INSIDE HITLER’S BUNKER: THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH
By Joachim Fest
The classic account of the endgame of the Third Reich, at least for English readers, has long been Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. Trevor-Roper was there on the spot at the end of the war and his book, which came out in 1946, has mostly stood the test of time. Still, some update after sixty years was probably necessary and one couldn’t ask for a better guide than Joachim Fest, whose work on the history of Nazi Germany stands alone for its readability and insight.
Fest begins by making a bold claim for the importance of Hitler’s last two weeks on (or under) earth. “Nothing gets to the root of what drove [Hitler] all his life better than to examine his behavior during those weeks, when he shut himself off from the world more than ever before.” All of his character traits were, in this period, “concentrated and intensified.” As Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg observed, “Hitler in the bunker – that’s the real Hitler!”
As excellent a “historical sketch” as Fest provides us, I can’t accept this premise. Hitler at the end was a physical and mental wreck. To be sure many of his personal qualities and obsessions became even more exaggerated, but he also went off in some new directions. When he said, for example, that he wanted his epitaph to read that he was “the victim of his generals,” this was in response to his feelings of being abandoned and betrayed at the end. It’s not the kind of thing he would have considered just a few years earlier.
As he did in his superb biography of Hitler (still the best one-volume account available, for my money), Fest intersperses more general reflective and thematic chapters into the narrative account of life in the monkey house (to borrow Trevor-Roper’s name for the Nazi court). In the final one of these he sums up Hitler’s world view, which was strictly (social) Darwinist in its positing of life being an endless war of all against all. In his less guarded moments Hitler would “mockingly denounce morality, religion, and all humanitarianism. In the real world, he declared, more ‘naked’ laws applied.” All moral and political codes meant to protect one human being from another were dismissed not only as deceptive and cowardly but as a sin against Nature, which was both the one true God and an “iron law of logic.”
All of which is a fair description of Hitler’s belief system. The depressing, even frightening thought is that it stands as an equally fair description of a lot of today’s politics as well. Longstanding political principles once held to be sacred, like democracy and the rule of law, are increasingly seen as the sort of “twaddle” Hitler derided. The only thing that matters is winners and losers, Lenin’s “Who, whom?” “What makes Hitler a phenomenon unlike any other in history is that his goals included absolutely no civilizing ideas,” Fest concludes. Perhaps not civilizing, but durable.
Notes:
Review first published online August 28, 2019.
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