With all his mad dreams of a racially pure Third Reich in ruins, Hitler decided to take
his own life. That disappointed a lot of people who wanted the chance to kill him themselves.
For months, Adolph Hitler he had been increasingly sequestered underground in his Führerbunker as the
Allies rained fire down upon Berlin. His armies were broken, his orders were being disregarded
by his own generals, and the communists were coming for the capital and for him.
By the end of April 1945, news had reached the Führer of the brutal killing of his ally,
Benito Mussolini. With that example before him and with his war machine on its last quivering legs,
he and his longtime companion Eva Braun died in a suicide pact and, per his will,
were burned immediately after their deaths. When the Russians took custody of Berlin shortly after,
they moved his remains several times before pulverizing and scattering them,
denying any lingering admirers of Hitler a grave to memorialize.
It was an inglorious end for the 20th century's most prominent face of state evil. It was also
a death free from the mob violence and dark catharsis of Mussolini's execution,
or the sense of justice that came with the Nuremberg trials. But… what if things had
gone differently? What if Hitler had been put on trial? Or what if the Soviet army had got their
hands on him? Here's how history might have played out differently if Hitler had been captured alive.
Had Winston Churchill gotten his wish, Hitler's reprieve from death
would have been brief, to say the least. Hitler's crimes were self-evident by 1945,
and the British leader, for one, was not inclined to show him mercy. Churchill
made plain his antipathy for Hitler and Nazism years before World War II began.
"Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder."
His hatred for Hitler by mid-war was such that the prime minister already had a vivid
and ruthless plan in mind for how to dispose of him. He declared in one cabinet meeting in 1942:
"If Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death."
He recommended the electric chair as
an appropriate method for a man he declared a "gangster."
Churchill was still in favor of summary execution by 1945,
dismissing any potential trial of Hitler or any other Nazi leader as a farce. But
he faced opposition from his fellow Allied leaders. As one diplomatic exchange put it:
"There must be no executions without trial otherwise the
world would say we were afraid to try them."
The remaining Nazi leadership faced justice before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,
and contrary to Churchill's fantasies, it is likely Hitler would have been tried there
had he been captured. Given the sentences handed down to many top brass at Nuremberg,
it's almost certain Hitler would have been executed in the end — by hanging, not the chair.
In some eyes, the justice of the Nuremberg trials was tainted by the involvement of the
Soviet Union. There were several ironies to Soviet involvement in
prosecuting the Nazis for war crimes — like their one-time alliance with Nazi Germany,
the involvement at Nuremberg of prosecutors who were party to Russian show trials,
and the Soviet attempt to pin the Katyn Massacre on Germany.
In fact, it was Joseph Stalin who was instrumental in establishing a postwar legal framework at all.
Putting Nazi leadership on trial was, in his mind, a valuable piece of political
theater that would bolster the Soviet Union's internal unity and international prestige. But
Stalin envisaged something more akin to his show trials, something that he could puppet from afar.
Might securing the top Nazi have let Stalin shape the trials more to his liking? The
Russian position on the Eastern front by 1945 gave him significant leverage at the
Yalta Conference. Had Soviet troops taken Adolf Hitler alive, Stalin would have had
another valuable bargaining chip. He might have won some concessions on the character of the
tribunal as the price for extraditing Hitler for a joint Allied prosecution. Denied that,
he may have had Hitler tried in Russia and used Hitler's own words as evidence,
making the trial part of the ideological battle between capitalism and communism.
One refrain of the defense sounded constantly throughout the Nuremberg trials:
The defendants were "just following orders." Expressed in so many words, it was the Nazi
leadership's attempt to pass the buck onto the one man who could not stand before the
International Military Tribunal. The defendants claimed that it was Adolf Hitler who set policy,
and his followers were unaware of the full and horrific consequences of that policy.
"I did not know anything that took place,
or the methods that were used, in the concentration camps later."
Given the intense professions of loyalty to Hitler by some of the Nuremberg defendants,
you still have to wonder if they would have tried to pin the blame on him had he been
alive. But Hitler would not have been able to lay the blame on a higher authority. He could
hardly plead ignorance either; besides his status as the leader of Germany,
there was ample evidence of Nazi atrocities. Many of those who were tried at Nuremberg didn't even
attempt to claim they hadn't done horrible things, only that they weren't responsible for them.
Denied that defense, Hitler might have used a number of other arguments put
forward during Nuremberg. He might have claimed the charges amounted to post ex
facto law. He could have also claimed that war crime charges could only be leveled at states,
not individuals. Given that the tribunal rejected these defenses without Hitler,
it's a safe bet they wouldn't have saved him from the noose.
"He is determined that the Russians mustn't get hold of his body."
Had Russian soldiers been able to take Adolf Hitler alive, there is the possibility that he
never would have lived to see Nuremberg. Having long been subjected to some of the most brutal
conditions of the entire war at the hands of the Nazis, the behavior of the Red Army in
Berlin at the end of World War II is infamous for its violence. In the words of one soldier:
"We are taking revenge for everything, and our revenge is just. Fire for fire,
blood for blood, death for death."
The reputation of the Red Army was severe enough that the likes of Hermann Göring sought
to surrender to the Western Allies rather than face the Soviets. While some Nazis,
such as Hans Fritzsche, were taken prisoner by Russian forces and later extradited to Nuremberg,
the sight of the supreme leader of the Nazis may have been too much for the rank and file. A mad
soldier or an embittered officer might have had Hitler killed there in Berlin,
not unlike Benito Mussolini's death at the hands of partisans at the Italian border.
Could Adolf Hitler have lived to see conviction and execution at Nuremberg,
even if he were captured? His health had collapsed by 1945,
and theories have run rampant ever since about the state of his mind and body in his final
months. It's long been thought that Hitler had Parkinson's disease. It's probable that he did,
though the tremors seen in his hand in newsreels could also be explained as withdrawal symptoms;
the opiates he was regularly injected with fell into short supply by the war's end.
A military doctor who examined Hitler in his last days, Ernst-Günther Schenck,
was shocked by Hitler's hunched, shriveled appearance when he examined him. He later said:
"His eyes, glaring at me painfully, were blood-shot,
and the drooping black sacs under the eyes betrayed fatigue and sleeplessness. [...] I
was looking at the eyes of death. We all were doomed. I was looking into the eye of death."
In such a physically weakened state, Hitler would have been ill-prepared to weather the
harsh conditions of captivity at Soviet hands. And according to Schenck, one genuine ailment
Hitler suffered from was arteriosclerotic heart disease. Illness, imprisonment,
and the loss of the war in combination might have done him in before he could be put on trial.