Adolf Hitler (German pronunciation: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ], about this sound (help-info); 20 April 1889, Braunau am Inn – 30 April 1945, Berlin), was an Austrian-born German politician, demagogue and leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He is considered one of the 20th century’s most powerful and notorious dictators.
His political life began in 1919 when he became a member of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP), and continued with its transformation into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP) in 1920, becoming party chairman in 1921. The obstacle to Hitler’s election as Chancellor was his stateless status from 1925 to 1932. In order to overcome this obstacle, he was appointed by Minister Dietrich Klagges, then Minister of the Interior and a member of the Thule Society, to the Brunswick representative office in Berlin, where he was granted civil servant status and naturalized German citizenship. In 1933, he became Chancellor (Reichskanzler) when he was appointed head of the new coalition government. In 1934, he took over the office of the President of the Republic (Reichspräsident) and created the office of head of state called Führer (Leader); he combined the heads of state and government using the title Führer und Reichskanzler. His dictatorship ended with his suicide on April 30, 1945. On September 1, 1939, he started World War II in Europe with the Polish Campaign. Throughout the war, he was closely involved in military operations and was central to the perpetuation of the Holocaust.
Hitler gained strength from the Great Depression in Germany after World War I. Through propaganda and eloquence, he gave hope to the economic aspirations of the lower and middle classes, while offering a certain level of nationalism, socialism, anti-Semitism, anti-communism and anti-capitalism. With the restoration of the economy, a rearmed army, a totalitarian and fascist regime, Hitler restored order within Germany and, having created a strong country, pursued an aggressive foreign policy, attacking Poland in order to expand the German “Lebensraum”. With Blitzkrieg tactics and an alliance of Axis powers, he occupied most of Europe, parts of Asia and Africa.
With the United States joining World War II on the side of the Allies and the Red Army advancing, the German army began to retreat. When Soviet forces entered Berlin on April 23, 1945, Germany’s defeat was certain. Hitler committed suicide in the underground bunker (Führerbunker) in occupied Berlin with his wife Eva Hitler (Eva Braun) on April 30, 1945. His body was cremated by his followers according to his will. The Greater German Reich came to an end with Alfred Jodl’s instrument of surrender, signed on May 7, 1945 and effective the following day.
Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy is considered the main reason for the outbreak of World War II in Europe. His anti-Semitic policies and racist ideology led to the deaths of at least 5.5 million people whom he considered inferior.
Hitler’s bloodline
Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler (1837-1903), was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. His baptismal record did not show his father’s name and Alois initially carried his mother’s surname ‘Schicklgruber’. In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois’ mother. Alois grew up in the family of Hiedler’s brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In 1876, Alois’ baptismal record was annotated by a priest to record Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois’ father (recorded as “Georg Hitler”). Alois later took the surname “Hitler” (also spelled ‘Hiedler’, ‘Hüttler’ or ‘Huettler’). This name is probably based on the German word hütte (“hut”) and probably means “one who lives in a hut”.
Nazi official Hans Frank claimed that Alois’s mother was employed as a cleaner by a Jewish family in Graz, the capital of the province of Styria, and that the family’s 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger, was Alois’s father. There was no one with the surname Frankenberger in Graz at the time and no record of Leopold Frankenberger’s existence has ever been found. Furthermore, Jewish residency in Styria had been illegal for nearly 400 years and was not re-legalized until decades after Alois’ birth. Historians therefore reject the claim that Alois’ father was Jewish.
His childhood and teenage years.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Upper Austria, part of the German-dominated Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of Alois Hitler[20] (1837-1903), then a customs officer, and Klara Pölzl[22] (1860-1907), Alois’s third wife (who was also his second cousin and had church permission to marry him). He was born the son of Klara Pölzl (1860-1907). He was the fourth of Alois’ six children. He was born an Austrian citizen.
Adolf, whose name means ‘noble wolf’ (Adolf = Adel + wolf) in Old German, was known simply as ‘Adi’ among his relatives. (Adolf Hitler used the pseudonym ‘Wolf’ among his inner circle from the early 1920s onwards. This even influenced the names of various centers on the European continent. Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Wolfsschlucht in France, Werwolf in Ukraine, etc.)
