by Ian Kershaw
After waiting ten minutes or so, still without a sound from Hitler’s room, Linge took the initiative. He took Bormann with him and cautiously opened the door. In the cramped study, Hitler and Eva Braun sat alongside each other on the small sofa. Eva Braun was slumped to Hitler’s left. A strong whiff of bitter almonds – the distinctive smell of prussic acid – drifted up from her body. Hitler’s head drooped lifelessly. Blood dripped from a bullet-hole in his right temple. His 7.65mm Walther pistol lay by his foot.156
1. Hitler, September 1936, portrayed wearing a suit and not the usual Party uniform.
2. Hitler discussing plans in 1936 for new administrative buildings in Weimar with his up-and-coming favourite architect, Albert Speer. Fritz Sauckel, Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Thuringia, is on Hitler’s right.
3. The Berlin Olympics, 1936: the crowd salutes Hitler.
4. British Royalty at the Berghof. Hitler meets the Duke and Duchess of Windsor on 22 October 1937, during the visit to Germany of the ex-King Edward VIII and his wife, the former Mrs Wallis Simpson.
5. Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg in 1937. He was to be dismissed from office as War Minister the following January on account of a scandal concerning his wife.
6. Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Until his dismissal, in the wake of the Blomberg scandal, at the beginning of February 1938 on trumped-up charges of homosexuality.
7. Hitler addresses the exultant masses in Vienna’s Heldenplatz on 15 March 1938, following the Anschluß.
8. The Axis: flanked by Mussolini and King Victor-Emmanuel III, Hitler views a parade of troops in Rome during his visit to Italy in May 1938.
9. Hitler is cheered by crowds of admirers in Florence.
10. Part of the exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’, which opened in Munich on 8 November 1937 and ran until 31 January 1938, purporting to show the ‘typical external features’ of Jews and to demonstrate their supposedly Asiatic characteristics. The exhibition drew 412,300 visitors in all – over 5,000 per day. It helped to promote the sharp growth of anti-Semitic violence in Munich and elsewhere in Germany during 1938.
11. ‘Jews in Berlin’, from the exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’, which opened in the Reich capital on 12 November 1938. This was two days after Goebbels had unleashed a nation-wide orgy of violence in which Jewish property was destroyed throughout Germany, leading to mass arrests of Jews and their exclusion from business and commerce.
12. The synagogue in Fasenenstraße, Berlin, burns after Nazi stormstroopers set it on fire during the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938.
13. The Jewish Community building in Kassel on the morning after the pogrom. Beds, papers, and furniture, thrown out by the Nazi perpetrators, lie on the street. Onlookers and police watch as two people attempt to clear up.
14. Passers-by – some smiling, some looking in apparent bewilderment – outside a demolished and looted Jewish shop in Berlin. The amount of glass smashed by Nazi mobs gave rise to the sarcastic appellation ‘Reichskristallnacht’.
15. A model family? Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their children Helga, Hilde, and baby Helmut, posing for the camera in 1936.
16. Goebbels, broadcasting to the Germans on the eve of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, 20 April 1939. The Propaganda Minister’s marriage had been under severe strain during the previous months on account of his affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova, but for prestige reasons Hitler had insisted that Goebbels and his wife did not separate.
17. An unusual photograph, taken about 1938, of Eva Braun, Hitler’s companion since 1932 – a relationship kept secret from the German public until 1945.
18. With Hitler looking on, General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, greets the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, at the Berghof on 15 September 1938, during the Sudeten crisis.
19. German troops crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague in March 1939, a few days after Hitler had forced the Czech government to agree to the imposition of a German Protectorate over the country.
20. Hitler’s imposing ‘study’ in the Reich Chancellery, used more to impress visitors than for work.
21. Pomp and Circumstance: Hermann Göring addresses Hitler during a ceremonial occasion – probably on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1939 – in the New Reich Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer and completed in early 1939.
22. ‘The Führer’s birthday’: Hitler is amused, on his forty-ninth birthday, 20 April 1938, when Ferdinand Porsche presents him with a model of the Volkswagen, pointing out that the engine is in the boot. None of the 336,000 Germans who ordered and paid for a car partly or in full ever took delivery of a Volkswagen. The vehicles were produced during the war exclusively for military purposes.
23. ‘The Führer’s birthday’: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, gives Hitler his present – a valuable equestrian portrait of Frederick the Great by Adolf von Menzel – on the Führer’s fiftieth birthday, 20 April 1939, watched by Sepp Dietrich commander of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and Karl Wolff, chief of Himmler’s personal staff.
24. Hitler, in evening dress, walks with Winifred Wagner past cheering crowds during the last Bayreuth Festival before the war, in July 1939.
