70 years ago on this date, April 30, 1945, Adolf
Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide after being married for one day. I will
post information about this event from Wikipedia and other links.
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A
headline in the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes announcing
Hitler's death.
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Adolf
Hitler killed himself by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker
in Berlin.[a][b][c]
His wife Eva (née Braun) committed suicide with him by taking cyanide.[d]
That afternoon, in accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, their remains
were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit, doused in
petrol, and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside the bunker.
Records in the Soviet archives show that their burnt remains were recovered and
interred in successive locations[e]
until 1970, when they were again exhumed, cremated, and the ashes scattered.[f]
Accounts
differ as to the cause of death; one states that he died by poison only[g]
and another that he died by a self-inflicted gunshot while biting down on a
cyanide capsule.[h]
Contemporary historians have rejected these accounts as being either Soviet
propaganda[i][j]
or an attempted compromise in order to reconcile the different conclusions.[h][k]
One eye-witness recorded that the body showed signs of having been shot through
the mouth, but this has been proven unlikely.[l][m]
There is also controversy regarding the authenticity of skull and jaw fragments
which were recovered.[n][o]
In 2009, American researchers performed DNA tests on a skull Soviet officials
had long believed to be Hitler's. The tests revealed that the skull was
actually that of a woman less than 40 years old. The jaw fragments which had
been recovered were not tested.
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| Map of the Battle of Berlin, phase of 16-25 April 1945. |
Preceding
events
By
early 1945, Germany's military situation was on the verge of total collapse.
Poland had fallen to the advancing Soviet
forces, who were preparing to cross the Oder between Küstrin and Frankfurt with the objective of capturing Berlin,
82 kilometres (51 mi) to the west. German forces had recently lost to the
Allies in the Ardennes Offensive, with British and Canadian
forces crossing the Rhine
into the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr. American forces
in the south had captured Lorraine and were advancing towards Mainz, Mannheim, and
the Rhine. In Italy, German forces were withdrawing north, as they were pressed
by the American and Commonwealth forces as part of the Spring Offensive to advance across
the Po
and into the foothills of the Alps. In parallel to the military actions, the
Allies had met at Yalta between 4–11 February to discuss the
conclusion of the war in Europe.
Hitler,
presiding over a rapidly disintegrating Third Reich,
retreated to his Führerbunker in Berlin on 16 January 1945. To the Nazi
leadership, it was clear that the battle
for Berlin would be the final battle of the war. Some 325,000 soldiers of
Germany's Army Group B were surrounded
and captured on 18 April, leaving the path open for American forces to
reach Berlin. By 11 April the Americans crossed the Elbe, 100 kilometres
(62 mi) to the west of the city. On 16 April, Soviet forces to the east
crossed the Oder and commenced the battle for the Seelow Heights, the last major
defensive line protecting Berlin on that side. By 19 April the Germans were in
full retreat from Seelow Heights, leaving no front line. Berlin was bombarded
by Soviet artillery for the first time on 20 April (Hitler's birthday). By the
evening of 21 April, Red Army tanks reached the outskirts of the city.
At
the afternoon situation conference on 22 April, Hitler suffered a total nervous
collapse when he was informed that the orders he had issued the previous day
for SS-General Felix Steiner's Army Detachment Steiner to move to the
rescue of Berlin had not been obeyed. Hitler launched a tirade against the
treachery and incompetence of his commanders, culminating in a declaration—for
the first time—that the war was lost. Hitler announced that he would stay in
Berlin until the end, and then shoot himself. Later that day he asked SS
physician Dr. Werner Haase about the most reliable method of
suicide. Haase suggested the "pistol-and-poison method" of combining
a dose of cyanide with a gunshot to the head. When Field Marshal and head of
the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring learned about
this, he sent a telegram to Hitler asking for permission to
take over the leadership of the Reich in accordance with Hitler's 1941 decree
naming Göring his successor. Hitler's influential secretary, Martin Bormann, convinced Hitler that Göring was
threatening a coup. In response, Hitler informed Göring that he would be
executed unless he resigned all of his posts. Later that day, he sacked Göring
from all of his offices and ordered his arrest.
By
27 April, Berlin was cut off from the rest of Germany. Secure radio
communications with defending units had been lost; the command staff in the
bunker had to depend on telephone lines for passing instructions and orders and
on public radio for news and information. On 28 April, a BBC report originating
from Reuters
was picked up; a copy of the message was given to Hitler. The report stated
that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had offered to surrender to the western Allies; the offer had
been declined. Himmler had implied to the Allies that he had the authority to
negotiate a surrender; Hitler considered this treason. During the afternoon his
anger and bitterness escalated into a rage against Himmler. Hitler ordered
Himmler's arrest and had Hermann Fegelein
(Himmler's SS representative at Hitler's
headquarters in Berlin) shot.
