Hitler seized the moment to rally his battered troops and issued a frontline declaration: “In this hour all of Germany is watching you, my eastern warriors, and only hopes that your resilience, your fanaticism, through your weapons and under your leadership the Bolshevik onslaught will suffocate in a bloodbath. In the moment in which destiny has removed from this earth the greatest war criminal of all time, the turning point in this war has been decided.”
It is impossible to know if Hitler believed the words he was offering Germany, or whether they were part of a calculated propagandistic effort to exploit what he saw as a remarkably fortuitous opportunity; whether he was simply harmonizing his rhetoric with that of Goebbels, or whether, in fact, these words emerged from some deeper conviction, a half-pleading, half-hopeful incantation shouted through the mist of self-delusion and into the still denser fog of desperation; or whether, in fact, these words were an expression of Hitler’s alleged steadfast conviction that Providence, or chance, had once again seen fit, as with his revered Frederick the Great, to rescue him from ruin.
The circumstances were so unexpected, the timing so uncanny, that even the soberest observers were left pondering Hitler’s reaction for years to come. “I don’t have a compelling answer even today to the question of what in this declaration was false optimism and what Hitler truly believed,” one Hitler adjutant recalled after the war. Another observer of the scene was inclined to believe that Hitler “was literally obsessed with the idea of some miraculous salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a straw.”
In the days following Roosevelt’s death, Hitler monitored developments to see if he could detect a shift in the political climate. He even considered dispatching Speer to the United States for a meeting with Truman. All the while he scrutinized the military situation for a perceptible shift in battlefield fortunes.
But April 13, the day after Roosevelt’s death, saw no abatement in enemy advances. Along the eastern front, the Soviets were bludgeoning the German defenses. In Vienna, they would soon obliterate the last pocket of resistance. A hundred miles to the west, Allied bombers pounded the area in a line from Venice to Linz. Berlin was battered by three successive waves of bombers. Three days later, on April 16, when the Soviet armies unleashed a final massive offensive against the German capital, it became clear there would be no second Brandenburg miracle. On April 20, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday was “celebrated” in a notably subdued atmosphere, with none of the pomp and celebration that had marked his previous birthday, when, two months before the Allied landings at Normandy, he still commanded the Continent.
One of his gifts in 1944 had been a specially bound facsimile edition of letters from Frederick to his lifelong servant and confidant, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, written between 1747 and 1755, in which Frederick muses on mundane affairs such as the expense of owning horses, the quality of operatic performances in Berlin, and dealing with a woman who says she can produce gold from water (he recommends imprisoning her until she can make good on her claim). Bound in white linen, and with an adulatory birthday greeting printed in large gold letters, this oversize album preserves the ostentatiousness and delusional confidence of the occasion, which Hitler attended in a celebratory white uniform.
A year later, stooped and grim, he wore his spattered field jacket. He attended the dinner, shook the necessary hands, then withdrew to his bunker quarters, where later Traudl Junge found him sitting in his armchair with his reading glasses and a book.
After that day, Junge told me, he never again spoke of a divine intervention or of a miraculous turn of events. Hitler spent his last ten days in an atmosphere of increasing gloom as the military situation deteriorated. On April 23, with the Soviet armies on the outskirts of Berlin, Göring sent a telegram from the Obersalzberg requesting decision-making authority in the event that Hitler was unable to exercise his responsibilities from the besieged capital. Sensing betrayal, Hitler had Göring arrested two days later. That same day, April 25, Soviet and American forces met on the bridge at Torgau, on the Elbe, in northwestern Saxony. Instead of exchanging gunfire, they shook hands. That Friday, Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s adjutant and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, was arrested while attempting to flee Berlin with a suitcase full of foreign currency. The next day Hitler learned that Himmler was in secret peace negotiations with the Allies. For Hitler, this was the bitterest disappointment of all. The following day, he had his cyanide capsules tested on his German shepherd, Blondi, then withdrew to a side room to dictate his last will and testament.
