Last 24 Hours of Hitler's Life

It’s late in April 1945. Adolf Hitler is in the throes of a nervous breakdown. It’s the end for him and he knows it. He calls for one of his secretaries, Gertrud “Traudl” Junge, and tells her to take down his last will and testament. Tearfully, she listens and writes down his insane words. His take on things: all this bloodshed is not my fault. The four other witnesses in that room, as well as Hitler, will be dead within 24 hours. We’ll discuss in-depth later about that deranged will and testament, which encapsulates just how insane he was. Hitler had known for a long time before that, maybe since 1943, that the war was lost, but he still clung on to the hope that there might be peace negotiations. Then at the beginning of 1945, his enemies encroached farther and farther towards Berlin.

The Soviet Red Army was intent on crushing Germany. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, whom Hitler had the nerve to call a barbarian, knew victory was close. In January alone, 450,000 Germans died, and in the three months that followed, 280,000 died. This was more German casualties than from 1942-1943, which just shows you how stubborn the Nazis were in not accepting defeat. In February, Hitler’s commander in Hungary watched as his men fell into a state of utter gloom. In his report, he wrote, “Amid all these stresses and strains, no improvement in morale or performance is visible. The numerical superiority of the enemy, combined with the knowledge that the battle is now being fought on German soil, has proved very demoralizing for the men.” German people ran from their homes as the Soviets moved in. One woman wrote, “The world is a very lonely place without family, friends, or even the familiarity of a home.” In April, a Russian soldier wrote to his beloved back home, saying, “At first the fascists fought back fiercely, but they could not endure this hell…Everything is bound to finish soon.”

On April 16th, Soviet forces had finally invaded Berlin. Inhabitants heard the gunfire not too far off in the distance. Some people ran to the shops to get what remained of the food. One of them, Ruth-Andreas Friedrich, poetically wrote, “Before us lies the endless city, black in the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And we are afraid.” The Nazis still relentlessly kept on killing. They emptied jails and shot those who’d resided there. German firing squads killed scores of people deemed not a supporter of the regime. POWs and concentration camp prisoners were lined up and massacred. The order, given by Hitler, was to keep going. But Berlin was doomed, with now even the Hitler Youth fighting toe-to-toe with the enemy. One woman explained what she saw, saying there were “young babyfaces peeping out beneath oversized steel helmets” and that it was “frightening to hear their high-pitched voices.” She said this went against human nature, and nothing could be better accredited to the madness of war.

You might wonder why so many people fought on in Germany. The historian Max Hastings wrote in his book “Inferno” that the Germans were well aware of the fact they would be given no mercy from the Red Army. It was a matter of fighting back or being murdered. The Russians had been on the wrong end of so much savagery themselves. They weren’t in the mood for sparing the enemy, which as they saw it, was all of Germany. Still, the atrocities committed on German civilians can’t be ignored. One woman starkly summed it up, saying, “It can’t be me this is happening to, so I’m expelling it all from me.” It was during these last few days of barbarity that Hitler sat in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery.

After hearing of the death of US President Roosevelt on April 12, he’d actually held out some hope that the new president, Harry Truman, would sign a peace treaty. That didn’t happen, of course. Hitler suffered a breakdown on April 22 when he heard that his orders for a counterattack hadn’t been followed through. He screamed and cursed the people he said had betrayed him. It was on this day that Hitler finally admitted to himself that all was lost. This was two days after his birthday, which you can understand didn’t involve much celebration. He did, however, make his last public appearance to congratulate some of the Hitler Youths who were ready to die for him. He was in such a state, he had to keep one of his shaking hands clasped behind his back.

He then went back into the bunker, knowing his life would soon be over. It was there that he would be married to his mistress Eva Braun. We know that in the last day or two one of the many things that occupied her mind was hiding her precious jewelry. In her last letter to her friend Herta Ostermayr, she wrote, “On no account must Heise’s bills be found…What should I say to you. I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible anymore to believe in God.” Many of Hitler’s inner circle made their plans to escape Berlin. Second in command, Hermann Goering, was one of them. Goering had told Hitler on his birthday that he had business to take care of and he needed to go over to Southern Germany. That much was true.

