The Last Days of Hitler

Conspiracy theory is not a recent invention. It has been around as long as humans have been alternatively gullible or deceitful; or as long as we've had crazies. Which is to say forever.*<br /><br />No sooner had Hitler killed himself than myths were sprouting like so many Spring crocuses. He was alive! He was in Argentina! <br /><br />None of this was helped by the fact that Russians were first in the Chancellery, and they weren't sharing.<br /><br />So, four months after Hitler's demise, Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British intelligence officer, was assigned the task of finding what happened to the Führer. And he did so, largely based upon the statements and testimonies of those who were in attendance at the end. Hitler had shot himself, and Eva Braun, whom he had just married, poisoned herself. On Hitler's pre-suicide order, their bodies were taken outside and burned so they would not suffer indignities.<br /><br />With government permission, Trevor-Roper turned his findings into this book. The book thickened up a bit with an extensive Introduction to the Third Edition, which includes the testimonies of German soldiers and assistants finally released from Russian prisons in 1956, testimonies which largely corroborated Trevor-Roper's original findings. (Dental records have finally settled the matter. I think.)<br /><br />Anyhow, this is the story of the last days of Hitler, and it's a gripping tale, even as we already knew who won the war. And it - the Book, a Preface, and an Introduction - are a sufficient reading journey.<br /><br />But there was an Epilogue. And the Epilogue tried to make some sense about how this all could have happened, how a people could have <i>let</i> this happen. Or, as the author asks: <i>how power came into the hands of such a set of monkeys</i>. <br /><br />Because, like conspiracy theories, there have always been monkeys. And still are. <br /><br />On the Nightly News, the model-pretty anchors ask preferred academics whether certain labels apply: Racist? Fascist? But these are, it seems to me, useless verdicts. I would prefer the question raised in this Epilogue: How did we let this happen?<br /><br />_________<br />*Many men saw Nero die, yet soon enough there were "false Nero" sightings. Paul is dead . . . but Elvis is alive. The Moon landing was staged in a television studio. 9/11 didn't happen or was done by Americans to sow hatred of Muslims. Jewish space lasers are responsible for the California brush fires. It was the Mafia that killed Kennedy; or the CIA; or LBJ. And now the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was stolen from the rightful winner.

I was pleasantly surprised at how vivid and immediate this book came across, even though it was written so long ago. Perhaps it is because it was written right at the end of the war, when the author was commissioned to explore and write-up all the known facts regarding Hitler's death in Berlin at the last days of WWII.<br /><br />Some critics have written that better and more accurate information has since come to light after Trevor-Roper's investigations in 1945-6, but I think these are somewhat minor details in an amazing story of the strange, terrible characters who surrounded The Fuhrer in the closing months and days of the war. Is it really a deal-breaker if the author was wrong in that Hitler shot himself in the temple rather than in the mouth on the afternoon of April 30, 1945? The overall result was very much the same. <br /><br />I think the author did an incredible job of making the reader feel like a spectator, a fly-on-the-wall, who is able to survive the bomb-plot of July 1944 along with Hitler, watching as he thanks Keitel for reviving him in the moments after the blast, all the way to the Reich Chancellery garden cremation observed by guards from a concrete tower just above the acrid smoke. Along the way, we meet the politically astute and always-correct Goebbels, the effete pompous Goebbels, the waffling Himmler, the too-late convert Speer, runaway General Fegelein, and so on. This is more than just a chronology of dates and events, even though they are accurately marked, but an illuminating peek into the weird menagerie of Nazi power.<br /><br />For those less familiar with WWII history and the personas of the Nazi Party, this may be a bit of a dive off the deep end, but for a more serious reader of those times, I heartily recommend this account of the end of the Third Reich.