Legally born with the surname Hitler, the male members of Adolf’s paternal ancestors had the surname ‘Hiedler’. In his book The Nazi Empire, the American journalist William L. Shirer writes the following about Hitler’s genealogy and surname: “Hitler’s grandfather, Johann Georg Hiedler, was a traveling miller. He traveled from village to village in Lower Austria. Five months after his first marriage in 1824, he had a son. But neither the boy nor his mother survived. Eighteen years later, while working in Duerrenthal, he married Maria Anna Schicklgruber, a forty-seven-year-old peasant woman from the village of Strones. Five years before, on June 7, 1837, Maria had had an illegitimate child, whom she named Alois. This child later became the father of Adolf Hitler. It was very likely that Alois’s father was Johann Hiedler, although there is no conclusive evidence. In any case, Johann had married the woman but, contrary to the custom in such cases, had not bothered to legitimize the child. The child grew up as Alois Schicklgruber. Anna died in 1847, after which Johann Hiedler disappeared for thirty years. At the age of eighty-four he reappeared in Weitra in the Waldviertel. This time he spelled his name Hitler. In the presence of a notary and three witnesses he registered himself as the father of Alois Schicklgruber.”
In the summer of 1892 the family moved to the German border town of Passau, where their father was appointed head of the customs office. In the spring of 1895 the family returned to Austria and moved to Rauschergut in Hafeld, so that Hitler attended the one-grade primary school in Fischlham from May. With the move to Lambach in July 1897, he moved to Leonding, where he completed second and third grade and finally fourth grade. He was recognized as a good and intelligent student. From 1900 he attended the K. k. State Realschule Linz, he showed a reluctance to learn and failed to pass to the next grade because he missed the performance target twice. He despised the religious education of Franz Sales Schwarz, only geography and history lessons from Leopold Pötsch interested him. In Mein Kampf (1925) he emphasized Pötsch’s positive influence. In his high school days, Hitler liked to read the books of Karl May, whom he admired all his life. His father had chosen him for a career as a civil servant and punished his reluctance to learn with frequent, unsuccessful beatings. In 1904 his mother sent Hitler to secondary school in Steyr. There he was not promoted to the ninth grade because of his poor school grades. Due to a temporary illness, he left the secondary school without any qualifications and was able to return to his mother in Linz.
The Linz period
Hitler did his primary education in the town where he was born. He started his secondary education in Linz. At the high school he attended in Linz, he had to repeat the first grade. At that time, he was at odds with his father, who wanted him to be a civil servant in the future, and said he wanted to be a painter. He skipped classes he didn’t like and wasn’t interested in them at all. In the future, he criticized his teachers very harshly, stating that he only liked his history teacher very much and that he owed him a lot. Adolf relied a lot on his drawings and paintings, and he never stopped resisting. (Before his participation in World War I, Hitler had more than 2,000 drawings and paintings.)
In Mein Kampf, Hitler explains:
“I excelled most in history and geography. It was at this time that I became a ‘nationalist’ and learned to understand, comprehend and penetrate the true meaning of history. My tastes did not lead me to a life similar to that of my father. My gift of speech began to develop through the persuasive, or rather cajoling, speeches I gave to my childhood friends. I became a small leader who could hardly manage myself. By the way, I can also say that I was a good student. Studying came easily to me. In my spare time I attended singing lessons with the “Lambach Chanoine”.”
Hitler was adamant about becoming a painter, he was very confident in his dreams of becoming an artist. For him, art was an ideal. Nevertheless, he felt that his father was right in his advice about the “struggle for life”. He agreed with his father who believed that his son should have a good profession where he could earn money safely:
“He could not understand why what had once formed the biggest links in his own life should not be accepted by me, which is why my father’s decision was simple, sure and very natural. My father, a man of steely character, honed by the fight of life, would not allow me, an inexperienced young man, to decide his future. But in the end it turned out differently. “
When he was thirteen, his father died of a pulmonary hemorrhage. The hemorrhage occurred during a morning stroll. He died in the arms of a nearby neighbor. (January 3, 1903 (Age 65)). Later, he suffered from a severe lung disease, and on doctor’s advice, he left school for a year, and then could not return to school due to financial problems. He started working as a laborer in construction with the responsibility of taking care of his mother. During this period he continued to draw.
