During the night of 28 April, General Wenck reported that his Twelfth Army had been forced back along the entire front. Wenck noted that no further attacks towards Berlin were possible. General Alfred Jodl (Supreme Army Command) did not provide this information to Hans Krebs in Berlin until early in the morning of 30 April.
On 29 April, Hans Krebs, Wilhelm Burgdorf, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann witnessed and signed the last will and testament of Adolf Hitler. Hitler dictated the document to his private secretary, Traudl Junge. Hitler was also that day informed of the violent death of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini on 28 April, which is presumed to have increased his determination to avoid capture.
On 30 April 1945, after intense street-to-street combat, when Soviet troops were within a block or two of the Reich Chancellory, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule. Hitler's body and that of Eva Braun (his mistress whom he had married the day before) were put in a bomb crater, doused in gasoline by Otto Günsche and other Führerbunker aides, and set alight as the Red Army advanced and shelling continued. Hitler also poisoned his dog Blondi to test the poison he and Eva Braun were going to take.
Those were the last three days of Hitler's life.I wonder, if at any time, did he think to himself, "Maybe this was not the way to go?"
I have to think that for however evil a man is, there's gotta be a moment of questioning, it's only human. But maybe I've answered my own question. He wasn't human. He walked, talked, and shat as a human, but his humanity left him a long time before the bite into a cyanide pill.
Here's what I find hilarious, though. Hitler's whole concept of racial hygiene was based on the ideas of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, who became famous for developing the racialist theory of the Aryan master race.
Now here begins the irony. His father was a government official and staunch royalist, his mother, Anne-Louise Magdeleine de Gercy, was the daughter of a royal tax official and a Creole woman from Santo Domingo. When he was fourteen his mother eloped with another man and brought Josef with her to Switzerland for a few years. It was in Switzerland that he began his interest in Orientalism.
Obviously this was the catalyst of his hatred towards other races. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos.
Gobineau believed the white race was superior to the others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan"(Indo-Iranian race). Gobineau originally wrote that white race miscegenation was inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.
Here's the kicker. Gobineau saw Jews as intelligent people who were very much a part of the superior race and who, if anything, stimulated industry and culture.
Hitler and Nazism borrowed much of Gobineau's ideology, though Gobineau himself was not particularly anti-Semitic. When the Nazis adopted Gobineau's theories, they were forced to edit his work extensively to make it conform to their views, much as they did in the case of Nietzsche.
So a guy, who was part Jewish himself, decides to base his ideology of hatred and murder, on another guy who actually includes Jews in the superior race demographic.
Nothing about Hitler screams winner. Hell, even at the end of his life, he had to kill a woman and dog, he just couldn't be man enough to end it on his own.
The world is better off without him. 63 years ago today, the world got a little less evil. The only good thing he did.
