enough. Consequently, he ordered the effect of the poison to be tried out on his Alsatian dog. At midnight Blondi was coaxed to the toilet in the bunker. Sergeant Tornow, who was in charge of Hitler’s dogs, forced the animal’s mouth open while Professor Haase, one of the medical staff, reached into the dog’s gullet and with forceps crushed an ampoule of poison inside. Shortly afterward Hitler entered the room and glanced expressionlessly at the corpse. He then invited the occupants of the two adjacent bunkers to come to the conference room for farewells. With a faraway expression, he went down the row, silently shaking hands with each person. Several said a few words to him, but he did not answer, or only moved his lips inaudibly. Shortly after three o’clock in the morning he had a telegram sent to Donitz complaining about inadequate military measures, and in a kind of stale, repetitive gesture he once more commanded the admiral to proceed “instantly and unsparingly against all traitors.”
Late in the forenoon the military conference took place as usual. With no sign of emotion, Hitler received the information that the Soviet troops had by now occupied the Tiergarten, Potsdamer Platz, and the subway on Vosstrasse, in the immediate vicinity of the chancellery. Then he ordered delivery of 200 liters of gasoline. At two o’clock he had his lunch in company with his secretaries and his cook; at the same moment, two Soviet sergeants raised the Red flag on the dome of the nearby Reichstag. After the meal he summoned his most intimate associates, including Goebbels, Bormann, Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, his secretaries, Frau Christian and Frau Junge, and several orderlies. Together with his wife, he shook hands with all of them and then, mute and stooped, he vanished inside his room. And as though this life, which had so largely been governed by staged happenings and had always aimed at glaringly dramatic effects, could only end with a preposterous climax, at this time a dance began in the chancellery canteen (if we are to believe the accounts of the participants), a dance in which the weeks of strained nerves sought violent release. Even repeated remonstrances that the Fuhrer was about to die could not bring it to a halt.75 It was April 30, 1945, shortly before 4 p.m.
What happened thereafter has never been completely and unequivocally clarified. According to the statements of most of the survivors of the bunker, a single shot sounded. Shortly afterward, Rattenhuber, the commander of the SS guards, entered the room. Hitler was sitting hunched over, face smeared with blood, on the sofa. Beside him was his wife, an unused revolver in her lap; she had taken poison. In contrast to this version of things, most Soviet accounts have held that Hitler also ended his life by poison. But there are contradictions in the Soviet story. On the one hand, it denies that any traces of a bullet were detectable in the fragments of a skull that were found later. On the other hand, the story attempts to say who in Hitler’s entourage had been assigned to deliver the “mercy shot” to make sure of his death. These contradictions tend to indicate that the Soviet version of Hitler’s suicide has a political coloration. It sounds like a last echo of the attempts constantly made during Hitler’s lifetime to refute him by belittling him, as though a certain mentality could not bear to concede abilities and strength to the morally reprehensible. It was the story of the Iron Cross or his gifts as political tactician or statesman all over again: he was now begrudged the courage required for the obviously sterner death by a bullet.76
Rattenhuber ordered the bodies to be taken into the courtyard. There he had the gasoline poured over them and invited the mourners to come up. No sooner had they assembled than Russian shelling drove them back to the bunker entrance. Hitler’s SS adjutant Otto Gunsche thereupon tossed a burning rag upon both corpses, and when the leaping flames swathed the bodies, everyone stood at attention and gave the Nazi salute. A member of the guards detachment who passed by the spot half an hour after this ceremony could “no longer recognize Hitler because he was pretty well charred.” And when he visited the spot again toward eight o’clock “a few flakes were flying up in the wind,” as he put it. Shortly before 11 P.M. the remains of the almost totally consumed bodies were swept onto a canvas shelter half, according to GUnsche’s account, “let down into a shell hole outside the exit from the bunker, covered over with earth, and the earth pounded firm with a wooden rammer.”77
Long ago, in the days of struggle, Hitler had let himself be represented grandiloquently as “the man who would rather be a dead Achilles than a living dog.” Later on, he had begun to elaborate the scenario for his obsequies. His burial place was to be a mighty crypt in the bell tower of the gigantic structure he had planned to build on the bank of the Danube at Linz. But in fact he was hastily shoveled into a shell hole among mountains of rubble, fragments of wall, cement mixers, and scattered rubbish.
This was not yet the end of the story. Goebbels tried to coax the Russians into separate negotiations by references to their “common holiday of May 1.” When these efforts failed, Goebbels and his family committed suicide. Bormann, together with the other inhabitants of the bunker, made an attempt to break out. Then Soviet troops occupied the abandoned bunker and immediately set about searching for the remains of Hitler’s body. A medical report dated May 8, 1945, of an autopsy of a severely charred male body came to the conclusion that this was “presumably Hitler’s corpse.” Other statements shortly afterward cast doubt on this assertion. Then again Soviet sources maintained that Hitler had after all been identified on the basis of dental studies; but this statement, too, was questioned, and rumors arose that the British authorities were hiding Hitler in their zone of occupation. At the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, Stalin assured his Western colleagues that the Russians had not found the corpse and that Hitler was hiding in Spain or South America.78 In the end the Russians managed to swathe the whole question in such obscurity that the wildest versions concerning the end of Hitler circulated. Some said he had been shot in the Berlin Tiergarten by a German squad of officers. Others had him fleeing in a submarine to a remote island. Still other stories maintained that he was living in a Spanish monastery or on a South American hacienda. All his life Hitler had owed his successes largely to one or the other of his enemies. Now, once more, his ill-wishers—as if in a last display of all the mistakes of the era—made it possible for him to live a mythical posthumous life.
For all that the event had no consequences, it was a symbol. It once again forcibly suggested that the appearance of Hitler, the conditions of his rise and his triumphs, were founded upon premises that point far beyond the narrow framework of merely German conditions. Granted, every nation bears the responsibility for its own history. But only a mind that has learned nothing from the misfortunes of these times will call him the man of a single nation and refuse to recognize that a powerful tendency of the age culminated in him, a tendency that dominated the entire first half of this century.
Thus Hitler not only destroyed Germany. He also put an end to old Europe with its nationalisms, its conflicts, its hereditary foes, and its insincere imperatives—as well as with its brilliance, its grandeur, and the magic of its
CONCLUSION
The Dead End
A man once said to me: “Listen, if you do that, Germany will fall apart in six weeks.”
I said: “What do you mean by that?”
“Germany will just collapse.”
I said: “What do you mean by that?”
“Germany will just cease to exist.”
I answered: “Once upon a time the German people survived the wars with the Romans. The German people survived the Great Migrations. The German people survived the later great battles of the Early and Late Middle Ages. The German people survived the wars of religion at the dawn of modern times. The German people survived the Thirty Years’ War. The German people later survived the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of Liberation; it even survived a World War, even the Revolution—it will survive even me!”
Almost without transition, virtually from one moment to the next, Nazism vanished after the death of Hitler
