Hitler's death, 75 years later
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Hitler decorates a member of the HitlerjuGend in his last public appearance, April 1945
75 years ago today, Adolf Hitler killed himself in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The city lay in ruins and hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Soviet Red Army were at that moment only hours from grinding the last Nazi resistance to powder, and Hitler, after final farewells to the small coterie of staff members, secretaries, and toadies who had remained with him, retired to his personal chambers with the new Frau Hitler, where she took poison and he shot himself. The staff burned their bodies immediately.
A fitting end, and it would be tempting to gloat over the circumstances of his death were it not for the 80+ million people he dragged into the abyss with him. So I think such a date calls for commemoration—not necessarily celebration, though it will always be true that the people rejoice when the wicked perish, but rather a remembering in order to understand. It is good to look to the past, to look it as fully in the face as we are able, and to try to reckon with what we see there. This should be no exception.
So in that spirit of remembering and learning I wanted to recommend two films and three books that could help you learn about what took place today in 1945. I’ll start with the movies first:
Downfall (Der Untergang)
Downfall is the great film treatment of the final days of Hitler and the Third Reich. Based on a book by historian Joachim Fest (see below) and the memoirs of a number of survivors of the Führerbunker, Downfall opens on Hitler’s 56th birthday and follows a wide number of characters through his final ten days of life and beyond, concluding with the attempt of the bunker’s survivors to break through the Russian encirclement.
Bruno gANZ AS aDOLF hITLER IN dER uNTERGANG (2004)
The filmmakers, led by director Oliver Hirschbiegel, include the perspectives of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s young, naive secretary, and her friends; the ordinary staff members of the bunker like switchboard operator Rochus Misch and Hitler’s personal adjutant Otto Günsche; the generals on Hitler’s staff and high-ranking members of his government like Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer; soldiers and officers cobbling together Berlin’s defenses; the doctors trying to save the wounded; and ordinary citizens of all ages now struggling to support the collapsing Nazi military against the power of the Red Army. Its scope is impressive, and Downfall offers as comprehensive a picture of the fall of Berlin as is possible in a single film.
The filmmakers did a solid job of presenting the known facts, and opted to depict only those things they could confirm from actual historical sources. So, since no one who was in the room with Hitler when he killed himself survived, the viewer experiences that moment as the survivors outside did—a muffled gunshot followed by the disposal of the bodies. While the film takes some artistic liberties with the story (perhaps most notably, softening the fate of Frau Junge), it mostly adheres to the documented historical record and does so with a minimum of fictionalization.
But while that’s a reason to watch Downfall, it’s not the reason. The main reason should be Swiss actor Bruno Ganz’s performance as Hitler—a dark, subtle, scary portrayal of an evil man now sickly and beaten down, rolling back and forth between self-pity and rage, charm and brutality, his old magnetism and something utterly repellent. Ganz presents us with a man who believes his own lies and, faced with defeat, has determined to take everyone down with him. This decision testifies to his evil; that many of his followers stick with him is a testament to that indescribable other side of his personality that Ganz, better than anyone else, brings to life. It’s the best onscreen realization of this complicated, inscrutable man that I’ve seen, and the much-memed scene in which he rants against his generals for their supposed betrayal is only one of the film’s many overwhelmingly powerful moments.
Downfall is a grim film, and appropriately so. Most of the historical figures we meet die before the end, many by their own hands, and some choose coldbloodedly to take their children with them. Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film is that in which Frau Goebbels first drugs and then, one by one, crushes cyanide capsules in the mouths of her six children.
But I think it’s a necessary film in the same way that a film about the Third Reich’s victims is, and with perhaps an even more important lesson. For where we all imagine what we might do if we were to face victimization by people like the Nazis, very few of us have the moral courage to imagine ourselves as the perpetrators. Until we can do that, and look beyond our easy image of the Nazis as monsters, we can’t fully recognize our own potential for evil. Downfall is at its best when it makes us most uncomfortable.
The Bunker
If you are curious about the subject but want to see something less graphic than Downfall or are genuinely intimidated by “the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” let me recommend The Bunker, a film based on the book of the same name by journalist James P. O’Donnell, the first non-Russian to gain access to the ruins of the bunker following the fall of Berlin.
Anthony Hopkins as Adolf Hitler in The Bunker (1981)
The Bunker begins with Hitler’s move from above ground to the Führerbunker in January of 1945 and focuses primarily on the last two weeks or so of Hitler’s life there. The Bunker played on CBS in 1981 and has many of the limitations of a TV movie of that time—it’s decidedly cheap looking in many respects, owing mostly to TV-style lighting though the sets and especially the costumes look good. But the film’s big draw is the cast, which features solid work by a number of recognizable faces including Richard Jordan, Michel Lonsdale, Michael Kitchen, and a very young Julian Fellowes, most famous now as the creator of Downton Abbey. But most important of all is Anthony Hopkins in an Emmy-winning performance as Hitler.
Hopkins’s Hitler is closed off and detached, almost catatonic in some scenes and flying into rages in others. (The film makes much of the many drugs administered to Hitler by his personal physician, Dr. Morell, one of history’s great quacks.) Hopkins clearly studied Hitler’s flamboyant oratorical gestures closely and incorporates them whenever Hitler loses his temper. The impression one gets is of an enfeebled man who almost ceases to exist when he is not performing. It’s alienating and terrifying, and were it not for Ganz’s more fully rounded Hitler in Downfall—a Hitler that integrates all of these seemingly disparate parts as well as his much noted charm and magnetism—I’d rate this as perhaps the best imagined Hitler on film.
But caveat lector. Be aware that the cheapness of the cinematography is not the only issue with The Bunker. Its scope is narrower and unless you already know a little bit of who’s who, the film may get confusing. This is especially the case near the end, as the major cast members either kill themselves or join groups hoping to break out of Berlin. Some characters simply disappear from the narrative. But the source material’s reliance on Albert Speer is perhaps the biggest issue. The film spends a lot of time following Speer through a half-baked plot to flood the bunker with tabun (a nerve agent developed in Germany by some of the same chemists who created sarin), an interesting story but one that Speer almost certainly made up after the war, when he spent decades carefully crafting an image as an apolitical artist and technocrat hoodwinked by the regime.
Nevertheless, if you’re aware of some of these historical problems, The Bunker can be both instructive and, more important, gripping. The final hour—with Hitler’s suicide and the deaths of the entire Goebbels family and many, many others—is genuinely chilling, a testament both to the actors and to the power of the true story they’re trying to reenact.
While The Bunker is available on a rather expensive DVD, you can find it free in its entirety—albeit in VHS quality—on YouTube.
Having noted these two films, let me recommend a few books if you want more detailed and rigorous non-fiction presentations of these events:
Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, by Joachim Fest
The book that provided the basis for the film Downfall, Hitler biographer Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker is a short, brisk read and a good guide to the sequence of events that played out in the days leading up to and following Hitler’s suicide. Fest capably interweaves the stories of the many people who both lived with Hitler in the bunker and those who passed through. (One of the striking things about the bunker, once you begin studying it, is how many people dropped in, especially in the final days. The films elide some of this out of necessity, though Downfall does an excellent job creating an impression of how busy the place was.) If you’re looking for a quick, straightforward narrative of Hitler’s final days and the fall of Berlin, this is the one I’d recommend.
As two bonus recommendations, if you’d like to read the perspective of just one of the people who visited the bunker in the final days, the opening chapters of Siegfried Knappe’s memoir Soldat relate his repeated trips to the bunker to brief Hitler as the defenses of Berlin crumbled; and if you’re interested in something that treats the last several months of the Reich in greater depth and gives a lot more context but shorter treatment to Hitler’s death, check out The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Antony Beevor.
Hitler: The Survival Myth, by Donald M. McKale
Up to this point I haven’t mentioned the many, many conspiracy theories surrounding Hitler’s death. This is not because I am unaware of them. Indeed, I have at least one student per semester who either is curious about or fervently believes one of these theories. Unfortunately for these students, the theories are all bogus—and I can tell them that one of my professors at Clemson literally wrote the book on it. Hitler: The Survival Myth, tracks the origins, spread, and evolution of these myths and theories from the immediate aftermath of his death and the capture of the bunker by the Russians through the decades following. Most of the many, many competing theories stem from the uncertainty surrounding Hitler’s fate—an uncertainty deliberately created by the Russians as disinformation for the western Allies and unwittingly abetted by the sensationalist western press ever since. McKale follows the growth and elaboration of these myths through meticulous research into decades of news coverage, public opinion polls, and more, and carefully debunks them.
Though the book is almost forty years old (it was originally published in 1981, the same year that The Bunker premiered on CBS), it is available in an updated edition and its premises and conclusions still hold up, as the conspiracy theories have only become more and more tenuously connected to reality in the years since.
As another bonus recommendation, Dr. McKale’s most recent book is Nazis After Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth, which deals in detail with some Nazis who did manage to escape and, in many cases, live to a ripe old age.
Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, by Luke Daly-Groves
Despite the prevalence and apparent popular appeal of Hitler survival theories, books like Dr. McKale’s are scarce, especially considering the vast literature on the Third Reich that has appeared in the last eighty years. Some of this scarcity surely stems from the association of these conspiracy theories with fringe pseudoscience (what begins as a question about Hitler’s suicide often quickly expands to encompass cloning and Nazi UFOs), Neo-Nazism (if Hitler didn’t kill himself, the Third Reich wasn’t really defeated, or so they think), and general kookery.
Luke Daly-Groves’s book Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy comes as a relief then. He does not dismiss the conspiracy theories but directly investigates and engages them and drives out false knowledge with good, relying on the proper use of the historical method and the mountains of available evidence. His book is one of the most recent and comprehensive looks at the subject and is designed specifically to counter the still-widespread conspiracy theories. Daly-Groves argues that argument and persuasion are more powerful in the long run than dismissal, and I think that makes his approach through this book worthwhile. You can listen to a good short interview with him on the History Hit podcast here, or via the embedded Stitcher player in this post.
Conclusion
This is a big anniversary and I hope you’ll take some time to understand what happened, what it can teach us about both the Third Reich and ourselves, and what ghostly remnants of these events we’re still living with today. These films and books offer a good introduction and lots of food for thought. Thanks for reading!
