The Wagnerian Finale

Few stories are better known or more poorly documented than that of the death of Adolf Hitler. Popular imagination the world over has been quick to seize on the macabre details of those last days in the bunker in flaming Berlin, where a mad genius cringed in the rain of Allied bombs and felt the walls of his terrible world closing in upon him. The suicide of his scheming henchman Goebbels, the defection of those who fattened on the blood he had spilled, the last-minute marriage with his blowzy mistress Eva Braun, the suicide pact they made together, and the final dispatch of their bodies to Valhalla in the flames of a funeral pyre wrote a tawdry Wagnerian finish to the evil story.

Yet few of the details which made the story so plausible have been adequately attested. U.S. and British investigation of Hitler's death did rot even begin until long after the Russians had made their own inquiry and carted off most of the evidence. "From personal and official knowledge," said Russia's Marshal Zhukov, then commander of Berlin, "we can say that Hitler had good opportunities to make a getaway with his bride." No official Russian report was ever forthcoming to indicate what that knowledge was; no eyewitnesses stepped forward to refute or endorse it. Instead a host of rumors and lesser legends arose to pique the imagination with the suggestion that Hitler was alive and biding his time for reconquest; he was hiding out in Argentina, the mountains of Bavaria, the Peruvian Andes. The probate courts of West Germany, seeking to settle Hitler's estate, could establish no satisfying proof that the man was dead.

Last week the first of the 9,626 German war prisoners whose release was promised at the Russo-German Moscow conference reached a drab reception center in Friedland. Among them were two who claimed to have seen the Hitler finale with their own eyes. One was his old pilot, SS Major General Hans Baur, who was captured in Berlin. Baur said positively that Hitler and Eva Braun were dead. "Hitler said goodbye to me and then shot himself," Baur told newsmen. Baur did not see the Fuehrer's body.

The other ex-prisoner was Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge, who was held for interrogation for three years in Moscow before being sent to a P.W. camp. The Fuehrer and Eva, said Linge. "were alone in one of the bunker rooms. Eva Braun took poison. Hitler shot himself. I carried his body out of the bunker and then helped pour the gasoline over it." He watched for five minutes while flames devoured the leader of the master race. If Linge spoke the truth, this was at last the incontrovertible eyewitness testimony needed to declare Adolf Hitler legally dead and put a period to the tale.

Did Hitler really fly into towering rages and chew up rugs? Linge was asked. "I can only laugh at that," said he. "Hitler always had himself in complete control." Why, then, had he killed himself? "Because," said Hitler's valet, "everything was hopeless."

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