The Death of Hitler

Warning: this episode contains discussion of suicide. Berlin, April 1945: After nearly 12 years, the "Thousand-Year Reich" is crumbling. Isolated in a bunker beneath the city, as Soviet forces close in on them, Adolf Hitler and his inner circle face the end. Today we're joined by Frank McDonough, a historian of the Third Reich and author of The Hitler Years series. Frank unpacks for us the final days of the Nazi dictator, and debunks some of the myths around his death. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 2:43Dan Snow?

  Welcome to Dan's Toast History Head. Eighty years ago, Adolf Hitler was sickly, tempestuous, scratching out a life beneath the streets of Berlin in his bomb-proof bunker. Now, at the end of April 1945, he was accepting defeat, acknowledging what the rest of the world had known for months, if not years.

• 3:10Dan Snow?

  He was there in the Führerbunker. It was a complex underneath the Reich Chancellery. Effectively, his office, his official residence, where he was able to seek refuge from the crash of Russian artillery, which was by now systematically reducing the city above his head to rubble. Russian tanks and troops had penetrated the city itself, and they were now just a few hundred yards away. I always think this is one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in history. Four years before, Hitler's infantrymen had been on the outskirts of Moscow, and now here were Joseph Stalin's Soviet troops

• 3:54Dan Snow?

  about to penetrate the very heart of the Third Reich.

• 4:01Dan Snow?

  With that as the context, he decided to sit down and dictate his last will and testament to his young assistant, Frau Tradljunga. He was unrepentant. He made arrangements for his art collection. He appointed the jambalisa leadership that would succeed him, and he stated categorically one last time that he hadn't wanted war in 1939. No, it had been the Jews and their supporters that were responsible for the war and all Germany's and Europe's woes.

• 4:32Dan Snow?

  The next day, on the 30th of April, after a big lunch with his staff, Hitler and his now-wife Eva Braun went into their private apartments and took their own lives. It's unclear entirely what happened, but it seems likely that her death was caused by biting into a cyanide capsule, and he put a gun to his own temple. They'd been married for one day. Their bodies were taken upstairs into the open air by loyal officers. As artillery shells rained down on them, they hastily dug a pit in the Chancery garden, cremated them, and threw their remains into the shallow grave.

• 5:15Dan Snow?

  It was a tawdry end for Hitler and indeed his whole National Socialist project. Hitler insisted that millions of people, men, women, and children, had fought and suffered and died and been wounded or brutalised, all to postpone this inevitable moment as long as possible. But now, in the spring of 1945, it came. Hitler was dead, and with him, the Third Reich. In this episode, we're going to dig into the final moments of one of the most prolific criminals in the long and lamentable history of humankind.

• 5:56Dan Snow?

  We're going to talk about the last hours and the death of Adolf Hitler 80 years ago. We're joined by the very brilliant historian Frank Madonna. He's been on the podcast many times. He's got a wonderful series of books called The Hitler Years. There's another one coming out soon on The Holocaust, which I know from talking to Frank was a very, very difficult project for him personally to work on as well. For more detail about anything here today, make sure you go and check out Frank Madonna's wonderful books. But in the meantime, let's get into it. This is another one of our D-Day to Berlin series, marking all those 80th anniversaries. This one is the final days, the final hours and minutes of Adolf Hitler.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  T minus 10.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

• 6:40Speaker 06

  No blank white unity till there is first and blank unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 6:55Dan Snow?

  Frank, good to have you back on the podcast.

• 6:57Speaker 07

  Great to be here.

• 6:58Dan Snow?

  Why does Hitler stay in Berlin? The Soviet jaws are closing around the city, aren't they?

• 7:02Speaker 07

  Well, you've got to remember that he kind of has this kind of nihilistic view of the world that it's either you win or you lose and you blow yourself up. Now, that's his vision of the world, really. So, I mean, I think he did know that Germany was heading for defeat and, you know, he did know that the Red Army would come into Berlin and would win. But he stuck firm to the idea that he could somehow turn this round. And even if he didn't turn it round, he had the idea of himself in history as some kind of martyr. So he thought, well, I'll die. And he does say to his secretary, Traudl Jung, he says, Nazism can't come back. I know that.

• 7:44Speaker 07

  But it might come back in 100 years. So he has this idea that he's leaving a legacy for the next 100 years. Goebbels shares that vision as well. So he sort of says, yeah, you know, let's die in a blaze of glory.

