The History Place - Defeat of Hitler: Downfall of Adolf Hitler
Downfall of Adolf Hitler
All of his life, Adolf Hitler had been obsessed with the musical works of German composer Richard Wagner.  As a teenager living in Austria,  Hitler was  deeply inspired by Wagner's operas  and their pagan, mythical tales of struggles against hated enemies. One time, back in 1905, after  seeing Wagner's opera Rienzi, young Hitler professed he would someday embark on a great mission,  leading his people to freedom, similar to the opera's story.
Now, some 40 years later, after failing in his mission as Führer of the  German People and Reich,  another of Wagner's operas hearkened, and it was Hitler's favorite – Der Ring des Nibelungen. It concerns  a magic Ring granting its possessor  the power to rule the   world.   In the last part of this opera,   entitled Götterdämmerung, or  'Twilight of the gods," the hero Siegfried, betrayed by those around him, loses the Ring and  winds up on a funeral pyre while the fortress of Valhalla burns and the kingdom of the gods is destroyed.
The dream of Germania--capital of Greater Germany as envisioned by Hitler in his scale model of a postwar Berlin.   Below: Reality--the muck and mire of bombed out Berlin in the spring of 1945.
This   essentially was the ending Hitler inflicted upon  himself, his People and   his Reich.
Piece by piece, it  all came together over the last ten days of his life, beginning  on Friday, April 20, 1945. That day Hitler met for the last time with his top Nazis. The occasion was Hitler's 56th birthday,  a dreary  celebration     inside the Führerbunker in Berlin. Present were Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Ribbentrop, Albert Speer and Martin Bormann, along with military leaders Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Karl Dönitz, and Hans Krebs, the new Chief of the General Staff.
At first, those present  tried  to convince the Führer to leave doomed Berlin for the relative safety of Berchtesgaden, the  mountain  area along the German-Austrian border where he had his  villa. From there he could continue the fight, supported by troops  positioned throughout the impenetrable Alpine mountains of western Austria and southern Bavaria. Such a move  might  prolong the war indefinitely and  improve the odds of a  favorable outcome for Germany, one way or another.
But Hitler  brushed aside this suggestion, knowing that  any journey outside the bunker  brought great risk of capture. And above all, the Führer did not want himself,  alive or dead,  to wind up  prominently displayed by his enemies, particularly the Russians.    However, he did give his bunker personnel   permission  to leave. Most   of his  staff  therefore departed  for Berchtesgaden via a convoy   of trucks and planes,  still hoping the Führer would   follow. Only a handful of Hitler's  personal staff  remained with him,   including his top aide Martin Bormann,  a few SS and military   aides, two   private secretaries,  and his longtime companion, Eva Braun.
Hitler's choice to remain in the Führerbunker to the very end amounted to his final   decision of the war. It was  made known  to the German people  via a special radio announcement in the hope that his presence  in the Nazi capital would inspire all remaining Wehrmacht, SS,  Volkssturm and Hitler Youth units   in   Berlin to hold out to the end as well.
Although the war was lost, Hitler nevertheless took pride in the knowledge  that he had not allowed another repeat of November 1918, when the German Army had meekly asked the Allies for armistice terms to conclude the First World War. This was all Hitler had left.  Just a few years earlier, the Führer  had been regarded by  most German's as their greatest-ever military leader. Now, all that remained  of his  military legacy was the fact  he had refused to give up no matter what.
The Führer's stubborn pride insured that thousands of  German soldiers, Hitler Youths and civilians would needlessly lose their lives  in the streets of Berlin, where advance units of the Red Army  were already probing. Inside the bunker, Hitler told General Jodl, "I will fight as long as I have a single soldier. When the last soldier deserts me. I will shoot myself."
However, the Führer's fatalism was not shared by  his two oldest comrades,  Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler,   who had both scooted away  from Berlin just hours after Hitler's birthday gathering. Göring  made it safely to  Berchtesgaden where he had his own villa, bringing along truckloads of artworks  looted from  museums all over occupied Europe. For his part, Himmler headed in the opposite direction, staying for the moment in  a  small town northwest of Berlin.