“For me, the problem of my profession would be solved in a much shorter time than I expected. Because my father died suddenly when I was thirteen years old. A stroke of paralysis struck him down when he was at his strongest. He ended his life on earth without pain. But it threw us into great sorrow. My father’s greatest wish was to help me in my profession to save his son from the privations of his early days. He could not fulfill this wish. But unconsciously he had planted in me the seeds of a future that neither of us could have imagined. ”
The antisemitism (anti-Semitism) in the books he read emerged at that time. Although he was against this idea at first, when he started to think that Jews favored each other in all areas such as culture, art, politics and business life, he began to dislike Jews. He explains this as follows:
“Whenever a theater performance or a piece of music was exaggerated, I saw that it was a Jewish production, and it was the Jews who exaggerated it. Since they had taken over many fields, they favored each other in all fields. A good German work would not get 5 out of 10, but a Jewish work would get 10. So I decided to become an antisemite.”
Vienna period.
When his mother’s illness struck, Hitler’s livelihood almost dried up and he lived on an orphan’s pension. So he decided to go to Vienna.
“I left for Vienna with a suitcase full of clothes and linen, with an unshakable will. Fifty years ago my father had managed to force his destiny. I was going to do like my father, but I was going to be a “man”, not a civil servant. “
In 1907 he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was rejected on the grounds that he was not suitable as a painter and was advised to develop his talents in architecture. Although Adolf was eager to follow this advice, it was necessary for him to have a technical background and a high school diploma.
At the age of nineteen, he lost his mother to breast cancer (December 21, 1907).[28] He always spoke of having a special bond with his mother and said that he was more saddened by her death than by the death of his father. After his mother’s death, Hitler’s only wish was to enter the Academy of Fine Arts.
“I respected my father and loved my mother.”
In 1908, after the Academy rejected him once again, he was left completely penniless, his hopes dashed. At the age of 21, Hitler gave his share of the orphan’s pension to his sister Paula, and when the small amount of inheritance money from his aunt ran out, he moved into a homeless shelter in 1909. In 1910, Hitler, who made a living by selling landscape paintings he copied from postcards to shops and tourists, moved into a house for working poor men.
“Finally, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I began to hear the word ‘Jew’ whenever politics was mentioned. These words aroused in me a slight feeling of protest. When I saw fights and conflicts arising from sects, unpleasant feelings arose in me.
I thought that the difference between the Germans and the Jews was only one of religion. In fact, I attributed their constant persecution to the difference in religion and therefore had no antipathy towards them.
In those days there were two million people living in Vienna and two hundred thousand of them were Jews. In the first days, my observations and thoughts were not strong enough to resist the onslaught of new values and ideas. Finally, when calm began to gradually settle in me and these feverish imaginings became clearer, the moment I came face to face with the Jewish question, I began to look more carefully at the world around me.
The way in which I was confronted with the Jewish question did not sit well with me. At that time, I considered a Jew only as a member of another religion, and I couldn’t help condemning all kinds of hostility arising from religious conflicts and religious beliefs in the name of tolerance and humanity. Meanwhile, the attitude of the anti-Semitic press in Vienna seemed to me to be unworthy of the customs and traditions of a civilized nation. “
It was in Vienna that Hitler first began to harbor anti-Semitic thoughts about the many Orthodox Jews in Eastern Europe (a large group of traditionally religious and prejudiced Jews, mixed with racist theories, according to Hitler). Over time, he was influenced by the writings of Lanz von Liebenfels on racial ideologies and antisemitism, and by the polemics generated by politicians such as Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, founder of the Christian Social Party and one of the most violent demagogues in history, and the pan-Germanist Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Later, in his book Mein Kampf (Mein Kampf), he described how he had moved from religious opposition to anti-Semitism to the opposite position – supporting anti-Semitism on racist grounds.
Munich era
In May 1912, with the last part of his father’s estate, he went to Munich. He had always wanted to live in the real Germany. He became more interested in architecture and the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Hitler began to claim that the Jews were the natural enemies of the Aryan race as he defined it and blamed them for the crisis in Austria. At the same time, he combined his anti-Semitism with anti-Marxism, defining the sharp contours of socialism, especially Bolshevism, whose leaders included many Jews. Blaming the Revolutions of 1917 for Germany’s military defeat, he also blamed the Jews for the military defeat of the German Empire and the resulting economic problems.
