Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.

Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead and millions more grieving their lost ones and trying to put their shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end wrecked, its remnants to be divided among the victorious and occupying powers. The arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich capital itself and presided over half of Europe. Even the German people, whose survival he had said was the very reason for his political fight, had proved ultimately dispensable to him.

In the event, the German people he was prepared to see damned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler. Beyond the repairing of broken lives and broken homes in broken towns and cities, the searing moral imprint of Hitler’s era would remain. Gradually, nevertheless, a new society, resting in time, mercifully, on new values, would emerge from the ruins of the old. For in its maelstrom of destruction Hitler’s rule had also conclusively demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into calamitous war.

The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis.

ILLUSTRATIONS

^{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 Anschlu?.}

^{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 Fasenenstra?e, 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 Goring addresses Hitler during a ceremonial occasion — probably on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1939 — in the New Reich Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer and}