25. Molotov signs the Non-Aggression Pact of the Soviet Union with Germany in the early hours of 24 August 1939, watched by Red Army Chief of Staff Marshal Boris S. Shaposhnikov, adjutant to Ribbentrop Richard Schulze, a smug-looking German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Joseph Stalin.
26. Hitler in his temporary field-headquarters during the Polish campaign, together with his Wehrmacht adjutants, Captain Nicolaus von Below (Luftwaffe), Captain Gerhard Engel (Army), and Colonel Rudolf Schmundt (chief adjutant). Martin Bormann is on Hitler’s left.
27. Hitler reviewing troops in Warsaw on 5 October 1939 at the conclusion of the victory over Poland.
28. Hitler during his address to the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich on 8 November 1939. Only minutes after he had left the building, a time-bomb placed by a Swabian joiner, Georg Elser, exploded close to where he had been speaking, killing eight and injuring more than sixty of those present.
29. Arthur Greiser, the fanatical Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Reichsgau Wartheland, the annexed part of western Poland, at the celebration for the ‘liberation’ of the area on 2 October 1939.
30. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia, a rival to Greiser in the brutal attempt to ‘germanize’ the annexed parts of Poland.
31. An ecstatic Hitler at his headquarters ‘Wolfsschlucht’ (Wolf’s Gorge), near Brûly-de-Pesche in Belgium, on hearing the news on 17 June 1940 that France had requested an armistice. Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison at Führer Headquarters, is on Hitler’s right.
32. Hitler visiting emplacements on the Maginot Line in Alsace, during his short stay at his headquarters ‘Tannenberg’, near Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, on 30 June 1940.
33. Hitler in Freudenstadt on 5 July 1940, the last day he was based at ‘Tannenberg’.
34. An immense crowd gathered on Wilhelmplatz in Berlin on 6 July 1940, wildly cheering the conquering hero on Hitler’s return from the triumph over France. Göring is beside Hitler on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery.
35. Hitler bids farewell to Franco following their talks at Hendaye, on the borders of France and Spain, on 23 October 1940. The smiles concealed the dissatisfaction felt by each of the dictators at the outcome of the talks.
36. Hitler meets the French head of state, Marshal Pétain, at Montoire on 24 October 1940 for talks which produced little tangible result.
37. Ribbentrop talking to Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, at a reception in the Hotel Kaiserhof during the latter’s visit to Berlin, 12–14 November 1940. The tough talks with Molotov confirmed to Hitler that he was right to plan for an attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.
38. Hitler and the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka,
in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 27 March 1941. Foreign Ministry official and interpreter Dr Paul Schmidt, who compiled the record of the meeting, is on the left. Matsuoka remained non-committal about Japanese intentions. Hitler had earlier that day given directions to his military leaders about the invasion of Yugoslavia.
39. Hitler at his headquarters at Mönichkirchen near Wiener Neustadt in mid-April 1941, during the Balkan campaign, talking to General Alfred Jodl head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff. Nicolaus von Below, his Luftwaffe adjutant, is behind Hitler.
40. A thoughtful Hitler, accompanied by head of the Wehrmacht High Command Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, travelling by train on 30 June 1941 to the headquarters of Army High Command in Angerburg, not far from his own new Führer Headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg, in East Prussia.
41. An Anti-Bolshevik Poster: ‘Europe’s victory is Your Prosperity’. With Britain destroyed, the mailed fist of Nazi Germany smashes Stalin’s Bolshevism.
42. Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch the weak Commander-in-Chief of the Army between February 1938 and his dismissal in December 1941, in a briefing with General Franz Haider, Chief of the General Staff from 1938 to 1942.
43. Field-Marshal Keitel discussing military matters with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union
44. Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler alongside his right-hand man SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office. With Hitler’s authorization, the steps were taken under their aegis in 1941–2 to implement the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.
45. ‘Should the international Jewish financiers succeed once again in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be not the victory of Jews but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’ – Adolf Hitler. The ‘prophecy’ that Hitler had announced to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939. The poster was produced in September 1941 as a ‘Slogan of the week’ by the central office of the Nazi Party’s Propaganda Department and distributed to Party branches throughout the Reich.
46. Hitler salutes the coffin of Reinhard Heydrich, who had been assassinated by Czech patriots flown in from Britain, at the state funeral of the Security Police Chief in the Mosaic Salon of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 9 June 1942.