By
this time, the Red Army had advanced to the Potsdamerplatz,
and all indications were that they were preparing to storm the Chancellery.
This report, combined with Himmler's treachery, prompted Hitler to make the
last decisions of his life. After midnight on 29 April, Hitler married Eva Braun
in a small civil ceremony in a map room within the Führerbunker.[q]
Afterwards Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife. Hitler
then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. He signed these
documents at 04:00 and then retired to bed (some sources say Hitler dictated
the last will and testament immediately before the wedding, but all sources
agree on the timing of the signing).[r][s]
During
the course of 29 April, Hitler learned of the death of his ally, Benito Mussolini, who had been executed by Italian
partisans. Mussolini's body and that of his mistress, Clara
Petacci, had been strung up by their heels. The bodies were later cut down
and thrown in the gutter, where vengeful Italians reviled them. It is probable
that these events strengthened Hitler's resolve not to allow himself or his
wife to be made "a spectacle of", as he had earlier recorded in his
Testament. That afternoon, Hitler expressed doubts about the cyanide capsules
he had received through Himmler's SS. To verify the capsules' potency, Hitler
ordered Dr. Werner Haase to test one on his dog, Blondi, and the
animal died as a result.
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Eva Braun and Hitler, with Blondi (June 1942)
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Suicide
Hitler
and Braun lived together as husband and wife in the bunker for fewer than 40
hours. By 01:00 on 30 April General Wilhelm Keitel
reported that all forces which Hitler had been depending on to come to the
rescue of Berlin had either been encircled or forced onto the defensive. Late
in the morning of 30 April, with the Soviets less than 500 metres
(1,600 ft) from the bunker, Hitler had a meeting with General Helmuth
Weidling, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, who told him that the garrison
would probably run out of ammunition that night and that the fighting in Berlin
would inevitably come to an end within the next 24 hours. Weidling asked Hitler
for permission for a breakout, a request he had made unsuccessfully
before. Hitler did not answer, and Weidling went back to his headquarters in
the Bendlerblock.
At about 13:00 he received Hitler's permission to try a breakout that night.
Hitler, two secretaries, and his personal cook then had lunch, after which
Hitler and Braun said farewell to members of the Führerbunker staff and
fellow occupants, including Bormann, Joseph Goebbels
and his family, the secretaries, and several military officers. At around 14:30
Adolf and Eva Hitler went into Hitler's personal study.
Several
witnesses later reported hearing a loud gunshot at around 15:30. After waiting
a few minutes, Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge,
with Bormann at his side, opened the study door. Linge later stated he
immediately noted a scent of burnt almonds, a common observation made in the
presence of prussic acid, the aqueous form of hydrogen cyanide. Hitler's
adjutant, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto
Günsche, entered the study and found the lifeless bodies on the sofa. Eva,
with her legs drawn up, was to Hitler's left and slumped away from him. Günsche
stated that Hitler "... sat ... sunken over, with blood dripping out
of his right temple. He had shot himself with his own pistol, a Walther PPK
7.65". The gun lay at his feet and according to SS-Oberscharführer
Rochus
Misch, Hitler's head was lying on the table in front of him. Blood dripping
from Hitler's right temple and chin had made a large stain on the right arm of
the sofa and was pooling on the carpet. According to Linge, Eva's body had no
visible physical wounds, and her face showed how she had died—cyanide
poisoning.[t]
Günsche and SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm
Mohnke stated "unequivocally" that all outsiders and those
performing duties and work in the bunker "did not have any access" to
Hitler's private living quarters during the time of death (between 15:00 and
16:00).
Günsche
left the study and announced that the Führer was dead. The two bodies were
carried up the stairs to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit
to the garden behind the Reich
Chancellery, where they were doused with petrol. An eye-witness, Rochus Misch,
reported someone shouting 'Hurry upstairs, they're burning the boss!' After the
first attempts to ignite the petrol did not work, Linge went back inside the
bunker and returned with a thick roll of papers. Bormann lit the papers and
threw the torch onto the bodies. As the two corpses caught fire, a small group,
including Bormann, Günsche, Linge, Goebbels, Erich
Kempka, Peter Högl, Ewald
Lindloff, and Hans Reisser, raised their arms in salute as they
stood just inside the bunker doorway.
At
around 16:15, Linge ordered SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Krüger and SS-Oberscharführer
Werner Schwiedel to roll up the rug in Hitler's study to burn it. The two men
removed the blood-stained rug, carried it up the stairs and outside to the
Chancellery garden. There the rug was placed on the ground and burned.
On
and off during the afternoon, the Soviets shelled the area in and around the
Reich Chancellery. SS guards brought over additional cans of petrol to further
burn the corpses. Linge later noted the fire did not completely destroy the
remains, as the corpses were being burned in the open, where the distribution
of heat varies. The burning of the corpses lasted from 16:00 to 18:30. The
remains were covered up in a shallow bomb crater at around 18:30 by Lindloff
and Reisser.
