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It's April 28th, 1945, just before midnight. We're in Berlin, at the Führerbunker. A man called Walter Wagner sits before a battered wooden table. These days Wagner is a war-weary member of the Home Guard, but in peacetime he was a lawyer, a notary. On that basis, he's been summoned here to officiate at an intimate private ceremony. In the stale air and dim lighting, Wagner quizzes the man and woman sitting opposite.
He fills out the paperwork and checks credentials. Are the couple who they say they are? Are their dates of birth correct? And, of course, are they of Aryan blood? With formalities over and rings exchanged, he declares them husband and wife. The bride looks splendid in her black silk dress. But there will be no photographs, no confetti, nor, for that matter, any smiles.
When she signs the register, the enormity of what has happened hasn't quite sunk in. She writes her name, Eva Braun, crosses it out, and corrects it. For one night only, actually two, she will be the First Lady and the last of the Third Reich. Mrs. Eva Hitler. From Neuser, this is the final part of the Hitler story. And this is Real Dictators.
By the end of 1944 there is no hope for Nazi Germany. In the east, the Red Army rampages ever closer. In the west, the Allies have slogged their way to the Rhine. From the skies, the Anglo-American bombing has swelled to such a crescendo that it seems unlikely the Faderland can withstand much more. Sixty cities destroyed, at least 300,000 dead. One by one, Hitler's Axis associates have thrown in the towel.
The dream of a Nazi empire from the Pyrenees to the Urals has gone up in smoke. Having stormed through the Baltic states, the Soviets train their sights on East Prussia. At Tannenberg, at the great military memorial, Hitler orders the removal of the coffin of President Hindenburg. In 1934, at the old man's funeral, the great flaming towers had provided a dramatic backdrop to Hitler's ascension to power.
It seems a long time ago. Hitler is not the only one alarmed at the rate of the Soviet advance. Stalin has gobbled up Romania, Bulgaria, and a chunk of Hungary. His Red Army has moved into Yugoslavia. The Land Grab is putting the wind up Roosevelt and Churchill. Senior Nazis pin their hopes on the Western Allies ditching Uncle Joe, joining forces with Germany to thwart the Bolshevik hordes. Professor Helen Rosch:
I mean, anti-Bolshevik, anti-Russian propaganda had always been quite key to the Nazi platform right from the beginning. But as you come into the final days of the war, it just reaches a kind of hysterical peak.
Goebbels is orchestrating these atrocity stories, real horror movie stuff, rape and mutilation and all of this kind of rhetoric. This is also, I think, why you get a spate of suicides towards the end of the war. You get so many Germans who, when the war seems to be coming to an end, they just think the retribution from the enemy is going to be so terrible that it's not worth living.
Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy. He actually played a German public opinion like a Stradivarius. We see Goebbels and the propaganda machinists' hysterical, hyperbolic
But actually, they used a great deal of reasonable-seeming argument. The clincher is right until the end, they could always point out the illogicality of the Allies' position, that it's based on a total ideological contradiction between capitalism and communism, between America and Russia, and it's going to break up. Sir Anthony Beaver.
The great joke in Berlin at the time, if you can call it a joke, is "optimists are learning English and pessimists are learning Russian." And that was certainly true. And even before Christmas, they were saying, "Be practical, give a coffin." They realized that they might well be all marched off to Siberia as slave labor. But there was always somehow the hope. And this is something where, with
In February 1945, the big three Allied leaders will convene again, this time at the Yalta Conference. Here they will demarcate their European spheres of influence. Militarily, the defeat of Germany is a done deal.
The focus now is on the Far East and finishing off Japan. The Soviets have already begun their last big push, the Vistula-Oda Offensive, clearing the path to Berlin. As in 1939, Poland is the crucible of what used to be Poland. At the outset of the war, Poland had been carved up between Nazi Germany and the USSR. In the summer of 1941, Germany then swallowed Poland whole.
The western part, ethnically cleansed, was absorbed into the Reich. The remainder has been run as a colony, the General-Government for the occupied Polish region, or just General-Government. Effectively, it's the personal fiefdom of a man named Hans Frank. If the name sounds familiar, it's because Frank was, for many years, Hitler's lawyer, going all the way back to his trial after the Munich Putsch in 1923. Dr. Chris Dillon,
So on Hans Frank's patch, the Polish inhabitants are technically stateless. So they're like any kind of rights. And this gives Frank an almost limitless power, and it certainly goes to Frank's head. So Hans Frank, for example, confiscates a huge country estate for his personal use. He builds an imitation of Hitler's Berghof. Frank is driven around in a luxurious limousine. And he grows so fat from lavish banquets that new uniforms have to be designed for him.