• 7:59Dan Snow?

  So in a way, this is Hitler's last big strategic decision. He says, well, let's stay in Berlin. We might have lost this war, but by giving this example, we might win the next one. Whereas him getting arrested, wearing sort of civilian clothes, trying to cross the Rhine and escape would just be utterly humiliating. That's his thinking.

• 8:17Speaker 07

  He would have been caught, you know, anyone famous, very famous, they get caught. He can't hide from your face. I mean, even if he shaved, they found the Himmler and he shaved his moustache off, but someone said, that's Himmler. And also, there's nothing in what he says to people, talks to people, that indicates that he wants to go into exile, you know, and live a quiet life in exile and secretly like that. It's not like that. He sort of talks about, I'll kill myself. Many times in the past, over the years, you know, like the Munich Beer Hall coup, for example, he said he'd kill himself. He said it many times that, you know, if it all goes per se, I'll kill myself.

• 9:00Speaker 07

  I just don't buy into the idea that, you know, he was gonna go off to Argentina. I mean, look, people did go off to Argentina and to South America. So people said, ah, but if they got there, surely Hitler went with them. But he didn't want to go. And it would have been impossible. How are you gonna get out of that bunker? It wasn't as if you could just get out the bunker and phone an Uber, take you to a ferry and then go to Argentina. It's just, it's so unbelievable that that could happen, really. So I'm not a big one for conspiracy theories, you know, because I know Hitler very well. I just don't buy he was the kind of person that would do that. For him, it would have been seen as humiliating. And I can't see him living

• 9:44Speaker 07

  his life in a little farm in Argentina with Eva Braun, you know, like turn into a, turn into a Sky TV programme, Hitler in Argentina.

• 9:57Dan Snow?

  They're in a big underground shelter, are they, beneath the Reich Chancellery?

• 10:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're in this Fuhrer bunker. It was designed by Albert Speer. It was built to go under the Reich Chancellery garden. So it's kind of like a self-contained unit. It's, it's about forty people can get in there and it's got living quarters. It's got some kind of air conditioning system, but doesn't really work, really. So they're sort of sharing the same air for days on end. So it's got like sort of offices that he has meetings at. It's got his own living quarters. He's got like a living room with a settee and stuff like that. Also, you know, his main military men are down there. And the Goebbels is in Berlin, but he goes in as well

• 10:44Speaker 07

  towards the end and stays with him as well. I mentioned Tradal Young. He's got three secretaries who are down there. So it's kind of like an underground shelter. And he stays in there in the latter day. Sometimes he goes up actually into the Reich Chancellery and goes into the rooms which are bombed, you know, but sometimes he goes in there and has a cup of coffee with Eva Braun. It's a kind of subterranean world, if you like. They've got links with the outside world. People come in and give them messages and so on and so forth.

• 11:19Dan Snow?

  Well roughly when was the last time he sort of left the premises totally and went and...

• 11:22Speaker 07

  We think that he might have gone up to the top near towards the end. There's supposed to be a photograph, some people have questioned it, but that's sort of round about the day before he dies, we think. The last time we see him above ground, I think it's like the 16th of March, when he gives out medals to these Hitler Youth people who are defending Berlin. I think that's the last time we officially see, there's a newsreel of that. But he's down in the bunker and he's listening to all these terrible reports that the Red Army are overwhelming the Wehrmacht in Berlin and the Allies are sort of coming from the West, they're moving through city by city now, capturing them.

• 12:08Speaker 07

  He knows things are bad in Italy as well.

• 12:10Dan Snow?

  What's his mental health or physical health like? I mean, is he, can he sleep? Is he, how's he getting through the day?

• 12:15Speaker 07

  I actually think, Dan, he's got bad mental health. I think he's mainly a depressive type of person, whose normal default position is to be depressed. And this is just run of the mill for him, you know, things are going badly. Well, in his life, lots of things went badly. You know, I suppose if you've had a life in which loads and loads of things have gone badly, you get used to it. So he sort of thinks, yeah, but I turned that round, you know, I went to jail for the Munich Beer Hall coup, but I got out, you know, and people said I couldn't get into power, but I did get into power. People said I couldn't revise the Treaty of Versailles, but I did. You know, and people warned me against attacking France, but I did and I won.

