‘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. The author is steeped in the more Wagnerian aspects of the war, though the repulse of German forces from Moscow at the end of 1941 was surely not, as he claims, ‘the Führer’s first significant defeat’, for what otherwise was the failure to subdue Britain in 1940? Michael Jones wishes to show the reason for and significance of the two VE Days — divisions which nearly caused a fatal rift between the Allies, a ‘crisis largely hidden from public view and in the event… successfully mastered’.
The Yalta conference of the ‘big three’ (Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill) in February 1945 had agreed the occupation zones in Germany, and the armies had advanced according to those arrangements, but by May mutual suspicion was gaining the upper hand, especially after Roosevelt’s death on 12 April.
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