What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler

Robert J. Hutchinson

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781621578895
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Think You Know Everything about the death of Hitler? Think Again. After World War II, 50 percent of Americans polled said they didn't believe Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in 1945, as captured Nazi officials claimed.Instead, they believed the dictator faked his death and escaped, perhaps to Argentina. This wasn't a crazy opinion: Joseph Stalin told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler's body and that he personally believed the Nazi leader had escaped justice.At least two German submarines crossed the Atlantic and landed on the coast of Argentina in July 1945.Plus, there were numerous reports of top Nazi officials successfully fleeing to South America where there was a large German colony. Incredible as it sounds, the mystery surrounding Adolf Hitler's final days only deepened in 2009 when a U.S. forensic team announced that a piece of Hitler's skull held in Soviet archives was not actually Hitler's. International interest increased further in 2014 when the FBI released previously classified files detailing investigations surrounding Hitler's possible escape.And the following year, The History Channel launched a three-year reality TV series investigating if it was possible Hitler did somehow survive. So what really happened? Popular history writer Robert J. Hutchinson, author of What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination, takes a fresh look at the evidence and discovers, once and for all, the truth about Hitler's last week in Berlin. Among the questions the book explores are... *What did surviving Nazi eyewitnesses really say about the Führer's final days in the bunker—and could they have been lying to aid Hitler's escape? *If Hitler didn't escape, why did the Allies not find his body? *What about Hitler's proven use of body doubles?Could Hitler have used a body double in the bunker while he and Eva Braun flew to safety in a long-range aircraft that took off from a runway in Berlin's Tiergarten? *Why did the FBI continue to investigate reports of Hitler's survival for more than a decade after World War II—reports that were only declassified in 2014? *What about sensational claims in books such as The Grey Wolf that Hitler and Eva Braun lived in an isolated chalet in the Andes – and that Hitler died in 1962? *Why were forensic tests on crucial physical evidence only conducted in 2016, more than 70 years after World War II ended? *And lots MORE.

1 PLOTTING THE DEATH OF HITLER

At 5:30 on the morning of July 20, 1944, a young German officer sat up in his bed in the cozy three-story house he shared with his older brother at 8 Tristanstrasse in the once leafy but now desolate suburb of Wannsee in southwest Berlin. The house still stands, an eerie reminder of a long-ago crisis and the mystery of how it ended.

The young officer had only slept for four hours the night before. Yet now he was wide awake, every nerve in his body on fire.

His name was Claus Philipp Maria von Stauffenberg.

Only thirty-six years old, the father of four young children, Stauffenberg had recently been promoted to chief of staff of Nazi Germany’s Reserve Army—known somewhat derisively as the Ersatzheer or Fake Army.

Just days before, Adolf Hitler had ordered the young officer to come up with a plan to provide badly needed reinforcements for the German troops who were fighting overwhelming Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. Stauffenberg had worked late into the night finalizing the report he would present personally to the Führer later that day.

Yet unbeknownst to Hitler, Stauffenberg and his associates were in reality doing everything they could to fail at their assigned task—without appearing to do so. The last thing they wanted was to send more young Germans to die fighting the Soviets, thereby prolonging the war.

The plot within the German Army to kill Adolf Hitler was taken over in 1944 by a young aristocrat and army officer named Claus Philipp Maria von Stauffenberg. Wikimedia Commons

Stauffenberg stood up stiffly from his bed. His driver would arrive in just a few minutes, at precisely six o’clock.

Movie-star handsome—he looked a little like a young Clark Gable—Stauffenberg had a straight jaw, blue eyes, a full head of dark-brown hair, neatly parted on the left, and a bright smile.

Yet he was now also severely handicapped.

On April 7 the year before, serving with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Tunisia, Stauffenberg had been badly wounded during the fighting that followed the Battle of Kasserine Pass, where Rommel had been engaged in a massive counteroffensive against newly arrived British, American, and French forces.

Stauffenberg, then a lieutenant colonel, had driven alongside units of the 10th Panzer Division near the Tunisian mountain town of Mezzouna. Suddenly, Spitfire fighter bombers from the Allied Desert Air Force appeared overhead and strafed Stauffenberg’s vehicle. He was nearly killed.

Despite three months in a military hospital in Munich, Stauffenberg lost his left eye (he now wore a black eye patch), his entire right hand, and the ring and pinkie fingers of his left hand.