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Situation of World War II in Europe at the
time of Hitler’s death. The white areas were controlled by Nazi forces, the
pink areas were controlled by the Allies, and the red areas indicate recent
Allied advances.
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July 1947 photo of the rear entrance to the
Führerbunker in the garden of the Reich
Chancellery. Hitler and Eva Braun were cremated in a shell hole in front of the
emergency exit at left; the cone-shaped structure in the centre served as the
exhaust, and as bomb shelter for the guards.
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Ruins of the bunker after demolition in 1947
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Aftermath
See
also: Mass suicides in 1945 Nazi Germany
The
first inkling to the outside world that Hitler was dead came from the Germans
themselves. On 1 May the radio station Reichssender Hamburg interrupted
their normal program to announce that an important broadcast would soon be
made. After dramatic funereal music by Wagner
and Bruckner,
Grand
Admiral Karl Dönitz (appointed as Hitler's successor in his
will) announced that Hitler was dead. Dönitz called upon the German people to
mourn their Führer, who died a hero defending the capital of the Reich. Hoping
to save the army and the nation by negotiating a partial surrender to the
British and Americans, Dönitz authorized a fighting withdrawal to the west. His
tactic was somewhat successful: it enabled about 1.8 million German soldiers to
avoid capture by the Soviets, but it came at a high cost in bloodshed, as
troops continued to fight until 8 May.
On
the morning of 1 May, thirteen hours after the event, Stalin
was informed of Hitler's suicide. General Hans Krebs had given this
information to Soviet General Vasily
Chuikov when they met at 04:00 on 1 May, when the Germans attempted to
negotiate acceptable surrender terms. Stalin demanded unconditional surrender
and asked for confirmation that Hitler was dead. He wanted Hitler's corpse
found. In the early morning hours of 2 May, the Soviets captured the Reich
Chancellery. Down in the Führerbunker, General Krebs and General Wilhelm
Burgdorf committed suicide by gunshot to the head.
Later
on 2 May, the remains of Hitler, Braun, and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and
her offspring, Wulf) were discovered in a shell crater by a unit of the Red
Army intelligence agency SMERSH tasked with finding Hitler's body. Stalin was still
wary about believing his old nemesis was dead, and restricted what information
could be publicly released. The remains of Hitler and Braun were repeatedly
buried and exhumed by SMERSH during the unit's relocation from Berlin to a new
facility in Magdeburg.
The bodies, along with the charred remains of propaganda minister Goebbels, his
wife Magda, and their
six children, were buried in an unmarked grave beneath a paved section of
the front courtyard. The location was kept secret.
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The picture depicts two versions of a
photograph of Adolf Hitler that was retouched by an artist of the United States
Secret Service in 1944 in order to show how Hitler may disguise himself to
escape capture after Germany's defeat. Since Hitler's death was not a certainty
in 1945 the pictures were posted up all over Germany in 1945 to ease finding
the (potentially) "fugitive" dictator.
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Different
versions of Hitler's fate were presented by the Soviet Union according to its
political desires. In the years immediately following 1945, the Soviets
maintained Hitler was not dead, but had fled and was being shielded by the
former western allies. This worked for a time to create doubt among western
authorities. The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg,
Thomas
J. Dodd, said: "No one can say he is dead." When President Harry
S. Truman asked Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 whether or not
Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, "No". But by 11 May 1945,
the Soviets had already confirmed through Hitler's dentist, Hugo
Blaschke, and his dental technician that the dental remains found were
Hitler's and Braun's. In November 1945, Dick White,
then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin (and later
head of MI5 and MI6 in succession), had
their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate the matter to
counter the Soviet claims. His findings were written in a report and published
in book form in 1947.
In
May 1946, SMERSH agents recovered from the crater where Hitler was buried two
burned skull fragments with gunshot damage. These remains were apparently
forgotten in the Russian State Archives until 1993, when they were re-found. In
2009 DNA
and forensic tests were performed on the skull fragment, which Soviet officials
had long believed to be Hitler's. According to the American researchers, the
tests revealed that the skull was actually that of a woman less than 40 years
old. The jaw fragments which had been recovered in May 1945 were not tested.
In
1969, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymensky's book on the death of Hitler was
published in the West. It included the SMERSH autopsy report, but because of
the earlier disinformation attempts, western historians thought it
untrustworthy.