He was trying to ship his stolen art treasures out of Berlin, so like Braun, he was worried about losing things of monetary value. Not long after it would get back to Hitler that Goering had spoken to the enemy. This infuriated Hitler, and it would make Goering a prominent feature in his will. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and the Nazi Party Chancellery, was one of the inner circles to stay behind in the bunker. He’d later flee after seeing the end of his leader, but he’d be dead soon enough, too. Then there was the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who was also there those last few days. He would be made Chancellor of Germany, but in the end, he, his wife and six kids would all be lost in that bunker.

As Berliners were suffering unimaginable torments that late April, Goebbels made one final announcement. He said, “I call on you to fight for your city. Fight with everything you have got, for the sake of your wives and your children, your mothers and your parents. Your arms are defending everything we have ever held dear, and all the generations that will come after us. Be proud and courageous! Be inventive and cunning!” How both he and Hitler could still ask people to fight in the face of certain loss was testament to their egoism and insanity. Then on April 27, Hitler got word that another of his closest had betrayed him. He heard through a BBC report that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had tried to negotiate a surrender with the enemy. Hitler raged like he’d never raged before. To him, that meant one thing: treason.

Hitler ordered the arrest of Himmler, after which Himmler went into hiding. He too, didn’t survive many more days. It was true, though, what Hitler had heard. Himmler had attempted to negotiate peace. Hitler’s world was falling apart, but he still decided there was still time to get married. At the stroke of midnight on April 28, Hitler and Eva Braun tied the knot. Both Goebbels and Bormann were there at the ceremony, but as you can imagine, with the Red Army just around the corner, it wasn’t the merriest of affairs. If there was any kind of event, it only involved having a wedding breakfast with booze, lots of booze. At some point, Braun signed off on the marriage certificate. She wrote Eva B, only to cross out the B and then write Hitler. She was now proudly Eva Hitler, but she wouldn’t get much time to enjoy her marriage. Hitler’s barber, August Wollenhaupt, would usually trim his mustache at around 11 am. This was also usually the time that his valet Heinz Linge would visit him each morning. Linge would act as a kind of referee, saying the German for, “On your marks” while holding a stopwatch. After that, Hitler would get ready as quickly as possible as if playing a child’s game.

Then Linge would pass Hitler his spectacles and the morning newspapers. On one of the days close to his death, Hitler wasn’t exactly in a great mood. He looked at Linge seriously and said, “You must never allow my corpse to fall into the hands of the Russians. They would make a spectacle in Moscow out of my body and put it in waxworks.” Linge also gave Hitler some cocaine drops for his painful right eye. He also handed him some pills for a flatulence problem. Hitler had many health problems close to the end, for which he took something like 28 different medications. In fact, he was starting to look like a man on the verge of dying from natural causes. A Hitler Youth who later escaped the bunker, described what the Fuhrer looked like during those final days. He said: “He was like a ghost - he didn't seem to see me or anyone. He just stared ahead, lost in thought.

At that moment, the bunker was shaken by a strong tremor as a bomb hit. Dirt and mortar trickled down on us, but he made no attempt to brush it off. He looked so much unhealthier than 10 days earlier at his birthday reception when I had first met him. It looked like he was suffering from jaundice. His face was sallow.” It was around this time that Hitler heard the news about the death of the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. He’d been summarily executed, which could only mean one thing to Hitler. He too, he knew, would very likely suffer a similar fate. Even worse, he heard that Mussolini, along with his dead mistress, had been dumped like dead cattle in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. There, crowds spat at the bodies before hanging them up by meat hooks. Hitler then heard that the Dachau Concentration Camp had fallen into the hands of the Americans. He very likely heard what had happened there.