Both men were  spurred to act on their own in the aftermath of the Führer's shocking behavior during the military conference held in the bunker on Sunday, April 22nd.   To everyone there that day, it seemed the Führer had suffered a total  mental and physical breakdown, completely losing control while letting loose a shrieking denunciation of the Army, then collapsing into a chair. News of the Führer's appalling condition  spread like wildfire among the top Nazis outside Berlin, including Göring and Himmler.
Hermann Göring (center)  with Hitler in early April 1945, mingling with German troops during one of their last public appearances together.    Below: SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler (left) visits an SS Panzer Corps on the Western Front in 1944.
Below: The United States Army arm-in-arm with  the Soviet  Red Army at Torgau, Germany.
Below: Russian Shturmoviks in action over Berlin in April 1945 as the  Red Army's main attack commences.
Göring, the Führer's designated successor,  now pondered whether or not to announce   he was the new leader of the Reich, since  Hitler was presently cut off from the rest of Germany in besieged Berlin, and apparently incapacitated. But the inherent danger of such a  move, even at this late stage, gave him pause for concern.  And so  Göring  put off a decision and instead sent Hitler a carefully worded telegram the next day, Monday, April 23rd,  trying to feel him out:
"My Führer!   In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree   that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom   of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree   of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o'clock tonight, I shall   take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall   consider the conditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for   the best interests of our country and our people..."
Göring didn't know that Hitler  had  since rebounded  from his meltdown   and    regained a measure of composure. Therefore, Hitler's    response to Göring's telegram, prompted by Martin Bormann, was that the Reich Marshal  had committed "high treason." Although this carried the death penalty,  Göring would be spared  if he  immediately resigned all of his titles and offices – which Göring promptly did. Next, Bormann, a longtime behind-the-scenes foe of Göring, transmitted an order to the SS near Berchtesgaden to arrest Göring   and his staff. As a result, just before dawn on Tuesday, April 24, Göring was put under house arrest. Thus ended the  long career of the man who would be Führer.
In contrast to Göring's cautiousness, Himmler took a much bolder approach. At the very moment that Hitler was reading Göring's telegram, Himmler was secretly proposing the surrender all  German troops in the West to General Eisenhower.
Himmler  had traveled to the city of Lübeck in northern Germany to meet with  Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler's idea was to have Bernadotte contact  Eisenhower  regarding  the surrender in the West, while at the same time Germany would continue  fighting  the Russians in the East,  soon to be joined by the Americans and British. Playing a key role in this new German-American-British alliance  would be the  leader of  post-Hitler Germany, Heinrich Himmler himself.
His proposal got nowhere. By now, Himmler's  name, and that of the SS organization he headed, was already synonymous with mass murder.
Meanwhile, the military situation continued to deteriorate. On Wednesday, April 25th, Russian  and American soldiers greeted each other face-to-face at Torgau on the Elbe River, seventy-five miles south of Berlin,    effectively severing Nazi Germany in two. The next day,    Russian artillery fire  made the first direct hits   upon the Reich Chancellery buildings in Berlin and the grounds  directly above the Führerbunker.
A German tank officer  described the  scene  in his diary: “We retreat again under heavy  Russian air attacks. Inscriptions [I see] on house walls [say]: ‘The hour  before sunrise is darkest’ and ‘We retreat but we are winning.’…The night is  fiery red. Heavy shelling. Otherwise a terrible silence…Women and children  huddling in niches and corners and listening for the sounds of battle…Nervous  breakdowns.”
By  Friday, April 27, Russian bombardment of the Reich Chancellery buildings   had reached its peak with numerous direct hits, causing Hitler to send frantic telegrams   to Field Marshal Keitel demanding that Berlin be relieved by now non-existent armies.
For Hitler, the worst blow of all  came the next day when BBC news radio reports concerning Himmler's surrender negotiations were broadcast from London and picked up by Goebbels'   Propaganda Ministry. According to eyewitnesses in the bunker, Hitler "raged like a madman" with a ferocity never seen before when informed of the betrayal. Himmler had been at his side since the   beginning,  earning the  fond nickname Der Treue Heinrich (Faithful   Heinrich) through  years of murderous, fanatical service to his Führer. Now, Hitler  wanted to have him shot.
