Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker in Berlin.
His wife Eva committed suicide with him by ingesting cyanide. That afternoon, in accordance
with Hitler's prior instructions, their remains were carried up the stairs through the bunker's
emergency exit, doused in petrol, and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside
the bunker. Records in the Soviet archives show that their burnt remains were recovered
and interred in successive locations until 1970, when they were again exhumed, cremated,
and the ashes scattered. Accounts differ as to the cause of death;
one states that he died by poison only and another that he died by a self-inflicted gunshot
while biting down on a cyanide capsule. Contemporary historians have rejected these accounts as
being either Soviet propaganda or an attempted compromise in order to reconcile the different
conclusions. One eye-witness recorded that the body showed signs of having been shot
through the mouth, but this has been proven unlikely. There is also controversy regarding
the authenticity of skull and jaw fragments which were recovered. In 2009, DNA tests were
performed on a skull Soviet officials had long believed to be Hitler's. According to
the American researchers, the tests revealed that the skull was actually that of a woman
less than 40 years old. The jaw fragments which had been recovered were not tested by
the American researchers.
Preceding events
By early 1945, Germany's military situation was on the verge of total collapse. Poland
had fallen to the advancing Soviet forces, who were preparing to cross the Oder between
Küstrin and Frankfurt with the objective of capturing Berlin, 82 kilometres to the
west. German forces had recently lost to the Allies in the Ardennes Offensive, with British
and Canadian forces crossing the Rhine into the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr.
American forces in the south had captured Lorraine and were advancing towards Mainz,
Mannheim, and the Rhine. In Italy, German forces were withdrawing north, as they were
pressed by the American and Commonwealth forces as part of the Spring Offensive to advance
across the Po and into the foothills of the Alps. In parallel to the military actions,
the Allies had met at Yalta between 4–11 February to discuss the conclusion of the
war in Europe. Hitler, presiding over a rapidly disintegrating
Third Reich, retreated to his Führerbunker in Berlin on 16 January 1945. To the Nazi
leadership, it was clear that the battle for Berlin would be the final battle of the war.
Some 325,000 soldiers of Germany's Army Group B were surrounded and captured on 18 April,
leaving the path open for American forces to reach Berlin. By 11 April the Americans
crossed the Elbe, 100 kilometres to the west of the city. Meanwhile, on 16 April, Soviet
forces to the east crossed the Oder and commenced the battle for the Seelow Heights, the last
major defensive line protecting Berlin on that side. By 19 April the Germans were in
full retreat from Seelow Heights, leaving no front line. Berlin was bombarded by Soviet
artillery for the first time on 20 April. By the evening of 21 April, Red Army tanks
reached the outskirts of the city.
At the afternoon situation conference on 22 April, Hitler suffered a total nervous collapse
when he was informed that the orders he had issued the previous day for SS-General Felix
Steiner's Army Detachment Steiner to move to the rescue of Berlin had not been obeyed.
Hitler launched a tirade against the treachery and incompetence of his commanders, culminating
in a declaration—for the first time—that the war was lost. Hitler announced that he
would stay in Berlin until the end, and then shoot himself. Later that day he asked SS
physician Dr. Werner Haase about the most reliable method of suicide. Haase suggested
the "pistol-and-poison method" of combining a dose of cyanide with a gunshot to the head.
When Field Marshal and head of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring learned about this, he sent
a telegram to Hitler asking for permission to take over the leadership of the Reich in
accordance with Hitler's 1941 decree naming Göring his successor. Hitler's influential
secretary, Martin Bormann, convinced Hitler that Göring was threatening a coup. In response,
Hitler informed Göring that he would be executed unless he resigned all of his posts. Later
that day, he sacked Göring from all of his offices and ordered his arrest.
By 27 April, Berlin was cut off from the rest of Germany. Secure radio communications with
defending units had been lost; the command staff in the bunker had to depend on telephone
lines for passing instructions and orders and on public radio for news and information.
On 28 April, a BBC report originating from Reuters was picked up; a copy of the message
was given to Hitler. The report stated that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had offered
to surrender to the western Allies; the offer had been declined. Himmler had implied to
the Allies that he had the authority to negotiate a surrender; Hitler considered this treason.
During the afternoon his anger and bitterness escalated into a rage against Himmler. Hitler
ordered Himmler's arrest and had Hermann Fegelein shot.
