The Annihilation of the Nazis

Beneath Berlin, a lesson awaits.

The famous photo of a Soviet soldier raising his flag over the German Reichstag in the Battle of Berlin, photographed by Yevgeny Khaldei.

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler entered his private sitting room in the Berlin Führerbunker. He was accompanied by Eva Braun, his long-time mistress and recently wedded wife. The two of them had been living in the bunker beneath the Reichschancellery for weeks, and now the Soviet army was within five hundred yards of their position. The two of them reclined on a sofa as the door was shut behind them by Waffen SS officer Otto Günsche.

Several minutes later, the sound of a gunshot rang through the cramped halls of the Führerbunker. That such a thing should be heard was not exceptional: the Russians had been shelling their position for days and were now close enough to employ small arms. But this sound came from inside the bunker, and thus Günsche knew it had happened. He entered the sitting room where he found Eva Braun leaning against her husband. A quick inspection confirmed that she had chewed on a cyanide capsule and met her end. Hitler was slumped over, blood running from a wound in his temple. Nearby lay the gun he had used to end his life. Within minutes, their bodies would be carried up to the surface, placed in a bomb crater, and incinerated to prevent recovery by the Soviets.

What explains the Hitlers’ actions that day? It would be simple enough to attribute it to the desire to avoid capture, which would undoubtedly have led to imprisonment, execution, and humiliation. But the Soviets would not have executed Eva: she was a fool of the highest degree, but had never committed any war crimes herself. Neither does the desire to avoid capture explain the actions of Hitler’s chosen successor, Joseph Goebbels, who committed suicide along with his wife the next day after they had killed all their children. Again, Goebbels would have been a prime target for prosecution, but the same cannot be said for his family.

What caused these people to annihilate themselves?

Suicide is often thought to be an irrational act: the choice of a crazed person. But apart from a small percentage of persons with the most severe mental illnesses, people who commit suicide do so for rational reasons. Correct reasons? Reasons in line with objective truth? No, but there is a kind of rationality to it.

One of the things that sets human beings apart from animals, as far as we know, is the pursuit of higher level meaning. Animal life can be reasonably described according to standard evolutionary logic: they exist to further the existence of their species. Therefore, animal life is often centered around procreation. This is not to say that an animal would never do anything just for fun or cannot experience a wide range of emotions. But animals do not have art museums, therapists, birthday parties, or ascetic practices. Even burial rites are few and far between. This is not solely because their brains are less powerful, but also because animals do not pursue higher meaning outside themselves and their species. The strong survive and the weak perish.

Human beings, on the other hand, seem to need higher meaning to such a degree that without it, they lose the will to live. They become a despair - a nothingness, or in Latin, a nihil. The natural result of this nothingness is self-annihilation. Human beings need higher meaning to drive themselves on, which is to say that they need hope. But if there is no greater meaning out there, then we exist in a state of nihilism and the rational thing to do (or at least the inevitable thing) is to destroy one’s own existence.

When Adolf Hitler shot himself in the Berlin Führerbunker, he did so not simply to avoid the shame of being captured by the Soviets or out of fear of the tortures they might visit upon him. He did it because his source of meaning had been destroyed.

Below this unassuming apartment block, Adolf Hitler annihilated himself. The Führerbunker was buried beneath the modern road.

What was his source of meaning? One might be tempted to say the German Volk: the nation which he believed to be the master race. Certainly, the German nation had experienced a massive setback by the spring of 1945. The dreams of world domination had turned into a nightmare of destruction in every major German city. Nevertheless, the people had not been annihilated, and they needed protection. If the German Volk was truly his source of meaning, why did Hitler commit suicide rather than protecting them to the last? Or better yet, why did he not surrender earlier to prevent the further destruction of German heritage and the lives of the German people?

Because it was not actually about the German Volk. They were merely the instrument, the receiving vessel, the force to be channeled.

