Tag: defeat

As he wrote during interrogation, until the very end of April 1945, Hitler’s inner circle, who was next to him in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin, did not know the Fuhrer’s final intentions.

“Only on April 30, in the afternoon, he called me together with my adjutant, Colonel Betz. Hitler met me in the hallway and led me to his room. He shook my hand and said: “Baur, I want to say goodbye to you, I want to thank you for all the years of service,” the ex-pilot recalled.

“He was very old and haggard. His hands were trembling, it was clear to me that they had made the final decision to commit suicide,” the military man recalled.

Hitler told him that he wanted to donate his favourite painting as a keepsake – a portrait of King Frederick the Great by Rembrandt that hung in his room. Baur tried to dissuade Hitler from committing suicide, “because then everything will fall apart in a few hours.”

“My soldiers can’t and don’t want to hold on anymore. I can’t take it anymore,” Hitler replied.

He went on to say that “the Russians are on Potsdamer Platz” and could capture him alive, allegedly using sleeping gas. Hitler added that he ordered to burn his corpse and the corpse of his wife Eva Braun, because he was afraid that they would be hanged for show, as the Italian partisans had previously hanged the corpse of the leader of fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini.