Hitler's End: A Study in Strongman Dysfunction

Strongmen are at their worst when their people need them the most

We pay much attention these days to how dictators come to power, but understanding how they decline and exit –almost always involuntarily—and remembering the disasters they caused to their people and the world is equally important right now.

To mark the anniversaries of the deaths of Il Duce and the Führer, this week I am adapting some excerpts from the “Endings” chapter of my book Strongmen, which is being reprinted again due to popular demand. Yesterday’s essay was about Benito Mussolini, and today’s is about Adolf Hitler.

Mussolini was shot by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945, three days after Italian partisans and the Allies liberated Italy. On April 30, 1945, Hitler killed himself as the Red Army entered Berlin. In Spain, Francisco Franco remained in office, taking right-wing dictatorship into the Cold War era, but in Italy and Germany the long nightmare of Fascism came to an end.

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Many people had predicted that Hitler might kill himself one day. The palm reader Josef Ranald, who met him in 1932, foresaw suicidal tendencies and a “violent end.” The Führer seemed confident and unstoppable, though, at the outset of World War II. He is “the sole master of the circus ring,” the writer André Gide observed after the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940. “Soon the very people he is crushing will be obliged, while cursing him, to admire him.”

Yet some Germans found it challenging to continue to admire Hitler as the war went on. The Nazis’ 1941 invasion of Russia led to a protracted two-front war, and the Stalingrad defeat of 1942-1943 shook the doctrine of Nazi military and racial superiority. Between 1942 and 1945, 390,000 Allied bombings cost half a million German lives in 130 towns and cities.

Germans also lacked food and clothing. Women wore their dead husbands’ and brothers’ garments, and workers from the East labored with rags around their feet. Even 111,000 pairs of shoes and 155,000 coats, collected from Jewish victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek, could not meet the demand.

Not that Hitler cared about Germans’ hardships. As setbacks on the battlefield complicated his master plan for an expanded Reich, Hitler, like Mussolini, blamed his own people. In 1940, during challenges in the campaign to occupy Norway, General Walter Warlimont had witnessed a “truly terrifying weakness of [Hitler’s] character” that was disastrous in a wartime leader: an inability to take responsibility for mistakes or deal with obstacles to the implementation of his will.

“Let it perish and be annihilated by some stronger power…I shall shed no tears for the German nation,” Hitler had stated in 1941, speaking of the eventuality of defeat, his scorn for his people evident.

So, it’s unsurprising that Hitler’s speeches, which had been his source of emotional connection with Germans, now disappointed with their lack of warmth and reassurance. Parallel to the wartime decline of Mussolini’s personality cult among Italians, Germans’ letters to Hitler and requests for his autograph declined drastically, while criticism of him escalated, leading to record numbers of prosecutions for anti-Hitler remarks in 1942.

Resistance to Hitler

The war years also brought discontent among a number of high-ranking military officers to a new level. Hitler’s reckless push to war and his 1938 takeover and purge of the leadership of the German armed forces had already spurred resistance in the defense world. The Abwehr (military intelligence) became a center of opposition under deputy head Major General Hans Oster, and German officers hatched myriad plots during the war to kill Hitler, all of which failed due to malfunctioning explosives or other quirks of fate.

The repositioning of an explosive-filled briefcase by an unwitting Hitler aide foiled an operation at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia by Claus von Stauffenberg, Oster, and others on July 20, 1944. The bombing left Hitler with minor injuries but killed and maimed multiple Nazi officers. It ended with the conspirators executed, their families imprisoned, 7,000 military and civilian officials arrested, and almost 4,000 executed.

“I am invulnerable. I am immortal,” a dazed Führer repeated over and over again to the doctor who treated him after the explosion. For believers, Hitler’s survival proved that he enjoyed divine protection. A conspirator concluded ruefully that Hitler had a “guardian devil” keeping him alive.

Germany had no equivalent of the armed partisan movements that appeared in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and other countries occupied by the Nazis. Resistance inside Nazi Germany took other forms, from individuals such as Josef Höfler, who smuggled Jews over the Swiss border, to the socialists of the Bund, to Helmut and Freya von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle, where aristocrats and other elites discussed how to end Nazism and transition to democracy.

The methods used by the White Rose resistance group of Munich University students merit our attention. Brother-sister conspirators Sophie and Hans Scholl and their associates started by sending anonymous letters denouncing the Nazis, each one reaching thousands throughout southwest Germany, and expanded to graffiti actions, like painting “Hitler mass murderer” on a Munich bookshop, and distributing leaflets at train stations and phone booths.

While the Scholls grew up with an anti-Nazi father, they had absorbed lessons in mass communications from the regime they so despised. As they stated, their goal was to produce “compelling propaganda” that would “impact a large part of the population.”

To that end, they sent their letters to people whose jobs put them in contact with many people, such as educators, doctors, and owners of restaurants, pubs, and bookshops. The letters asked the recipients to copy the messages and spread them “from person to person.” Working in an analog era and in a police state, they sought to construct an anti-fascist social network.

Eight months of frenetic activity ended with their arrest in February 1943. “I had to act out of my inner conviction and I believed this inner obligation was more binding than the oath of loyalty I had given as a soldier,” Hans Scholl told Gestapo interrogators before he was executed along with his sister.

Hitler Abandons His People

As the war became more difficult for Germany, Hitler’s willingness to engage with reality grew more limited; the dozens of drugs he was taking likely did not help on that score. General Franz Halder worried that Hitler’s “chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions.”

While the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt brought a wave of Führer-affection, Hitler’s disappearance from public events after that further decreased public confidence in his leadership. ”The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it,” was one German’s judgment of the outcome of Hitler’s rule.  

In January 1945, the Red Army reached Germany (the Western Allies arrived in March) and the liberation of the concentration camps began. Hitler took refuge in his Berlin bunker and ceased almost all contact with the public.

His March 1945 Nero Decree mandated the destruction of vital military and transport infrastructure –another sign that he had given up on Germans, who in his mind had failed to rise to the greatness he had offered them—but Albert Speer, as Minister of Armaments, managed to delay its implementation.

Scottish Infantry Division soldiers from the British 2nd Army with a captured swastika in Kranenburg during the Battle of the Reichswald, Feb. 10, 1945. Hitler remained in his bunker, barely communicating with Germans, as the Reich crumbled. Sergeant Norman Midgley/No.5 Army Film & Photographic Unit/BIPPA/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

On April 29, Hitler married his companion, Eva Braun. She wore Ferragamo shoes and a couture dress that had been delivered under fire to the Führerbunker. That same day, Hitler heard the news of Il Duce’s death and macabre display in Piazzale Loreto.

On April 30^th, he and Braun took cyanide, and he shot himself in the head. Hitler may have had Mussolini’s humiliating fate in mind when he asked that aides incinerate their bodies in the bunker’s garden so his death would not become a “spectacle.” But he could not prevent his ashes being taken by the Red Army, which meant that he ended up in the hands of the Communists he so hated.  

The absence of a body deprived Germans of the cathartic verification of death Italians had with Mussolini. Some of his followers preferred to believe he had escaped to Argentina. Tens of thousands of others, driven by codes of honor or shame, killed themselves in 1945. They included Magda and Joseph Goebbels; 10-20% of German Generals and Admirals; and myriad NSDAP members and civil servants.

In July 1945, as Germany lay in ruins, U.S. Army intelligence officers interviewed Hitler’s sister Paula. “I must honestly confess that I would have preferred it if he had followed his original ambition and become an architect,” she stated, speaking for millions.