After a long study of the sessions of the Parliament of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, he developed a fixed belief in the inferiority and vulgarity of the democratic parliamentary system. This, in turn, shaped the basis of his political views.
“In the spring of 1912 I went to Munich, and the city was as familiar to me as if I had lived there for years; my studies had repeatedly led me to this center of German art. Germany cannot be seen without knowing Munich, and one cannot have an idea of German art without knowing Munich. ”
His trip to Munich allowed him to evade military service in Austria for a time, but he was subsequently arrested by the Austrian army. After a physical examination and a plea of contrition, he was declared unfit for military service and allowed to return to Munich. Nevertheless, when Germany entered World War I in August 1914, he urgently asked King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to fight in the Bavarian regiment. His request was granted and Hitler voluntarily joined the Bavarian army.
Military Service
On the Western Front, Hitler was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment (“List Regiment”) under the command of Colonel Julius List. He participated in the First Battle of Ypres, the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras and the Battle of Passchendaele.[29] On active service in France and Belgium as a messenger at the headquarters of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment and exposed to enemy fire, Hitler, unlike the other soldiers with him, never complained about the food or the difficult conditions. Preferring instead to talk about art or history, Hitler wrote poetry and produced some cartoons and educational drawings for the army newspaper. For his speed and success in performing his duties, he received two military decorations: the Iron Cross Second Class in December 1914 and the Iron Cross First Class on August 4, 1918, an honor rarely awarded to a corporal-level soldier. It is an ironic coincidence that the officer who nominated him for the medal – Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann – was Jewish. On May 18, 1918, he received the Black Wound Badge.
Although Hitler did not want to leave the regiment, he was still not promoted on the grounds that his ‘leadership qualities were not up to scratch’. According to some sources, the main reason he was not promoted was that he was not a German citizen. His position at the regiment’s headquarters not only presented many dangers, but also gave him time to pursue his artistic endeavors. Wounded in the leg in northern France in October 1916, Hitler returned to front-line duty in March 1917.
On October 15, 1918, shortly before the end of the war, Hitler was taken to the military hospital on the battlefield with temporary blindness from a poison gas attack. According to some psychologists, such as David Lewis and Bernhard Horstmann, this temporary blindness was caused by an attack of hysteria. Hitler was convinced that the purpose of his life was to save Germany.
Hitler, who had long admired Germany, became a passionate patriot during the war, even though he was still not a German citizen. He was shocked by Germany’s surrender in November 1918, when the German army was still holding enemy territory. Like many German nationalists, he believed in the ‘myth of the stab in the back’, which depicted their defeat at the table rather than on the battlefield. The politicians who caused this were later dubbed the ‘November Traitors’.
According to witnesses, Hitler was obedient to his officers. He never protested or reproached them. He never complained about being mistreated as a soldier. According to witnesses, he never smoked or drank, never talked about his friends and family, was not interested in visiting brothels. He usually sat in a corner of the bunker for hours reading, thinking or painting.
Entry into politics
His participation in the Thule Society and the Guido von List Society
Hitler met Adolf Josef Lanz in 1914 through Dietrich Eckart, his neighbor in Vienna, and became a member of the List Society in the same year. As a matter of fact, the book Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder (Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder) by Guido von List, one of the books in the U.S. Library of Congress, where occultic books from Hitler’s personal library were preserved after World War II, has a dedication to my dear Armanen brother Adolf Hitler. It is thought that Hitler was a member of the List Society because the term Armanen was first coined by Guido von List and was written only for members of the List Society.
Two years after World War I, Adolf Hitler entered civilian life with official orders from the army on March 31, 1920. As revealed by renowned historians Alan Bullock and Ian Kershaw, and as is officially known, on the same day Hitler moved into room 41 in the famous Thierschstrasse residence in Munich. Next door to this room was the office of the Völkischer Beobachter, the most popular nationalist newspaper in Germany at the time, owned by the founder of the Thule Society, Baron Sebottendorf, who later donated it to Hitler. After meeting Sebottendorf in person in Munich, Hitler first joined the German Workers’ Party and later the Thule Society under membership number 555-7.