• 13:00Speaker 07

  So he sort of thinks things can turn around. He feels like he's lucky, that he's the lucky person, that things often go his way. Even when Roosevelt dies on the 12th of April, he sees it as a sign, it's a sign, he says to Goebbels, we're going to turn this round. So there's all this sort of daydreaming that goes on, a lack of reality. I personally think that he knew it was hopeless. I think he did. But he wasn't the kind of person who would ever admit that.

• 13:36Dan Snow?

  Reports about him suggest that he was shaking, unsteady on his feet.

• 13:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 13:41Dan Snow?

  About the fits of temper.

• 13:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, doctors have said that he probably had, they've seen these pictures of his arm, you see there's a few pictures of his arm shaking badly. People are saying that that's Parkinson's disease, that he had Parkinson's disease and it was affecting his leg and his arm. On top of that, he had bad stomach and he was taking all kinds of drugs given by his own physician, Dr Morell. We reckon he took a lot of speed, you know, amphetamines. We're not sure about cocaine, although he did take something like a cream for cocaine. Cause he had problems with his dental fixtures. So he's put it on, rubbed on, he quite liked it because it was a lot of cocaine and it,

• 14:26Speaker 07

  it's said that he kind of liked that. So it's like a hypochondriac. You go to their house, the drawers are full of various potions and stuff like that. I think he was a hypochondriac and I think he did take painkillers and he definitely took amphetamines. Amphetamines do make people's temper go up and down, you know, sometimes they can go crazy with a temper. I mean, I think we can exaggerate Hitler's temper. I don't think he was screaming, ranting and raving all the time. I just don't think he did. He did scream and rant and rave, you know, we've seen the famous downfall clip, haven't we? But they then pile on all modern things to it.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  The interesting thing to read about Hitler is his meetings, his military meetings with the Wehrmacht and the Navy. And when you read them, it's surprising how calm he is. The transcript of what was said at these meetings, and it's not every five minutes, the Fuhrer jumped from his seat and screamed that, Kiesel or whatever, it's not like that. So I'm not sure about this kind of idea of him as a ranting, raving lunatic. I think that's a bit, it's a bit exaggerated really.

• 15:39Dan Snow?

  But extraordinary Frank that they were having meetings, minutes were being kept and typed up, and this is an empire on the very, very brink of absolute extermination.

• 15:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, they did. Well, he started at Rastenburg, which is where his military headquarters were. He moves out of there by the end to go to Berlin. But he took all this paraphernalia with him. He wanted a record himself because he wanted to make sure that nobody was double-crossing him. So he wanted to say, this is what was said at this meeting and that meeting. So he did have a stenographer and they're fairly accurate reports of what was said at these meetings with the military men and the Navy. Because he doesn't have political meetings, so there's no cabinet meetings that we can look at. You just have to go to his correspondence with individual people, Göring, Goebbels,

• 16:33Speaker 07

  Himmler, Albert Speer. They're the kind of main people who he's conversing with this time.

• 16:40Dan Snow?

  And is he still moving units around on the map like he's a great military supremo?

• 16:45Speaker 07

  Supposedly he is. Whether those units can actually move on the ground is another matter. And I don't think they're very keen on telling him exactly what is happening towards the end. I think they're sort of making up a little bit of a fiction in a way. He asked for a counter-attack. That's the one where he screams and rants in downfall. He asked for a counter-attack and then he finds out the counter-attack never happened in Berlin. So he goes mad about that, you know, you lied to me about this. So that is true that. He does rant and rave when Göring sends him a telegram saying, look, I think you're no longer capable of running the country. I'm going to take over my powers as deputy leader.

• 17:28Speaker 07

  And then he strips Göring of all of his officers of state and that. The fact he could do that right at the end shows that he still had some power.

• 17:38Dan Snow?

  Yeah, isn't it strange that he sent SS guys around to Göring's house, didn't he? So, so the regime continued to function in some ways.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's the weird thing, isn't it? I think it's the loyalty to him. You see, I think he's established a personal loyalty as the Fuhrer. And people, they are fond of him. They're definitely loyal to him. The public are loyal to him. The public go on supporting him to the bitter end as well. Again, we sort of think, well, why did they do that? Is it really true? But it is largely true that the functions of the Third Reich carry on, even in these terrible situations where the whole city is destroyed and yet, you know, they managed to get the water supply back on, the electricity. Amazing powers of recovery from the German authorities.

• 18:28Dan Snow?

  I guess there is one other big bit of disobedience. The so-called Nero decree. Tell me about that, which is the end of March. Hitler would have been in the bunker issuing that, would he?