Frank and his cronies plunder the general government, and it's a place of just limitless racial oppression. And the net result of Frank's tenure is that whereas 11 million Poles had lived in this area in 1939, by the time the Red Army arrive in 1944 to liberate it, there's only 7 million people there. It's an extraordinary loss of life and of expulsion that is overseen by Hans Frank.
The new Poland was intended to be the stepping stone to Hitler's racial utopia, part of the relocation of 20 million Germans to the East. Hitler had declared it a new Garden of Eden. In reality, on the soil of Poland, the Nazis have built those camps whose names live in infamy: Shelmo, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz.
Despite the inevitability of defeat, these camps have gone into a final orgy of extermination. The Hungarian government is now seeking peace with the Soviet Union, but Hitler marches into Budapest and installs a bloodthirsty Nazi-style regime, one eager to please,
Auschwitz reaches its murderous peak in the early summer of 1944 with the deportation of Hungary's remaining Jewish population. Almost half a million Jews arrive in Auschwitz between May and July alone.
And the vast majority are murdered in gas chambers on arrival. So this is an extremely intense phase of mass murder, which even though it's later in the war, is the highest death count that the Nazis inflict on Europe's Jews. Still, the authorities remain coy about the industrialized nature of the killing. They describe it in euphemisms. Evacuation. Deportation. Resettlement.
In the summer of 1943, a Nazi judge named Konrad Morgan enters the equation. He delivers Himmler a report: "Is the dear Reichsfuhrer aware that in some of these concentration camps, Jews are being systematically murdered?" He stumbled upon this information while investigating the commandant at Majdanek, Karl Otto Koch. Koch has been caught with his hand in the till, racketeering, hiring out his inmates as local labor.
A bit of digging has revealed widespread embezzlement. There's even an allegation that the Commandant's wife has a lampshade made of human skin. What's more, Koch's personal enrichment, here and previously, seems accompanied by a slew of unsanctioned killings. Morgan is more concerned with the legality of these actions rather than the morality. He prepares some 800 cases of homicide against Koch, his deputies, and others. But Hans Frank steps in.
He refuses to acknowledge that such things could be happening on his turf. Hitler adds that any deaths must surely be due to disease, though for good measure he will have Koch shot. Morgan is undaunted. He extends his inquiries. With Auschwitz next on the list, Himmler shuts down the investigation. Hitler decrees that they should cease all camp operations outside the borders of Germany.
But with the Soviets liberating Koch's camp in July 1944, the dirty secret is out. There is a contradiction at the heart of the Nazi myth. The new Germany, supposedly ethnically pure, is now overrun with refugees and forced laborers. 300,000 in Berlin alone.
There was a lot of anxiety about what that meant in terms of things like sexual relations as well, because obviously most German men are off at the front and you have this kind of moral panic in a sense about what's happening if you've got German men being replaced by foreign men who may be making moves. And, you know, this was something that did happen. You get relationships happening.
There are other reasons for Germans to be fearful. In 1943 the Jews of Warsaw, walled up in a ghetto, had risen against their Nazi overlords. Resisting clearance for transportation, 1500 fighters used a stash of smuggled weapons to battle from the tunnels and cellars underneath the city. They held out for 33 days until the SS moved in with flamethrowers. The cruelty of this suppression was staggering.
But if the Poles believe the Soviets will be any more merciful, they've got another thing coming. Hitler, despite all evidence to the contrary, still thinks the war can be won. Desperate for a breakthrough, he'd rushed into service the V-1 flying bomb. It was part of his much vaunted "Miracle Weapons" program. The V-1's successor, the V-2 rocket, is a ballistic missile. Launched from bases in Holland, the V-2 can strike London in minutes. There is no defense against it.
It's the brainchild of a rocket scientist called Werner Von Braun. He will soon be spirited away to the United States to work on its space program. But the V-2 is a vanity project, a costly one, not least for the 12,000 workers who die in its construction.
Freeman Dyson, who was a scientist during the war, calculated at the time that for each V2 rocket, you could have built 15 German fighter aircraft to defend the Third Reich. Dyson said, it's an extraordinary thing to say, that every time he heard a V2 explosion, his heart leapt with joy because he realized, you know, this is 15 jets the Germans are not going to be able to build.
It's the power of the imagery which is what always engages Hitler. It's never clear that he's anything more than an opera set designer. And this is the ultimate grand opera. We will destroy your country with rockets. As Tom Lehrer said in his famous song, when the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? It's not our department, says Wernher von Braun. There is talk of an atomic bomb project.