<i>While their foul subject was fresh, the first post-war English historians, in early before the smoke had cleared, smelt the Devil.</i> (Clive James)<br /><br /><br />I liked reading <i>The Last Days of Hitler</i> (1947) much more than I liked watching <i>Downfall</i>. Trevor-Roper’s reunion of English historical styles—Gibbon’s irony, Strachey’s titter, Carlyle’s bilious verve, if not his love of strongmen and Germany—makes even the flatulent fug of the <i>Führerbunker</i>, its Sardanapalan delirium, enjoyable to read about:<br /><br /><blockquote>Pacing up and down in the Bunker…he would wave a road map, fast decomposing with the sweat of his hands, and explain to any casual visitor the complicated military operations whereby they would all be saved. Sometimes he would shout orders, as if himself directing the defenders; sometimes he would spread the map on the table, and stooping over it, with trembling hands he would arrange and rearrange a set of buttons, as consolatory symbols of relieving armies. In the tropical climate of a court, emotions and beliefs quickly change their direction. No one except Hitler still believed in Wenck’s army, but no one disagreed with his reassurances; and in a moment of time the chorus which had been chanting <i>lamentoso</i>, the dirge of despair and suicide, would suddenly break out <i>allegro vivace</i>, with a triumphant welcome for the army of Wenck.</blockquote><br /><br />Trevor-Roper was a young Oxford don given wartime leave to assist the intelligence services. He studied radio intercepts and tracked the turf wars of German Army Intelligence and the SS. After the war, to forestall a posthumous Hitler cult, on one hand, and to refute Soviet claims that Hitler was alive and being secretly rehabilitated by the Western Allies for a renewed anti-Soviet crusade, on the other, Trevor-Roper was assigned, in September 1945, to establish the facts of Hitler’s last days and death. His mission entailed the pursuit, arrest and interrogation of fugitive members of the Fuhrer’s entourage; he also dug up a copy of Hitler’s will buried in a garden, and shadowboxed with the stony Soviet authorities who had recovered Hitler’s corpse but kept mum on Stalin’s orders. “Conceivably,” he writes in the introduction to the 1956 edition, “when we remember the narrow and recondite fronts upon which inter-Bolshevik struggles are fought, the question of Hitler’s death, and the official doctrine about it, may have been the symbol of some deeper tension in Russian politics.” Part of what I like in this book is its origin as an intelligence report, the survey of a world in which Hitler wasn’t yet a memory; even the 1956 introduction is far from confident that Nazism will never rise again. Trevor-Roper sees the Soviets sharing the West's fear of Nazi revival, but dispelling Hitler’s ghost with a distinctive political exorcism. For instance, even when the Soviets did admit Hitler’s death, they mentioned only the poison-taking, denying his “soldier’s death” by pistol:<br /><br /><blockquote>Why then did the Russians expurgate the revolver from their version of Hitler’s death? There is a perfectly rational explanation which, though conjectural, may well be true. The Russians may well have concealed the manner of Hitler’s suicide for precisely the same reason for which Hitler chose it: because it was a soldier’s death. I myself suspect that this was their reason. After all, it is in line with their general practice. Previous tyrannies of the spirit have sought to crush defeated but dangerous philosophies by emphatic, public executions: the gibbet, the block, the bloody quarters exhibited <i>in terrorem populi</i>. But such spectacular liquidations, however effective at the time, have a habit of breeding later myths: there are relics of the dead, pilgrimages to the place of execution. The Russian Bolsheviks have therefore preferred in general a less emphatic method: their ideological enemies have slid into oblivion in nameless graves at uncertain dates and no relics of them are available for later veneration. I have already suggested that it was for this reason, and in accordance with this philosophy, that they concealed the circumstances of Hitler’s death, hid his bones, and destroyed the scene of his suicide and Nordic funeral. It may well be that when such total concealment was no longer possible and they decided to admit the facts, there was one fact which they thought it expedient to alter. The soldier’s death might seem to the Germans heroic. Suicide by poison might well seem to the Russians a more expedient version. <br /><br />If this is so, it raises an interesting general question. For my book was also written, in the first place, for exactly the same reason which made the Russians frown on it: to prevent (as far as such means can prevent) the rebirth of the Hitler myth. It would thus seem that we and the Russians, in this matter, seek exactly the same end by diametrically opposite means: they by suppressing the evidence, we by publishing it. Which of these two methods is the more effective is arguable. I will only say that I personally believe in my own. For when has the suppression of the truth prevented the rise of a myth, if a myth is wanted? When has the absence of genuine relics prevented the discovery of false relics, if they are needed? When has uncertainty about a true shrine prevented pilgrimages to a false one? And besides, there seems to me in the Russian argument, if I have correctly described it, a somewhat sinister implication. If they fear the truth, does it not seem that they believe in its power: that they think that Hitler’s reign really was inspiring, that his end really was glorious, and that secrecy is necessary to prevent the spread of such a view? It is a view which I do not share. It seems to me, having perhaps too naïve a faith in human nature and human reason, that Hitler’s reign was so evil, his character so detestable, that no one can be seduced into admiring him by reading the true history either of his life or of his melodramatic and carefully stage-managed end.</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />

