The last days of a beer-hall agitator

The Bangkok Post April 1989

Adolf Hitler started out in life as a casual labourer and a third-rate commercial artist. He rose through the ranks of the beer-hall agitators to command an empire which stretched from the Caucasus to the Atlantic. He ended his days with a self-administered bullet through the mouth in a bunker fifty feet under the grounds of the Chancellery in Berlin. That was on April 30, 1945.

Hitler’s last days are a pathetic record of drugs, insanity and increasing terror, set against the backdrop of the ruins of Berlin, which now, forty-five years later, are in the news again. In 1944 Hitler admitted: ‘For five years I have been separated from the world.’ As the Second World War drew to a close, this savage demagogue increasingly lost touch with reality.

Hitler spent the greater part of the war at his headquarters, the Wolfschanze or ‘Wolf’s lair’, deep in the remote province of East Prussia. But in early 1945 he moved to Berlin. The setting for his final weeks is a strange one. The Chancellery air-raid shelter, near the recent euphoria at Potsdamerplatz, was buried under reinforced concrete. It consisted of two storeys of cramped rooms. The lower storey was the Fuhrerbunker, numbering eighteen rooms in all. Hitler and Eva Braun, his mistress of thirteen years, had a cramped suite of six rooms. The only touch of decoration in Hitler’s study was a portrait of Frederick the Great, about whom he used to say: ‘look at those strong blue eyes, that wide brow. What a head!’ He liked to quote Frederick the Great’s remark – ‘Now I know men, I prefer dogs.’

Eva Braun has been described as a pretty, empty-headed blonde, round-faced and blue-eyed - a shop girl, a good-time girl. Like many of the political stage-managers of the 20th century – Mao Tse-tung, Ferdinand Marcos – Hitler’s taste in women ran to the tacky – beauty queens and bubble heads. Braun had little to recommend her and Hitler kept her in the background for most of his political life. It was one of his more enlightened strategic moves.

Hitler’s health was not good and the confines of the bunker didn’t help. At fifty-six, he already looked an old man. Doctor Morell, his private physician, had been treating him with an alarming assortment of drugs for years. A strung-out insomniac took many of the major decisions of the Second World War. Dr Morell administered twenty-eight different mixtures of drugs to Hitler, including fake medicines, narcotics, stimulants and aphrodisiacs. For two years he had been taking Dr Koestler’s Anti-gas pills, compounded of strychnine and belladonna. It is widely believed that during the last two years of the Third Reich, practically all the members of Hitler’s entourage were kept functioning on drugs of one sort or another.

During his last months of life Hitler rarely ventured out of the Chancellery bunker. Ever since he had uncovered a bomb plot to assassinate him in July 1944 (there had been seven attempts on his life in all), he had been understandably cautious.

One amusing trip he did make during his final months consisted of an invitation to tea en famille at the Goebbels’ home. A bodyguard of six SS officers accompanied him, and a servant with a briefcase in which there was a thermos flask of tea and a bag of cakes. The Fuhrer was taking no chances. Goebbels at one point in 1944 said of him: ‘It takes a bomb under his backside to make Hitler see reason,’ so perhaps the Fuhrer was only taking his host at his word.

During the last weeks he was averaging three hours of sleep a day and often conducting conferences and meetings through until dawn. He rose at noon, took a walk around the Chancellery garden in the afternoon and a short nap in the evening. He ranted and raved as usual, storming up and down the corridor and making life uncomfortable for everybody as the course of the war began to run against him.

In January 1945 the Russians overran Poland. Later that year, in March, the British and American forces crossed the Rhine. In February, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta and restated their demand for an unconditional surrender. Hitler didn’t mince words about Churchill. ‘That Jew-ridden, half-American drunkard,’ he called him. In the same month, Hitler contemplate denouncing the Geneva and other international conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war.

‘To hell with that... If I make it clear that I ... treat them without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few Germans will think twice before they desert.’

By April 12, when president Roosevelt died, Hitler began to realise the end was in sight. Eva Braun arrived at the bunker, never to leave it again alive. On April 22, Hitler announced over the radio that he intended to stick it out to the bitter end and would not abandon Berlin. Goebbels moved into the bunker with his wife and six children, occupying four rooms on the top storey. They wouldn’t leave again either. Hitler began to burn his papers.

The air attacks continued. Hitler sat down, after a night of conferences, to a breakfast of chocolates and cakes. His Alsatian bitch Blondi had produced puppies and the man who was responsible for the deaths of millions of men, women and children in the preceding seven years would lie on his back after breakfast and play with the puppies.

On Monday April 23, he contemplated the possibility of shooting himself in the bunker and having his body burned to avoid it falling into the hands of the advancing Russians.

On April 24, handing her a vial of poison, he said to his secretary, Hanna Reitach: ‘Hanna, you belong to those who will die with me. Each of us has a vial of poison such at this. I do not wish that one of us falls into the hands of the Russians alive, nor do I wish our bodies to be found by them.’

Eva Braun, empty-headed to the end, spent the time running around changing her clothes and putting on make-up in order to keep Adolf in a cheery mood, ‘Poor, poor Adolf,’ she complained, ‘deserted by everyone, betrayed by all.’

On April 26, the Russians, less that a mile away, began shelling the Chancellery.

When news reached him on the night of the 28th of Himmler’s offer to negotiate peace terms, Hitler was furious. ‘His colour rose to a heated red and his face was unrecognisable ... after a lengthy outburst, Hitler sank into a stupor, and for a time the entire bunker was silent.’ His decision to commit suicide was made.

He did the decent thing and at one o’ clock in the morning of the 29th he married his mistress of thirteen years, Eva Braun. We don’t know what the bride wore, but the couple swore that they were of ‘pure Aryan descent’ (though Hitler’s claim to this is a bit tarnished) and drank champagne to celebrate. Then Hitler dictated his will and political testament, unrepentant for his crimes to the end.

Also on the 29th, news of Mussolini’s death reached him. Il Duce, together with his mistress, was shot by Lake Como, and their bodies strung up in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

Blondi, the dog, was put down. We don’t know what happened to the puppies. Maybe they were given to a home. Hitler bid farewell to his staff and sent his chauffeur out for 200 litres of petrol. The Russians were in Potsdamerplatz, round the corner.

Hitler had his vegetarian lunch. He got Eva from her room and, saying goodbye to his cronies, Goebbels and Bormann, went into his suite.

At half-past three on April 30, 1945, a single gunshot was heard. Adolf Hitler had shot himself through the mouth and his wife had taken poison.

The bodies were taken up to the Chancellery garden and set alight with the help of the petrol. The cronies stood to attention and gave the Hitler salute as the bodies burned. The ashes were never found but it is thought that they were given to Artut Axmann, the leader of the Hitler Youth, as a relic for future generations.

The radio announced the news on May 1 and played Wagner. Goebbels poisoned his six children, shot his wife and himself, and his adjutant made a mess of burning the bodies in the Chancellery garden: not enough petrol.

The Third Reich, founded by a failed Austrian artist and beer-hall agitator called Adolf Hitler, fell a week later.