Say he didn’t kill himself and was captured…is their any way he would have survived long enough to stand trial? I can’t imagine no one would kill him on his way to trial.
I imagine the Russians (who presumably would’ve been the ones capturing him) would’ve realized the risk of an early assassination and took measures to make sure he was well guarded. I doubt anyone would have risked getting on Stalin’s bad side just to have Hitler killed a few months earlier then he would’ve been due to an inevitable death sentence at Nuremburg.
Presumably it would have depended on what Stalin wanted, or what the Soviet generals in charge of taking Berlin thought that Stalin wanted. Stalin may not have wanted a public trial, for fear that Hitler might say embarrassing things about stuff like the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.
Hard to say but I have no doubt that Hitler did not want to be in Russian hands.
The Trial of Adolf Hitler. Apparently unavailable on Amazon, but I read it years ago from my public library. Hitler escapes from a collapsing Berlin and makes his way to South America, but is eventually exposed and tried.
There is actually some good evidence that Hitler was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and since that diagnosis was a death sentence back then, this may be the reason he turned away from a direct invasion of Britain and gone on to attack the Soviet Union. He was trying to speed up his conquest of Europe.
If this is true, it is doubtful he would’ve lived to be tried in my opinion. Although possibly his trial might’ve been held much sooner after capture than they are today.
Parkinson’s, hmmm, I wonder if Eva had to help him aim that gun?
They’d also have to worry about people getting their hands on him-ala Mussolini.
Hilter made his mind up to die after he saw what happend to his pal Mussolini.
The only way for Hitler to be captured alive was for his own people (I mean his inner guard) to trap him and lock him up safely so he couldn’t kill himself. THEN hand him over to the Russians. Since the Russians were brutally killing their own people, not to mention Germans there is no way any German would do this. Because all that would happen is you turn over Hitler then you get killed as well.
Remember though the fate of Germany was certain, no one knew what would happen and perhaps Hitler’s memory wouldn’t be so bad, so no one wanted to go against that, should ten years from now a pro-Hitler government emerge again.
Remember Nukes and the Cold War didn’t even come into most people’s minds.
The Allies had already decided that the Russians would take Berlin. This is one of the reasons the Americans didn’t charge toward Berlin. The generals saw no point in American deaths if they’d just have to turn it over to the Russians anyway.
If you’re a WWII buff and like discussing it and doing “What ifs” check out the Axis Forums
Regardless, it’s unlikely he’d die from an accident or disease on the road to Nuremburg, or whereever.
I suspect also that with Hitler around, other top Nazis would have been spared trial and death, and if not punishment. presumably, they could sate their taste for vengeance more directly.
After the Battle of San Jacinto, a lot of Texans were ready to eviscerate Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. All that “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember Goliad” – that wasn’t just talk. They hated the man because he had a literal “take no prisoners” policy.
Yet the soldiers guarding jim when the General and Presidente was recognized by his men restrained themselves, and Sam Houston held back from doing anything in order to use the General as a bargaining chip to obtain a quick end to the war.
I’m not saying that Santa Ana is Hitler, but the case illustrates that, even when a leader who is despised and who lots of people would like to see dead falls into the hands of the other side, his death is not a Sure Thing.
In the case of the Second World War, of the leaders of the Axis powers that lost the war:
(1) Hitler killed himself;
(2) Mussolini was killed by partisans from his own country;
(3) The Showa Emperor (Hirohito) continued to rule Japan, but with lessened powers, for another 43 years – even though many argued that he was partly responsible for Japanese war crimes.
Note that Tojo was executed.
Hitler, Himmler and Goering all committed suicide. Goering managed it despite great difficulty in obtaining the poison. Hitler also had many other people to order to kill him if he couldn’t do it, and he poisoned and shot himself. He was not going to be captured alive. And in WWI he was decorated for bravery. Not a plausible scenario that he would off himself or back out.
If we suspend credulity and imagine Hitler being captured by the Russians then my guess is that he doesn’t make it to Nuremberg–the Soviets throw a big show trial in Moscow and then execute him, probably with torture in between.
Maybe, I believe the basic idea behind the Nuremburg Trials were agreed to by the Allies before the fall of Berlin. Does anyone know if there was an agreement as to whether Hitler would be tried there in the event that he was captured. Be sort of odd if it didn’t come up.
Tom; Tojo actually did attempt to kill himself, but was captured and hospitalized before he died. Of course, since we’re considering alternate history, the same thing might’ve happened to Hitler.
I’d put it as better than “some good evidence” that he was suffering from Parkinson’s. However, you’re misunderstanding the timescales.
Parkinson’s is a degenerative disease that, while nasty, takes some time to kill you. In Hitler’s case, it’s fairly late in the war that the symptoms become obviously apparent - the deterioration after the July '44 bomb plot is when it became hard to hide from those around him. And quite when Hitler first became aware of the symptoms is difficult to assess. Never mind when or whether he understood them (and I’m not sure offhand that any of his doctors ever gave him a Parkinson’s diagnosis). But it’s wild speculation that he was aware of anything untoward with his health in the 1940-1 period. Yes, he did at times express doubts that he would live to see the Third Reich triumph, but those don’t seem to be tied to any specific symptoms.
Correspondingly, the disease wasn’t that advanced in 1945 and this would have been obvious to Allied doctors. He’d have handily lived to face a trial in 1946.
On the broader question, the authority of Stalin does seem to me the crucial factor. Soviet troops just aren’t going to summarily execute Hitler in the ruins of Berlin.
Indeed, I can’t think of any senior Nazi who did obviously suffer that fate. (Granted, the non-suicides were all trying to flee westwards.)
It could be argued that a brave way out for Hitler would have been for him to die fighting a street battle in Berlin against the Russians, side by side with all the poor slobs he directed to fight until the end. Killing himself was an act of cowardice in my book.
In regards to Parkinson’s-like symptoms, it’s impossible to know how much of that was due to the incredible onslaught of drugs and supplements he was administered by his personal quack physician:
*"Morell was an unpleasant figure even by Nazi standards–grossly obese, with frog-like features, sulfurous B.O. and venomous halitosis…to combat recurrences of (Hitler’s) volcanic stomach problems, Morell plied him with a remedy called “Dr. Küster’s Anti-gas pills,” which contained significant amounts of strychnine–and Hitler often took as many as 16 of the little black pills a day. The sallow skin, glaucous eyes and attention lapses noted by observers later in the war are consistent with strychnine poisoning; another ingredient in the pills, antropine, causes mood wings from euphoria to violent anger.
Even more peculiar were the injections of amphetamines that Morell administered every morning before breakfast from 1941, which may have exacerbated the erratic behavior, inflexibility, paranoia and indecision that Hitler began to display increasingly as the war ground on. And there was a barrage of other supplements–vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose and opiates, all intended to combat the dictator’s real or imagined ailments.
After the war, US intelligence officers discovered that Morell was pumping Hitler with 28 different drugs, including eye-drops that contained 10 percent cocaine (up to 10 treatments a day), a concoction made from human placenta and “potency pills” made from ground bull’s testicles.*
This site has more than you may want to know about Hitler’s health and the bizarre things he did to maintain it (including examining his own feces and self-administering herbal enemas, the sort of stuff that’s still popular among the “detoxification” crowd).
Agreed.