Sometime between half-past three and four o’clock on Monday, the 30th of April 1945, Hitler shot himself. Eva Hitler née Braun, his wife of one day, took poison at the same time. It was another week before Germany capitulated. The brutal war in the Far East would drag on for another four months. But Hitler’s death marked the symbolic end of the Second World War. German capitulation had been impossible as long as he was alive. Now, within hours of his death, the remaining bunker inmates were vainly attempting to negotiate a capitulation with the commander of the Red Army in Berlin. For them, Hitler was already history. All they could think of was saving their own skins.
The Nazi grandees who had turned up in the bunker ten days earlier to offer Hitler their congratulations on his fifty-sixth birthday thought the same way. The end was plainly imminent. They couldn’t wait to get away. They wanted to survive, not join Hitler’s Götterdämmerung. Göring was quickly off for southern Germany. He wore a drab khaki uniform, not his usual resplendent silver-grey finery. Somebody said he looked like an American general. Himmler, Speer, Ribbentrop, and others offered Hitler their perfunctory congratulations. Then they, too, left at the first opportunity. You could say it was one of the few occasions in history where the sinking ship deserted the rat.
Two days later, on the 22nd of April, something sensational happened in the bunker. Hitler’s voice thundered through the corridors in an uncontrollable outburst of white-hot fury: he’d been betrayed on all sides, and the war was lost. Nobody had heard anything like it before. That in itself is remarkable. One of the things that struck me when I was working on my Hitler biography was how he was able so consistently and for so long to hold on to the fiction that the war could still be won. It was an extraordinary display of willpower. But now he gave up. For the first time, he was openly resigned to defeat. He refused to leave Berlin. The bunker inmates were condemned to wait with him for the inevitable. The Red Army was getting closer every day. But as long as Hitler lived, there was no escape. The main topic of conversation was how to commit suicide. Hitler saw treason all around him. Göring was peremptorily thrown out of the Nazi Party for suggesting that he take control if Hitler was incapacitated in Berlin. The last straw was the news that Himmler had been trying to do a deal with the western allies. Himmler’s own loss of reality matched Hitler’s. He thought he could still play a leading role in a new struggle of Germany with the western powers against Bolshevism. His only worry was whether he should bow or shake hands when introduced to Eisenhower.
During the night of 29-30 April, Hitler dictated his testament and, in a weird noctural service, married Eva Braun, his mistress of many years,. The Russians were by now very close. Hitler didn’t care about the colossal suffering he was still inflicting on the people of the Reich capital through persisting in the futile struggle. He thought only of himself: that he shouldn’t be captured alive and put on show in Moscow. He told his orderlies that he and Eva Braun would kill themselves that day, and gave them instructions about burning the bodies. Around half past three that afternoon, Eva Braun and Hitler said their last farewells and withdrew into their private quarters. Eventually, Heinz Linge, Hitler’s chief orderly, entered the room. He found Hitler and Eva Braun slumped on the sofa. A pool of blood on the floor trickled from the wound in the right side of Hitler’s head. The distinctive smell of bitter almonds wafted up from Eva Braun.
I did wonder whether we should be noting the sixtieth anniversary of his shabby and sordid end at all. I’ve some sympathy with those who think we already hear too much about Hitler. It seems at times that you can hardly open a paper or switch on the television without seeing some further trivial bit of information about Hitler. Anybody could be forgiven for thinking we’ve reached just about saturation point. But let’s just remind ourselves what lies behind this near-obsessive preoccupation with Hitler. I think it boils down to this. No single individual left such an imprint on the twentieth century Hitler did. Looking back, sixty years after 1945, we can see that the Second World War was a defining episode of that century. It fundamentally reshaped the balance of world power. Its victims totalled over fifty millions. Close on two-thirds of them were civilians.There’s been no other war like it in history. Its main author was Adolf Hitler. The other defining episode emerged in the context of that war: the murder of the Jews and others the Nazis deemed racially ‘undesirable’ – what we now call the Holocaust. In intent, planning, scale, and method, there has been no other genocide like it in history. The Holocaust has lastingly reshaped our views of humanity. Its main author was also Adolf Hitler. These alone are sufficient reasons to take the anniversary of Hitler’s death as cause to reflect briefly on his place in history.
How did Hitler see his place in history? It’s harder to answer this question than we might presume, especially for the last years of his life. To do so, we have to remind ourselves of the main driving-force behind his political ‘career’. This ‘career’ was truly astonishing. In the first half of his life he was an absolute nobody. In the second half he made the world hold its breath and wrought destruction on Europe unmatched even by Attila the Hun.
He was made by one war. He fought another to undo its consequences. The first war instilled in him an extraordinary will to destruction. The second war – his war – saw him carry out that destruction. I’ve become increasingly convinced that the First World War was the central episode in Hitler’s life. But not as he described it. He always spoke of it as the best years of his life. We haven’t much reliable evidence to go on. But I doubt very much that he really experienced it as that.
