Hitler's Last Day

by Emma Craigie

  The singer Al Bowlly himself was a casualty. A week after recording ‘When That Man Is Dead and Gone’, a bomb exploded outside his flat near Piccadilly. Lying on his bed reading a cowboy book, Bowlly was killed outright.

  The British public first heard about Adolf Hitler in November 1923 when he attempted to seize control of the Bavarian government as a first step towards overturning the Weimar Republic. But his political awakening began in the First World War.

  The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for life is only preserved because other living things perish.

  Adolf Hitler, 1928

  On 1st August 1914 Hitler was photographed in a crowd which had gathered to celebrate the outbreak of the First World War in the Odeonsplatz, Munich. He later wrote in Mein Kampf that he ‘thanked heaven from the fullness of [his] heart for the favour of having been permitted to live at such a time.’ The war was ‘a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth’.

  That distress began in early childhood. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in the town of Braunau am Inn in Austria. His father Alois was a bad-tempered, authoritarian and unpredictable man, frequently drunk. According to Adolf’s younger sister Paula, her brother received daily thrashings. Their mother Klara was much younger than their father, and closely related to him. She addressed him as “Uncle”. Hitler later told people that she would sit outside the room, waiting for the beatings to finish so that she could comfort her son. She was, in Paula’s words, ‘a very soft and tender person’ and Adolf adored her. His father died when Adolf was 14 and his mother when he was 18. Her doctor, who had attended many deaths, later recalled, ‘I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’

  Hitler had already faced disappointment when he failed to get a place to study architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts shortly before his mother’s death. After her funeral in 1907 he returned to the Austrian capital. He lived in cheap lodgings and then, after a period of sleeping on park benches, moved into a men’s hostel. He fraudulently claimed financial support – pretending to be a student – and supplemented this by selling small paintings and sketches, but lived an indolent life. He rose at noon and stayed up late at night working on grandiose architectural projects, designing castles, theatres and concert halls. He wrote operas and plays. Each project began with manic euphoria, but none were finished. His ambitious dreams alternated with periods of depression.

  Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like the maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.

  Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

  Hitler frequently got into furious arguments at the night kitchens where he went for bread and soup. According to one of his early flatmates in Vienna, Jewish-Czech August Kubizek, the 19-year-old Hitler quarrelled with everyone and had frenzies of hatred. The anti-Semitism of Vienna, crudely expressed in endless cheap pamphlets, gave Hitler the relief of a focus for his feelings of fury and resentment. Writing Mein Kampf 15 years later, he claimed that this was the period when his view of life took shape: ‘since then I have extended that foundation very little, and I have changed nothing in it.’

  This festering aggression found a new outlet in the First World War. Hitler was accepted into the German army as a regimental staff runner and suddenly his aimless life had a structure and purpose. In the next four years he was twice wounded and twice decorated but he never rose above corporal. According to one of his fellow soldiers he sat in a corner ‘with his helmet on his head, lost in thought, and none of us could coax him out of his apathy’. He was seen as a loner, a dreamer. His only friend was a dog, a white terrier he called Foxl which had wandered over from the English trenches. According to his military chief, Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler was brave but odd, and couldn’t be promoted further because it was clear that he couldn’t command respect.

  In these nights hatred grew in me – hatred for the originators of this dastardly crime.

  Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

  On 10th November 1918, the day before Armistice Day, Hitler was in hospital in north-east Germany convalescing after his second injury. As he recalled in Mein Kampf, a pastor came in to address the patients. With regret he told them that Germany had become a republic; the monarchy had fallen; the war was lost. To Hitler the news was unbearable:

  ‘I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.

  ‘Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept… But now I could not help it…

  ‘And so it had all been in vain… Did all this happen only that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the Fatherland?... I, for my part, decided to go into politics.’

  A man – I’ve heard a man, he’s unknown, I’ve forgotten his name. But if anyone can free us from Versailles then it’s this man. This unknown man will restore our honour!

  Rudolf Hess, May 1920

  After leaving hospital Hitler went to live in Munich and started attending political meetings. He made his first public speech on 16th October 1919 in a beer cellar in a Munich suburb to an audience of 111 people. He spoke till he was sweating and exhausted, unblocking a dam of hatred towards the political establishment, frustration at the humiliation of the defeat of the 1914–18 war and determination to overturn the traitors who, in June, had signed the Versailles Treaty. Hitler was thrilled to discover ‘what I had always felt deep down in my heart... proved to be true. I could make a good speech’. The audience was electrified by his raw intensity. He was voicing the pain of people who felt powerless and offering hope of a glorious future to people who felt battered by defeat. Within weeks he was attracting audiences of 400; the following February he addressed 2,000 people crammed into a huge beer hall in the centre of the city. People stood on the tables and roared as he shrieked abuse at the Jews. There was tumultuous applause as he declared, ‘Our motto is only struggle! We go forward unshakably to our goal!’

  By July 1921, Hitler had assumed leadership of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, later known as the Nazis. By the autumn of 1923 he had gathered more than 55,000 followers, a thousandfold increase from when he joined as the 55th member. Intoxicated by this success, and inspired by Mussolini’s successful ‘March on Rome’ the previous October, Hitler decided to attempt a coup – later known as the Beer Hall Putsch – and assert his position as the leader of all the anti-Republican protest groups in Munich. The putsch was planned one day and executed the next.