By this time, the Red Army had advanced to the Potsdamerplatz, and all indications were
that they were preparing to storm the Chancellery. This report, combined with Himmler's treachery,
prompted Hitler to make the last decisions of his life. After midnight on 29 April, Hitler
married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in a map room within the Führerbunker. Afterwards
Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife. Hitler then took secretary Traudl
Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. He signed these documents
at 04:00 and then retired to bed. During the course of 29 April, Hitler learned
of the death of his ally, Benito Mussolini, who had been executed by Italian partisans.
Mussolini's body and that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been strung up by their
heels. The bodies were later cut down and thrown in the gutter, where vengeful Italians
reviled them. It is probable that these events strengthened Hitler's resolve not to allow
himself or his wife to be made "a spectacle of", as he had earlier recorded in his Testament.
That afternoon, Hitler expressed doubts about the cyanide capsules he had received through
Himmler's SS. To verify the capsules' potency, Hitler ordered Dr. Werner Haase to test one
on his dog, Blondi, and the animal died as a result.
Suicide
Hitler and Braun lived together as husband and wife in the bunker for fewer than 40 hours.
By 01:00 on 30 April General Wilhelm Keitel reported that all forces which Hitler had
been depending on to come to the rescue of Berlin had either been encircled or forced
onto the defensive. Late in the morning of 30 April, with the Soviets less than 500 metres
from the bunker, Hitler had a meeting with General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the
Berlin Defence Area, who told him that the garrison would probably run out of ammunition
that night and that the fighting in Berlin would inevitably come to an end within the
next 24 hours. Weidling asked Hitler for permission for a breakout, a request he had made unsuccessfully
before. Hitler did not answer, and Weidling went back to his headquarters in the Bendlerblock.
At about 13:00 he received Hitler's permission to try a breakout that night. Hitler, two
secretaries, and his personal cook then had lunch, after which Hitler and Braun said their
personal farewells to members of the Führerbunker staff and fellow occupants, including Bormann,
Joseph Goebbels and his family, the secretaries, and several military officers. At around 14:30
Adolf and Eva Hitler went into Hitler's personal study.
Several witnesses later reported hearing a loud gunshot at around 15:30. After waiting
a few minutes, Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge, with Bormann at his side, opened the study
door. Linge later stated he immediately noted a scent of burnt almonds, a common observation
made in the presence of prussic acid, the aqueous form of hydrogen cyanide. Hitler's
adjutant, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, entered the study and found the lifeless bodies
on the sofa. Eva, with her legs drawn up, was to Hitler's left and slumped away from
him. Günsche stated that Hitler "... sat ... sunken over, with blood dripping out of his
right temple. He had shot himself with his own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65". The gun lay
at his feet and according to SS-Oberscharführer Rochus Misch, Hitler's head was lying on the
table in front of him. Blood dripping from Hitler's right temple and chin had made a
large stain on the right arm of the sofa and was pooling on the carpet. According to Linge,
Eva's body had no visible physical wounds, and her face showed how she had died—cyanide
poisoning. Günsche and Mohnke stated "unequivocally" that all outsiders and those performing duties
and work in the bunker "did not have any access" to Hitler's private living quarters during
the time of death.
Günsche left the study and announced that the Führer was dead. The two bodies were
carried up the stairs to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit to the
garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were doused with petrol. An eye-witness,
Rochus Misch, reported someone shouting 'Hurry upstairs, they're burning the boss!' After
the first attempts to ignite the petrol did not work, Linge went back inside the bunker
and returned with a thick roll of papers. Bormann lit the papers and threw the torch
onto the bodies. As the two corpses caught fire, a small group, including Bormann, Günsche,
Linge, Goebbels, Peter Högl, Ewald Lindloff, and Hans Reisser, raised their arms in salute
as they stood just inside the bunker doorway. At around 16:15, Linge ordered SS-Untersturmführer
Heinz Krüger and SS-Oberscharführer Werner Schwiedel to roll up the rug in Hitler's study
to burn it. The two men removed the blood-stained rug, carried it up the stairs and outside
to the Chancellery garden. There the rug was placed on the ground and burned.
On and off during the afternoon, the Soviets shelled the area in and around the Reich Chancellery.
SS guards brought over additional cans of petrol to further burn the corpses. Linge
later noted the fire did not completely destroy the remains, as the corpses were being burned
in the open, where the distribution of heat varies. The burning of the corpses lasted
from 16:00 to 18:30. The remains were covered up in a shallow bomb crater at around 18:30
by Lindloff and Reisser. Aftermath
The first inkling to the outside world that Hitler was dead came from the Germans themselves.
