Was playing a game lately, where in an alternate universe, the Nazi’s won World War 2 and took over the world (Wolfenstein: The New Order) and I can’t pick it up again because it made me feel sick, physically and mentally.
It also had gotten me to think, how come Hitler, who was arguably the most powerful man in the world, didn’t escape to South America with other high ranking officials? Surely he had the means, the motive and opportunity, he had to have known the Russians were encroaching, so what gives? Why did he off himself instead of trying to escape, surely he had advanced notice of some kind. Also, why would Eva Braun do the same? What would the charges be against her? Forgive my ignorance (history channel only goes so far), I just want to know more about the subject.
You can read all sorts of medical excuses why he was off his rocker - fatigue, medications, illnesses, self-importance, a sense of grandeur or megalomania - or just plain bat-shit crazy. Toward the end he was apparently ordering around army divisions that no longer existed, hoping there was a saving maneuver on the horizon.
Others no doubt were less invested and much more motivated to worry more about self-preservation and less about history recording them as having buggered off when the going got tough.
I don’t know enough about the German communications to comment on whether even moving to his alpine retreat would have worked - what was communication like those last few weeks and days? Could he have run the country from Bergen-whatever without giving away his position to invaders. I assume that spot would have been a lot hard to defend to the bitter end like Berlin.
I’ve never found it that hard to understand. Every day, people all over the world end their own lives when they feel there is nothing else to live for. Why is it so hard to comprehend that a physically ill soon to be former dictator might not say “I had my run, its all over. I dont wanna live as the worlds most wanted fugitive”
Also, not that many high level officials escaped. Eichmann was probably the biggest fish to (temporarily) escape. The other bigwigs were killed, commited suicide or were tried at Nuremburg.
Very true, and wasn’t he also on a lot of strange drug treatments/non-traditional medications?
I don’t find it so hard to believe that he would just off himself, but I am thinking in a traditional (non-suicidal) way, wouldn’t most people try to escape anyway?
Assume he did escape to Argentina. He would be the single most wanted person on the planet. Additionally, he would have had to live with his failure, he would have had to live out the rest of his days without ever delivering another speech, without being surrounded by millions saluting him and hanging on his every word.
For a megalomaniac like Hitler that would have been worse than death. He went out the only way he could have. He thought he was right all the way to the end, that betrayal is what caused his defeat. The worst betrayal would have been being turned over to the Soviets for execution. So he did it himself and saved himself the ignominy of having to sit through a trial and finding out he couldn’t lie to himself anymore.
My God, I didn’t think of it that way at all, I suppose it’s implied to a degree but I didn’t. That makes a ton of sense. Argentina! I kept thinking it was Chile or something where those others had escaped, have to wonder what the people there did with them when they died…
As I recall, there was an attempt on the Allied side to undertake some sort of psychological analysis/evaluation of him during the war, that predicted he would commit suicide if and when defeat looked inevitable.
I think Airman Doors has hit the nail on the head of what most historians believe. In the world of his own personal drama, there’d have been nothing to live for. Even as early as the Stalingrad defeat, the public line (for a while) was to evoke a similarity with the 300 at Thermopylae; by the end, the only way he could save his reputation in his own eyes was to blame the German people for not being up to his expectations of their historical destiny, and to play Brünnhilde casting herself into the flames.
Or a more monstrous Norma Desmond (“I AM big! It’s the world that got small!”).
And he wasn’t the only one. Apart from poor silly Eva Braun standing by her man, the Goebbelses were determined to die in the last ditch, and murdered their children before doing so, and plenty of lower-level officials committed suicide too.
Hitler said from the start, during the polish invasion, He was either going to win, or die.
He was already a nut bag.
“I now wish to be nothing other than the first soldier of the German Reich. Therefore I have put on that tunic which has always been the most holy and dear to me. I shall not take it off again until after victory is ours, or I shall not live to see the day!”
According to Albert Speer, when he offered to save the Goebbels children by taking them out of Berlin at a time when this was still possible and urged Magda Goebbels to allow this, she refused, saying that she did not want them “to grow up in a world without National Socialism”.
I think that basically encapsulates the mindset of the leadership group that chose to die rather than escape and survive. It wasn’t just that they feared what would happen to them if they fell into Soviet hands, or even that they feared having to live ordinary lives on South American farms. It was that they didn’t want to live with their failure.
I remember reading how if Germany had developed the atomic bomb first by 1945, they would have been far more likely to have used it to incite people in German cities to fight to the bitter end (“If this German city surrenders and falls, we’ll just nuke it to prevent its use to the enemy”) as opposed to offensive use since they really have no capability to actually transport it anywhere meaningful.
Well that settles that about Hitler, him being a sick twisted narcissistic, domineering nutbag explains it all.
On another note
Would it have been possible with U-Boats with V-2 launchers somehow attached, almost like a precursor to the nuclear armed subs of today? What is the main reason for the Nazi’s failing to develop a nuclear weapon? Was it Allied sabotage?
The did have a proposal to use one of the newer snorkel equipped U-Boats to take a V-2 Launcher off the US East Coast and launch, I believe they intended it to be dragged on a submersible barge. No idea how feasible that was.
IIRC, V2’s used cryonic fuel (liquid oxygen) so not particularly U-boat friendly. Plus, submarines with submersible giant cargo doors is I assume another new technology that would have needed development.
Another point is that V2 with its clockwork autopilot needed a very stable launch site. Toward the end, they couldn’t create paved launch sites without them being bombed, so their technique was to find a location in the country, flood the ground with liquid nitrogen so it was frozen solid, then they had a short time when they could set up the launch pad and fuel up on a stable base. I don’t know whether they could feasibly aim a device on the open water with ocean wave action. Not to mention needing some idea of wind readings to target, which I believe required aircraft.
Here is a rant you’ve seen riffed countless times, but with the real subtitles. Downfall was a movie, not a documentary, but it was based mainly on the memoirs of Traudl Junge (she’s the character in the green blouse comforting the crying secretary). You’ll notice how everybody is to blame but himself. – typical narcissistic behavior, turned up to eleven.
In a much earlier bunker movie, Hitler, the Last Ten Days, he orders the Berlin subway be flooded to prevent their use in bypassing strong points. The officer objects, reminding him that they are being used as shelters. Hitler responds that the lives of “little people” are of no concern to him.
Genocide is bad enough but what kind of monster would refuse to save her own children? There is evidence that the eldest daughter, twelve, did not die voluntarily.
There are bad people, there are monsters, then there are Nazis.
Well, no “high ranking Nazi officials” escaped to Argentina. The highest ranking was Adolf Eichmann, a real scumbag and war criminal but a mere lieutenant colonel. The Allies were on the lookout for high ranking Nazis and few got thru. Yes, a number of rather nasty low level war criminals did get out, but their crimes were not known at that time, and there was no immediate manhunt for them.
Heinrich Müller, the then head of the Gestapo was never found, true.
Eva Braun would have been horribly mistreated by the Soviets. Mass rapes and torture were endemic during that period.