They have all deserted you; they have all betrayed you." SS general Wilhelm Möhnke, an unswerving loyalist to the last, observed without cynicism or irony at the bunker's situation conference on April 27: "We haven't quite accomplished what we intended to do in 1933, my Führer." Quite so.
The smaller fry lapsed into drunken boisterousness in the last hours on April 30, amid dancing and casual copulation in the canteen. The icy tension of past weeks was replaced by a widespread collapse into hysteria. An orderly went upstairs to call for some quiet in the bunker. "The Führer is about to die", he said sternly. He was ignored. The partying went on, even as a pistol shot was heard.
An orgy of denial in Hitler's bunker
Hitler' basically had a fundamentally anarchistic nature. His only policies were to fight, and to destroy. He possessed no coherent vision of where he was leading Germany. His generals, and the German people, were extraordinarily slow to grasp this, and indeed many of them never did so.
Hitler's incoherence and absolute lack of scruple helped him until 1939 to outmanoeuvre the statesmen of Europe, because his behaviour was entirely outside their experience. Thereafter, "like a gang leader, he pursued a course that never went beyond the idea of killing and looting. The conflicts he initiated with growing malice against almost the whole world typically had no military goal." In the summer of 1941, when he anticipated finishing off Russia by autumn, he invited his staff to prepare plans for an invasion of Afghanistan and India.
Why, given that this was so, even most of those intimately familiar with Hitler remained loyal to the bitter end. It is far more interesting, and far more challenging, to examine the behaviour of the German nation between 1918 and 1945 than to examine that of Hitler, whose most startling characteristic was his banality. |
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In May 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, two great prizes remained:
The first, Berlin, was almost completely in the hands of the Soviets. The second, Berchtesgaden, home to Adolf Hitler's famous mountain retreat, remained to be captured.
The winners in the race to seize Berchtesgaden were quickly forgotten in the wake of Allied victory.
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The death knell of Hitler's vaunted Thousand Year Reich
There was no more hellish place on earth than Berlin in late 1944 and the early months of 1945. Its people were slowly starving to death in horrific conditions that included a relentless bombing campaign by the Allied air forces. A once proud city, Berlin was daily being reduced to smoking rubble. Even so, the German penchant for black humor was painfully evident during the Christmas season of 1944 when Berliners were heard to quip, ''Be practical: give a coffin.'' Before the war ended there would not be sufficient coffins available to bury those killed in Berlin.
As the city's inhabitants struggled merely to survive another day, it was already clear to virtually everyone but a vain, delusional Hitler that the war was irrevocably lost. Hitler's reckless gamble that he could split the Western Allies with a massive counteroffensive in the Ardennes in December was already a failure, and with the Red Army poised to open a series of fresh offensives in the East, Germany's fate was all but sealed.
Attempts by his field commanders to impose a measure of reality upon Hitler were rebuffed by his insistence that the situation was not as dire as they made out. To the bitter end, neither Hitler nor the detested head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, whom he foolishly placed in command of an army group defending the Vistula River in Poland, believed the grim estimates of the German field commanders. Privately, however, even Hitler realized the war was lost, but he scorned any notion of surrender as heresy. ''We may go down,'' he told an aide, ''but we will take a world with us.''
Stalin was obsessed with the possibility that the Allies might somehow beat the Russians to Berlin. In January 1945 the Red Army massed over four million troops along the Vistula for the final offensive against Nazi Germany. At least 8.5 million people living in East Prussia tried to escape the impending Soviet onslaught. Some managed to hide in the forests and those who could fled westward, hoping to reach Allied lines before falling into the hands of the Russians. The vast majority were not successful. In the port city of Königsberg, for example, many were machine-gunned; others were simply run over by Soviet tanks. At sea, a Russian submarine torpedoed the liner Wilhelm Gustloff with a loss of 5,300 of the 6,600 civilian passengers. One of the first places liberated by the Russians was Auschwitz and its nearby P.O.W. camps. Small wonder that a British P.O.W. exclaimed: ''My God! I'll forgive the Russians absolutely anything they do to this country. . . . Absolutely anything.''
Although the appalling atrocities committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union made retribution inevitable, the breadth of Russian vengeance against the German people during the last months of the war was both enormous in its scope and terrible in its fury. After Red Army soldiers learned that Russian P.O.W.'s had been turned over to the SS for execution, they sent a clear message: ''They would take no prisoners.''
The collective wrath of the Russians went well beyond the actions of an unenlightened, sexually repressed society, into the entirely uncharted sphere of a mass psychosis of horrific savagery. This was matched by what seems to have been a collective national guilt complex that on the one hand, was bent on revenge, and on the other, sought to assuage its culpability in a sea of alcohol so huge that it ''gravely damaged the fighting capacity of the Red Army.'' German civilians, ranging from very young girls to old women, were gang raped, mutilated, humiliated and then frequently murdered by Red Army soldiers. As many as two million German women were raped, many more than once.