The movie DOWNFALL was not based on this book. But that only makes the written account of Hitler's last days more fascinating! The movie version was made in modern Germany, with attractive young German actors, and inevitably the weak-willed generals and frightened secretaries come across more as Germans want to remember them -- as basically decent people held captive by a monster. <br /><br />Take the case of Fegelein. The book and the movie both tell the story of the dashing young SS officer who was married to Eva Braun's sister, who lost his head and went AWOL just before the end. Both agree that Hitler flew into a typical rage and had the young officer executed shortly before his own death. But the differences are intriguing. According to Hugh Trevor Roper, when Fegelein was captured and dragged back into the bunker, all of Hitler's followers -- including Eva Braun -- openly jeered at the young man and insisted that Hitler had been "betrayed" by Fegelein. <br /><br />But the movie invents an entirely different scene, where Eva Braun throws herself at Hitler's feet and tearfully begs him to show mercy to her sister's new husband. It's a scene that really has mythic power, with the beautiful helpless woman showing all her gentleness and tenderness and her monstrous master showing all his coldness and cruelty. It's like Pocohontas pleading for the life of Captain John Smith! But why invent such a scene? It's not to make Hitler look good. No, the real point is to let everyone else off the hook. Eva Braun comes out smelling like a rose. She's Germany, see. She may be loyal, loyal unto death, but in her heart she never becomes really evil. Is that what Germans really want to believe? If so, it's still important that books like this remain in print.<br /><br />

Was commissioned and used as the official British intelligence report of death of Hitler and has stood up to the test of time when Russia released its imprisoned Nazis as was verified by many witnesses. A harrowing account of the madness that happened as the Allies closed in- Highly recommended for history buffs.

What really happened in the last week or so in the <i>Führerbunker</i> ? <br /><br />Between the double crosses of Soviet Archives holding Hitler's remains, Bormann's disappearance (which we can write off as: made his acquaintance with shellfire) &amp; the final words of his last bodyguard &amp; several secretaries, <u>some</u> clarity has been added since '47.<br /><br />Still, the big picture remains unchanged. The fun in Trevor's classic account is the then-fresh hunt, crisscrossing the former territory of Greater Germany by jeep, for survivors in hiding and their characteristic blend of amnesia.

Το βιβλίο του αξιωματικού που ερεύνησε για λογαριασμό της Αγγλικής κυβέρνησης τι απέγινε το πτώμα του Χίτλερ.Γενικά,ξεκινάει ως ένα πολλά υποσχόμενο βιβλίο τ' οποίο είναι σωστά δομημένο και καλά ομαδοποιημένο.Αλλά σε τελική ανάλυση δεν πρόσφερει κάποια πληροφορία για τις τελευταίες μέρες τ��υ Χίτλερ εκτός απο τις ήδη γνωστές.Καλό βιβλίο για να περάσεις όμορφα την ώρα σου αλλά ως εκεί.

It must be such fun to write about Nazis because you can be an absolute bitch and what's anyone going to say?: <br /><br />"Himmler himself, everyone is agreed, was an utterly insignificant man, common, pedantic, and mean. ... Hitler himself, in one sense, was not a Nazi, for the doctrines of Nazism, that great system of teutonic nonsense, were to him only a weapon of politics ... but to Himmler they were, every iota of them, the pure Aryan truth. ... With such a narrow pedantry, with such black-letter antiquarianism, did Himmler study the details of this sad rubbish. ... He gave Speer the impression of being 'half schoolmaster, half crank'."<br /><br />Schwerin von Krosigk "did not attempt to answer this question; no doubt he was satisfied that the posing of it alone would impress posterity with his philosophical profundity."<br /><br />"The letter from Eva Braun does not survive. It was, says Hanna Reitsch, 'so vulgar, so theatrical, and in such poor, adolescent taste' that its survival could only do harm; and she tore it up. In those qualities Hanna Reitsch preferred to remain without a rival."<br /><br />"As Samuel Butler says, 'the advantage of doing one's praising for one's self is that one can lay it on so thick, and exactly in the right places.'"<br /><br />"Narrow-minded and fanatical though he was, Donitz at least had some of the ordinary common sense of the practical man. If he was politically ignorant, at least he was not politically silly."