• 18:36Speaker 07

  Well, Hitler knew about Stalin's scorched earth policy. And Stalin's scorched earth policy was, as the Red Army retreated, they destroyed any infrastructure they could so that the enemy couldn't gain control of that infrastructure. So he'd done that scorched earth policy and it did work. The Soviet Union did remarkable. They'd destroy a factory, dismantle it, move it eastwards and open it again. They'll rebuild it and open it quickly. So Hitler wanted to have his own scorched earth policy. He thought, well, the Allies are moving in the West. I want my scorched earth policy. I want them to destroy all of our main industry in the Ruhr.

• 19:18Speaker 07

  So that's what he told Speer to do, this Nero decree, in which he asks for this to happen. But Speer doesn't do it. He just ignores it. And then he tells him a few days before Hitler dies, they'd have a final meeting and Speer said, "Look, I want to tell you something." I didn't carry out that Nero decree that he gave me. So apparently Hitler just sort of looked at him coldly. I didn't say another word. He just looked at him like, yeah, fine. Okay, right. And that was the end. He said in his memoir, Spear said, that was the moment I knew that the relationship I had with him had ended. So it shows that not everything got going

• 20:01Speaker 07

  because they knew the West were going to win. And people like Spear were thinking, well, let's do a separate deal with the West and allies, Britain and America, and then persuade the allies to turn on Stalin.

• 20:15Dan Snow?

  Let's get into those last few days. It's a day I find easy to remember, Hitler's birthday, because it's my dad and my sister's birthday, April 20th. Do they make an occasion of it?

• 20:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, they have a party. The champagne is drunk. They go up to the bombed Reich Chancellery and they have champagne and a cake is brought out. So yeah, there was celebration of it. People don't realise that he was 56 in 1945. He's quite young, actually. You know, and people talk about it, you know, travel young gives a very good description of the party and says, you know, everyone was trying to put aside Ava Brown was one of them who she liked to have a good time. So she saw a party or drinking as a distraction from that Hitler, of course, didn't drink. We did go to the party, stayed for a bit, and then he went back to the bunker.

• 21:12Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the end of Hitler, more coming up.

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• 24:11Dan Snow?

  So they have a party, what's the next big milestone? Would it be Hitler's marriage? It's a big week for him.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, they have a party, that's the 20th of April, which is the birthday. And then on the 28th or the 29th, he hears about Mussolini, that Mussolini is captured by partisans. And then he strung up with his mistress, Clara Patacci, over a garage. So they're hung upside down in this garage, they're already shot dead. And this sort of rattles Hitler, you know, Hitler thinks, oh, I don't want to be out on the streets of Berlin, being picked over by a angry mob. So this sort of convinces him that he's got to kill himself. It makes a big impact on him. So he decides, first of all, to marry Eva Braun.

• 24:56Speaker 07

  It's a kind of compensator for all the privations she's had to suffer by being his partner, so to speak. So he decides to marry her. And they have a marriage ceremony, which is conducted by a local official. You know, so he comes in, conducts the marriage ceremony. And then Hitler slips away during the ceremony to get his last will and testament typed by his secretary, Charles Young. So he starts to dictate his last will and testament. It's in two parts. One's a personal testament. He says, I'm going to kill myself because I don't want to face the humiliation of defeat, he says, with my wife Eva.

• 25:40Speaker 07

  He says, but also I'm going to give, you know, a political testament of what I want to happen. He appoints Grand Admiral Dernitz as the president in this will and testament. Of course, he's a naval man. And he did that because of his hatred of the military leadership by then. He said, you know, they don't deserve to run this country. He made Goebbels Chancellor.

• 26:03Speaker 07

  Quiz question, who's the shortest reigning German Chancellor? It's actually Goebbels. But the main thing about that testament, I think, which is interesting is that he doesn't take any responsibility for the Second World War. He says, "The Second World War was forced on us by the worldwide Jewish conspiracy." And these people, you know, are trying to rule the earth and we tried to stop them. He says, "We could have settled the Polish issue by negotiation, but the Poles wouldn't have it." He said, "Again, they were pushed on by the Jewish worldwide conspiracy." What's interesting is that is antisemitism stays right there, front and centre, right to the very end,

• 26:46Speaker 07

  which is very interesting that he sees that and even says that in the future, "The task of the German people is to destroy Judaism if they want to prosper."

• 26:57Dan Snow?

  So unrepentant, even with the Russian guns bringing down fire on on the ground above him.