Like so many soldiers, he had gone into that war with great enthusiasm and passionate belief in Germany’s cause. But, like so many, he soon had to live with daily death and destruction all around him. In the very ‘baptism of fire’ of his own battalion, already in autumn 1914, 80% of his comrades were wiped out. For four years, with hardly a break, he was a first-hand witness to the carnage on the western front. He became hardened to human loss on a huge scale, indifferent to death and suffering. In a telling letter written in 1915, he said the sacrifices would be worthwhile if they brought ‘a purer homeland, purged of alien elements’. More than three years later, in hospital recovering from mustard-gas poisoning, he was shocked to the very core at the wholly unexpected news of Germany’s defeat and the socialist revolution that followed it. So the terrible sacrifice had after all been in vain after all. That couldn’t be true. He looked for an explanation – and found a scapegoat.
The First World War was the time when Hitler’s existing more or less conventional antisemitism became pathological, proto-genocidal. Hatred of the Jews had been mounting sharply during the war. It now gripped Hitler, too, as never before, not even in his Vienna years. The reasons for the war, and the disgrace of defeat, became crystal clear to him. The Jews were to blame - for the war itself, and for what he saw as Germany’s shameful capitulation in 1918. Hitler was a convert to the stab-in-the-back legend before it was even invented. He believed the Jews had undermined Germany from within. His first written statement on antisemitism, in September 1919, said the ultimate aim of a national government had to be ‘the removal of the Jews altogether’. In Mein Kampf, in the mid-1920s, he wrote that the sacrifice of millions of Germany’s best men could have been avoided if ‘some or twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters had been held under poison gas’ as the war started. The link between the Jews and war was indelibly etched on his mind. And the Jews were for him all-powerful – running western capitalism, directing Soviet Bolshevism, and wrecking Germany. Another war had to destroy that power. It had to be a war against the Jews. It had to be the unfinished business of the First World War. More than all else, it had to expiate the shame of capitulation in 1918.
What’s crucial to note, then, is this: for Hitler, the Second World War was revenge for the First. As a second world war loomed, Hitler returned to the connection with the Jews in the infamous ‘prophecy’ he first made on 30 January 1939. He said: ‘If international Jewish financiers … should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’. This wasn’t mere propaganda. Nor was it a prior announcement of the ‘Final Solution’. But it did reveal Hitler’s intrinsic genocidal mentality. It highlighted his conviction that another war would, somehow, bring about the destruction of the Jews. He’d go on to invoke his ‘prophecy’ more than a dozen times between 1941 and 1945, as the Jews of Europe were engulfed in the ‘Final Solution’. And he’d always misdate it to 1 September 1939, the day of the German invasion of Poland, the day the war began. So we have to see: the genocide against the Jews was, for Hitler, not something separate from the war. It was central to the war itself. It was only logical, then, that on the night before his death he was still urging the nation on to the fight against the Jews. He pointed out in his Testament that he had this time left no one in any doubt that the sacrifices would not take place ‘without the real culprit having to atone for his guilt’. For Hitler the war was no conventional conflict. It was an apocalyptic struggle for revenge and salvation. It’s important to hold on to this point. It links to the way Hitler saw his own place in history.
In his typical dualistic fashion, he’d only ever posed the stark alternatives of total victory or total defeat. By early 1945, total victory was long out of the question. Total defeat loomed. Why did Hitler reject outright the suggestions coming from Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Göring, Himmler, and others to try to negotiate an end to the war with one side or the other? Well one reason was his vain hope, of course, that the anti-German alliance would split. He’d dreamt that one last victory would concentrate the minds of the west on the need to join Germany in the fight against Bolshevism. He said he’d only negotiate from strength. Such hopes were ever more illusory. But his loss of grip on reality wasn’t such that he was blind to that. He wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t see, like anyone else, that the war was hopelessly lost. He knew that he personally was a barrier to any negotiated settlement. He couldn’t survive one. Nor could he allow himself to fall into the hands of the enemy. But he could have killed himself at any point, saving the calamitous human losses of the last months of the war – heavier than in any other year of the conflict. He did it only when the Russians were at his very door. Why hold out in an obviously lost cause until then?
One reason was certainly the unheroic determination to cling on to his life, whatever the cost to others, to the very end. But Hitler wasn’t a coward. And he spoke more than once of how easy it would be to end his own misery by putting a bullet through his head. We come back to what Hitler thought he was fighting the war for. And to his view of his place in history.
The war, for Hitler, couldn’t conceivably be ended by a compromise peace – for him, another sell-out. He knew his Clausewitz. The great German military thinker had written: ‘Even the loss of freedom after an honourable and bloody battle secures the rebirth of the people’. Hitler followed this maxim. There could, therefore, be no thought of a negotiated settlement. For Hitler, would have been another capitulation – the mark of cowardice that would defile the nation yet again. The very purpose of the war had been to expunge the capitulation of 1918. There will be no repeat of November 1918, he stated over and again. ‘The war can last as long as it wants. Germany will never capitulate’, he declared. It wasn’t propaganda. He meant it. He told his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, at the end of 1944: ‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us’. Honour in an epic defeat, a ‘heroic’ death, maximum destruction of the enemy to the last: these were what Hitler wanted to bequeath as his legacy to what he called ‘the coming man’. This was Hitler’s own view of his place in history as Germany’s defeat became inevitable.
next > Page 1 of 3