Since  Himmler was nowhere to be found,  Hitler ordered his personal liaison in the bunker, SS-General Hermann Fegelein, shot instead.   Fegelein was already under suspicion, having been nabbed the day before trying to sneak out of Berlin in civilian clothing. After some brief questioning,  he was taken  up to the Chancellery garden above the   bunker and  summarily executed.
In the meantime, advance units of the Red Army  had smashed through the German defenses in Berlin and were only a few miles away from the bunker. Hitler was informed there was perhaps a day or two left before the Russians arrived at his doorstep.
Now, at long last, Hitler reconciled himself to defeat, and  began preparations for  his own death.
First, he  married Eva Braun, as a reward for her ceaseless devotion, during a relationship in which she had spent nearly all of her time at Berchtesgaden waiting for him to show up. They were married in a brief ceremony about an hour past midnight,  early Sunday, April 29, with Goebbels and Bormann in attendance. Everyone was  then invited into the Führer's private quarters for a  wedding breakfast   featuring champagne and    fond reminisces by Hitler of  better days gone by, followed by a  bitter accounting  of  the recent betrayal by his two oldest comrades. Those who listened were moved to tears. Shortly thereafter, Hitler  excused himself, bringing along  his staff secretary, Traudl Junge, to whom he  dictated his last will along with a  two-part   political testament.
In his will he left his possessions to the Nazi Party and also revealed his  fate: "I myself and my wife – in order to escape the disgrace of deposition   or capitulation – choose death. It is our wish to be burnt immediately   on the spot where I have carried out the greatest part of my daily work   in the course of  twelve years' of service to my people."
His political testament recited  familiar themes   first stated in his book Mein Kampf back in 1925. In addition, he    blamed the Jews for everything, including the war. He cited  the extermination threat he had made on January 30, 1939, followed by a veiled reference to  the gas chambers, labeling  them  a  “humane means” of making the Jews atone for the guilt of causing the war.
In the second part of his  political testament, he expelled both Göring and Himmler from the Nazi Party and appointed Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor, not as Führer, but as President of the Reich. Dönitz was to preside over a government with Goebbels as Chancellor and Bormann as Party Minister. After completing his dictations, Hitler went off to bed, having been up all night.
While the Führer slept,  the Battle of Berlin raged in the streets above him, with the Germans fighting fanatically to defend every inch, just as Hitler hoped they would. Above all, they tried to knock out the Russian T34 tanks now rolling toward Hitler. A Russian tank driver recalled: "There were a lot of Panzerfausts [anti-tank grenade launchers] in Berlin. They were lying in every basement. Mostly the operators were old men or boys."
Casualties on both sides were high. But the Russians  pressed forward relentlessly, blasting through anything in their way.  The Red Army under Marshal Zhukov, after a journey of some 1500 miles that had begun back in Stalingrad, was now close to victory. When the Führer awoke  about noontime,    he was told  that Russian troops were only a mile from the bunker.
The Chancellery garden with entrance to the Führerbunker on left and adjacent ventilation tower as seen in 1947.  Below: Portrait from 1942 of Eva Braun and Hitler with his dog Blondi.
Realizing  their Führer intended to self-destruct, four  of his remaining military adjutants asked  for  permission to leave the bunker, on the excuse that they wanted to check on the status of a relief column supposedly being led by General Wenck. Hitler granted their requests. He also took this opportunity to give his Luftwaffe adjutant, Colonel Below, one last Führer message to be hand delivered to  the  Army High Command:
"The people and the armed forces have given their all in this long and hard struggle. The sacrifice has been enormous. But my trust has been misused by many people. Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined resistance throughout the war. It was therefore not granted to me to lead the people to victory. The Army General Staff cannot be compared with the General Staff in the First World War. Its achievements were far behind those of the fighting front. The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people."
Thus the last official words of the Führer contained both a final insult  of the Army leadership along with a repetition of the  Lebensraum theme for the East.