Using heavy water from Norway, of a mega-gun that can destroy London, of Japanese-style kamikaze squadrons, of mountain fortresses in the Alps from where the Nazis can start Armageddon. And for Hitler, one last cunning plan. In May 1940, Hitler had stunned the world by rolling over France in just four weeks. His panzers had burst through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest. His brainwave this time?
He's going to stage a rerun. Ardennes II, the sequel, will see the Wehrmacht steamroller through Belgium, split the British and American armies, and drive to the sea at Antwerp. The Western Allies will then sue for peace, leaving Hitler to go back to beating the Russians. And he's going to fight dirty. He's going to dress up English-speaking soldiers in American uniforms and deposit them behind US lines, sowing confusion.
Field Marshal Model has a confession for his Fuhrer. He thinks the plan is bonkers. The problem with his generals, says Hitler, is they lack vision. He should have done as Stalin did and had them purged.
So his idea really was to take the Allies by surprise, and with any luck this might lead to a second Dunkirk. I mean, it was, again, fantasy. All of his generals tried to warn him that actually, "Main chur, you know, I'm afraid this one is over-optimistic. We haven't got the fuel, we haven't actually got the troops, and certainly not the tanks. Even if we manage to break through, we have not got the troops to hold the corridor."
On December 11th, Hitler moves to his western bunker, the Eagle's Eyrie. Everything is set. A special detachment of troops is assembled under the hero commander, Otto Skorzeny. They've been schooled in New York street talk and the latest baseball scores, as well as the art of misdirecting traffic. The staff remark on Hitler's appalling physical condition. His skin is grey, he's hunched and trembling, he's dragging a leg.
But he has one thing they don't: the luck of the devil. December the 16th, 5:30 a.m. in the Ardennes forest. Snow has fallen thick. The winding roads are covered with ice. The Germans are in retreat. The idea of a counteroffensive seems preposterous. So relaxed are the Americans. The line is manned by reserve troops: cooks, truck drivers, rookie recruits. What they don't realize
is that 250,000 men of the Wehrmacht in arctic fighting gear are moving forward. The main thrust focused on a seven mile gap. This time, it's the Allies who are caught napping. Behind the lines, Hitler's fake GIs snip telephone wires and reroute tank columns. In the vanguard, SS Panzer units smash through the Americans to the heights of Bobbastogne. At the eagle's eerie, Hitler is crowing.
He even okays a plan to kidnap General Eisenhower. But behind the scenes, there is a heavy case of the "I told you so's." Hitler has thrown everything into the opening assault. There's nothing in reserve. Within ten days, the attack has lost momentum. And momentum is the one thing that Blitzkrieg relies upon. Professor Thomas Weber,
They know this cannot somehow be some kind of slow battle. It needs to happen with lightning speed. This cannot possibly, as far as the Germans are concerned, be a protracted battle or even turn into a battle of attrition. The Americans will call this the Battle of the Bulge, due to the German salient protruding into their lines. It's particularly savage, one of the US Army's bloodiest engagements.
But within five weeks, the Germans have retreated. The American sector is back up to strength. Hitler has staked his shirt and lost it. Dr. John Curatola
But one thing it does do, it does prove to the Americans that the Germans are indeed still very dangerous. I mean, you look at the casualty rates of the Allies and the Americans in late 1944 or 45, they go up significantly. So this war is not over. I mean, we can see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't translate to the infantryman who still has to clear out these towns and move into Germany proper. So where now for the Fuhrer, literally?
The Russians are closing in on the Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg. Hitler's alpine home, the Berghof, is equally unsafe, far too identifiable a target. So on January 16, 1945, the Fuhrer moves to Berlin, somewhere he rarely visits. He expresses a wish to make a heroic last stand among his people. He will do so from the Chancellery itself, or rather the Fuhrerbunker, the concrete complex of rooms beneath its gardens.
The staff and secretaries return too. At 24 years old, Hitler's favorite, Traudl Junge, is already a widow. She is back after a bleak Christmas in Munich. She tells her boss about the bombing raids, about the soldiers returning emaciated and frostbitten, about the new civil militia comprised of old men and children. "Don't worry," says Hitler, patting her cheek. "This will soon be over." On January 27th, Auschwitz is liberated.
That same day, Hitler gives a military conference in the Chancellery. The building is bomb-damaged, its windows blown out. He spouts all the usual nonsense about the glories of the Great War and how his comrades dug in and never gave up. Dr. Theo Morel, Hitler's personal physician, was recently dismissed, by the way. Finally exposed as a quack. The drugs he was pumping into the Führer were inducing psychosis.