• 27:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, he's not willing to accept that he did anything wrong.

• 27:07Dan Snow?

  He takes the last will and testament. They've got married. Was there a party after the ceremony?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, there was a party. Yeah, they sort of hosted it in Hitler's living room. And again, there was champagne and a cake and, you know, it was very convivial and they're all there, you know. So Brown was very happy, yeah.

• 27:28Dan Snow?

  And did Brown know that Hitler was about to conduct a murder-suicide? Were they talking about it openly?

• 27:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, he told her, yeah. By the time he'd written his will and testament, it had already been agreed with her. Because he says, "We have decided to kill ourselves in the will and testament."

• 27:45Dan Snow?

  So they're at the party, they're all drinking. Hitler signs his will at, what, five in the morning?

• 27:51Speaker 07

  Something like that, yeah. She's shocked. Charles Young said, "I couldn't believe it." As he was saying, I thought he was gonna take some responsibility for all the destruction that he brought on the world, but he didn't. He stuck true. And he also stuck true to his decision, clearly, to kill all of the world's Jews.

• 28:12Dan Snow?

  How does he intend the will to have any force? Does he telegraph it out? Does he smuggle it out?

• 28:17Speaker 07

  Well, five copies are made and some brave person gets one copy out and ends up handing it personally to Grand Admiral Den, for example. So the will is actually carried out.

• 28:30Dan Snow?

  So as you say, there are still messengers coming in and out of the bunker and even though it's all pretty much on the front line now.

• 28:36Speaker 07

  There's messengers coming in and out, you know, and it goes by that service here, messenger service.

• 28:42Dan Snow?

  The Soviets are now, what, 400 metres away?

• 28:45Speaker 07

  They've completely encircled the Reich Chancellery, so they're kind of all around the Reich Chancellery. It's just a matter of when they're gonna go in. There's now negotiations opening up between the general staffs of the German army and the Red Army about, you know, when are you gonna surrender and stuff like that. So there's already discussions that this isn't gonna last much longer. The people in the bunker say, you know, that the best, we can last for two days, I think.

• 29:12Dan Snow?

  Let's get to the afternoon of the 30th. Does he go through the bunker saying goodbye? Is this quite a public moment?

• 29:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, he does. Yeah, he has a lunch, which is his favourite. It's like a pasta dish with a tomato. He eats that. It's made for him and he likes it and he congratulates the cook and says, oh, that was wonderful. Then he says goodbye to these secretaries as well, the cook, and then the three secretaries. He says goodbye to them. Because he always has his meals with them, you see. He doesn't like to have his meals with military people. He likes to have it with people who aren't connected to the military. So he has the meal, says goodbye to all the people. There's a lot of crying. Magda Gebel, she gets hysterical in the corridor as he says goodbye to her and says, you can't leave us, my Fuhrer, and all this.

• 30:01Speaker 07

  Sort of somebody shepherds her away, but that's the only sort of sign of emotion that goes on. And then the last, the people, there's so many people in the bunker, aren't there, who testified later? But what happened, they say that he then went into... His room, his living room with Eva Braun. And then they heard a gunshot. Then they opened the door and he was dead with a bullet hole in his forehead. And she was just immobile and dead from the smell. Aniseed smell, they thought she'd taken a cyanide capsule. He'd apparently taken a cyanide capsule and shot himself. It's unclear whether he took the cyanide capsule and shot himself at the same time

• 30:46Speaker 07

  or just shot himself in the head. Because he didn't have the same smell around him that you would associate with a cyanide capsule. And then, of course, these assistants, they take him up as was pre-planned. Take him up to the Right Chancery Garden and set alight to the two corpses. They don't completely burn, they're put in a shallow grave.

• 31:12Dan Snow?

  This is Dan's Noisy History Hits. More on the last few minutes of Hitler's life after this.

• 31:24Speaker 04

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• 32:23Speaker 06

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• 32:47Dan Snow?

  The other suicide murder is so extraordinary, isn't it? The one that just appalls everyone who hears about it. Tell me about the Goebbels family.

• 32:56Speaker 07

  Well, obviously, Gebbels becomes the chancellor for a day, but he decides that he's going to kill himself. But what's awful is that his wife Magda and him agreed that their six children will be killed as well using cyanide. Magda says that in a letter, she's saying, "I can't envisage my children living in a world without the Führer, and I can't envisage living in that world either. So I'm doing it to save their skin." And Gebbels says, "Who wants to be the daughter or son of me? Because I'm going to be vilified." He said, "So they'll have to have decades of shame. So I'm going to save them from that." So that's how they justify it. And they're helped by a doctor.