As if taking a final cue from his mentor Frederick, and in a tradition of subsequent rulers, Hitler divided this parting document into a personal and political testament. Unlike Frederick’s last will, which was dictated in his waning years from the elegant though rheumatic circumstances of Sanssouci and provided his vision for smooth transition and good governance after his demise, Hitler’s final words were plaintive, defensive, and mendacious, dictated shortly after midnight in a bunker room, as he stood at a table with his head down and his arms outstretched, while Traudl Junge sat across from him with a pencil and stenographic pad. “It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939,” Hitler began.
It was wanted and provoked exclusively by those international statesmen, who either were of Jewish origins or worked for Jewish interests. I have made too many offers for limiting and restricting arms production for posterity, with all talk of cowardice aside, to be able to blame me for the responsibility for the outbreak of war. Further, I never wanted another war with England or even America after the first wretched world war.
He went on to detail his eleventh-hour efforts to avert war in the summer of 1939, as dutifully recounted by Sven Hedin, and attributed his failure to the desire on the part of British industry to go to war, and to the “propaganda of international Jewry.” He then detailed the betrayals he had suffered at the hands of his own associates, and designated the governing body that was to rule Germany after his death. It seemed a strange way to write a will, a stranger way still to make provisions for an empire that had already ceased to exist. Hitler’s final act was stranger yet. “Since I believed during the years of struggle that I could not responsibly contract a marriage, I have now decided before the conclusion of this earthly course to take as my wife that girl who after long years of loyal friendship came to this nearly besieged city to share her fate with mine,” Hitler stipulated in his private will. “By her own wish she will go as my wife into death. This will compensate us for what we lost through my work in the service of my people.”
While Junge hammered these words in triplicate on a manual typewriter, Hitler walked down the hall to another room that had been set for a small wedding ceremony. With a justice of the peace who had been pulled from the street fighting above, and with Martin Bormann and Goebbels serving as witnesses, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were declared man and wife. A round of champagne was poured, glasses were raised, and eventually, shortly after four o’clock in the morning, the last will and testament was signed. Then Hitler and Braun withdrew to their private quarters. The next morning, when Junge encountered the newly minted bride and hesitated, Braun said, “It’s all right, you can call me Frau Hitler.”
The next two days were spent discussing the respective advantages of suicide by cyanide or pistol shot, the leave-taking of associates, the rumble of approaching gunfire. At one point, a bomb struck overhead, sending a shiver through the bunker complex. On April 30, Hitler and his wife took lunch as usual, in the company of Traudl Junge and another secretary. Hitler ate in silence, his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on the table. After lunch, he summoned his entire entourage and bade them farewell, shaking hands and murmuring parting words that were barely audible. Braun bequeathed her silver fox stole to Junge. Hitler promised the Graff portrait to Hans Bauer, and gave his gold party pin to Goebbels’s wife, Magda. Shortly before three o’clock that afternoon, Hitler and Braun withdrew to their quarters. At some point between th
ree-thirty and four, a single pistol shot was fired.
When Hitler’s adjutants opened the door, they were met with the acrid smell of cyanide and the sight of Braun stretched on the sofa, her shoes neatly to the side. Hitler was slumped beside her with a single bullet in his head and a plate-size pool of blood on the floor. They were wrapped in blankets and carried up the narrow stairs to the chancellery garden, where they were placed in a shallow grave, doused with twenty-five gallons of petrol, and set ablaze. One witness remembers watching Braun’s blue silk dress eviscerate, revealing for a brief instant her smooth, white skin, gradually charred to black amid the flames. Hitler’s bunker rooms were also drenched with petrol and set ablaze, but the flames quickly choked and died in the tight, airless space.
An American soldier inspecting Hitler’s bedroom in the Berlin bunker. The room has been stripped of everything personal except Hitler’s remaining books.