Morel was dragged away, kicking and screaming. But the madness doesn't let up. General Guderian is especially frustrated. Heinrich Himmler, a man with no military experience whatsoever, but who likes dressing up in uniforms, has been put in charge of protecting Berlin from the East. The SS chief is now pitched against the mighty Soviet General Zhukov, and the one-time chicken farmer is being well and truly plucked.
Add to that, an entire army of 200,000 men is now marooned in Lacthea, the Kulan pocket,
Never forget that right at the end of the war, as the Russian armies were in the suburbs of Berlin, there were still huge German armies intact elsewhere in Europe to hold on territory. There was the garrison in the Netherlands. There was the garrison in Norway. There was, of course, the army of Italy under Kesselring. So they didn't withdraw them.
Hitler embarks on a two-hour rant, issuing the usual accusations of betrayal. Guderian is told to take six weeks leave, but Hitler's faith in Himmler, in his big beasts, has been sorely misplaced.
What really happens now is that people really divide into two groups. One think that this is the end. They think that they will die either in a last stand or that they would commit suicide once the war is over. But then there are others, and a surprisingly large number of Germans, who think that they can turn their back on Hitler and that they can do a deal with the British and the Americans. And these include people like Goering, people like Himmler.
Through Hermann Göring, lines of communication have been kept open to neutral Sweden. When Hitler finds out about the backchanneling, he flies into a classic rage. He warns Göring he could have him shot. Himmler meanwhile has launched a separate peace initiative. In one of the most shamefaced moves of the war, he has reached out to representatives of the World Jewish Congress. In a twisted logic, Himmler paints this move as a humanitarian act.
He's doing it to save Jews. In fact, he's using the remaining camp prisoners as bargaining chips.
even someone like Himmler, to state the obvious, who's responsible more than anyone else other than Hitler for the Holocaust. He is meeting a representative of the World Jewish Congress in the belief that somehow, even after everything that has happened, even after close than six million Jews that he and other Germans have killed, he still somehow thinks there can be some kind of deal. It's, of course, delusional,
It's interesting that a lot of the higher members of the hierarchy
They aren't so brought into Nazism that they don't want to imagine a life beyond Nazism and beyond Hitler. And in fact, they're just desperate to broker whatever deals they think will save Erskine's. Himmler is a really good example of that. Having orchestrated the Holocaust in its entirety, he then begins sort of keeping back their
various pockets of Jewish hostages, if you like, who he can then use to barter with international organizations. For Hitler, the news grows worse by the hour. Vienna has been overrun by the Soviets. In the West, the Allies have been allowed to cross the Rhine. That's another betrayal for Hitler to chalk up. Field Marshal von Rundstedt gets the chop.
When Eva Braun returns to Berlin, she confirms more rumors: that, as the Western Allies approach, surrenders are coming in thick and fast. When the Bishop of Münster hands over his town, Hitler says he'll have him hanged. The Führerbunker is a miserable grey shelter. Its 12-foot thick reinforced roof is encased beneath a further 30 feet of concrete. Inside, you cross dockboards over endless puddles. It's been built below the water table,
making for quarters that are cramped, damp and airless. So much for living space. Pumps drone round the clock. So does the air conditioning, and so does Hitler, and there is no natural light. Clanging down a metal stairway you enter a low-ceilinged warren of rooms, cubicles, a kitchen and an officer's mess. A switchboard and telex machines connect the bunker to the outside world.
though the most reliable news now comes from the officially forbidden BBC. At the far end is the six-room suite occupied by Hitler and Eva Braun. The sole adornment is a portrait of Frederick the Great, which the Fuhrer gazes at for inspiration. This is their life from now on, and it's a paranoid existence. All who enter the bunker must surrender their weapons. Amid the doom and gloom is a ray of sunshine.
On April 12th, teetotal Hitler decrees that Champagne must be opened. A stunning bulletin has just come in: President Franklin D. Roosevelt is dead. He'd been at his retreat in Georgia and took to bed, complaining of a headache. He died soon after of a cerebral hemorrhage. FDR's death is certainly a blow to the Allies, but Vice President Harry S. Truman is promptly sworn in. The show must go on.
In a representative democracy, not everything revolves around a figurehead leader. Victory is not, as Goebbels now claims, written in the stars. Meanwhile, Soviet troops begin to encircle Berlin. Hitler pins his hope on an army led by SS General Felix Steiner. Just like in the cowboy stories Hitler loved as a child, Steiner will ride in and save the day.
Steiner, by the way, has been involved in yet another plot to remove Hitler, this time for reasons of insanity. April 20th, 1945. Today is Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday. He's kicked off festivities by deciding to burn his personal papers, though given that he hardly wrote any of his orders down, this shouldn't be too taxing for his staff. The Red Army is mere miles away.