• 33:42Speaker 07

  The doctor goes in with Magda, and they give each of the children a cyanide capsule. It's very sad, really. And they are then taken out. And they're seen, actually, the photograph of them is taken. They're all lying in the Reich Chancellery garden, not buried. And then Gebbels and Magda Gebbels, either they took the cyanide themselves, or one of them did and the other one shot the other, or whatever. We don't really know exactly. There's no eyewitness who can say exactly what happened. But their bodies were found, so they definitely did take cyanide. So those two died as well, and their children died too.

• 34:29Dan Snow?

  Extraordinary, yeah. So five daughters and one son, all killed there. What happened after? After these bodies were laid out in the garden of the Reich Chancellery? What happened to everyone else? And when Hitler and Goebbels were dead, did everyone just sort of, every man for himself?

• 34:43Speaker 07

  Bormann tried to escape. He tried to escape. Some people said he did escape to South America. But in 1973... A corpse was found and later DNA was attached to the corpse showing that Bormann had died, escaping from the Reich Chancellery. The Gestapo official Heinrich Muller, he left the bunker, but we never heard of him again. So he obviously was killed. Some of them committed suicide. Some of the army officers took their own life. Quite a large number, actually. And ordinary individuals took their own life as well. You know, there's a a local town where maybe about 1,500 people killed themselves. These were just ordinary people from the town.

• 35:27Speaker 07

  So the surrender took place on the first of May. So the day after Hitler's death, the surrender started to open. I think on the second of May, it was finalized and that was it. That was the kind of end of the the military conflict. Although, Dönitz carried on with the war for a week. He was trying to find out if he could get a separate piece for Germany at the expense of the Soviet Union.

• 35:58Dan Snow?

  So through the 30th and the first, I suppose people are just slipping out of the bunker and just trying their lap, trying to escape.

• 36:04Speaker 07

  Yeah. Traul Young, she goes out as well. She escapes and she ends up in Munich. So it shows that some of them got out and did get away.

• 36:14Dan Snow?

  Do you have an Soviet account of when they entered those grounds and storming through that bunker must have been, it's just, what a moment for those Soviet troops.

• 36:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, we've got accounts of the Soviet soldiers who went in and they saw, there's photographs as well. They went into his living room and stuff and photographed the Seti, Chez L'Ange, which has got some blood on it where Hitler was shot and so on. So they did film the bunker. They took souvenirs as well. So you've got like Red Army men with busts of Hitler under their arm, photographs of things like that.

• 36:46Dan Snow?

  They knew that Hitler had committed suicide, did they? Did they try and recover his body, his remains?

• 36:51Speaker 07

  They did recover those charred remains. The Soviets did recover them. And they did an autopsy on them. So that exists, the autopsy. They cut out his jaw. So they cut out above and below his jaw. And through that, because that survived, his dentist, Hitler's dentist, looked at these jaws and said, yeah, that's Hitler. Cause he had a strange dentistry. He was always getting. Silver fillings put in and gold teeth replacing his other one and he had a dental plate, a very distinctive dental plate on the bottom, like a bridge that held together

• 37:31Speaker 07

  a lot of his teeth as well. So the dental records are pretty good and they were used. There's what you can remember is there was three different investigations into Hitler's death. There was the Red Army Soviet investigation, which involved these autopsies and stuff like that. There was also a British led investigation by you, Trevor Roper, and he interviewed every single person who was in the bunker at the time. There's no forensic evidence in Trevor Roper's report. There is forensic evidence in the Soviet autopsy, which I mentioned the dental records is the main way of identifying Hitler. And in nineteen forty four, Hitler

• 38:16Speaker 07

  had agreed to have an X-ray taken of his head after the the bomb plot. So they were able to take that X-ray of his head and compare it to the dental plate that they cut out of his mouth, the Soviets at the end of the war. Then there was, you know, if you want more, you know, you've got these people who go for conspiracy theories, they always ignore things like this. There was a four year investigation by the state of Bavaria into Hitler's death and they went through everything and the dentists gave evidence of that. Everyone in the bunker gave evidence of that. All of the evidence of the eyewitness accounts

• 38:57Speaker 07

  was taken and so on. And they concluded nineteen fifty six, they said Hitler died in the bunker by a single shock to his head, self inflicted. And Ava Brown, she died with cyanide. So that was what that concluded. And that was a four year investigation. And obviously there were people who said that Hitler was alive, you know, the CIA would report. It's a bit like Elvis. We've seen Elvis down or Chippy and all that. It's a bit like that really. None of these CIA.

