For someone whose death was desired and fantasised about for so long by millions of people, Adolf Hitler’s demise was ultimately anticlimactic, largely due to the foresight of the man himself.
Seeing what had happened to his erstwhile ally, Benito Mussolini, the Führer arranged for his and Eva Braun’s bodies to be burned after his suicide on April 30th, 1945, thus precluding any desecration of his corpse.
As Caroline Sharples outlines in this fascinating book, the subsequent events and the rapid dispersal of the few witnesses to the death and burning gave rise to a strange legal limbo that lasted about a decade, not to mention conspiracy theories about his survival, which, in the early years at least, were not altogether fanciful.
The Allies managed to get their hands on a few of the surviving witnesses, and their investigator, Hugh Trevor-Roper, established that Hitler was indeed dead, but the Soviets had other witnesses in their custody, and purportedly some of the Führer’s remains. Stalin had his own motives for being coy about details of the death, and disclosure of the extant remains, which amounted to fragments of Hitler’s jaw, would not happen until after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the death being confirmed scientifically in 2018.
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The Allies also approached the matter with caution as they investigated. One of the many strengths of Sharples’ book is how she delineates the political atmosphere of post-capitulation Germany and the real fears the Allies harboured about a recrudescence of nazism. Hitler’s cadaver was, in those days, potentially a political fetish in its absence as much as its presence and there was no inevitability about how the Nazis soon sank into historical opprobrium of unprecedentedly universal scale.
Sharples, a seasoned historian of the Third Reich and postwar Germany, ballasts the book with a preamble on talk of Hitler’s demise during his lifetime and the reaction to his death (in which de Valera’s visit to the German legation gets a brief, and scrupulously fair, treatment).
The lack of new revelations might make The Long Death of Adolf Hitler a touch unsatisfactory for the sort of general reader drawn by the title, but this splendidly researched and methodically argued book is a vital addition to the history of the last days of the Third Reich.
