After the Red Army's successful Vistula-Oder offensive campaign of early 1945, when they paused to regroup before their final westward push, while at the same time the American 1st and 3rd Armies had linked following the failure of the Germans' last planned offensive which halted because of fuel starvation and forcing their withdrawal, German military commanders and civilian leaders knew the time was near for German's defeat...Even Adolf Hitler, in his drug-addled confusion from his daily methamphetamine injections from his quack doctor. Theodor Morell, must have had rational moments when the fog cleared enough for him to know his house of cards was falling...
Those around him, while wanting to maintain the appearance of loyalty to Der Fuehrer, were making quiet preparations for the inevitable...Magda Goebbels, even more of a fanatic than her second husband, brought her six minor children with her to Hitler's underground bunker where she personally murdered each one, saying she did not want them to survive in a world not ruled by Nazi doctrine...This was followed with the couple's last walk together outside as she knowingly went to her death at the hands of her husband, who then took his own life with the same pistol...
This act alone of allowing civilians to shelter in a military facility as a war raged above shows the disintegration of discipline that took place as the Reich crumbled...Any military administrator would know what distractions a group of non-essential civilians would cause in this situation, especially close family...
Yet Hitler, as CIC, allowed not only this disruption, but permitted his longtime girlfriend, Eva Braun to enter his domain even as she knew it would likely be for the short remainder of her life...Others, such as Martin Bormann, the repulsive toad who was almost universally disliked, were already present as part of Hitler's travelling entourage...As Hitler's secretary and chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Bormann held unparalleled power with the secret information he had concerning party officials, and his personal access to Hitler himself...
One of Bormann's most closely guarded confidences was the size and source of Hitler's personal wealth...Bormann was entrusted by Hitler with the safeguarding and investment of the fortune collected by him over the years from royalties paid him from sales of Mein Kampf, and even from his image which appeared on the postage stamps in every piece of mail distributed by the Reichspost...
Bormann knew the whereabouts of Hitler's hidden wealth, and was thought to have prepared escape routes for himself and Hitler to other countries where the funds could buy them both safe passage and a secure haven...Bormann's final destination still wears a shroud of controversy as the remains found under a Berlin street have been connected to his family DNA, but not conclusively enough for doubting critics...Much of the looted Nazi wealth is known to have been cached in South America...
While conducting my recent library inventory, I noticed a fair number of books concerning this particular time period, many of them unreviewed by myself...It seems like an opportune time to revisit these authors for comparison...Most authors seem to concentrate heavily on the final ten days of bunker activity when all knew the end was imminent...
An example of this is "The Bunker" by James P. O'Donnell, which combines researched historical fact with dramatic speculation of what might have played out underground...Factually accepted by many at the time of its 1978 printing, it is at best incomplete...O'Donnell parlayed his familiarity with the bunker as one of the first non-Soviets to see the interior (thanks to a bribe paid to a guard) combined with the imagination befitting a novelist, into a literary docu-drama in which the lines between fact and fiction are blurred for the sake of public acclamation and sales figures...
The book is still a worthwhile read, but caution is advised to use the more accessible research tools available 40 years after its publication before accepting the words as unvarnished truth...It remains on my bookshelf as some of its eyewitness accounts are valuable for comparison...
"The End" is another fine historical account of Nazi Germany by one of its most dedicated chroniclers, Ian Kershaw, who in his usual style, overcomes his well-placed disgust in Nazi philosophy and practices with meticulous research, and a writing style second to none in relating an accurate picture of a crumbling regime...Narrowing his scope to coverage of the final two years of Hitler's failed experiment in social engineering, Kershaw documents a post-mortem of the doomed autocracy...
It is thought that Hitler was much more willing to accept the deaths of millions, than that of his own...He was willing to sacrifice the last German standing to prevent his own capture, and ordered all Berliners, no matter their age or condition, to fight against the onslaught of the Red Army, believing that they would buy enough time with the sacrifice of their lives to allow the military miracle he expected as the rightful successor to his idol, the homosexual Frederick the Great...
He was approached countless times in the months preceding the Nazi collapse to take advantage of the plans of others to secrete him to safety (along with the planners themselves of course)...The would-be escape artists included civilian as well as military strategists, each plotting a pathway to survival...And as Hitler's senior staff continued their outward displays of fawning sycophancy, many were quietly planning a way out, with or without der Fuehrer...
One of the most intriguing hypotheses is presented in "Grey Wolf" written by Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams...Presented as a sensationalist story, but written in a more factual style, the book does offer some documented fact, but doesn't completely convince this reader of the validity of its evidence trail...Mostly consisting of conjecture, its main body of evidence seems to be heavily redacted interoffice memos written by FBI and OSS operatives, plus mostly unsubstantiated eyewitness reports and newspaper clippings ...
The authors purport that the newlyweds, Herr Hitler and Frau Hitler (nee Braun), escaped via the already known tunnel from the Fuehrerbunker to the underground Berlin subway system...From there the authors speculate their underground route took them under Berlin, then overland to Hohenzollerndamm Airstrip which was actually a repurposed boulevard under heavy Allied fire after April 22...
Their circuitous route from there took them by Junkers JU-52 west to Magdeburg, then north by west to Tønder, Denmark, later backtracking to Travemünde in the city of Lubeck where Himmler was known to have betrayed Hitler...Transferring to a Junkers JU-252, the traveling entourage supposedly went south to the relative safety of Franco's Spain...Moving only when continually updated intel indicated safe passage, they moved on to Moron Air Base (coincidentally operated by the USAF for the duration of the Cold War), then by Junkers JU-52 again to a Spanish naval port in the Canary Islands...
Three Type IX U-boats allegedly awaited their arrival to whisk them off to Argentina where they supposedly made their home, raised children and eventually died under the protection of a friendly government...It makes a compelling adventure story, but I do not believe that Hitler's enormous ego would allow him to dictate his last will and testament to Traudl Junge, then slink off to oblivion...
I believe he died in the bunker, whether by his own hand or not...His true believers may have died with him, but I can't see the greed-driven Martin Bormann leaving that much wealth to be scooped up by whomever happens to find it...He was far too detail minded to leave that to chance...
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