It is a grim story of the very worst that mankind is capable of, with each participant seemingly bent on outdoing every other in degree of brutality. The Red Army 'had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism, it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.'' Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who commanded the Third Belarussian Front, was considered one the most intelligent and enlightened of the Red Army generals. But when asked what he planned to do to rein in the looting and destruction by his troops even he replied, ''It is now time for our soldiers to issue their own justice.''
In the end, it was all a ''senseless slaughter which resulted from Hitler's outrageous vanity.'' His ''incompetence, the frenzied refusal to accept reality and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime were revealed all too clearly in its passing.'' Unfortunately, as postwar events in Africa and the Balkans have shown, mankind has not seen the last of such brutality.
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Berlin:
The Downfall, 1945
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On 30 April 1945 momentous events were in the making in the bunker where the Führer was holed up to conduct the last-ditch defence of Berlin. East of the beleaguered city General Weidling’s 56 Panzer Corps had disintegrated without trace and the fiery General had been appointed as the new battle commander of Berlin. To the north of the city SS General Felix Steiner’s 7th Panzer Division and 25th Panzer Grenadier Division were stalled at Eberswalde while the Russians had already swarmed across the River Havel to encircle the besieged city. The Führer was unaware that his trusted Armaments Minister Albert Speer had secretly arranged with Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici of Army Group Vistula for Berlin to be abandoned to the Russians so as to preserve his architectural landmarks and industrial installations.
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Felix Martin Julius Steiner (1896-1966) was a German Heer and Waffen-SS officer who served in both World War I and World War II.
Steiner ranks as one of the most innovative commanders of the Waffen-SS. He skilfully commanded the SS-Deutschland Regiment through the invasions of Poland, France and the Low Countries.
After the early war campaigns, Steiner was chosen by SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to oversee the creation of, and then command the new volunteer SS Division, SS-Division (mot) Wiking. The Wiking was made up of Non-German volunteers, and at the time of its creation consisted mostly of Dutch, Walloons, and Scandinavians.
In the Wiking Division, Steiner created a capable formation from disparate elements, and he commanded them competently through the many battles in the east from 1941 until his promotion to command of the III.(Germanische) SS-Panzerkorps.
Steiner commanded the III.(Gem)SS Pz Korps through the setbacks and subsequent retreat in the east, until in 1945 he was given command of the newly formed paper tiger, the XI. SS Armee.
Steiner had always been one of Hitler's favourite commanders, who admired his 'get the job done' attitude and the fact that he owed his allegiance to the Waffen SS, not the Prussian Officer Corps. However, when Hitler was besieged in Berlin, he ordered Steiner's Army to attack and relieve Berlin. With few working tanks and roughly a divisions' worth of infantry, Steiner chose the life of his men over the life of the Nazi leadership, and declined to attack.
His failure to attack the Russians advancing on Berlin earned Hitler's contempt.
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During the 1940 Blitzkrieg when the Germans swept through France, Paris had been declared an open city (un-defended) for the same purpose of preservation. Now as the Third Reich was crumbling the wily Albert Speer was looking to his own place in posterity. The Gatow and Tempelhof airfields were now cut off and Russian tanks were amassing south of Potsdamer Platz for the final assault on the Reich Chancellery. General Busse’s 9th Army was encircled south-west of Berlin and the only encouraging news was that Field-Marshal Schörner’s Army Group operating in Czechoslovakia had inflicted heavy losses on the Russians while trying to fight their way through to relieve the city. General Wenck’s 12th Army now at Potsdam was the Führer’s main hope for relief of the city but Russian spearheads were already reported to be trickling into the Tiergarten.
In collaboration with the treacherous Heinrici, Colonel-General Manteuffel’s 3rd Panzer Army and other elements of the Army Group were heading across Mecklenburg deliberately by-passing Berlin towards the haven of Allied lines so as to avoid Russian captivity. Field-Marshal Keitel (Chief of Defence Staff at the Führer ‘s HQ) lost no time in dismissing both these senior commanders for their disobedience of orders, but such orders were now becoming ineffective.
Reichsmarschall Göring and Reichsführer Himmler were finally expelled from the Party and stripped of all functions for their gross disloyalty, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was designated as successor to the Führer . Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, the only person to shine as a real Warlord on the Russian front, was proclaimed the new C-in-C Army after the Führer‘s death.
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Karl-August Hanke
(August 24, 1903–May, 1945) was a Nazi Party official who served as Gauleiter of Lower Silesia from 1940 to 1945 and was also a key member of Josef Göbbels's Propagandaministerium throughout the years of the Third Reich. He was a Reserve Wehrmacht officer, serving in the German Army from 1940 to 1944 and was also a member of the Allgemeine-SS (General SS). During the French campaign of 1940, Hanke served in Erwin Rommel's 7. Panzer-Division, on one occasion even saving his general's life when he and the general had suddenly driven into a large force of French bicycle troops.