Shortly thereafter, the final bit of  news from the outside world ever to reach Hitler told of the death of  his oldest political ally, Benito Mussolini. The one-time dictator of Italy had tried to flee  along with his mistress, but had been captured by Italian   partisans,  executed, hung upside down and then thrown into the gutter. Hitler's only reaction was an expressed determination not to suffer a similar fate.
Hitler never heard the other  news  that day from Italy.  SS-General Karl Wolff, formerly Himmler's chief aide, had  successfully negotiated the unconditional surrender of all  German forces in Italy to the Western Allies.
Hitler's sole concern right now was to ready  himself for the moment of death. He had in his possession several small glass capsules containing liquid cyanide poison. All one had to do was bite down on the glass and  painless death would follow in  seconds. But since the capsules had been supplied by the now-traitorous Himmler, the Führer worried  they might not be the real thing. Hitler therefore ordered one  tested    on his favorite dog, Blondi, which killed the animal  instantly. After this, he  handed out  the cyanide capsules to his female   secretaries,  apologizing  that he did not have better parting gifts   for them. The capsules, he told them, were theirs to use when the Russians stormed   the bunker.
As Sunday evening   wore on, Hitler asked everyone to stay up. They waited for hours, for what they sensed would be a final goodbye. It came about 2:30 a.m.,   early in the morning of Monday, April 30th, when Hitler came out of his private   quarters into the dining area. The  remaining members of his staff lined up  to receive him.  With glazed   eyes, Hitler shook each hand, muttering a few inaudible words quietly, then retired back into his quarters. His  secretary, Traudl Junge, recalled the moment: "He looked like a shadow. He looked emotionless, and very gray and pale, like a broken old man...his movements were very slow. He was not the dictator anymore, and the impressive, fascinating man he was earlier."
Following   the Führer's departure, his staff mulled over the significance   of what they had just experienced. Strangely, the tremendous tension of preceding days   seemed to suddenly evaporate upon their realization  that the end    was near. A lighthearted mood surfaced, followed by spontaneous displays   of merry-making even including dancing. At one point, they had to be told to keep the noise down.
At noontime on April 30th, Hitler attended his last-ever military  conference and   was told the Russians were  a block away. Two hours later,  Hitler sat down    for  his final meal, a vegetarian lunch. His wife had no appetite. In the meantime,  his chauffeur was  ordered   to deliver 200 liters of gasoline to the Chancellery garden.
Hitler, accompanied by his wife Eva, now bid a last farewell to Bormann, Goebbels,   Generals Krebs and Burgdorf. Hitler and his wife  went back into their private quarters while   Bormann and Goebbels stood quietly nearby. A few moments later, about 3:30 p.m.,  a gunshot   was heard. Bormann and Goebbels   hesitated at first, then entered  the room. They saw the body of Hitler sprawled on the sofa, dripping with   blood from a gunshot to his right temple. He had killed himself with the same small revolver he once used to fire a warning shot into the ceiling back during the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923 – a gun he had kept ever since. His wife, Eva, had died from biting into one of the cyanide capsules.
Russian  soldiers  in Berlin gaze upon a  Nazi eagle fallen from the Reich Chancellery building.  Below: Germans POWs from Berlin are escorted by Russians.
Below: Hitler's successor,  Karl Dönitz, now a prisoner of the British along with Albert Speer and General Alfred Jodl.
As Russian artillery shells exploded nearby, the bodies were carried up the stairs to the   Reich Chancellery garden, placed in a shell crater, doused heavily with gasoline and burned while Bormann and Goebbels   stood by silently, with arms extended in a final Nazi salute. Over the next three hours, the bodies   were repeatedly doused  until there were only charred remains, which were  swept   into a canvas, laid in a different shell crater and buried anonymously.
Back inside the bunker, with the Führer now gone, people lit cigarettes, a practice Hitler had  forbidden in his presence. Next, they    began to  organize   themselves into groups to  flee the bunker and hopefully escape the Russians.