In the bunker the shelling has become so intense that the chance to escape up to the surface during the all-clear, to stroll in the rubble of the Chancellery Garden, is increasingly rare. But there is duty to be done. Hitler must pin medals on the boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth defending the last few city blocks of the Third Reich. Hitler, the subterranean golem, blinks into the sunlight. It's the last time the Fuhrer will ever appear in public.
That night, the Allies mark the occasion with a thousand-bomber raid on the capital. On April 22, Hitler is gripped by violent mood swings, veering between triumphalism and despair as General Steiner's relief mission collapses, exposed as fantasy.
He still seems to have believed, or he hoped maybe, until very late, that somehow there might be some kind of magic reversal in the war effort. But once he realizes that that's not going to happen, he decides that he will just die in the ruins of Berlin. Before the ring around the Chancellery closes completely, Albert Speer makes the fleeting visit.
Hitler has ordered his armaments minister to pursue a scorched earth policy: to leave nothing for the enemy, to turn Germany into a wasteland. Speer confesses that he hasn't followed through. The people of the Reich need to be left with something. But it's the people who failed him, froths Hitler. The war is lost because they let him down. They are not worthy. Why didn't Hitler kill Speer for disloyalty? He killed everyone else for disloyalty.
Because in the end, the relationship with Speer is very complex. It's partly father and son. Many historians attribute a strong homoerotic element to the older man in love with the younger man. Hitler was in love with Speer. Whatever kind of love you choose to characterize it, it was powerful enough to stop Hitler killing Speer.
Back outside, Speer explores the possibility of pumping poison gas into an air conditioning vent, which would be poetic. But the ducts are protected. The Führer has thought of everything. To Hitler now there is only one true loyalist: Joseph Goebbels. The Minister of Propaganda arrives at the bunker with his wife, Magda, and their six young children. Five girls and one boy. Their names all begin with H, in honor of you-know-who.
The staff are appalled. Why bring kids here? But for Frau Goebbels, a life without National Socialism, for all of them, is a life not worth living. With them, too, is Hitler's trusty lackey, Martin Bormann, though the slippery sidekick has been doing some scheming of his own. Bormann gets a message to Berchtesgaden where Göring is now holed up. Hitler has had a nervous breakdown, he tells the Luftwaffe chief. Cut off in his bunker, he can no longer function as leader.
On April 23, Goering cables Hitler back. He understands his Führer's predicament, he says. As Hitler's official number two, he requests permission to act on the Reich's behalf and negotiate immediately for a ceasefire. If he hasn't heard back by 10:00 p.m., he will assume that he is the new head of state. Most likely this is Bormann setting Goering up. If so, it has the desired result.
Hitler loses it. He demands that Göring be executed for high treason. He orders the SS to arrest Fat Hermann immediately. On April 24 Goebbels makes one last broadcast to the undeserving citizens of the Reich: "Our heart must not waver and not tremble. It must be our pride and our ambition to break the Bolshevik mass onslaught."
The German people have been listening to a lie since 1933. So the German people are constantly fed a diet of this kind of propaganda. And of course, if you hear it enough, it must be true. You know, when your cities rubble, it's kind of hard to cover that one up after a while. The next day, American and Soviet forces are shaking hands on the River Elbe. Germany has been cut in two.
By the 27th, Hitler is in a delirious "I love you man" state, hugging his officers, pinning iron crosses on anyone within reach. And then, for the last time, there is Benito Mussolini. On the 28th, dramatic news comes in: the deposed Italian dictator has been ambushed by partisans. Il Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, have been gunned down, summarily executed.
Their bodies are dragged back to Milan and hung upside down outside a filling station. The locals beat the corpses to a pulp. People close to Hitler, including Eva Braun, really urge Hitler to leave Berlin. There are planes that are ready to fly him to the south, to fly him to the Alps, but Hitler refuses to do so. He decides to stay in Berlin. And that really is born out of the realization that the war is over.
And this is also really driven out of a fear of what would happen to him. He seems to have been worried that the same fate would fall onto him what happened to Mussolini. His obsession was that he would be taken back to Moscow in an iron cage where he would be humiliated and all the rest of it. And this is why he was determined to face the end if necessary with a pistol thrust in his mouth.
That same day, the BBC confirms that Himmler has also taken it upon himself to act on behalf of the Reich and surrender unconditionally. There seems to be no end to the treachery. Himmler has an SS liaison officer in the bunker, a man called Hermann Feglein, but he appears, wisely, to have done a runner. Feglein is caught by the Gestapo.