A photograph of Hitler’s bedroom at the time shows a spartan and plundered space. The bed has been stripped of its mattress, revealing a simple wooden bed frame and a loose weave of steel springs. Barren clothing hangers dangle in the open closet. A chest-high strongbox dominates the foreground. The thick door has been cut open with a welder’s torch. In the far left corner, a simple wooden chair stands against the wall along with a low square table that almost abuts the bed. Nothing personal remains, with the exception of scattered books: five volumes stacked in two piles on top of the breached strongbox, clearly part of a series, possibly one of the Meyer or Brockhaus encyclopedias that Hitler invariably kept in his proximity. A single volume lies on the floor near the closet, and two more near the far wall. One book rests on the table, perched on the corner nearest Hitler’s bed. It is the only volume whose spine faces the camera, and appears to be a handsomely bound tome of several hundred pages, as hefty as the abridged edition of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; its identity might have been decipherable from the spine were it not for the glare of the flash that blinds us to both author and title.
We will never know the titles of the books Hitler had at his bedside the day he killed himself, but we do know eighty books that were in the bunker complex at the time, some rather recent acquisitions, such as a 1943 book titled A Prehistory of Roosevelt’s War, by Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff. But there were also books he had acquired as a young man and at some point brought with him to Berlin: a 1913 treatise on Wagner’s Parsifal, a tract on racial values published in 1917, a 1921 history of the swastika, and a dozen or so books on mystical and occult subjects all from the early 1920s, including a 120-page paperback called The Prophecies of Nostradamus, by Carl Loog, published in 1921.
In this cheap paperback, printed on paper that today is rapidly deteriorating, Loog predicts the emergence of a “prophet” “with a raging head”—mit rasendem Kopf—who will “liberate” the German people and make himself “heard around the world.” In explicating one of Nostradamus’s more cryptic passages, this 1921 publication predicts the outbreak of a “second world war” in 1939, with Germany going to war against Poland, France, and England. The author is so certain of the timing and circumstance of this future war—two decades into the future—that he cites the relevant Nostradamus stanza (century 3, quatrain 57) in its entirety and provides a detailed explication. “If you assume in the previous stanzas that Mars stands for war, then it is not difficult today to translate this riddle as ‘world war,’” Loog writes. “The remaining Mars stanzas almost certainly then suggest a second or third world war.” Loog sees Nostradamus’s quatrain 57 as a road map to war:
Seven times you will see the British nation change
Steeped in blood in 290 years
Free not at all from its support Germanic.
Aries doubt his Bastarnian Pole.
The English nation will “change seven times” and be “steeped in blood” in 290 years’ time; war will consume the “Bastarnian Pole.” (Loog explains that “Bastarnians” were a Germanic tribe who once occupied an area acceded to Poland after 1918.) Loog sets England’s 290-year countdown to bloodshed ticking in 1649, the year Charles I is executed and Oliver Cromwell comes to power, then catalogues the subsequent “changes” as corresponding to the reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, Queen Anne, and finally George I.
“From that point on, the politics of England run pretty much in one direction,” Loog writes, noting that the remaining balance of 150 years proceeds with relative calm, bringing him to the fateful year of 1939. “Nostradamus evidently wants to explain that 1939 will go hand in hand with the last and greatest English crisis and a crisis for the reconstituted country of Poland,” Loog writes.
When I ordered this particular volume in the rare book reading room at Brown University, it was brought to me in an acid-free gray paper sleeve, marked with the catalogue number 38. As I leafed through the pages, I found no marginalia, no penciled intrusions, either comments or underscorings, no question marks or exclamation points, nor any other revealing artifacts that might give some bearing on Hitler’s engagement with this remarkable text. The only evidence that the book had been read was the jagged edge where some pages had been cut with a dull-edged object, perhaps a letter opener, leaving a frayed seam along the top of each page that had grown brittle with time. In studying the volume, I quickly discovered that Hitler, or whoever cut these pages, had sliced only as far as page 42, twenty-six pages before Loog’s prediction of the “prophet” with the raging head and a “second world war.”