The US soldiers had been so appalled at what they saw, that they gave no quarter to the German soldiers they captured. Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks later said the smell of death was “overpowering.” What those soldiers witnessed was human cruelty on another level. It may never be known what happened on that day. Some reports tell US soldiers massacred 520 Germans, but other reports say the number was as low as 50. After an investigation, it was ruled that while international law had been breached, “in the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken.” Hitler, on hearing the news in his bunker, likely thought about this violent retribution while the image of the dead Mussolini and his mistress was still in his mind. Also, in the distance, he knew the Soviet army was laying waste to his city. It was around this time that Hitler called on that secretary, Traudl Junge. She would die an old woman in 2002, and always said she wasn’t aware of the depth of Nazi atrocities.

She also admitted she loved her dear leader, something in later life that gave her cause to feel guilty. She once said, “I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side, almost until the bitter end. It wasn't what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things.” She said Hitler had made it clear to everyone in that bunker that the one thing that he could not allow was his body to fall into the hands of the encroaching Soviets. As for the writing of his will, Junge had woken up from her usual nap around 11 pm. After that, she went to see Hitler as she would usually drink tea with him at that time. Hitler’s vegetarian cook, Fraulein Constanze Manzialy, also attended the tea drinking sessions.

But that night when she knocked on his door, something was different. Hitler said to her, “Have you had a nice little rest, child?” She replied, “Yes, I have slept a little.” Hitler said, “Come along, I want to dictate something.” One thing he told her was that his body was to be cremated. He said he wanted his art collection to go to a gallery in the town of Linz, which he called his hometown. As for the little things, of perhaps mere sentimental value, or what he called items “for the maintenance of a modest simple life”, they should go to relatives and his “faithful workers.” Anything else of value he said should go to the National Socialist German Workers Party. Here’s a snippet from his testament, word for word: “Since I did not think I should take the responsibility of entering into marriage during the years of combat, I have decided now before termination of life on this Earth, to marry the woman who, after many years of true friendship, entered voluntarily into this already almost besieged city, to share my fate.

She goes to death with me as my wife, according to her own desire.” He then went for a bit, talking about how he’d given his life to the service of his country, saying he had not intended to go to war in 1939. He said of the reason for the war, “It was desired and provoked entirely by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or worked in the Jewish interest.” He had the gall to add, “The responsibility of the outbreak of this war cannot rest on me.” He even said history won’t blame him for the bloodbath of the war but will blame “international Jewry and its assistants.” The British, he said, were offered a solution to what he called the Polish-German problem, but “responsible circles in English politics wanted war.” He then called out Himmler and Goering as traitors and wrote down a list of names who should fulfill certain positions. His final words: “Above all, I obligate the leadership of the nation and its followers to the most minute observation of the racial laws and to pitiless resistance against the universal poisoner of all people, international Judaism. Given at Berlin, 29 April, 1945, 4 am. Adolf Hitler” There were four witness names: Goebbels, Bormann, Burgdorf and Krebs.

All four would soon be dead. Sometime later, while Hitler's SS bodyguards were destroying all the documents around the bunker, doctors followed orders and poisoned his much-loved Alsatian dog, Blondi. Braun's spaniel was also forced into the afterlife. It was around this time, someone heard Braun say, “I would rather die here. I do not want to escape.” A lot of silent hand-shaking took place as Hitler looked for the last time in the eyes of the people that had supported him. It seems that Braun’s last words were to the secretary, Junge, who accepted the gift of a coat. With it, she heard the words, “Take my fur coat as a memory. I always like well-dressed women.” It was Goebbels that announced the death of Hitler, stating in a message that the time of death was 3:30 p.m., April 30.

Hitler and Braun were subsequently cremated in the garden of the Reich Chancellery as Soviet artillery could be heard close by. Goebbels and Bormann soaked the bodies in petrol and lit them, after which they gave the Nazi salute. The fighting didn’t just stop after that. As an observer of this extra bloodshed, a British Lieutenant named David Fraser, remarked, “There is still too much vile cruelty in the world for us to be able to say with true satisfaction, ‘Good is victorious.” Let’s hope nothing like it ever happens again.