When they find him, he's staggeringly drunk, dressed in civilian clothes, pockets stuffed with jewelry and Swiss francs. They drag him back to the bunker. Eva Braun is upset, and not just because some of the jewelry was hers. Fegelein is married to her sister, her pregnant sister. She pleads with Hitler to spare the life of her brother-in-law. Fegelein is locked in a room. They can always shoot him later, and they do. The news from the outside is grim.
All food and ammunition dumps are in enemy hands. Within two days, the troops will be out of bullets. The battle for Berlin is in its death throes. In these surreal end times, people are now openly drinking and smoking around Hitler, something they would never have done before. There's fevered discussion about preferred methods of offing themselves. Cyanide capsules are passed around like sweets. Hitler has a last pair of visitors.
They are a female pilot, Hannah Reich, and her passenger and lover, Field Marshal Robert von Grim. He is Göring's replacement as head of the Luftwaffe. Both are diehard Nazis. Somehow, under furious fire, Reich manages to land her plane right by the Brandenburg Gate.
Reich flies out again bearing farewell letters for loved ones, including a polite note from Ava Brown to her sister, explaining why they had to kill her husband. That night, the dining room is decorated. The best silver, the best crystal. There's a linen tablecloth with the initial H on it. Hitler meanwhile dictates his last will and testament to a tearful Traudl Junger. He has no regrets, he says. He will die with a joyful heart.
He confirms the new line of succession. Goebbels is to be Chancellor, Bormann will be party minister, and there's a wild card. On Hitler's death, Admiral Karl Dönitz will become President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Dönitz, in charge of troops north of Berlin, is just about the only commander in the field still fighting.
Dönitz is furious about that, that in Hitler's will he's made a Reichsfuhrer. Dönitz knows that because of this he'll get a massive prison sentence. He realizes it's a job he has to do because someone has to do it. And who says Romans is dead? In the will there is also special mention for one lucky lady.
I have decided now, before the end of my earthly career, to take as my wife the girl who, after many years of loyal friendship, came of her own free will in order to share my fate." At just after midnight, once Walter Wagner has conducted the nuptials, eight guests sit down for the funereal wedding feast of liverwurst sandwiches. The Goebbels, Bormann, a private secretary, Gerd de Christian,
Generals Hans Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf, Arthur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth, and the Fuhrer's cook, Constanze Manziali. Poor old Wagner will be dispatched back up top. He'll be dead within hours, copping a Russian bullet to the head. Hitler briefly lets his hair down. He even has a glass of sweet Toque wine. Goebbels, as impending Chancellor, will have duties to fulfill, reminds Hitler. He orders him to leave the bunker.
though little Joe will have none of it. Team Goebbels is staying put. Not to be outdone, Goebbels gets Traudljunger to type up his will too, a tortured rant about the guilt of the Jews and their deserved annihilation. The next day the happy couple stay in bed till noon. When they do get up, Frau Hitler gives away her possessions, including her prized fur coat. But Hitler is troubled.
He has doubts as to the efficacy of the cyanide pills. Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, the bunker's medic, proposes a demonstration. Hitler's trusty Alsatian, Blondie, is whistled up. She will serve her master one last time. A cyanide capsule is forced down her throat. It kills her, evidently painlessly, within seconds. She's just given birth to five puppies, by the way. They'd been delighting the Goebbels' kids.
The SS will round them up later and shoot them. A line is formed of the bunker staff. Hitler passes along it, shaking hands, and then retires to his room. A macabre spontaneous party breaks out in his absence. A last Bacchanalian release. But as it goes on into the early hours, Bormann tells them to keep the noise down. By the morning of the 30th, the fighting is in the Tiergarten, right next door. Hitler re-emerges.
He doesn't even seem to recognize anyone anymore. Eva indicates to the secretarial staff that they should all get the hell out of there. Hitler has very specific instructions. He orders that 200 liters of gasoline be delivered to the bunker entrance. When he dies, there must be no trace left of his body. In the heat of battle, this is a selfish request. Soviet troops are in the zoo gardens just a few hundred yards away.
Absurdly, under heavy fire, the last defenders of Berlin must abandon the barricades and scrabble around siphoning fuel from wrecked vehicles. At around 3:30 pm, the Hitlers sit together on the sofa in their suite, door closed. Mrs. Hitler is the first to die, biting down on a cyanide capsule. Mr. Hitler pulls out a picture of his mother as a young woman, stares at it, then does the same thing.
while simultaneously shooting himself in the mouth with his trusty Walther. Troudeljonger is reading the Goebbels kids a story when they hear the shot. Little Helmut yells out, "Bullseye!" When others realize what's happened, there's a rush to break down Hitler's door. Inside, the Fuhrer has slid off the couch, sprawled face down across the coffee table. To his left is Eva, slumped over the armrest, lips tightly closed.