Hanke was instrumental in shaping Albert Speer's early career in the Nazi Party and both remained close friends. So much so in fact that in 1944 (according to Albert Speer's book Inside the Third Reich), Hanke strongly advised Speer never to visit Auschwitz for any reason as he had "seen something that he was not allowed to describe and indeed could not describe".
Hanke orchestrated the brutal expulsion of the civilian population of Breslau in the dying months of the war (deemed necessary for an effecive military defence of the city), however he is best known as the last Reichsführer-SS, replacing Heinrich Himmler on April 20, 1945. Just eight days before, he had been honored with Nazi Germany's highest decoration, the German Order, a reward for his defence of Breslau against the advancing Soviets. Hanke's ascendancy to the rank of Reichsführer-SS was as a result of Adolf Hitler proclaiming Himmler as a traitor and stripping Himmler of all his offices and ranks and ordering his arrest.
Karl Hanke was never to receive word of his promotion to the highest possible SS rank, as he was captured by either Czech or Polish partisans and executed sometime in May of 1945 |
As the minutes ticked by, Hitler was constantly enquiring about the progress of General Wenck’s spearheads who were specially earmarked to relieve the city.
Around mid-day the Führer summoned all his female secretarial staff who had volunteered to stay in the bunker for a farewell lunch and delivered his least oration, unlike all those previous occasions when he had been addressing dozens of his Field-Marshals at war conferences:
“I wish that my Generals could have been as brave as you are, but they betrayed me and they bear responsibility for this destruction of the Fatherland.”
Handing out cyanide capsules to each of the staff, he apologized profusely that he was unable to offer them kinder farewell gifts.
Even now at the twelfth hour the Führer was still living in his dream-world that General Wenck’s relief columns would somehow reach the beleaguered city but his spearheads were stalled to the south as the 12th Army was gradually disintegrating.
By now the Russians were fighting in the subway tunnels under Friedrichstrasse and Vossstrasse, they were at Weidendamn bridge and Potsdamer Platz with spearheads already pouring into the famous Tiergarten. Within a matter of hours they would reach the Reich Chancellery.
The Führer was dressed as punctiliously as ever, donning the olive-green shirt with black shoes, socks and trousers for the very last time. He sent for Martin Bormann and his personal adjutant Otto Günsche who were to ensure that both the bodies were burned to ashes:
“I would not like my body to be put on display in some waxworks. I want the Russians to realise that I remained here until the very last moment because the Captain always goes down with his ship. My weak-minded Generals were always looking over their shoulders for a chance to retreat but the Führer does not desert the Fatherland.”
Strolling through the bunker for the last time accompanied by Eva Braun, he must have noticed the officers of his escort waiting with two stretchers near the exit staircase. The loyal General Hans Krebs (Chief of General Staff) informed the Führer that there was now little hope of General Wenck’s relief columns reaching the battered city.
It was mid-afternoon by the time Hitler and his new wife of 24 hours only withdrew into the green-and-white tiled study from where he had conducted so many battles for his Thousand Year Reich.
He closed the doors leaving Bormann, Göbbels, Hans Krebs and Burgdorf in the conference room. The doors sealed off all sounds except the gentle murmur of the ventilation plant and the explosion of Russian shells above ground. The Russian spearheads were now within sight of the Reich Chancellery, advancing inch by inch through the rubble.
Sitting on the narrow couch Eva kicked off her shoes and swung her legs up on to the faded upholstery. The Führer sat by her side with a portrait of Frederick the Great frowning down in front of him. They both unscrewed the brass casings and extracted the glass phials with their amber liquid content. Eva bit the glass and sank her head on to Hitler’s shoulder as her knees drew up sharply in agony. Controlling his trembling hand, Hitler raised the heavy 7.65 mm Walther to his right temple, clenched his teeth on the phial and squeezed the trigger.
Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz the new Reich President was forming his Government at Flensburg near the Danish border and issued the first proclamation to the German people:
Our brave Führer died today at his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting to the last breath against the Bolshevik menace and international Jury. He laid down his life for the Fatherland and we now resolve to carry on the unequal struggle until final victory.
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The Death of Hitler
By
Ada Petrova and Peter Watson
On a cold afternoon at the end of March 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sat down at his headquarters in
Reims, northeastern France and drafted an unprecedented and historic cable. It was sent to Moscow, for the personal attention of Joseph Stalin. This was the first time in all the years of war that the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force had communicated directly with the Soviet leader, but there were now urgent and pressing reasons for doing so.
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Another interpretation of the facts, an alternative to the mythic known and accepted one, more logical than the one supinely accepted until today…..
Hitler's Last Days
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