The consensus of scholarly opinion and witness testimony points to the fact that, on 30 April 1945, Hitler chose to kill himself rather than end up in the hands of the advancing [Soviets]. In his last hours, he married his long‐term companion, Eva Braun, dictated his will and political testament and administered cyanide to his beloved Alsatian, Blondi, to determine the effectiveness of the poison.¹⁶
Having heard about the public desecration of Mussolini’s corpse on 28 April, he made preparations to ensure that no similar humiliation would be extended to his remains. Petrol was ordered and his staff were instructed to incinerate his body when the time came. Indeed, Hitler’s own precautions would prompt much of the postwar debate and confusion about his fate.
(Source.)
The first formal declaration of Hitler’s death came late on the evening of 1 May 1945 via a radio broadcast by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Sombre music and drum rolls gave way to the momentous announcement: ‘our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. In the deepest sorrow and respect, the German people bow’. It was, proclaimed Dönitz, a ‘hero’s death’, Hitler falling in battle while fighting valiantly against the ‘Bolshevik storm’.
‘Hitler Dead’ screamed countless international headlines the next day. The bold, dramatic and matter‐of‐fact statement left little room for ambiguity. Hitler had met his end, [Fascism] was vanquished and the Second World War was effectively over.
The Daily Herald printed a caricature of a burning [Fascist] emblem under the slogan ‘WAStika’. The cover of Time magazine simply struck Hitler’s face out with a large red cross.
The media’s response to Hitler’s passing was predominantly one of intense relief. ‘The whole building cheered’, recalled Karl Lehmann, a member of the BBC Monitoring unit. Numerous editorials depicted it as a moment of universal liberation — ‘a terrible scourge and force of evil has been removed’, declared the Lancashire Daily Post.[1] The sense of catharsis continued into the VE Day celebrations a few days later when the burning of Hitler’s effigy typically formed the high point of the UK’s festivities.
In the midst of this jubilation, however, there was widespread uncertainty about the precise cause of death. Dönitz’s talk of Hitler ‘falling’ in battle filled the first wave of international news reports, but many of the accompanying editorials urged caution about accepting this at face value.
There was suspicion that either the [Fascists] were exaggerating the circumstances of his demise to foster a ‘Hitler legend’, or that they were peddling an entirely false narrative to distract from his retreat from the scene. Questioned on the matter during a White House press conference, President Harry S. Truman insisted that he had it ‘on the best authority possible’ that Hitler was, indeed, dead — but conceded there were no details yet as to how he died.
The press were right to question the death‐in‐battle scenario invented in the Dönitz broadcast. Stationed in Flensburg, over 270 miles away from the death scene, the Admiral was reliant upon information fed to him by colleagues in [the] Führerbunker, namely Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Head of the Party Chancellery Martin Bormann.
The pair had already delayed sending definitive news of Hitler’s passing, prompting Dönitz to misdate the fatal moment to the afternoon of 1 May, rather than the 30 April. They also neglected to supply details of what, exactly, had occurred, leaving Dönitz to fill in the gaps for himself. As it transpired, he was not the only person speculating on Hitler’s fate.
*removed externally hosted image*
United States made propaganda forgery of [a Fascist] stamp. Portrait of Hitler made into skull; instead of “German Reich” the stamp reads “Lost Reich”. Produced by Operation Cornflakes, U.S. Office of Strategic Services, circa 1942, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Futsches-Reich-Briefmarke-UK.jpg [accessed 29 April 2020]The Western Allies, anxious to puncture martyrdom myths before they could take hold, swiftly countered Dönitz’s heroic imagery by reviving rumours of Hitler’s previously failing health. The Soviets, meanwhile, [at first] denounced reports of Hitler’s death as a ‘fascist trick’ to conceal his escape from Berlin. Even when reports of a Hitler suicide emerged from 3 May, debate continued as to whether the [Fascist] leader had shot himself or taken cyanide — poison being perceived by the Soviets as a particularly cowardly (and thus eminently appropriate) way out for Hitler.
What, though, did the general public make of all this? Within hours of the Dönitz broadcast, the New York Times and the social research organisation Mass Observation were gauging reactions across Manhattan and London respectively. At first, the news appeared anticlimactic; people who had longed for this moment felt disoriented, numb or empty now it was finally upon them.
As the implications sunk in, Hitler’s death raised optimism that the war might finally be over, but dashed hopes that the public would see him brought to justice. ‘Too bad he’s dead’, mused one young New Yorker, ‘he should have been tortured’.[2]
Concerning what happened to his body, the likeliest explanation is that the Soviets dumped all of the ashes in the Biederitz River in 1970. Click here for the details.