Her black dress is soaked from a jug of water that's been knocked over. Dr. Stumpfegger and Heinz Linger, Hitler's valet, carry out the Fuhrer's body on a brown army blanket. Bormann follows, bearing Eva Braun in his arms. Hitler's chauffeur, Erich Kemper, intervenes. Eva always hated Bormann. Better that he do it. On the surface, Russian shells rain down. They lay the bodies in a shallow ditch, ducking back in for cover.
They then pour the gasoline, as Hitler had requested. Someone lights a match, but it keeps blowing out. A burning rag is tossed in instead. They keep pouring fuel until there's none left. It takes four hours for the flames to go out. The charred remnants are scooped up and shoved down a shell hole. Earth is pounded hard on top. When Frau Goebbels puts her children in their bunk beds that evening, she insists they drink from a flask of medicine.
actually a heavy dose of morphine. Later, sure that they're unconscious, their mother then crushes an ampule of cyanide into each of their mouths. Having murdered her own children, she and her husband go outside. Joseph Goebbels shoots his wife before turning the gun on himself. Several of the bunker staff do the same, including Generals Krebs and Bergdorf. In the overcrowded Chancellery Field Hospital, news of the Fuhrer's death is met with shock.
and a further outbreak of suicides. We get the end of times theme. There are so many suicides. There are not only the suicides in the bunker, but there are masses of suicides all over Germany.
And it's pure Jim Jones, the Kool-Aid, Jonestown, Guyana. And it is a reminder to all of us that what we're dealing with is bigger than a political party, bigger than a political regime, bigger than an ideology. It's a cult. This is London calling. Here is a news flash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.
In the chaos, some of the staff, including Traudljunger, manage to slip through the Russian lines. Others surrender. Bormann and Stumpfegger are killed by Soviet gunfire while attempting to cross a railway bridge. Elsewhere, Himmler is found wandering in disguise, dressed in a private's uniform, complete with comedy eyepatch. When his British captors figure out who he really is and subject him to a medical exam,
He too bites down on a cyanide capsule he's hidden in a gum cavity. Goering is captured, alongside the likes of Ribbentrop, Frank, Jodl and Keitel. He will be put on trial by the Allies at Nuremberg, though Goering will cheat the gallows by taking his own life. News of Hitler's death spreads quickly to the citizens of the Reich. The end of someone revered as superhuman is almost impossible to comprehend.
especially when it's revealed that he didn't perish fighting at the head of his army, as Admiral Dönitz has led them to believe. People who were in their teens in 1945, they've been born potentially in the late 20s, early 30s. They've never known anything other than Nazism. All of their school days, all of their Hitler Youth Service, they've been subject to this constant indoctrination. And you can understand why within that framework,
A world without Nazism seems unthinkable. A world without Hitler seems unthinkable. Two days after Hitler's death, in what would have been his ultimate nightmare, the Soviet hammer and sickle flies over the Reichstag. A cessation of hostilities will be announced on May 7th, with victory in Europe, VE Day, declared on May 8th.
General Jodl and Field Marshal Keitel sign the instruments of surrender on Dönitz's behalf. Jodl to the Western Allies, Keitel in Berlin. Dönitz's tenure as Reichs-President will last just 23 days. There will be stories of Hitler's survival, of his escape to Argentina alongside the likes of Adolf Eichmann, of his capture and execution by the Red Army. There is, however, little doubt as to Hitler's fate.
In Berlin, proof of his death is demanded by Soviet officers. The remains are unearthed and a fragment of jawbone removed. Hitler's dental records are then used for confirmation. The bone will later make its way to Moscow. Forensic analysis has always confirmed it as Hitler's. Plus, there are enough eyewitnesses to independently corroborate what happened.
Sir Stuart Menzies, who was head of MI6, ordered one of his young operatives, an oxodon called Hugh Trevor Roper. He'd run his own intelligence operation in the first part of World War II. Menzies gave him this task
of piecing together the end of Hitler because he foresaw that there are going to be all kinds of fantasists and conspiracy theorists and Nazis who are going to say that Führer is not dead. He's in Argentina.
And so Trevor Roper went with forensic detail and supreme powers in Germany to do everything he wanted to do. And his first thing was to go to the bunker itself. He was the first of the Westerners to get there, bribe Russian sentries with cigarettes, and then proceeded to go around Germany arresting everyone who was in the bunker. He arrested the whole damn lot of them. Hitler's butler offered his own services to Hugh Trevor Roper as butler.