In
1970, the SMERSH facility, by then controlled by the KGB, was scheduled to be
handed over to the East German government. Fearing that a known Hitler
burial site might become a Neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri
Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains that had been
buried in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. A Soviet KGB team was given detailed
burial charts. On 4 April 1970 they secretly exhumed five wooden boxes
containing the remains of "10 or 11 bodies ... in an advanced state
of decay". The remains were thoroughly burned and crushed, after which the
ashes were thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe. [u]
According
to Ian Kershaw the corpses of Braun and Hitler were thoroughly burned when the
Red Army found them, and only a lower jaw with dental work could be identified
as Hitler's remains.
Gallery
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Goebbels Family
portrait: in the centre are Magda Goebbels and Joseph Goebbels, with their six
children Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Hedwig, Holdine and Heidrun. Behind is
Harald Quandt in the uniform of a Flight Sergeant of the Air Force [retouched
postcard].
Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their
six children. Standing in the back is Goebbels' stepson, Harald
Quandt, the sole family member to survive the war.
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Hitler (right) visiting Berlin defenders in
early April 1945 with Hermann Göring (centre) and the Chief of the OKW Field
Marshal Keitel (partially hidden)
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| Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, was one of the first persons into the study after Hitler committed suicide. |
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Churchill sits on a
damaged chair from the Führerbunker in July 1945.
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See
also
- The Bunker (1981 film)
- The Bunker (book)
- The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973 film)
- Conspiracy theories about Adolf Hitler's death
- Downfall (2004 film)
- Führer Headquarters
- Glossary of Nazi Germany
- Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973 film)
- List of Nazi Party leaders and officials
- Popular culture representations of Hitler after his death
- Vorbunker
- War and Remembrance (1988–89 TV miniseries)
Notes
1.
"... Günsche stated he entered the study
to inspect the bodies, and observed Hitler ... sat ... sunken over,
with blood dripping out of his right temple. He had shot himself with his own
pistol, a PPK 7.65." (Fischer
2008, p. 47).
"... Blood dripped from a bullet hole in his right
temple ..."(Kershaw
2008, p. 955).
"...30 April ... During the afternoon Hitler
shot himself..." (MI5
staff 2011).
"... her lips puckered from the poison." (Beevor
2002, p. 359).
"... [the bodies] were deposited initially in an
unmarked grave in a forest far to the west of Berlin, reburied in 1946 in a
plot of land in Magdeberg." (Kershaw
2008, p. 958).
"In 1970 the Kremlin finally disposed of the body in
absolute secrecy ... body ... was exhumed and burned." (Beevor
2002, p. 431).
"... both committing suicide by biting their cyanide
ampoules." (Erickson
1983, p. 606).
"... we have a fair answer ... to the version
of ... Russian author Lev Bezymenski ... Hitler did shoot himself and
did bite into the cyanide capsule, just as Professor Haase had clearly and
repeatedly instructed ... " (O'Donnell
2001, pp. 322–323)
"... New versions of Hitler's fate were presented by
the Soviet Union according to the political needs of the moment ..."
(Eberle
& Uhl 2005, p. 288).
"The intentionally misleading account of Hitler's
death by cyanide poisoning put about by Soviet historians ... can be
dismissed."(Kershaw
2001, p. 1037).
"... most Soviet accounts have held that Hitler also
[Hitler and Eva Braun] ended his life by poison ... there are
contradictions in the Soviet story ... these contradictions tend to
indicate that the Soviet version of Hitler's suicide has a political
colouration."(Fest
1974, p. 749).
"Axmann elaborated on his testimony when questioned
about his "assumption" that Hitler had shot himself through the
mouth."(Joachimsthaler
1999, p. 157).
"... the version involving a 'shot in the mouth' with
secondary injuries to the temples must be rejected ... the majority of
witnesses saw an entry wound in the temple.. according to all witnesses there
was no injury to the back of the head." (Joachimsthaler
1999, p. 166).
"... the only thing to remain of Hitler was a gold
bridge with porcelain facets from his upper jaw and the lower jawbone with some
teeth and two bridges." (Joachimsthaler
1999, p. 225).
"Hitler's jaws ... had been retained by SMERSH,
while the NKVD kept the cranium." (Beevor
2002, p. 431)
"Deep in the Lubyanka, headquarters of Russia's
secret police, a fragment of Hitler's jaw is preserved as a trophy of the Red
Army's victory over Nazi Germany. A fragment of skull with a bullet hole lies
in the State Archive". (Halpin
& Boyes 2009).
"In the small hours of 28–29 April ... " (MI5
staff 2011).
Using sources available to Trevor Roper (a World War II
MI5 agent and historian/author of The Last Days of Hitler), MI5 records
the marriage as taking place after Hitler had dictated the last will and
testament. (MI5
staff 2011).
Beevor
2002, p. 343 records the marriage as taking place before Hitler
had dictated the last will and testament.
"Cyanide poisoning. Its 'bite' was marked in her
features." (Linge
2009, p. 199).
Beevor states that "... the ashes were
flushed into the town [Magdeberg] sewage system." (Beevor
2002, p. 431).
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