The Death of Hitler

Abstract

When von Below left the Bunker, Hitler was already preparing for the end. During the day the last news from the outside world had been brought in. Mussolini was dead. Hitler’s partner in crime, the herald of Fascism, who had first shown to Hitler the possibilities of dictatorship in modem Europe, and had preceded him in the stages of disillusion and defeat, had now illustrated in a signal manner the fate which fallen tyrants must expect. Captured by partisans during the general uprising of northern Italy, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci had been executed, and their bodies suspended by the feet in the market place of Milan to be beaten and pelted by the vindictive crowd. If the full details were ever known to them, Hitler and Eva Braun could only have repeated the orders they had already given: their bodies were to be destroyed ‘so that nothing remains’; ‘I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle to divert his hysterical masses.’ In fact it is improbable that these details were reported, or could have strengthened an already firm decision. The fate of defeated despots has generally been the same; and Hitler, who had himself exhibited the body of a field marshal on a meathook, had no need of remote historical examples or of a new and dramatic instance, to know the probable fate of his own corpse, if it should be found.¹ at the Trial and printed in the Sunday Express, 25 August 1946, even quotes Goering as saying, ‘You remember the Mussolini incident? We had pictures of Mussolini dead in the gutter with his mistress, and hanging in the air upside- down. They were awful! Hitler went into a frenzy, shouting: “This will never happen to me!” ’ A glance at the dates disposes of this romance. Goering saw Hitler for the last time eight days before Mussolini‘s death. Goering may have seen pictures of Mussolini’s body in captivity; Hitler never. Such is the value of unchecked human testimony, on which, however, much of written history is based.