  A little man… unshaven with disorderly hair and so hoarse that he could hardly speak.

  Description of Hitler in a Times report of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch

  On the evening of 8th November, Hitler burst into a Munich beer cellar where 3,000 people were listening to speeches by Bavarian politicians. He was accompanied by one of his most glamorous supporters – the war hero and ace fighter pilot Hermann Göring – and a team of helmeted storm troopers pushing a heavy machine gun. Hitler leapt onto a chair, waving a dog whip and brandishing a pistol. In order to make himself heard he fired a shot at the ceiling and then shouted across the vast room, ‘The national revolution has broken out in Munich! The whole city is at this moment occupied by our troops! The hall is surrounded by 600 men. Nobody is allowed to leave!’

  The city was not occupied by Nazi troops and the putsch fizzled out after a 30-second exchange of gunfire in which four policemen and 14 Nazis were killed. One of the activists was a young chicken farmer with a soft pudgy face and glasses. He held his head high and carried a standard bearing a swastika. His name was Heinrich Himmler.

  Hermann Göring was shot in the leg. Adolf Hitler tripped and
dislocated his shoulder. Both men fled the scene. Göring managed to escape to Austria where he was treated for his injuries and given morphine for the pain. It was the beginning of a lifelong addiction. Hitler only managed to get as far as a friend’s house outside Munich and was arrested two days later. Together with several other organisers of the march he was tried for treason. Hitler was given the minimum sentence of five years and in April 1924 was sent to Landsberg Prison.

  In Landsberg, Hitler had a large room with windows looking out over beautiful countryside. Many of the prison guards were Nazi Party members and secretly showed their respect with greetings of Heil Hitler. He was allowed to receive flowers and gifts and had so many visitors that once numbers topped 500 he decided to restrict them. He spent most of his time writing, or rather dictating, Mein Kampf, setting out a political ideology which he never revised. He argued that the future success of the German nation required triumph over the evil conspiracies of the Jews and communists and territorial expansion in the east.

  After the shambles of the 1923 putsch, Hitler spent ten years building up the Nazi Party and, with the support of the former chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler, developed the SS as an effective military elite. The focus of his ambition turned from Bavarian politics to national leadership.

  That is the miracle of our age, that you have found me, that you have found me among so many millions! And that I have found you, that is Germany’s good fortune!

  Adolf Hitler, 13th September 1936

  Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30th January 1933 was greeted by huge, orchestrated torchlight processions. The reality was that the Nazi Party had come to power with minority support following an election that failed to deliver a majority government. Germany was suffering catastrophic inflation and high unemployment, which Hitler tackled with a massive programme of road building, construction and military rearmament. The expansion was funded by huge borrowing, the seizure of assets and printing money.

  At the same time Hitler introduced policies designed to destroy opposition. Trade unions and all other political parties were banned. Opponents were murdered or sent to newly created concentration camps. In pursuit of a notion of racial perfection, laws of ‘Racial Hygiene’ were brought in. Sex was forbidden between so-called Aryans and Jews or ‘gypsies, negroes or their bastard offspring’. A eugenics programme for the medical murder of people with disabilities was secretly established.

  The changes were enforced by violence, delivered by the SS and the newly formed Gestapo, and by extravagant propaganda. A young journalist with a PhD in Romantic Literature, Joseph Goebbels, was put in charge of controlling the media. A young architect, Albert Speer, was brought in to design the visual impact of mass rallies and marches.

  My dear wife.

  This is hell. The Russians don’t want to leave Moscow. It’s so cold my very soul is freezing. I beg of you – stop writing about the silks and boots I’m supposed to bring you from Moscow. Can’t you understand I’m dying?

  Adolf Fortheimer, German Soldier, December 1941

  In 1939 Hitler reflected on the achievements of the first six years of his leadership in a speech to the German parliament, the Reichstag:

  ‘I have restored to the Reich the provinces grabbed from us in 1919; I have led millions of deeply unhappy Germans, who have been snatched away from us, back into the Fatherland; I have restored the thousand-year-old historical unity of German living space; and I have attempted to accomplish all that without shedding blood and without inflicting the sufferings of war on my people or any other. I have accomplished all this, as one who 21 years ago was still an unknown worker and soldier of my people, by my own efforts...’

  By the end of 1938 the Rhineland, Austria and Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia had all been pulled into a greater Germany without any international opposition. But the invasion of Poland triggered the British and French declarations of war on Germany on 3rd September 1939. Undeterred, in April 1940, Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway, again without encountering significant opposition. Then in the spring of 1941 German troops were sent into the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa and the Middle East, and later into Iraq and Crete. The beginning of the end of this massive expansion came in June 1941 when, in contravention of a non-aggression pact of 1939, Hitler launched a massive attack on Soviet Russia. Six months later he declared war on the United States. By Christmas 1944 Germany was pincered between these two advancing superpowers.

