Why has Hitler taken so long to die? 

Around 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. His physical exit from this world was swift, yet in cultural terms the Nazi dictator has taken an extraordinarily long time to die. For over 80 years, Hitler’s fate has been the subject of outlandish conspiracy theories and survival legends.

It has been reimagined within films, TV and novels. There is a steady stream of tourist activity around the site of his former bunker, while efforts to depict his last days in public exhibitions have courted controversy. In 2008, for example, an initial attempt to include a Hitler figure at the Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds resulted in an angry visitor decapitating the waxwork.

What lies behind this extraordinary afterlife? 

As I argue in my book, Hitler’s death is fundamentally unique in the history of 20th century dictators. For example, in contrast to Joseph Stalin, Hitler died amid imminent regime change, meaning that there was no successor government with the ability (or inclination) to perform conventional funeral rites. Taking matters into his own hands and evading capture also ensured that there was no filmed capture, trial or execution, nor any posthumous display of his body, as seen with Hitler’s comrade Benito Mussolini.

No one saw him die. His quiet disappearance created a climate of uncertainty. In the absence of an identifiable corpse, how can you be sure that death really occurred?

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Accordingly, in the summer of 1945 there was feverish speculation as to what had ‘really’ happened during those final days of the Second World War. Rumoured sightings of Hitler, alive and well, flooded across Europe, and then evolved into tales of an escape to a South American hideaway. Asked in parliament as to whether the government was satisfied “beyond all shadow of doubt” that Hitler was truly dead, even Winston Churchill had to concede he had no deeper knowledge than anyone else.

But the wartime Allies recognised that the idea of a still-breathing Hitler could fan the flames of Nazism. Determined to stamp out that abhorrent ideology, a series of intelligence inquiries were conducted into the dictator’s last movements. British and American investigators interrogated members of Hitler’s entourage; the Soviets scoured the bunker for clues.

Yet a climate of mutual mistrust amid emerging Cold War tensions precluded any open and honest exchange of information. It was not until 2018 that French scientists were able to affirm that dental remains, now held in Russian archives, had, indeed, belonged to the Nazi leader.

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An unconventional death scene and a belated ability to put the historical records in order thus offer two explanations as to why Hitler’s death has been so protracted. But we also need to consider the emotional investment of ordinary people. 

Throughout WWII, the demise of Hitler was held up as a veritable war goal for the Allies. Propaganda posters depicted him battered and bleeding under the force of Allied military might. Wartime songs dreamed of dancing around Hitler’s grave and, more than once, premature reports of Hitler’s death resulted in the jamming of switchboards as people scrambled for confirmation of this much-desired news.

Several fundraising campaigns for the armed forces were predicated on selling nails for Hitler’s coffin, and there were recurring jokes and news stories about how people were planning to mark his funeral. Anticipating Hitler’s death became a useful morale booster and a popular form of wartime entertainment.

Such activities left people expecting a spectacular, fitting and, above all, public fall for the Nazi leader. Hitler’s death was held up as a symbolic endpoint to an era of conflict, terror and unimaginable atrocities. When that moment finally arrived – unwitnessed, unceremonious and devoid of justice – it felt strangely hollow.

Small wonder, then, that audiences felt compelled to reinvent the historical circumstances of Hitler’s death to craft a more satisfying outcome. 

All too often, literature on Hitler’s death has become fixated on simply proving, or refuting, his suicide. But it is only by tracing the political and emotional meanings attached to his demise that we can fully understand the peculiar cultural resonance that his fate has engendered.

The Nazi dictator has taken a long time to die, precisely because the manner of his passing didn’t deliver the closure the world had been primed to expect. 

The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History by Caroline Sharples, is out 10 March (Yale University Press, £25). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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