Joining the German Labor Party
Hitler participated in the Munich Revolution and for a time became a socialist activist. He later trained in the Bayerische Reichswehr Gruppennkommando Nr. 4, the intelligence branch of the Bavarian army, headed by Captain Karl Mair, and participated in counter-revolutionary actions.
After World War I and the German defeat, Hitler tried to remain in the army for as long as possible, as he had no formal education and no business career. Around this time, through Dietrich Eckart, whom he had befriended since 1914 and whom he described as his spiritual father, Hitler became a member of the Thule Society, founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf, whom the Nazis described as their chief teacher and the birthplace of Nazism, and soon began to read Ostara, a magazine published between 1905 and 1917 by Adolf Josef Lanz, whom the Nazis described as their occult leader, and began to harbor ideas of white supremacy, anti-Semitism and anticommunism.
He spent the winter as a guard in the prison camp at Traunstein near the Austrian border. In the spring of 1919 he returned to Munich. In Munich he collected information for the commission of inquiry set up by the 2nd Infantry Regiment to investigate those responsible for the short-lived Soviet regime. In recognition of his services, he was given a new job in the Press and News Bureau of the Political Section of the Army Regional Command. The army opened political training courses for soldiers in order to spread its conservative views. Hitler was an attentive student of one of these courses. One day, when a good word for the Jews was used in class, he immediately interrupted the lecture and gave a long speech denigrating the Jews. His superiors were so pleased with his speech on the Jews that they appointed him Bildungsoffizier (training officer) in the Munich regiment. His main task was to fight dangerous ideas, pacifism, socialism and democracy. This gave Hitler the opportunity to test his ability to speak. For speaking out was, in his view, the first prerequisite for successful politics.
One day in September 1919, he received an order from the Army Political Branch: He was to investigate a small political group in Munich, the German Workers’ Party, founded by the Thule Society founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf. Hitler knew one of the speakers at a meeting of the party he was assigned to investigate. A week earlier, at one of the army training courses, he had heard a lecture by a civil engineer named Gottfried Feder and had been very pleased with it. After Feder’s speech at this party meeting was over, Hitler was going to get up and leave.
At this moment a professor stood up and questioned whether Feder’s ideas were correct. He proposed that Bavaria should secede from Prussia and form a South German nation together with Austria. This idea was very popular in Munich at the time. But Hitler was so angered that he stood up and responded so harshly that the professor walked out of the hall while the audience looked at this unknown young speaker with astonished faces. A member of the audience ran up to Hitler and thrust a small pamphlet into his hand. This was Anton Drexler, a blacksmith by trade. Drexler can be called the real founder of National Socialism in terms of political organization.
Hitler was surprised to receive a card the next day informing him that he had been accepted into the German Workers’ Party. Hitler actually wanted to found his own party. So he was about to write a letter expressing this idea when a curiosity aroused in him and he decided to go to the committee meeting to which he had been invited and tell them in person why he did not want to join their party. He went to the meeting and was well received, but he could not express his wish not to join. After the meeting he returned to his barracks. He thought long and hard for two days and then decided to join this unknown party. Adolf Hitler thus became the seventh member of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), a party founded by engineer Gottfried Feder and six others.
Hitler took over the party’s propaganda at the beginning of 1920. On February 24, 1920, the German Workers’ Party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). The supporters of the NSDAP were called “Nazis” by communists and social democrats in contempt.
Sebottendorf handed over the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, the Thule’s largest propaganda tool in Germany, to Hitler, who joined the leadership of the Thule Society and chose Hitler as Führer. Meanwhile, Joseph Goebbels ensured that the newspaper became entirely a party newsletter. He published articles in the newspaper explaining the ideas of his party. Hitler, the newspaper’s patron, worked his way up to the top of the party and became its leader on July 29, 1921.
The Brewery Putsch and Mein Kampf
In imitation of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, on November 8-9, 1923, he organized the Brewery Putsch to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich. He was put on trial for forming paramilitary units against the regular army and overthrowing the legitimate government. On April 1, 1924, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Rudolf von Sebottendorf, who was researching in Tibet at the time, returned to Germany in October 1924. As is known following Sebottendorf’s 4-page letter to Georg Neithardt, one of the judges of the Bavarian People’s Court, on October 4, 1924, on December 20, 1924, Hitler was released by the Bavarian People’s Court, with Judge Neithardt’s ruling, on the grounds that he did not pose a danger to public order and the people and that he had no connection to paramilitary organizations engaged in activities aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government.