The film Downfall (Der Untergang) portrays the final days Hitler and his staff spent in the Führerbunker. It is based on the eyewitness testimony of dozens of people, the most prominent being Hitler’s personal secretary Traudl Junge. The dialogue in the film therefore provides the best approximation of what we know Hitler said in those dark hours. Early in the film, General Wilhelm Mohnke, who has been helping to organize the fight against the invading Soviets, reports to Hitler about the conditions outside: the Soviets far outnumber the Germans and have them encircled, so it is only a matter of time until the city falls. But what of the Berliners?

Mohnke: “We’ll fight until the last man in Berlin. There are still three million civilians here. They have to be evacuated.”

Hitler: “I understand your concern, Mohnke. But we have to be cold as ice. We can’t spend any energy on so-called civilians.”

Mohnke: “With all due respect, what will happen to the women and children, and the thousands of wounded and elderly?”

Hitler: “In a war such as this one, there are no civilians.”¹

The film does an excellent job here depicting Hitler’s mindset at the time. By this point, every major German city had been severely damaged by Allied bombing. Hamburg and Dresden suffered conventional bombings as destructive as the nuclear weapons later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Berliners were suffering greatly even before the Soviets reached the city.

But is Hitler concerned about his beloved German Volk? No. It is not worth devoting resources to allow the people to flee to the west, where they will find much better treatment among the Americans and British than what awaits them from the Soviets. The only thing worth defending is the Nazi regime itself.

In another scene from Downfall, Hitler speaks with his armaments minister, Albert Speer. It is one of the most chilling moments in the film.

Hitler: “If the war is lost, it’s immaterial if the people perish too. It is not necessary to consider the German people’s primitive survival needs. On the contrary, we’d best destroy them ourselves. Our people turned out weak, and according to the laws of nature, they should die out.

Speer: “They’re your people. You’re their Führer.”

Hitler: “The only ones who will survive the battle are the inferior ones. Our best people have fallen already.”²

Is this merely the filmmaker projecting onto Hitler our belief in his monstrosity? Would even he have shown such callous disregard for the human lives that supposedly mattered most to him? Didn’t he care about the Aryan race and find his meaning in its promotion?

In fact, the film is accurate. When Speer informed Hitler that the Nazi economy could only hold out for a few more weeks before total collapse, the Führer really did express his resignation to the German people’s annihilation. Not only that, he sought to hasten it.

“In Gitta Sereny’s biography of Speer, Hitler is quoted as responding, ‘it is not necessary to worry about their [the German people’s] needs for elemental survival.’ He stunned his Armaments Minister, accustomed to the Führer’s fulminations against the ‘inferior’ peoples of the Soviet Union, by declaring ‘the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East.’ On March 19, Hitler then promulgated a special decree titled ‘Destructive Measures on Reich Territory.’ Otherwise remembered as the ‘Scorched Earth Decree’ or ‘Nero Decree,’ for the brutal Roman Emperor Nero (ruled 54-68 C.E.), the order mandated the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure.³

Hitler believed it was not he who had failed, but the German people themselves. They had not lived up to the promise of their superior racial breeding. Therefore, annihilation was a fitting end for them. For Hitler never found ultimate satisfaction in the German people - their history, culture, and accomplishments. His greatest source of meaning and that of all hardened Nazi ideologues was power itself.

This is why he could brush off the idea of protecting Berlin’s civilians while throwing everything into increasingly harebrained schemes to keep the Soviets from capturing the Reichschancellery. This is why he saw no reason to keep living beyond the fall of the Nazi regime, even though tens of millions of Germans would survive the war. For when there was no more power to be had, there was no longer a reason to live.

Where did Hitler receive such an idea? That will be the subject of my next article.

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1. Downfall (Der Untergang). Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, performances by Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, et al., Constantin Film, 2004. I am quoting the official English subtitles.

2. Ibid

3. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/sealing-third-reichs-downfall-adolf-hitlers-nero-decree#:~:text=The%20decree%20came%20about%20after,the%20Third%20Reich's%20war%20effort.