For Joseph Goebbels, life without Hitler was not worth living for himself, his wife and their six young children. On  Tuesday, May 1st, Goebbels and his wife therefore poisoned   their six  children,  aged 12 and younger, whom they had brought into  the bunker.  Next they went up into the Chancellery   garden and  each bit into a cyanide capsule. After collapsing and dying, they were  shot   in the head by   an SS man as Goebbels had requested. Their bodies were then burned, but only partially,    and were not buried. The macabre remains were discovered by the Russians   the next day and filmed, with the grotesquely charred body of Goebbels becoming an enduring symbol of the legacy of Hitler's twelve-year  Reich.
At 10 p.m. on May 1st,  a special  radio announcement told the German people their Führer had died "fighting with his last breath for Germany against Bolshevism," and also announced Dönitz as his designated successor. By now,  the Russians were already combing  through the wreckage of the Reich Chancellery looking  for any sign of Hitler's body.
With the Führer dead and the German nation  in ruins,  Dönitz and surviving  leaders of the Wehrmacht had just one thing in mind – stall for time to allow as many troops and civilians as possible  to flee from the Russians and make it into  western zones occupied by the Americans and British.
Thus it wasn't  until  Saturday, May 5th, when a military representative, Admiral Hans von  Friedeburg, was sent by Dönitz  to General Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims, France.   He was then joined by General  Jodl. Even now, the  Germans tried to stall the proceedings  by  suggesting a piecemeal surrender limited  to the  West, thereby allowing even more troops to flee  the Russians.  But Eisenhower saw through this ploy and  demanded the Germans quit stalling and sign  an unconditional surrender for all fronts.
And so, in the early morning hours of Monday, May  7th, with  authorization from Dönitz, General Jodl signed the   unconditional surrender document. The signing was, as Winston Churchill put it, “the signal  for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.”  Huge crowds gathered to rejoice in London, Paris, New York and Moscow.
The guns across Europe were silent. Nazi Germany  was finished.
The German people, who had once cheered mightily for Hitler and  enthusiastically embraced Nazism, now faced a stark and uncertain future. A German woman summed  up the  dilemma: "There  won’t be any more dying, any more raids. It’s over. But then the fear set in of  what would happen afterwards. We were spiritually and emotionally drained.  Hitler’s doctrines were discredited. And then the desperation set in of  realizing that it had all been for nothing, and that was a terrible feeling.  Surviving, finding something to eat and drink, was less difficult for me than  the psychological emptiness. It was incomprehensible that all this was supposed  to be over, and that it had all been for nothing."
For Jews and others, who had been  targeted by Nazis,  a great sense of relief was felt at outlasting Hitler. One woman who survived the Final Solution  reflected: “During the five terrible war years, we could  not indulge in simple pleasures that life offers to normal people. All our  efforts were directed towards fighting the enemy and surviving. Now, for the  first time since September 1, 1939, we could unwind and be normal again – to  walk the streets without the fear of hearing the hated “Halt!” without the fear of being rounded up by the Germans and  pushed into military trucks. No more “Achtung,  Achtung!” coming down from the street loud-speakers. No more ghettos, no  more starvation, typhus, gas chambers, Einsatzgruppen [killing squads]. The intense fear and persecution were over."
The Germans  themselves had paid dearly for Hitler’s war, suffering four million civilian and three million military deaths. Hitler's nemesis, Soviet  Russia, had suffered staggering losses including seven million soldiers  and an  estimated 16 million civilian deaths. Throughout Europe and Russia, six million Jews  had    been systematically murdered by Nazis.
For the victorious Allies, with images of recently liberated concentration camps still fresh in their minds, the  question of justice now arose. Fortunately for the Allies, the rapid demise of  Nazi Germany had resulted in the wholesale capture of gigantic document archives from  all branches of Hitler’s government along with secret papers, conference  reports and private diaries.
The Nazis had kept meticulous written records of their  activities, from mass murder of the Jews, to Hitler’s private talks. In  addition, captured Nazi officials and high ranking military officers underwent  lengthy interrogations. With all of the evidence at hand, the Allies decided to  prosecute. The place chosen for the trial was Nuremberg, the now-ruined city  that had once hosted annual rallies glorifying Hitler and Nazism.       
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