  On 15th January 1945, Hitler retreated from the hideous reality of defeat. He rushed back to Berlin, and buried himself in his Führerbunker, giving orders to Albert Speer that all German infrastructure and industry be destroyed. There would be no surrender. Victory or destruction were the only options.

  There were two bunkers beneath the Reich Chancellery building in Berlin. The older one, the upper bunker, had been designed by Albert Speer as an air raid shelter in the early 1930s. It was built beneath the cellars of the old Reich Chancellery and was ready for use by 1936. A lower bunker, which became known as the Führerbunker, was constructed in 1944. It was located 8.5 metres below the garden and protected by a 3-metre-deep concrete roof.

  During January 1945 Hitler slept in the Führerbunker but worked in the remaining rooms of the Reich Chancellery. In the early afternoon of 3rd February 1945, the US Air Force undertook a mass bombing attack on Berlin, creating a fireball which burned for five days and inflicting the worst damage that the capital had yet suffered. From this point Hitler stayed underground.

  Most of the senior Nazis had sent their families to safety and had moved out of the capital. Only Joseph Goebbels remained in Berlin, sleeping in a luxurious bunker built beneath his family home. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had been living in a sanatorium in the beautiful resort of Hohenlychen since January, receiving treatments for stress and severe stomach pain. Himmler held a very inflated view of himself as a figure of international stature and had become convinced that he was the best person to negotiate the peace and lead Germany into the future. At the suggestion of his Swedish masseur, Felix Kersten, who took advantage of his relationship with the SS chief to try and get concentration camp prisoners released, Himmler had two secret meetings: one with Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, and one with Norbert Masur, the Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress. Ostensibly the purpose of both meetings was to discuss the release of prisoners, but Himmler’s motive was to open up a channel of communication with the Western Allies. He hoped that Masur would put the issue of the Final Solution behind him.

  You know what I wish? I wish they had killed Hitler and then there would be a chance to end the war!

  Albine Paul, Nazi Party supporter, spring 1945

  On 11th March 1945 there was a service of remembrance for the war dead in the village of Markt Schellenberg, close to Hitler’s mountain retreat in Obersalzberg. At the end of his speech the local army commander called for a Sieg Heil to the Führer. There was a deadly silence. None of the civilians, Home Guard or soldiers responded. On this cold morning everyone kept their mouths shut and their right arms tightly by their sides. At hundreds of rallies held during the previous 12 years these people, and millions of others, had leapt, mesmerised, to their feet to “Sieg Heil” the close of Adolf Hitler’s rousing speeches. But the spell had been broken.

  Hitler went outside for the last time on his 56th birthday, 20th April 1945. He dragged himself up the concrete steps from the Führerbunker to the Reich Chancellery garden to inspect a group of young boys, members of the Hitler Youth. The boys had been instructed to look straight ahead, so 16-year-old Armin Lehmann was shocked at the Führer’s decrepit appearance when it finally came to his turn and his leader was standing right in front of him. His hands were shaking as he grabbed Lehmann’s arm and clutched at his sleeve before enclosing the boy’s right hand in both of his. ‘I could not believe,’ Lehmann later wrote, ‘that this withered old man in front of me was the visionary who had led our nation to greatne
ss.’

  If the German people cannot wrest victory from the enemy, then they shall be destroyed… they deserve to perish, for the best of Germany’s manhood will have fallen in battle. Germany’s end will be horrible, and the German people will have deserved it.

  Adolf Hitler, summer 1944

  In the following days the Russian army encircled Berlin and entered the suburbs. An attempt by Göring to clarify his position as Hitler’s successor triggered one of the Führer’s ferocious outbursts and Göring’s dismissal as head of the air force. Hitler felt betrayed on all sides. He blamed the disaster of the war on the incompetence of his generals, and ultimately a failure of the German people. When he learned about Himmler’s attempts to negotiate with the West he turned purple with rage and ordered his arrest and execution.

  That evening, 28th April 1945, Hitler started to get his personal affairs in order. He instructed Joseph Goebbels to find an official with the authority to conduct a civil wedding and to source some wedding rings. After a lifetime insisting, ‘for me marriage would have been a disaster… it’s better to have a mistress’, Hitler had decided to marry Eva Braun, the woman who had been his secret mistress for 14 years. He then asked his secretary Traudl Junge to take down his final testament and will. Adolf Hitler, who for the past 12 years had kept Germany under his spell, who had masterminded some of the most extraordinary battles in modern history, was preparing to end his life.

  This book tells the story of Monday 30th April, the day Hitler commits suicide, and also the day before, when so many extraordinary things happen both inside the bunker and across the world that help place that last day in context.

  On D-Day, 6th June 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers wrote about the life and death events happening around them. Sometimes, as soon as they’d scrambled to the top of the beach, having dodged bullets and mortars, out would come a diary and pencil. These diaries provided perfect source material for the book D-Day: Minute by Minute. In contrast, we were expecting first-hand accounts of the end of April 1945 to be hard to come by – few people had any idea these two days would be so historic. And yet we found scores of diaries and memoirs. It’s as if, amongst the chaos, one way of coming to terms with the experience was to keep a diary – some updated theirs four or five times a day.