But he eventually found Hitler's last will and testimony buried in the garden of one of these people. In other words, he nabbed the lot, he interrogated the lot, and he wrote his detailed report where he established beyond reasonable doubt all that had happened in the last days.
Of course he did die. And we know that for two reasons. If we just look at the man of how he had developed over the previous 20, 30, 40 years or so, there is no way that Adolf Hitler would be the kind of person who would think that
after having been the leader of Germany for such a long time, that if that didn't work out, he would somehow still want to live and he would somehow want to move to some place in Southern America or wherever to live a quiet life. It's absolutely inconceivable that Hitler would have wanted a life of this kind. But irrespective of this kind of psychological assessment of Hitler and his behavior,
There's eyewitness accounts. His skull and his teeth were of course taken to Moscow, which was assessed in recent years. And there's absolutely no doubt that Hitler and Eva Braun did die in the ruins of Berlin. The bodies of the Goebbels are only partially burned. There being no fuel left, they are easily identifiable and put on display. Adolf Hitler was 56 years old.
As the dictator of Nazi Germany, he terrorized Europe, did his best to wipe out an entire race, and sparked a world war which cost the lives of 60 million people. His barbarous regime inflicted such suffering that the conflict he started still shapes the world we live in.
that a man of that delusion is able to cajole, manipulate, arm twist himself into power. I think it's a warning to problems of human nature, how humans can easily be manipulated through information to thinking certain ways. His legacy reminds us of how our minds can be manipulated down some very dark holes
In one thing, Hitler did live on, namely in his vision what the defeat of Germany would mean for the future of the world and the future of conflict. His expectation was that with Germany gone, there would be a new global showdown. It would be a new global showdown between America and the Soviet Union.
And of course, in that, he was right. What followed here was, of course, the beginnings of the Cold War that continued at least until 1990. The Cold War happens immediately World War II ends. The two sides get together, they drink,
But then it all goes. You have, very soon after the Berlin blockade, you have the Berlin airlift. And immediately, Germans in the western section cease to be the enemy. They become friends.
Hitler's legacy is a Germany divided, discredited, weaker, morally tarnished, but this lets far too many Germans off the hook to focus purely on Hitler. Hitler wouldn't have got anywhere if it hadn't been for decision makers in the Weimar Republic, the complicity of the German army, and increasingly popular support
of ordinary Germans. So the cautionary tale here lies in the appetite of those that loved and discerned this charisma for strong masculine leadership, for reassertion of German national greatness, and to some extent, a popular belief that there was some kind of Jewish question to which Hitler and the Nazis were the answer. So although a dismally, epocally important historical figure,
We shouldn't allow it to become an alibi for the much broader array of forces and belief systems that facilitated it. In many ways, the legacy for us should be we have always got dictators wrong. We have never understood dictator syndrome. In the 1930s, the British and the French underestimated the threat from Hitler simply because they thought that nobody could be stupid enough to want to have another world war after the horrors of the First World War.
The problem is we have not gone over this idea of confirmation bias when it comes to the mentality of dictators. They do not think the same way as generals. And we have made this mistake time and time again.
We had genocides before in the 20th century. We had the genocide of the Armenians. We had the genocide of the Herero in German southwest Africa. But this was totally new, actually having a kind of production line of death and the sadism which went with it.
is very difficult for us to actually understand conceptually, morally, and in any other way. You try time and again to get your head around it and Jews themselves who survived the Third Reich didn't and still don't understand why the whole thing suddenly exploded in their faces. They were left as perplexed as we are.
If you look at other historical regimes, yes, they are remembered in sculpture, in paintings, in poetry, in epics and so forth. But they're not remembered like this because we don't have a media to remember them. You see, remember the point in which Hitler struts onto the stage of history is a point of confluence. We suddenly have the maturity of all these technologies, sound and film, color film.
We have the technologies of amplification. We have the technologies of air transport, which allows Hitler to visit five different German cities in a single day and so forth. And it's at this very moment that Hitler is there. And so it means that he's able to bequeath his imagistic legacy to human history. Hitler died, but Hitlerism is very much with us.
It's very telling in my view that you aren't allowed in Germany to name a baby Adolf. It's illegal, it's against the law. And that in itself perhaps goes some way to show just how terrible and, if you like, evil Hitler's legacy has been. That we can't even use the name that happened to be his name.
how many million deaths, how much genocide could have been spared if he'd never been on the earth. It's crazy to think the whole course of human history would be different. Many of the monuments to Nazism, including the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker, were swiftly blown up by the Soviets. Today, there is only a small notice board to indicate the location of Hitler's final hideout. It stands in the car park.
of a housing estate. Real Dictators will be back soon. Stay tuned.