During this period, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (Mein Kampf) through Rudolf Hess, and the fact that he had written a book containing his autobiography and ideas while in prison gave him the opportunity to explain the party’s future goals to the public. The book shaped the party’s activities thereafter. After his release from prison, Hitler reorganized the party. His party failed until 1929. Only after the World Economic Crisis did it gain more votes (1929). In the 1930 elections it became the second largest party after the SPD with 18% of the vote. Hitler’s votes came more from Protestants than Catholics, more from the countryside than from the cities, and more from the upper-middle class than from the workers.
Adolf Hitler’s rise to power
Having voluntarily renounced his Austrian citizenship in 1925, Hitler was still not a German citizen and was in danger of not even being able to stand for election. This was a big problem for him. On February 25, 1932, the National Socialist Minister of the Interior of the State of Brunswick announced that Hitler had been appointed Attaché to the Brunswick representation in Berlin. With this comical maneuver, Hitler automatically became a Brunswick and therefore a German citizen and was eligible to run for President of Germany. Easily overcoming this obstacle, Hitler threw himself into the election campaign with great energy.
On March 13, 1932, Hitler ran for the presidency as the NSDAP candidate and was opposed by the independent candidate Paul von Hindenburg, who had held the presidency since 1925, the KPD candidate Ernst Thälmann and the Stahlhelm/DNVP candidate Theodor Duesterberg. Hitler received 11,339,446 votes in the election, 30.1%. His strongest opponent, Hindenburg, received 18,651,497 votes. Hindenburg received 49.6% of the votes, but he missed the presidency by a very small margin (0.4%) and the election went to a second round. The second round of the presidential election took place on April 10, 1932. Hitler received 13,418,547 votes (36.8%) in this round. Hindenburg received 19,359,983 votes (53%) and was elected President. Hitler came second in these elections.
A few months after the presidential election, on July 31, 1932, the party contested the general election for the third time. The election results again failed to produce a party with a majority in parliament. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which received 37% of the total votes, was the party with the highest number of seats in parliament, although it did not win a majority.
In January 1933, fears that the communists would create a “revolutionary situation” by disrupting the entire economy with a general strike or that civil war would break out in the country were so deep that President Paul von Hindenburg[64] appointed Hitler chancellor in the hope that he would form a stable government in coalition with the Catholic Center Party. However, no agreement was reached with the Catholic Center Party. Instead, Hitler enlisted the support of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), led by media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, and formed a coalition with it.
The death of Adolf Hitler
On April 30, 1945, as Germany’s defeat in the war became certain and despair grew, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun decided to commit suicide in Berlin. They locked themselves in a room and first Eva Braun bit into a capsule containing cyanide and the poison took effect within seconds, then Hitler bit into a cyanide capsule and simultaneously shot himself in the right temple with a pistol. (No gunpowder residue was found in Hitler’s jawbone, suggesting that Hitler did not die from a gunshot wound to the mouth. At his request, his bodies were burned with gasoline in the garden of the Führerbunker, placed in a pit caused by the bombs. It is claimed that Hitler wanted this because he did not want to be captured and exposed by the Soviet army. Before committing suicide, he told the generals with him, “You must never give my body to the Russians, they will make a statue of me in Moscow.”
When Russian forces broke in and discovered the bodies, Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bodies, identified in a dental autopsy, were buried by the secret Soviet department SMERSH at their new headquarters in Magdeburg, after being moved around for some time to prevent them from becoming a shrine of sorts. On April 4, 1970, a Soviet KGB team exhumed the remains of Hitler and Braun from the tomb at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg, completely cremated them and dumped their ashes into the river Biederitz, a tributary of the Elbe River.
After his death, Hitler left orders for the destruction to continue and in his will he ignored other NSDAP leaders, naming Karl Dönitz as president of Germany and Joseph Goebbels as chancellor of Germany. Nevertheless, Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda Goebbels also committed suicide on May 1, 1945.
