The Last Days of Hitler, Joachim Fest

The true story of Hitler's downfall. The novel that inspired the film Der Untergang, which caused a media frenzy in Germany and France.

"Hitler in the bunker is the real Hitler." Joachim Fest studies here an unknown Hitler, the "underground man," who had his first bunker built in 1933 and multiplied his shelters until 1945. He shows how the ultimate confinement in besieged central Berlin is the supreme manifestation of the "back against the wall" situation that the dictator had always sought. We better understand why Hitler wanted, at all costs and until his end, to go down in history as a unique man. And, in this story of ruins, destruction, and chimerical hopes, one of the keys to Hitler's power appears: maintaining, even against all evidence, the illusion of a victorious Third Reich. Joachim Fest describes day by day Hitler's physical decline and analyzes its historical consequences on the ultimate battle of the Reich; he recounts the extraordinary atmosphere of prostration, interspersed with brief frantic moments, that reigned in the bunker while the Gestapo continued its murders. He also clarifies the six contradictory versions of Hitler's suicide.