47. Hitler comforts Heydrich’s sons at the state funeral. Privately, he was critical of Heydrich’s carelessness in regard to his own security. Other Nazi leaders in the photo are, Kurt Daluege (head of the Ordnungspolizei); Bernhard Rust (Reich Minister for Education); Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Viktor Lutze (SA Chief of Staff); Baldur von Schirach (Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna); Robert Ley (Nazi Party Organization Leader and head of the German Labour Front); Himmler; Wilhelm Frick (Reich Minister of the Interior); and Göring.
48. Hitler addresses 12,000 officers and officer-candidates in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 28 September 1942.
49. Some of the assembled young officers cheering Hitler at the meeting.
50. Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock in 1942, as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group South. During the second half of 1941 he had commanded Army Group Centre, which had spearheaded the thrust to Moscow. Though increasingly critical of Hitler’s military leadership, he remained a loyalist.
51. Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein, possibly Hitler’s most gifted military commander. Despite his growing differences with Hitler, he refused to join the conspiracy against him, stating: ‘Prussian field-marshals do not mutiny.’
52. Hitler speaking on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 15 March 1942, in the Ehrenhof (‘courtyard of honour’) of the Arsenal on Unter den Linden in Berlin.
53. The Eastern Front, July 1942. Motorized troops drive away from a blazing Russian village they have destroyed.
54. Hitler’s ‘clients’: entertaining the heads of satellite states. Hitler greets the Croatian head of state, Dr Ante Pavelic, in the Wolf’s Lair on 27 April 1943
55. Hitler on his way to discussions with the Romanian leader, Marshal Antonescu at Führer Head-quarters on II February 1942. Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt is on the left.
56. Hitler greets King Boris III of Bulgaria in the Wolf’s Lair on 24 March 1942. Little over a week after a subsequent tense visit, on 15 August 1943, King Boris died suddenly of a heart attack, giving rise to rumours abroad that Hitler had had him poisoned.
57. The turn of the Slovakian President, Monsignor Dr Josef Tiso, to visit Hitler on 22 April 1943 at the restored baroque palace of Klessheim, near Salzburg.
58. Hitler greets the Finnish leader Marshal Mannerheim at the Wolf’s Lair on 27 June 1942. Keitel is in the background.
59. Admiral Horthy, Hungarian head of state, speaks with Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Martin Bormann during a visit to the Wolf’s Lair on 8–10 September 1941. Later visits, as the fortunes of war deteriorated, proved less harmonious than this one.
60. The Over-extended Front. By 1942 demands for men and equipment across a vast range of fronts and conditions had generated just the strategic incoherence Hitler had always feared. Norway: A ‘Do 24’ flying boat is deposited on land by the crane of a salvage vessel, to be towed to a repair hangar.
61. The Over-extended Front. Leningrad: A huge cannon, mounted on a train, fires on the besieged city. The gun weighed 145 tons, had a barrel 16.4 metres long, and had a range of 46.6 kilometres.
62. The Over-extended Front. Libya: German tanks rolling along the front in Cyrenaica.
63. The Over-extended Front. Bosnia: An expedition to hunt down partisans.
64. An exhausted German soldier on the Eastern Front.
65. Hitler viewing the Wehrmacht parade after laying a wreath at the cenotaph on Unter den Linden on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 21 March 1943. Behind Hitler are Göring, Keitel, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Karl Dönitz, and Himmler. Shortly beforehand, a planned attempt to kill Hitler by opponents from within Army Group Centre had had to be aborted when the dictator’s usual timetable on the day was altered without notice.
66. Hitler is saluted by the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich on 8 November 1943, the twentieth anniversary of the Beerhall Putsch. Göring is to Hitler’s right. It was to be the last time that Hitler would appear in person at this symbolic ritual, a high point in the Nazi calendar.
67. Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery (following the flight of Rudolf Heß to Scotland in May 1941). From the beginning of the war onwards he was invariably at Hitler’s side, and in April 1943 was officially appointed Secretary to the Führer. This proximity, together with his control of the Party, gave him great power.
68. Hitler and Goebbels, still capable of raising a smile despite military disasters and mounting domestic problems, photographed during a walk on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden in June 1943.
69. The Eastern Front in spring and autumn. A German vehicle bogged down in heavy mud.
70. The Eastern Front in winter. Tanks and armoured vehicles, unusable in the conditions, had to be dug in at strategic points to secure them against Soviet attacks.
71. The Eastern Front in summer. Limitless space. A Waffen-SS unit treks across seemingly unending fields.
72. The ‘Final Solution’. French Jews being deported in 1942. Frightened faces peer out from behind the barbed-wire covering the slats of the railway-wagon.
73. The ‘Final Solution’. Polish Jews forced to dig their own grave, 1942.
74. The ‘Final Solution’. Incinerators at Majdanek with skeletons of camp-prisoners murdered on the approach of the Red Army and liberation of the camp on 27 July 1944.