Books: Horse Opera Liebestod

To THE BITTER END (632 pp.)—Hans Bernd Gisevius, translated by Richard and Clara Winston—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER (254 pp.)—H. R. Trevor-Roper—Mac/n/7/an ($3).

Since no body has ever been found, the question of Hitler’s death is still a topic that haunts historians. One of these two new books gives an apparently authentic description of several plots on Hitler’s life; the other tries to piece together the details of his death. Both deserve considerable credence. Trevor-Roper’s book, the heart of which has already appeared in LIFE, is the report of the official British historian. Gisevius, a German, was rescued from Germany by the OSS, which thus, to some extent, vouches for him.

Wrong Day for It. Readers may well conclude from the two volumes that Hitler’s death in the ruins of Berlin is not so hard to believe as his continued survival through a dozen years of intraparty intrigue. As far back as 1938, German bigwigs planned their first Putsch. In on the deal, according to Gisevius, were Chief of Staff Franz Haider, General Erwin von Witzleben and a string of other generals. Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, Major General Hans Oster (the brains of Wehrmacht counterintelligence) and Author Gisevius himself were among the conspirators. The calendar, he says, explains why the plot failed. Putsch day was set to coincide with the march on Czechoslovakia. But Munich intervened—Nazi Germany had won a war without firing a shot, and in the face of the news most of the plotting generals backed out. Writes

Gisevius: “Schacht, Oster and I sat around Witzleben’s fireplace [burning] our lovely plans.”

For some years a Prussian civil servant, later vice consul in Zurich, Author Gisevius claims to have been a member of an eager, unstable and heterogeneous group which schemed against Hitler from the Reichstag fire (1933) down through World War II. He regards Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg (the man who nearly killed Hitler on July 20, 1944) as a Johnny-come-lately with half-Nazi ideas of his own. It was Stauffenberg who lugged a bomb-laden briefcase into field headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, and left it to explode under Hitler’s nose. The blast gave Hitler a good shaking up, and as a result of it more than 50 general staff officers died. Author Gisevius, one of the few plotters who survived, went into hiding, escaped to Switzerland when the OSS smuggled him a forged passport. Readers may balk at the rightist, sometimes self-righteous tone of his book, but they will find it by far the fullest account to date of anti-Hitler plotting.

Nibelung Nonsense. British Historian Trevor-Roper, whose book is the August co-choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, picks up the pieces where Gisevius drops them and reconstructs a Wagnerian drama of the suicide “love death” of Hitler and Eva Braun. His evidence, gathered from documents and survivors, is circumstantial but pretty convincing. From the Führer-bunker, deep under the Reich Chancellery garden, the war “was directed by somnambulist decisions,” he says. Russian shells crashed down overhead; Berlin was almost surrounded; in G.I. slang, the doomed party leaders were getting “bunker happy.” Hitler himself deteriorated rapidly.

His left foot dragged the ground, he developed a stoop. He suffered from an infected sinus, swollen glands in the neck, continual headaches and stomach cramps. To relieve these pains, his physician gave him a proprietary drug compounded of strychnine and belladonna. It was called Dr. Koester’s Antigas Pills.

They could not, unfortunately, deflate the “gaseous metaphysics” of Nazi doctrine, even in its final Götterdammerung convulsions. Martin Bormann, faithful to the end, pumped the Führer full of false hopes. Göring, in his Prussian retreat, dressed “now like an oriental Rajah, now in a light-blue uniform with a bejeweled baton of pure gold and ivory, now in white silk, like a Doge of Venice . . . studded with jewels . . . and a swastika of gleaming pearls. . . .” Himmler, deluded to the end, maintained a “school of eager researchers [who] studied . . . Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, the symbolism of the suppression of the harp in Ulster, and the occult significance of Gothic pinnacles and top-hats at Eton.” Hitler himself sometimes rose from his “modest supper of vegetable pie and distilled water to prance upon the table and identify himself with the great conquerors of the past.”

Angelic Antics. In this megalomaniac delusion, Goebbels played his usual sycophantic role. One night, as the bombs thundered above them, he read to Hitler from Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great. When he had finished, “tears stood in the Führer’s eyes” and two horoscopes were sent for—Hitler’s and that of the German Republic. They predicted a change of fortune after a period of disaster. A few days later came news of Roosevelt’s death. Reported a witness, Count Schwerin von Krosigk: “We felt the wings of the Angel of History rustle through the room. Could this be the long-desired change of fortune?”

But the bunkermates weren’t on the side of history’s angel. During the night of April 27-28, “Hitler called his court around him, and in this macabre conclave all rehearsed their plans for suicide.” Only SS General Fegelein, Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, declined: “He had not secured his adoption into the family in order to burn on the family pyre.” He escaped from the bunker but was captured and shot. Early in the morning of April 30, Hitler married Eva Braun. (She supplied, says the author, “that ideal of restfulness . . . for which his bourgeois soul so hankered.”) That day in the Chancellery canteen, where the soldiers and orderlies took their meals, there was a dance. Word went up from the Führerbunker to make less noise. At 3:30 p.m., Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, he by shooting, she with poison; their bodies were carried outside to the garden and burned. It was a horse-opera Liebestod, enacted to the crash of Russian shells and robbed of its Wagnerian grandeur by a curious anticlimax: those remaining in the bunker lit up cigarets. “During Hitler’s lifetime that had been absolutely forbidden; but now the headmaster had gone and the boys could break the rules.”