Getting dressed in the standard-issue uniform of the Wehrmacht was therefore an ordeal. The tunic was thick gabardine material with large brass buttons and a stiff collar, and Stauffenberg had difficulty getting it on and off with only two fingers and the thumb on his left hand.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

“They are shooting Jews en masse. These crimes must not be allowed to continue.”

—Claus von Stauffenberg, August 1942¹

With the steely determination for which he was known, Stauffenberg had trained himself to do it.

Now he quickly washed his face, shaved, and carefully pulled on a freshly ironed tunic. Stauffenberg wanted nothing unusual to draw attention to himself. Months of careful planning were about to come to fruition. The destiny of Germany, and of the entire world, was about to be irrevocably changed.

Since the previous autumn, the young German officer had taken over as de facto leader of a five-year-old conspiracy within the Wehrmacht—Germany’s armed forces—to overthrow the Führer. He was determined to do what dozens of other top-ranked generals, politicians, and religious leaders had been planning for years but failed to accomplish: to kill Adolf Hitler.

In addition, the conspiracy was far more ambitious than merely an attempt on Hitler’s life.

Stauffenberg and his associates were determined to save Germany from utter destruction, particularly from the marauding and revenge-minded Soviet Red Army.

Yet to do so, they not only had to kill Hitler and his top aides but also somehow neutralize the vast Nazi organization that had penetrated, like a virus, every facet of German life.

The conspirators had hit upon a brilliant way to do this: take advantage of an already existing Nazi plan, code-named Operation Valkyrie, that called for the Reserve Army bureaucracy to take control of the country in the event of an attempted coup or catastrophic breakdown of the Nazi government.

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT

“A man of intractable will… Stauffenberg was clear and purposeful in one respect: he did not want Hitler to drag the fatally imperiled army down with him in his own destruction. A soldier to the core, the salvation of his fatherland was equivalent in Stauffenberg’s mind to the salvation of the Wehrmacht.”

—Hans B. Gisevius, July 20 plot survivor²

The Nazis themselves had foreseen the possibility of a coup attempt. They feared that the four million foreign workers, prisoners of war, and outright slaves inside Germany might rise up against the government.

Playing on that fear, the conspirators had persuaded Hitler to establish an elaborate parallel system of communications and operations that could be activated, in an emergency, to maintain government control.

And unbeknownst to Hitler’s inner circle, anti-Nazi conspirators had partially infiltrated this alternative government apparatus at the highest levels. The key word, however, is partially. Some of the highest-ranking members of the Reserve Army, such as Stauffenberg, were plotting to kill Hitler; others took a wait-and-see attitude; and still others knew nothing about the plot.

General Friedrich Fromm, the head of the Reserve Army since 1937, was one example of an officer who was on the fence. The fifty-six-year-old career army officer, who knew about the conspiracy against Hitler, was an opportunist who took no active part in the plot but promised to support the conspirators if a coup succeeded.

Yet in a stroke of good luck, Stauffenberg—one of the few junior officers Hitler trusted—had recently been promoted to be Fromm’s deputy. It was this role, in fact, that required him to report to Hitler regularly.

As the Nazi war machine collapsed in the face of the combined Soviet and Western Allies’ advance, Hitler was continually reorganizing his military units and pretending he still had forces at their peak strength. In fact, however, the full-strength divisions that Hitler was moving around on his large military maps existed only on paper and in his own mind; in reality, he was deploying the tattered remnants of decimated units and the unfortunate teenagers and old men the Nazis dragooned into service at the end of the war.

The plan that Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators had hatched was to kill Hitler and then blame his assassination on disloyal Nazi leaders. The conspirators would then activate the Operation Valkyrie alternative government, and the Reserve Army units under the control of the Valkyrie command center would quickly arrest all the top Nazi leaders, seize the communications centers, and declare that the Army had saved the country from anti-Hitler conspirators among Nazi Party officials.

In other words, the conspirators would use the Nazi government’s own emergency plan against it.

The plotters would then immediately declare a ceasefire and negotiate with the British and American governments for a separate peace to stop the advance of Soviet forces into Europe. It was an audacious plan that could well have worked—and saved millions of lives.

