Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945
Volker Ullrich and translated by Jefferson Chase
Knopf (September 2020)
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Adolph Hitler
This is the second of two volumes within which Volker Ullrich focuses on the ascent and subsequent downfall of one of the greatest (albeit most evil) leaders in modern history. (I am now reading the first volume that examines the years 1889-1939. Yes, I should have read it first.) By now, historians have probably had access to most (if not all) of the documentation and commentaries about Adolph Hitler. Here is a brief timeline of the period that extends from in 1939 until 1945:
o 1939: Peace treaty with Russia secured with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Hitler invades Poland on September 1st and after three weeks of lightning war or ‘Blitzkrieg’ the country is divided between Russia and Germany. On September 3rd France, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand declared war on Germany.
o 1940: The Nazis occupy Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. Romania and Yugoslavia are invaded.
o June 1941: With Operation Barbarossa, Germany attacks Russia, ignoring the peace pact.
o December 1941: Japanese Air Force attacks Pearl Harbor and war is declared on the United States.
o February 1943: Although commanded by Hitler to stand and fight, the Germans surrender in the battle of Stalingrad. From this point in the war, Germany is continually retreating.
o July 1944: Hitler survives an assassination attempt and purges the army of all possible suspects.
o January 1945: Soviet troops enter Nazi Germany.
o 22 April 1945: Hitler decides to remain in Berlin until the last, committing suicide rather than allow capture.
o 26 April 1945: With Berlin under total control of the Soviet Army, Hitler commits suicide with his wife of two days, Eva Braun; their bodies are then set afire outside the bunker.
According to MI5 Security Service, “Hitler retreated to the bunker in January 1945 as the Russians advanced across Poland towards eastern Germany and the Allied air forces devastated Berlin with bombing raids. By the start of April 1945, 2.5 million Russian soldiers had reached the German capital. Two weeks later, they had reached the city centre and were fighting within only a few hundred yards of Hitler’s refuge. In the small hours of 28-29 April Hitler dictated his will, in the form of a political and personal testament, to Gertrud “Traudl” Junge, who was one of his secretaries. Soon afterwards Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun were married.
“Accounts from two of the secretaries present recorded that they had been called together to see the newly married couple. Hitler and Eva emerged from the map-room where the marriage ceremony had taken place, accompanied by Goebbels, his wife Magda and Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann. Turning to Hitler’s personal secretary, Gerda Christian, Eva pointed to the wedding ring on her finger and received her congratulations.
“A party followed to celebrate the occasion. According to Christian, Hitler talked mostly of the past and of happier times. However, he admitted to her that he knew the war was lost. He added that he would never allow himself to be taken prisoner by the Russians but intended to shoot himself. He confided to Junge that the wedding had been an emotional experience, but that for him death would only mean a personal redemption of his many worries and of what had been a very difficult life.”
In her review of Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945 for The New York Times, By 1941, Ullrich writes, Germany’s defeat was already assured, but Hitler would have none of it, getting rid of any military experts who challenged him. He doubled down on his own pitilessness, even toward his own people, saying that if they didn’t fight ‘they deserve to die out.’ Following Hitler’s lead, Goebbels treated the Germans like chumps to be duped. ‘There are so many lies that truth and swindle can scarcely be distinguished, he noted with satisfaction in his diary during the early stages of Barbarossa. ‘That is best for us at the moment.’
“The truth did emerge in the end, but only after years of mass death and cataclysmic destruction. Hitler had peddled so many lies that the fantasy he created was stretched impossibly thin. For all his pretensions to invincibility, he ended up a broken, sickly man, who confronted the reality bearing down on him by killing himself in his bunker. He had ordered his people to burn his body, so that only a few charred bits of bone and pieces of dental work remained. As Ullrich puts it, ‘There was hardly anything else left of the man who at the height of his career had fancied himself the ruler of the world.’”
Although I am a non-scholar in the field of military history, I have read several dozen books about Adolph Hitler and am now convinced that none of them — or any yet to come — can or will surpass Volker Ullrich’s in terms of scope of coverage and quality of analysis of Hitler’s life and legacy. His material provides a definitive source.