The Dictator's Wasteland

Sleeping only three hours a night at the close of his life, Hitler had become a physical and nervous wreck. Thanks to the attentions of a doctor who loved to write prescriptions and administer injections, he was also a borderline drug addict.

But three long years of defeat had prepared Hitler to embrace the ultimate failure in April of 1945. Even before the war began, he had promised that "we may be destroyed, but if we are, we will drag a world with us, a world in flames."

Certainly he had succeeded in devastating the Jewish population of Europe. It was his proudest achievement, one that the impending Allied victory could never undo. As Allied armies liberated the extermination camps in the weeks and months before Hitler's death, the world was appalled by the full extent of the dictator's evil deeds.

The camps showed the Nazi order at its most horrendous, but there were plenty of other dreadful spectacles in Hitler’s Europe. For the German dictator intended that the triumphant Allies, especially the despised Russians, inherit nothing but a wasteland.

Blaming his generals for losing the war and screaming that the German people were no longer worthy of him, Hitler was pleased to order the destruction of everything in Germany that could be destroyed. All public and private records were to be consumed by the flames, all industrial plants to be rendered unworkable, all cultural objects from paintings to palaces to cathedrals to be ruined.

Fortunately, such orders were generally resisted. His lieutenant for industry, Albert Speer, realized that Hitler had become "a man to whom the end of his own life meant the end of everything." Sickened by the madness of his own government, Speer countermanded the directives that Hitler issued in the last days of the war.

For his part, Hitler toyed with the possibility that the world might end before the Allied noose around his neck began to strangle him. "Who knows," he asked, "when the moon may not crash into the earth and this whole planet go up in flames and ashes?"

A Vision of Planetary Destruction

As the Third Reich crumbled completely, Hitler burned with an overwhelming desire for universal destruction. Had it been within his power, he would no doubt have ordered every city on earth to be turned into a scorched and lifeless desert.

For this is the inescapable accompaniment of the desire to conquer the world: the lust to destroy it. The themes of universal domination and universal death are inextricably linked not only in Hitler’s consciousness, but in the darkest depths of the human psyche.

Although his mind was clouded by defeat and despair, Hitler could still imagine his postwar fate, whichever of the Allied armies captured him: He would be tried and executed as a war criminal. Death by his own hand would be an infinitely more acceptable alternative, for such an end would place him forever beyond the reach of his encircling enemies.

During the summer of 1944, he had privately revealed his attitude to suicide: "It is only a fraction of a second; then one is released from all that and has one’s rest and eternal peace." Now that fraction of a second was drawing near.

Now, in the spring of 1945, he would arrange matters so that even his physical remains would escape the Soviets’ grasp. Before he and Eva Braun killed themselves instantaneously by crushing small glass vials full of cyanide between their teeth, Hitler told his adjutant, Otto Gunsche, to be sure that both of their corpses were burned to ashes.

Probably thinking of how the Soviets had preserved Lenin’s body, Hitler expressed a fear that his corpse would be "put on display in some waxworks in the future."

Lest they learn that their leader had taken the easy way out, the German people were told that he had fallen in battle while defending Berlin from the Jewish-Marxist menace. The radio announcement of his death was accompanied by "Siegfried’s Funeral Music" from Richard Wagner’s opera Twilight of the Gods.

Hitler’s political testament, dictated 36 hours before his death, told the world that "I die with a happy heart. From the sacrifice of our soldiers and from my own unity with them will spring up in the history of Germany the seed of a radiant renaissance of the National Socialist movement." As he dictated these words from the safety of his bunker, the Soviet army was reducing Berlin to rubble over his head.

But Hitler’s unquenchable thirst for world conquest was apparent even when his physical domain had been reduced to a few dozen rooms located 35 to 50 feet underground. Everything would yet redound to Germany’s Aryan glory, his testament suggests. In the fullness of time the world would be conquered by a second Hitlerian wave — by political disciples who would learn Mein Kampf by heart and forever deify and worship the first Fuhrer.

© 1998 by Larry Hedrick. All rights reserved.

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