The madness of Nazism laid bare

‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno Ganz, who not so much portrays Hitler as becomes him in Bernd Eichinger’s 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall), spits the Führer’s nihilist venom so convincingly that the fundamental insanity of Nazism is at once laid bare, even to his closest collaborators. The madness of Nazism is now merely Hitler himself, and when on 30 April Ganz/Hitler, entombed in the Führerbunker, shoots himself, the film’s tension is at once gone. What follows is just rats fleeing the hole; and the rest, as it were, is silence.

But it was not. VE (Victory in Europe) Day was not celebrated in London until 8 May, and in Moscow on 9 May. What happened in those last ten days of the war, ‘after Hitler’?

The stories have long been told, beginning with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s semi-official The Last Days of Hitler, but this ambitious book attempts to draw together the many threads during the period of the empty tomb.