What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler

What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler
Author: Robert J. Hutchinson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1621578895

Think You Know Everything about the death of Hitler? Think Again. After World War II, 50 percent of Americans polled said they didn’t believe Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in 1945, as captured Nazi officials claimed. Instead, they believed the dictator faked his death and escaped, perhaps to Argentina. This wasn’t a crazy opinion: Joseph Stalin told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler’s body and that he personally believed the Nazi leader had escaped justice. At least two German submarines crossed the Atlantic and landed on the coast of Argentina in July 1945. Plus, there were numerous reports of top Nazi officials successfully fleeing to South America where there was a large German colony. Incredible as it sounds, the mystery surrounding Adolf Hitler’s final days only deepened in 2009 when a U.S. forensic team announced that a piece of Hitler’s skull held in Soviet archives was not actually Hitler’s. International interest increased further in 2014 when the FBI released previously classified files detailing investigations surrounding Hitler’s possible escape. And the following year, The History Channel launched a three-year reality TV series investigating if it was possible Hitler did somehow survive. So what really happened? Popular history writer Robert J. Hutchinson, author of What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination, takes a fresh look at the evidence and discovers, once and for all, the truth about Hitler’s last week in Berlin. Among the questions the book explores are... * What did surviving Nazi eyewitnesses really say about the Führer’s final days in the bunker—and could they have been lying to aid Hitler’s escape? * If Hitler didn’t escape, why did the Allies not find his body? * What about Hitler’s proven use of body doubles? Could Hitler have used a body double in the bunker while he and Eva Braun flew to safety in a long-range aircraft that took off from a runway in Berlin’s Tiergarten? * Why did the FBI continue to investigate reports of Hitler’s survival for more than a decade after World War II—reports that were only declassified in 2014? * What about sensational claims in books such as The Grey Wolfthat Hitler and Eva Braun lived in an isolated chalet in the Andes – and that Hitler died in 1962? * Why were forensic tests on crucial physical evidence only conducted in 2016, more than 70 years after World War II ended? * And lots MORE.

The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler

The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler
Author: Robert Payne
Publisher: Brick Tower Press
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2016-10-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

In The Life And Death of Adolf Hitler, biographer Robert Payne unravels the tangled threads of Hitler’s public and private life and looks behind the caricature with the Charlie Chaplin mustache and the unruly shock of hair to reveal a Hitler possessed of immense personal charm that impressed both men and women and brought followers and contributions to the burgeoning Nazi Party. Although he misread his strength and organized an ill-fated putsch, Hitler spent his months in prison writing Mein Kampf, which increased his following. Once in undisputed command of the Party, Hitler renounced the chastity of his youth and began a sordid affair with his niece, whose suicide prompted him to reject forever all conventional morality. He promised anything to prospective supporters, then cold-bloodedly murdered them before they could claim a share of the power he reserved for himself. Once he became Chancellor, Hitler step by step bent the powers of the state to his own purposes to satisfy his private fantasies, rearming Germany, slaughtering his real or imaginary enemies, blackmailing one by one the leaders of Europe, and plunging the world into the holocaust of World War II. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER is the story of not so much a man corrupted by power as a corrupt man who achieved absolute power and used it to an unprecedented degree, knowing at every moment exactly what he was doing and calculating his enemies’ weaknesses to a hair’s breadth. It is the story of a living man.

The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler

The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler
Author: James Cross Giblin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780395903711

Traces Hitler's life from his childhood in Austria to his final days in Berlin, exploring how his promises of prosperity and power along with anti-Semitic rhetoric allowed him to lead the nation of Germany into World War II.

The Bunker

The Bunker
Author: James P. O'Donnell
Publisher: Da Capo
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780306809583

A compulsively readable account of Hitler's last days, written by one of the first Americans to enter Hitler's bunker after the fall of Berlin

Death of Hitler

Death of Hitler
Author: Ada Petrova
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2007-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393315436

In this groundbreaking book, which reads like a riveting detective story, Ada Petrova and Peter Watson provide the answers to these two questions. Given access to the Russians' hitherto unseen Hitler Archive - File I-G-23, the so-called Operation Myth File - they reveal not only the truth of what went on in Berlin in May 1945 after the Russians captured the bunker in which Hitler, Eva Braun, and their entourage spent their last days, but also why the Soviet regime felt the details of the Fuhrer's death had to be kept secret for so long. Further, they explain how and why his body and those of Braun, Josef and Magda Goebbels, and the Goebbels' six children were secretly buried in Magdeburg, East Germany, and finally disinterred and cremated in 1970 by order of the then KGB chief Yuri Andropov.

The Death of Democracy

The Death of Democracy
Author: Benjamin Carter Hett
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250162513

A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen. Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship. Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.

Hitler's Last Days

Hitler's Last Days
Author: Bill O'Reilly
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-06-09
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1627793976

By early 1945, the destruction of the German Nazi State seems certain. The Allied forces, led by American generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, are gaining control of Europe, leaving German leaders scrambling. Facing defeat, Adolf Hitler flees to a secret bunker with his new wife, Eva Braun, and his beloved dog, Blondi. It is there that all three would meet their end, thus ending the Third Reich and one of the darkest chapters of history. Hitler's Last Days is a gripping account of the death of one of the most reviled villains of the 20th century—a man whose regime of murder and terror haunts the world even today. Adapted from Bill O'Reilly's historical thriller Killing Patton, this book will have young readers—and grown-ups too—hooked on history. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.