Quoting Robert J. Hutchinson’s What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler:
Throughout this time, the [Soviets] kept as a strict state secret the fact that they had Hitler’s remains safely buried in Magdeburg, Even as tireless a researcher as James O’Donnell—the Newsweek reporter who was in the bunker in July 1945, interviewed more than a hundred eyewitnesses, and wrote one of the best books on the final week of the war, The Bunker—had no clue what happened to Hitler’s body.
”The possibility that Hitler’s ashes were sent to Moscow does exist,” he concluded in 1978, “but more likely they were scattered in Buch, where the autopsy took place.”⁶
But Hitler’s body had not been turned into ashes and scattered in 1945. Instead, it had been buried in the driveway of a military garage. In 1970, however, the military installation in Magdeburg was going to be transferred from the control of the Russians to that of Communist East Germany.
The [Soviets] worried that the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun might one day be rediscovered and could conceivably become the object of veneration by future neo[fascists]. […] As a result, Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB at the time and later the Russian prime minister, ordered that Hitler’s remains, such as they were, be disposed of once and for all. He ordered that the bodies be once again disinterred, burned into dust, and the ashes scattered.
As Petrova and Watson recount, this was no easy feat. Hitler’s secret grave had been left undisturbed for a quarter of a century. Under the code name Operation Archive, the Russians began the elaborate process of digging up the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, and the Goebbelses. Andropov selected a KGB officer named Vladimir Gumenyuk to pick a secret final resting place for Hitler’s remains and to lead a three‐man team in taking the remains there for destruction.
By April 4, 1970, the old Soviet building at 36 Westerndstrasse was surrounded by new high‐rise office buildings, and the [Soviets] were afraid that observers might see what they were doing. Gumenyuk’s team pitched a large tent over the spot where the remains of Hitler and the Goebbels’ family had been buried to prevent observation.
At first, the [Soviet] team, following a set of secret instructions, couldn’t find anything. Then they realized that they had counted forty‐five meters instead of forty‐five paces from a specific coordinate. They put the dirt back, moved the tent, and tried again.
Eventually, they located the wooden boxes that had been buried twenty‐five years earlier. Unfortunately, most of the wood had completely disintegrated. The remains of all the buried [Fascists] and even the dogs were jumbled together in what the [Soviets] called a “jellied mass,” mixed with the soil.
“The remains had been lying for a long time in the ground, and I'm generally a squeamish person, so I took rubber gloves, boots, and a special suit of chemical protection,” Gumenyuk said in a 2010 interview. “I thought the smell would be terrible, and even took the mask. But when they began to dig, nothing like that happened. Sometimes when digging in the garden, you find a bone—it was the same thing here. We shifted the bones and put the ground back.”⁷
Posing as fishermen, Gumenyuk and his team drove to an isolated spot in a nearby forest. There they built two fires, one to cook some soup and another to incinerate the mortal remains of Adolf Hitler. As occurred nearly twenty‐five years earlier, the [Soviets] poured gasoline on the bones they had found and then lit them on fire. They waited patiently until only ashes were left, then ground everything into a pile of dust. They scooped up the ashes and placed them in a rucksack.
The [Soviets] then drove to a secret location—revealed later to be the Biederitz River, a tributary of the Ehle just west of the village of Biederitz⁸—and dumped the ashes into the rushing water.
The dénouement of Hitler’s reign took only twenty seconds. “It was over in no time at all,” Gumenyuk said. “I opened up the rucksack, the wind caught the ashes up in a little brown cloud, and in a second they were gone.”⁹
Today, all that physically remains of the anticommunist dictator are his teeth, now stored stored in the Russian national archives.
Caroline Sharples’s The Death of Nazism? Investigating Perpetrator Remains and Survival Rumours in Post‐war Germany takes a slightly closer look at how the surviving Fascists reacted to their Chancellor’s demise:
It was at 10.30pm on Tuesday, 1 May 1945, following three solemn drum rolls, that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz took to the airwaves of North German radio to make a crucial announcement: “German men and women, soldiers of the armed forces: our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. In the deepest sorrow and respect, the German people bow”.¹² Reflecting on the manner of Hitler’s death, Dönitz added:
At an early date, he had recognised the frightful danger of Bolshevism and dedicated his existence to this struggle. At the end of his struggle, of his unswerving straight road of life, stands his hero's death in the capital of the German Reich. His life has been one single service for Germany.¹³
Further reports within the German press the following day elaborated on the glorious nature of the Führer’s last stand — and applied a similar rhetoric of immortality to that previously assigned to those killed in the Munich Putsch. The Hamburger Zeitung, for example, insisted:
We know that he must have perished while fighting bitterly in the Reich Chancellery. We know that the enemy will be able to find a body in the ruins caused by countless artillery shells and countless flame throwers, and that they may say that it is the Führer’s body, but we will not believe it… What is mortal of him has perished, has passed away but he has fulfilled his most beautiful oath [to give his life to his people, that is to say, the bourgeoisie]… He began by fighting for his people, and he ended that way. A life of battle.¹⁴
Similarly, a message broadcast to troops stationed in the Netherlands proclaimed:
Adolf Hitler, you are not dead, you live on within us. The ideals which you gave us cannot be extinguished… Beneath the ruins of a devastated Berlin, you remain the fountain of all Germans.¹⁵
In terms of the final pieces of [Fascist] propaganda, then, the cult of the Führer remained very much alive. His memory and, in particular, the seemingly dramatic nature of his demise — courageously resisting the Soviet advance into Berlin — served as a last ditch appeal to the German people to keep on fighting.
