Did Hitler Order the Subways Flooded?

Factual Questions
1

Last Sunday night (Aug 10), I watched a documentary on the History Channel titled “No Surrender: German and Japanese Kamikazes” in which the writers mentioned that while Hitler was in his bunker at the end of the war, he ordered Berlin’s subways flooded so that any residents who had taken shelter from the bombing there would be killed. Apparently, the writers’ take on this was that Hitler knew the end was near and he wanted to take as much of Germany with him as possible when he died.

I was floored. While I realize he wasn’t the world’s most normal guy, this seems a bit crazy, even for Hitler. And in the eighteen gazillion other documentaries I have seen and the many books I have read that discuss this point in history, I have never heard anything like that before.

I have googled without success trying to find an independent source that mentions this. Does anyone out there know whether this really happened?

2

I’ve never heard of this either. It’s not so much that I don’t think he would, it’s that I don’t know how it would’ve been done.

3

It did happen, although the impact of it is disputed. Antony Beevor talks about this in his excellent book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 at pages 370-372.

The tunnels were flooded by blowing up a section of tunel running beneath a canal on the night of 1-2 May. Hitler was already dead by then, but it was probably by his order. Beevor argues the estiamtes of 15-50,000 killed were probably inflated as the tunnels were only flooded to about a meter and a half depth and many of the bodies later recovered were of those who had died of wounds earlier.

Hitler’s orders to fight to the last and his desire to see Germany fall in flames around him probably explain why it was done.