Seventy-nine years ago today, Adolf Hitler, aware of the imminent defeat of Germany’s armed forces, and aware of the ignominious end to Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, on May 28th, died by suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin. He had just turned 56 on April 20. His body, along with that of Eva Braun, his bride of one day, was quickly brought up to the Reich Chancellery courtyard, doused with gasoline and burned. Their remains were buried in a shallow crater in the courtyard later that evening. As Hitler’s biographer, Volker Ulrich, concludes: “There was hardly anything left of the man who at the height of his career had fancied himself the ruler of the world.”
Eight days later Germany surrendered.
It is safe to say that, but for Hitler, upwards of 50 million people might not have met an untimely end in the 12 years that Hitler’s Third Reich existed. “Nor,” as William Shirer wrote the day after Hitler’s death, “will the world he poisoned be purified for a long time.”
Gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the Hitler phenomena: how a sociopath could acquire complete control over the levers of power in the German Government and military, and how he reaped the uncritical adulation of millions of otherwise ordinary citizens of one of the most advanced and cultured societies in the world, leading them on a path of utter destruction. In his newly published book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, author Timothy Ryback is at pains to point out that Hitler’s ascent to power was achieved entirely by peaceful means—he was duly appointed Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg, and granted plenary power by the German Reichstag. His enablers (such as Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen) ultimately failed to take seriously his warnings, outlined in his book Mein Kampf, and believed they could control him.
I continue to believe the best, most succinct, description of this phenomena is that provided by French historian François Kersaudy (which I quote in the source notes to From Day to Day). Here it is again:
“Few destinies can be as amazing as that of the homeless, unemployed painter from Vienna who, in less than two decades, had made himself the absolute master of Germany. He had certainly been powerfully helped by the rancours [sic] of defeat, the fear of communism, a devastating economic crisis, the near-sightedness of the big German industrialists and the ineptitude of his political rivals. Yet none of the above would suffice to explain this solitary, uncultured and unbalanced Austrian’s Hitler meteoric rise to power, unless one were to take into account his fanatical singleness of purpose, high degree of opportunism, and complete lack of scruples, added to an astonishing personal magnetism, undeniable talents both as an actor and as a stage manager, and of course an unrivalled ability to browbeat and paralyse [sic] through an expertly balanced combination of secrecy, surprise, verbal abuse and concentrated violence.”
I read the foregoing as both a description of what once was, and as a warning of what can be yet again.