I must admit that there was a grain of truth in their propaganda: the Fascist ideals did not perish with the death of their leader. While Fascism might have lost its institutional status, most of the remaining Axis personnel survived under antisocialist régimes, and the same capitalist system that gave rise to them and which they fought so hard to protect is still blighting the earth…
…for now.
As for my own opinion on Adolf Schicklgruber’s death: no comment.
Click here for other events that happened today (April 30).
1925: The NSDAP and Ernst Röhm’s SA organization (also known as Frontbann at this time) formally split.
1934: Bernhard Rust became the Third Reich’s Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichserziehungsminister).
1937: The Spanish Nationalist battleship España sank after hitting a mine off Cape Penas near Santander during the blockade of Bilbao.
1938: The Imperialists captured the Chinese city of Xuzhou, and the Kriegsmarine launched Wilhelm Bauer at the Howaldtswerke shipyard in Kiel.
1939: The Third Reich passed laws in preparation to move Jewish families into buildings reserved for Jewish residences, and Kurt Fricke became the Kriegsmarine liaison to the Luftwaffe.
1940: The Fascists established the first guarded Jewish ghetto at Łódź, Poland (and later sealed it off with 230,000 Jews inside). Additionally, the Fascist ‘Barfile’ naval infantry battalion landed on Cephalonia, Greece, and the German 196th Division arrived at Dombås, Norway on foot as their vehicles had been rendered useless after encountering blown bridges; their initial attacks were held off by the British 15th Brigade; despite causing heavy casualties to the Fascists, the British withdrew their defensive line at dusk by train toward Åndalsnes.
1941: As Georgios Tsolakoglou became the Prime Minister of the Axis’s collaborationist régime in Greece, Berlin set the launch date of Operation Barbarossa to June 22, 1941, and Axis aircraft bombed Malta; a bomb passed through Allied cruiser HMS Gloucester without detonating. Friedrich Paulus gave Erwin Rommel the authorization to begin a ground assault on Tobruk, Libya, which was launched that evening after an entire day of artillery shelling at Ras el Madauar near Tobruk. Aaxis tanks broke through the defensive perimeter, and infantry overran several Australian positions, penetrating as far as three kilometers.
1942: Adolf Schicklgruber and Benito Mussolini met at Berchtesgaden in southern Germany to discuss Mediterranean strategy; priority was given to capturing the Suez Canal and neutralizing Malta. Axis Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano noted that Schicklgruber appeared to be pretty tired. As well, Axis bombers attacked Norwich, England for the twoth consecutive day, and the Axis captured Lashio Airfield, Burma while Friedrich Paulus began planning for Operation Fridericus, an offensive south of Kharkov, Ukraine, setting the operation’s launch date for May 18, 1942.
1943: The Axis commenced the construction for the Bergen‐Belsen Concentration Camp in northwestern Germany.
1944: The Axis forces in the Truk lagoon (Chuuk) experienced an Allied raid.
1945: As Ferdinand Schörner became the Wehrmacht’s Commander‐in‐Chief, Axis police chief Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank announced over radio that any attempt to rise up by the citizens of Prague in the puppet state of Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia would be wiped out violently. Meanwhile, SS diehards in the Kroll Opera House assaulted Soviet infantry—who were only eight hundred metres from the Reichstag—from the rear, but the Axis lost the opera house after several hours of bitter hand‐to‐hand(!) fighting. The Axis also lost Walter Schreiber to Soviet captors, Finnmark and München to the Western Allies, twenty thousand prisoners of war from Sandbostel, one hundred thousand prisoners of war from Moosburg, the transport Kunikawa Maru at Borneo, Miho Maru in the Yellow Sea, a beachhead on the west bank of the Pegu River at Pegu, and Oil Refinery № 6 at Toshien District. Commissioner of the Axis occupation in the Netherlands, Arthur Seyß‐Inquart, officially agreed that Allied aircraft delivering food and other supplies to Dutch civilians would not be harassed by Axis defensive fire. Perhaps the only good news for the Axis was that its submarine U‐286 sank the frigate HMS Goodall in the Barents Sea with heavy loss of life returning from escorting a Soviet convoy. HMS Goodall became the last ship sunken in the conflict against the Third Reich.
·6 months ago
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