A valuable read for a number of reasons. <br /><br />First, this is the earliest systematic attempt to reconstruct the events in the <i>Führerbunker</i>. Trevor-Roper, a trained historian, was an agent of British intelligence during World War II and it was his unenviable task to discover, as far as was possible in the immediate aftermath of the war, what had happened to Hitler. This entailed trips in and out of the American, British, and finally Russian zones of occupation and at least one trip into the abandoned bunker. He conducted months of interrogations and interviews and tracked down some incredibly important documents, like two of the signed triplicate copies of Hitler’s last will and testament, which had been smuggled out of Berlin following the Russian encirclement at the end of April 1945. (I have thought for a while that Trevor-Roper’s story would make an excellent war/detective movie.) This book is the result, and it is meticulously put together from the available material. <br /><br /><i>Available</i> is a crucial word there, and that’s another part of what makes this book a good read. Many of the survivors of the bunker had been captured by the Russians, who were not forthcoming with interviews, documentation, or even admissions of who they had in captivity. As a result, Trevor-Roper had to rely heavily on the partial witness of those who had ended up in American or British custody. <br /><br />He is frank about this. For example, portions of his reconstruction of the scene of Hitler’s suicide are based on the testimony of Hitlerjugend leader Artur Axmann as well as that of Otto Günsche, one of Hitler’s SS adjutants, <i>as reported by Axmann</i>. Günsche’s information is secondhand because Günsche was held in Russian captivity until the late 1950s, and it was not even clear at the time of Trevor-Roper’s writing that Günsche was still alive. Other examples abound—to cite one, Rochus Misch, one of the ordinary blokes assigned to the bunker to man the phones, and whose eyewitness testimony is indispensable in accounts of the fall of Berlin now, is missing entirely from this reconstruction, for the same reasons.<br /><br />That Trevor-Roper could gather, assess, and order this amount of material into a coherent narrative in the time in which he did is remarkable, as is the fact that, excepting those places where new information has emerged with the release of prisoners or the discovery of new material, the narrative holds up.<br /><br />And that’s the final valuable thing about reading this book. New material has come to light since Trevor-Roper published the first edition, and so the book is dated in its way. But Trevor-Roper lived until 2003, and revised the book several times. The version I read is the <i>seventh</i> edition, and includes three prefaces bringing the reader abreast of updated information and changes to the body of the text. What these prefaces—especially that to the seventh edition, the longest of the front matter—offer the reader is a glimpse of the historical process and the historian at work. Trevor-Roper lived long enough to have to explain the genesis of the book to entirely new generations of readers, and does so at length, giving insight into his work both as an intelligence officer and an historian and how he gathered and weighed evidence. <br /><br />The result is not just a well-written (and it is elegantly written) account of the rot and collapse of the “court” of Adolf Hitler and its final ruination in the <i>Führerbunker</i>, but a layered case study in historical method. If I taught any kind of upper level historiography class I’d have this on the syllabus—along with Luke Daly-Groves’s <i>Hitler’s Death</i>—for sure.<br /><br />If I have any criticisms or words of caution, it is that: 1) the narrative that forms the main body of the book has been revised, sometimes substantially (eg Hitler did not shoot himself in the mouth but in the temple, Albert Speer probably made up the story about his plan to flood the bunker with nerve gas, and a number of small issues of time, date, and sequence have become clearer), since the late 1940s, so don’t read this book without reading Trevor-Roper’s prefaces and notes; 2) while elegantly and sometimes even beautifully written, Trevor-Roper sometimes lets his urbanity and education get away from him, purpling his descriptions with arch imagery drawn from myth which threatens to undo the otherwise excellent job he does of bringing Hitler and his inner circle down to the level of real human beings; and 3) relatedly, his utter contempt for many of the figures in this drama—while more than justified, all things considered—is abundantly clear, and could cast doubt on his objectivity. <br /><br />That said, despite its age and the incompleteness of its sources in its original form and the few niggling criticisms I’d recommend being aware of, <i>The Last Days of Hitler</i> is still a good place to go for the title story, and, unlike a lot of other Hitler books from the same early pre-war period suffering from similar handicaps, still has value far beyond historical curiosity. <br /><br />Recommended.

Excellent read. <br />Informative, eloquent and written only shortly after the history it describes, this 'freshness' works in the book's favour for a modern reader in ways its author might not have wholly anticipated. The events in the bunker happened seventy-five years ago (writing this in 2020) and they seem both contemporary and weirdly ancient, as does Trevor-Roper's style and treatment of it.<br />Great history both for the book itself and the window it gives us onto the immediate post-war spirit.