Inside Hitler's Bunker

Inside Hitler's Bunker
Joachim Fest, Pan Macmillan 190 pages, $25

The recent movie Downfall seems to be symptomatic of a resurgence in interest in the fall of Berlin and, in particular, Hitler’s last days.

There is considerable material already written on the period, by Cornelius Ryan, John Toland and Hugh Trevor-Roper to name a few authors not on Hitler’s staff.

Enter Joachim Fest Described as “Germany’s most insightful historian of Nazism”, Fest covers the mysteries of the capture of the Reichstag (staged by the Russians) and the whereabouts of Hitler’s corpse (almost certainly burned beyond recognition and partially destroyed by bombing – the Russians autopsied what remains were found).

Fest plays psychologist discussing the mental and physical state of the Fuhrer (drugged and enfeebled, veering wildly between hysterical despair and lunatic optimism) in those last days.

The book is a good read. Its description of interminable situation conferences and manoeuvring of mythical army groups, while the golden peacocks of the party made good their escape, is gripping. The fall of Goering and Himmler is closely observed, as is the eventual breakout from the bunker.

What of the Fuhrerbunker, the stage where the drama unfolded? Twelve metres underground, covered by 4m of solid concrete with a 5m deep floor slab, the bunker was impossible to destroy as the Russians claimed they had. It still exists deep under a garden, home to a children’s nursery and play centre.

For me, the horror was not the murder of the Goebbels’ children by their own mother, not the Gotterdammerung” Hitler wanted for the whole of Germany, not the final solution – the senseless waste of human life on all fronts. think I have become immune to all that.

It was the food. The gargantuan amount of food kept for the inhabitants of the bunker. Not staples. Pate, meats, and cream, the best of everything – a haunting vision of two suicided generals in a sea of half empty cognac bottles – while Berlin starved.

– Hugh McKenzie

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