A German Prince

Stauffenberg was an unlikely choice to head up such an operation. He was only thirty-six years old and a member of the most prominent family in southern Germany. His parents held the titular ranks of count and countess.

Stauffenberg’s father, Alfred Klemens Philipp Friedrich Justinian, was a high official in the Kingdom of Württemberg, which, until 1918, had been a constitutional monarchy within the German Empire established in 1871. His mother, Gräfin von Üxküll-Gyllenband, came from an equally distinguished family. Born in 1907, Stauffenberg was raised in the rarefied atmosphere of a lavish country estate, Castle Stauffenberg, located amidst the rolling green meadows and lush forests of Lautlingen, just south of the university town of Tübingen. He and his two brothers, Berthold and Alexander, spent their childhood riding horses (Stauffenberg was an expert equestrian), playing classical music (he played the cello), and wandering the hills of Bavaria as part of the Wandervogel German youth movement.

Unsure of what to do with his life— he considered careers in music and architecture—Stauffenberg eventually followed the example of other sons of the aristocracy and joined the Army in 1926 at the age of nineteen. He was commissioned a lieutenant in 1930.

Like many Germans, Stauffenberg neither supported nor opposed the Nazis when they first came to power. He took a wait-and-see attitude and liked some aspects of the Nazi program. Stauffenberg supported the rearmament of Germany’s military, the renewal of German national pride, the annexation of parts of Poland and the Sudetenland, and even some aspects of Nazi racial ideology. Yet Stauffenberg, who was raised and remained a Roman Catholic all his life, never joined the Nazi Party.

The young aristocrat had been a member of the circle of intellectuals attracted to the esoteric writings of the German poet Stefan George, who had called for a spiritual aristocracy— what he called a “Secret Germany”—to rebuild the nation. Although the Nazis incorporated into their propaganda some of George’s concepts, including the idea of a “Thousand Year Reich,” George despised the Nazis. He fled to Switzerland shortly after Hitler came to power, dying there in 1933.

That same year, Stauffenberg married a young Lutheran aristocrat named Magdalena (“Nina”) von Lerchenfeld, the daughter of a Bavarian politician and a Baltic-German noblewoman. Although both their mothers were Lutherans, the young couple married in a Catholic ceremony in Bavaria, and their five children were raised Catholic.

As the years passed, whatever initial enthusiasm Stauffenberg may have felt for the Nazi promises to revitalize Germany dissipated. He became severely disillusioned.

Stauffenberg was not entirely free of the anti-Semitic bias of his age. Recent scholarship has even challenged the notion that he was an unqualified hero.³ Yet the barbarism of the Nazis towards the Jews and other persecuted minorities—seen, for example, during the Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish synagogues in 1938—genuinely disgusted him.

As a young officer, Stauffenberg participated in the German invasion of Russia code-named Operation Barbarossa. There he learned of and was appalled by the atrocities committed by the murderous Schutzstaffel (SS) units in Poland and elsewhere, including the mass shootings of Jewish civilians in Russia. He also witnessed the atrocities committed against Russian prisoners of war. (Some historians have recently claimed that he was complicit in some of these atrocities.)⁴

Soon Stauffenberg discovered that there was strong opposition to Hitler and the Nazis within the German Army. Disaffection with the Führer in the Wehrmacht had begun as early as 1934 but intensified in 1938. Many in the top ranks of Germany’s professional army regarded Hitler, who had served with distinction during World War I but only achieved the low rank of Gefreiter (lance corporal), as an arrogant, untrained military amateur who could very easily lead Germany to destruction. Yet so long as Germany’s newly rearmed armies swept from victory to victory, the anti-Hitler members of the military felt powerless to take action.

At first, it seemed that Hitler could do no wrong. The lightning-fast conquests, first of Poland and then of France, convinced many Germans that Hitler was a military genius. In reality, Hitler may not have known much about military strategy and tactics, but he had an instinctive grasp of the weakness of political leaders—and exploited that weakness every chance he got.

The Flight to the Wolf’s Lair

Just a few minutes after 6:00 a.m., Stauffenberg’s regular chauffeur, Gefreiter (Lance Corporal) Karl Schweizer, parked outside the house on Tristanstrasse. Stauffenberg and his older brother Berthold walked outside, passing through the brick gate that marked the entrance to the property.

The house on Tristanstrasse in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee that Stauffenberg shared with his bro...