• 39:30Speaker 07

  Reports have got any validity. They're all sorts of, you know, people giving reports saying, I saw Hitler in the pub or something, but none of them have got any validity. It's like sort of, yes, people did say, I saw Hitler in Argentina, right? People did report that to the CIA, but it was never verified. He was never found. So I think, you know, we can just ignore that.

• 39:57Dan Snow?

  So within hours, Berlin has fallen to the Soviets. The war lasts another week?

• 40:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, as we say, that's why we're having the VE Day, isn't it? On the eighth. On the seventh, they surrendered to the British and the Americans. A Soviet representative was there. The Allies insisted that the army surrendered because they didn't want to legitimize the regime of Dernits. So they didn't want to legitimize that. So he said, no, we don't want him to sign the surrender. We don't even agree that that's a legitimate government. We want the army, armed forces to sign the surrender. So they signed the surrender in a place called Reims on the seventh. And on the eighth, we announced VE Day, the end of of things. But it wasn't all over then. They actually have a signing in Berlin,

• 40:46Speaker 07

  which took place sometime after midnight on the ninth. So you've got two different celebrations. We celebrate VE Day on the eighth for the signing on the seventh. And the Soviet Union and Russia, they celebrate on the ninth. It's called Victory Day and they do that on the ninth. So there's a little bit of confusion at the end.

• 41:10Dan Snow?

  Frank, obviously, the the last will and testament, a lot of it is sort of a political screed, justifying himself, talking about the future and the past. Um. There is also the political arrangements for the new Nazi regime that only lasts a week. Is there anything else in there? Is there anything else that endured? Did Hitler get his way on anything?

• 41:27Speaker 07

  No, not much endures. You know, the Third Reich is destroyed, isn't it, completely? Whether the German people felt the same, the Americans did opinion polls in nineteen forties, late nineteen forties, and they found that something like fifty-three percent of the German people thought Nazism was a good thing, it was just badly applied. And so, you know, there was a lingering love of Hitler, the Hitler Youth. I mean, I've talked to some Hitler Youth, well, many years ago now, who survived and they're still, you know, my Führer, they're definitely still loyal to Hitler. And we know about the Odessa file, don't we?

• 42:08Speaker 07

  That these SS men had these periodic meetings where they celebrated Hitler. But in a sense, the Third Reich is then blasted out of history, isn't it? It's sort of destroyed. Most Germans then agreed that they've got to become a democracy. Some people said they were forced to be free, but Germany has been a functioning democracy since, you know, nineteen forty-nine. They've got laws that prevent democracy being overthrown. Some of the most stringent laws are under the German constitution. Be far easier to overthrow America or Britain than it would to overthrow democracy in Germany, which is a good thing.

• 42:52Dan Snow?

  Yes, but amazing that despite the absolute catastrophe that Hitler inflicted upon the people of the world, but particularly people in Germany, that it didn't ruin his reputation. The manner of his death, the manner of the collapse of the German empire didn't actually blacken his name with large chunks of the German population.

• 43:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's true. There are neo-Nazis who support Hitler, but you couldn't say he's been rehabilitated.

• 43:19Dan Snow?

  And let's hope his master plan that in a hundred years' time, the manner of his death would inspire a new generation of Nazis. Let's hope that also does not come to pass like the rest of his last will and testament. Frank, thank you so much for coming on the podcast again. You're an absolute legend. Tell everyone about your biographies of Hitler.

• 43:35Speaker 07

  Well, I've written a series called The Hitler Years and it covers German history from 1918 through to 1945. And there's a fourth volume coming out in November, The Hitler Years Holocaust 1933 to 1945. So that concentrates on the Holocaust. So through those four books, you've got a complete history of Germany from 1918 to 1945.

• 44:03Dan Snow?

  Great stuff, Frank. Thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. We're going to talk to you again soon, I'm sure.

• 44:08Speaker 07

  I hope so. Take care.

• 44:21Speaker 06

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke and hopefully a lot of napkins. All for $8. Ba da ba ba ba.

• 44:35Speaker 02

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• 45:26Dan Snow?

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