Whether Hitler was aware of Nostradamus’s predictions we will never know, but with this particular volume, the Hitler library both fulfills the Benjamin conceit and extends its dimensions: Not only is the collector preserved within his books, but his life is scripted in their pages.
* * *
1 In his copy of Hugo Rochs’s Schlieffen biography, Hitler has marked in pencil a passage on page 61 that anticipates this fallback measure. “The most difficult campaign plans are those in which one must defend oneself against much stronger and more powerful enemies. Then one must take refuge in politics and seek to divide one’s enemies from within or to separate one or the other of them from the rest by offering advantages.”
2 Hitler’s oldest surviving book on Frederick the Great is a nineteenth-century volume, Histories and Whatever Else There Is to Report About Old Fritz, the Great King and Hero. Written in verse, it relates the same incident as no less consequential but in slightly quainter terms:
So was the chain that long did dangle
And held Prussia in a murderous strangle
Just as they once together were bound
Fell away in a single round.
(So wurde die Ringe der grossen Kette
Die Preussen beinahe erdrosselt hätte—
Wie einst an einander gefugt man sie fand—
Jetzt würden abgetrennt nacheinand—)
AFTERWORD
The Fates of Books
WHEN WALTER BENJAMIN wrote that books “preserve” the collector, he saw the private library not only as the summation of a life in which the collector became “comprehensible” once his last volume was acquired and shelved, but also as the end point to the trajectory of the books themselves, which passed from hand to hand, often through remarkably circuitous routes, until coming to final rest on the shelf of the collector. Like Alois Hudal, Benjamin found wisdom in Latin: habent sua fata libelli.
“These words have been intended as a general statement about books,” Benjamin observed. “So books like The Divine Comedy, Spinoza’s Ethics, and The Origin of Species have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying differently. For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates.”
For Benjamin, each volume of a library represented an individual “destiny,” each with its own story, its own fated purpose in the life of the collector, whether it be to entertain, to distract, to inform, or to decorate, but ultimately and collectively to bear witness after the collector was “exterminated,” like an assem
bled chorus from a Greek tragedy.
There is, of course, a detectable myopia, even presumption, to this particular Benjamin conceit, for it assumes that a particular book is “fated” for a particular library, that its ultimate raison d’être is to “preserve” its collector, to play the role of posthumous witness, to be pressed into lasting servitude to the memory of the “exterminated” collector. This is certainly a comforting thought to the collector with an eye to posterity, but a blinkered view to the true fate of books, to the fact that few libraries ever survive their collector intact, as Benjamin himself painfully discovered in March 1933. Within weeks of Hitler’s seizure of power, Benjamin fled Germany, entrusting his book collection to a neighbor, who eventually forwarded a portion of the collection—“the most precious half”—to Denmark, where Benjamin was staying with the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Benjamin eventually moved to Paris, taking his books with him.
When money grew tight, Benjamin sold individual volumes to make ends meet. His melancholy deepened when he attempted to secure the other half of his library in Berlin, only to learn that his remaining books and papers had been destroyed.
Following the German invasion in 1940, Benjamin was briefly detained by French authorities, then released through the intervention of a French acquaintance. He abandoned the surviving “precious” portion of his library, and fled south to Lourdes, then to Marseille, where he hoped to immigrate to the United States, where fellow German intellectuals were in exile. In a letter to a former student, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin spoke of the “fear-filled life”—angsterfülltes Leben—he now faced, not knowing what the next hour, let alone the next day, might bring. At any moment, he could be handed over to the Gestapo. In early autumn, he decided to cross the French-Spanish border at Portbou, an isolated coastal town unpatrolled by French authorities. On the morning of September 27, 1940, Benjamin set off with a small group of refugees on a brief but rigorous walk along a mountain path to Portbou, only to be detained by the Spanish guards who had temporarily closed the border. Exhausted and fearful of being handed over to the French authorities, Benjamin scrawled a brief note that evening—“I am in a hopeless situation and have no other possibility but to end it”—and took his life with an overdose of morphine.
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