On 1 May the radio station Reichssender Hamburg interrupted their normal program to announce
that an important broadcast would soon be made. After dramatic funereal music by Wagner
and Bruckner, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz announced that Hitler was dead. Dönitz called upon
the German people to mourn their Führer, who died a hero defending the capital of the
Reich. Hoping to save the army and the nation by negotiating a partial surrender to the
British and Americans, Dönitz authorized a fighting withdrawal to the west. His tactic
was somewhat successful: it enabled about 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid capture
by the Soviets, but it came at a high cost in bloodshed, as troops continued to fight
until 8 May. On the morning of 1 May, thirteen hours after
the event, Stalin was informed of Hitler's suicide. General Hans Krebs had given this
information to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov when they met at 04:00 on 1 May, when the
Germans attempted to negotiate acceptable surrender terms. Stalin demanded unconditional
surrender and asked for confirmation that Hitler was dead. He wanted Hitler's corpse
found. In the early morning hours of 2 May, the Soviets captured the Reich Chancellery.
Down in the Führerbunker, General Krebs and General Burgdorf committed suicide by gunshot
to the head. Later on 2 May, the remains of Hitler, Braun,
and two dogs were discovered in a shell crater by a unit of the Red Army intelligence agency
SMERSH tasked with finding Hitler's body. Stalin was still wary about believing his
old nemesis was dead, and restricted the information that was publicly released. The remains of
Hitler and Braun were repeatedly buried and exhumed by SMERSH during the unit's relocation
from Berlin to a new facility in Magdeburg. The bodies, along with the charred remains
of propaganda minister Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their six children, were buried
in an unmarked grave beneath a paved section of the front courtyard. The location was kept
secret.
Different versions of Hitler's fate were presented by the Soviet Union according to its political
desires. In the years immediately following 1945, the Soviets maintained Hitler was not
dead, but had fled and was being shielded by the former western allies. This worked
for a time to create doubt among western authorities. The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg,
Thomas J. Dodd, said: "No one can say he is dead." When President Harry S. Truman asked
Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 whether or not Hitler was dead, Stalin
replied bluntly, "No". But by 11 May 1945, the Soviets had already confirmed through
Hitler's dentist, Hugo Blaschke, and his dental technician that the dental remains found were
Hitler's and Braun's. In November 1945, Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in
the British sector of Berlin, had their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate the matter to
counter the Soviet claims. His findings were written in a report and published in book
form in 1947. In 1969, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymensky's
book on the death of Hitler was published in the West. It included the SMERSH autopsy
report, but because of the earlier disinformation attempts, western historians thought it untrustworthy.
In 1970, the SMERSH facility, by then controlled by the KGB, was scheduled to be handed over
to the East German government. Fearing that a known Hitler burial site might become a
Neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains
that had been buried in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. A Soviet KGB team was given detailed
burial charts. On 4 April 1970 they secretly exhumed five wooden boxes containing the remains
of "10 or 11 bodies ... in an advanced state of decay". The remains were thoroughly burned
and crushed, after which the ashes were thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the
nearby Elbe. According to Ian Kershaw the corpses of Braun
and Hitler were fully burned when the Red Army found them, and only a lower jaw with
dental work could be identified as Hitler's remains.
Gallery
See also
Notes
Citations
References
Further reading
Books Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny.
New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013564-0. Fest, Joachim. Inside Hitler's Bunker: The
Last Days of the Third Reich. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-13577-5.
Gardner, Dave. The Last of the Hitlers: The story of Adolf Hitler's British Nephew and
the Amazing Pact to Make Sure his Genes Die Out. Worcester, UK: BMM. ISBN 978-0-9541544-0-0.
Lehmann, Armin D.. In Hitler's Bunker: A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Führer's
Last Days. Guilford, CT: Lyon's Press. ISBN 978-1-59228-578-5. Rzhevskaya, Elena. Берлин, май 1945.
Записки военного переводчика [Berlin 1945: Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter].
Ryan, Cornelius. The Last Battle. New York: Simon and Schuster. OCLC 711509.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh [1947]. The Last Days of Hitler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
ISBN 978-0-226-81224-3. Waite, Robert G. L. [1977]. The Psychopathic
God: Adolf Hitler. New York: DaCapo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80514-1.
Articles BBC staff. "Russia displays 'Hitler skull
fragment'". BBC. CNN staff. "Official: KGB chief ordered Hitler's
remains destroyed". CNN. Petrova, Ada; Watson, Peter. "The Death of
Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives". Washington Post.