Last 24 Hours of Hitler's Life - YouTube

It’s late in April 1945. Adolf Hitler  is in the throes of a nervous breakdown.  

It’s the end for him and he knows it. He calls for  one of his secretaries, Gertrud “Traudl” Junge,  

and tells her to take down his last will  and testament. Tearfully, she listens and  

writes down his insane words. His take on  things: all this bloodshed is not my fault. 

The four other witnesses in that room, as  well as Hitler, will be dead within 24 hours.  

We’ll talk in-depth later about  that deranged will and testament,  

which encapsulates just how insane he was. Hitler had known for a long time before that,  

maybe since 1943, that the war was lost,  but he still clung on to the hope that  

there might be peace negotiations. Then at the beginning of 1945,  

his enemies encroached farther and farther  towards Berlin. The Soviet Red Army was  

intent on crushing Germany. The Soviet leader,  Joseph Stalin, whom Hitler had the nerve to  

call a barbarian, knew victory was close. In January alone, 450,000 Germans died,  

and in the three months that followed, 280,000  died. This was more German casualties than from  

1942-1943, which just shows you how stubborn  the Nazis were in not accepting defeat. 

In February, Hitler’s commander in Hungary watched  as his men fell into a state of utter gloom. In  

his report, he wrote, “Amid all these stresses and  strains, no improvement in morale or performance  

is visible. The numerical superiority of the  enemy, combined with the knowledge that the  

battle is now being fought on German soil,  has proved very demoralizing for the men.” 

German people ran from their homes as  the Soviets moved in. One woman wrote,  

“The world is a very lonely place without family,  friends, or even the familiarity of a home.”  

In April, a Russian soldier wrote to his beloved  back home, saying, “At first the fascists fought  

back fiercely, but they could not endure this  hell…Everything is bound to finish soon.” 

On April 16th, Soviet forces had finally invaded  Berlin. Inhabitants heard the gunfire not too far  

off in the distance. Some people ran to the shops  to get what remained of the food. One of them,  

Ruth-Andreas Friedrich, poetically  wrote, “Before us lies the endless city,  

black in the black of night, cowering as if to  creep back into the earth. And we are afraid.” 

The Nazis still relentlessly kept on killing. They  emptied jails and shot those who’d resided there.  

German firing squads killed scores  of people deemed not a supporter of  

the regime. POWs and concentration camp  prisoners were lined up and massacred.  

The order, given by Hitler, was to keep going. But Berlin was doomed, with now even the Hitler  

Youth fighting toe-to-toe with the enemy. One  woman explained what she saw, saying there were  

“young babyfaces peeping out beneath oversized  steel helmets” and that it was “frightening to  

hear their high-pitched voices.” She said this  went against human nature, and nothing could  

be better accredited to the madness of war. You might wonder why so many people fought on  

in Germany. The historian Max Hastings wrote  in his book “Inferno” that the Germans were  

well aware of the fact they would be  given no mercy from the Red Army. It  

was a matter of fighting back or being murdered. The Russians had been on the wrong end of so much  

savagery themselves. They weren’t in the mood  for sparing the enemy, which as they saw it,  

was all of Germany. Still, the atrocities  committed on German civilians can’t be ignored.  

One woman starkly summed it up, saying,  “It can’t be me this is happening to,  

so I’m expelling it all from me.” It was during these last few days of  

barbarity that Hitler sat in his bunker under the  Reich Chancellery. After hearing of the death of  

US President Roosevelt on April 12, he’d actually  held out some hope that the new president,  

Harry Truman, would sign a peace treaty. That didn’t happen, of course. Hitler suffered  

a breakdown on April 22 when he heard that his  orders for a counterattack hadn’t been followed  

through. He screamed and cursed the people he said  had betrayed him. It was on this day that Hitler  

finally admitted to himself that all was lost. This was two days after his birthday,  

which you can understand didn’t involve much  celebration. He did, however, make his last  

public appearance to congratulate some of the  Hitler Youths who were ready to die for him.

He was in such a state, he had to keep one  of his shaking hands clasped behind his back.  

He then went back into the bunker,  knowing his life would soon be over. 

It was there that he would be  married to his mistress Eva Braun.

We know that in the last day or two one  of the many things that occupied her mind  

was hiding her precious jewelry. In her last  letter to her friend Herta Ostermayr, she wrote,  

“On no account must Heise’s bills be found…What  should I say to you. I cannot understand how it  

should have all come to this, but it is  impossible anymore to believe in God.” 

Many of Hitler’s inner circle  made their plans to escape Berlin.  

Second in command, Hermann  Goering, was one of them.

Goering had told Hitler on his birthday that he  had business to take care of and he needed to go  

over to Southern Germany. That much was true.  He was trying to ship his stolen art treasures  

out of Berlin, so like Braun, he was worried about  losing things of monetary value. Not long after it  

would get back to Hitler that Goering had spoken  to the enemy. This infuriated Hitler, and it would  

make Goering a prominent feature in his will. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and  

the Nazi Party Chancellery, was one of the  inner circle to stay behind in the bunker.  

He’d later flee after seeing the end of his  leader, but he’d be dead soon enough, too.

Then there was the propaganda  minister, Joseph Goebbels,  

who was also there those last few days.  He would be made Chancellor of Germany,  

but in the end, he, his wife and six  kids would all be lost in that bunker. 

As Berliners were suffering unimaginable  torments that late April, Goebbels made one final  

announcement. He said, “I call on you to fight  for your city. Fight with everything you have got,  

for the sake of your wives and your children,  your mothers and your parents. Your arms are  

defending everything we have ever held dear, and  all the generations that will come after us. Be  

proud and courageous! Be inventive and cunning!” How both he and Hitler could still ask people  

to fight in the face of certain loss was  testament to their egoism and insanity. 

Then on April 27, Hitler got word that another of  his closest had betrayed him. He heard through a  

BBC report that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler  had tried to negotiate a surrender with the enemy.  

Hitler raged like he’d never raged before.  To him, that meant one thing: treason.

Hitler ordered the arrest of Himmler,  after which Himmler went into hiding.  

He too, didn’t survive many more days. It  was true, though, what Hitler had heard.  

Himmler had attempted to negotiate peace. Hitler’s world was falling apart, but he still  

decided there was still time to get married. At the stroke of midnight on April 28,  

Hitler and Eva Braun tied the knot. Both Goebbels  and Bormann were there at the ceremony, but as  

you can imagine, with the Red Army just around  the corner, it wasn’t the merriest of affairs. 

If there was any kind of event, it only  involved having a wedding breakfast with booze,  

lots of booze. At some point, Braun signed off  on the marriage certificate. She wrote Eva B,  

only to cross out the B and then write  Hitler. She was now proudly Eva Hitler,  

but she wouldn’t get much  time to enjoy her marriage. 

Hitler’s barber, August Wollenhaupt, would  usually trim his mustache at around 11 am.  

This was also usually the time that his valet  Heinz Linge would visit him each morning.

Linge would act as a kind of referee, saying  the German for, “On your marks” while holding  

a stopwatch. After that, Hitler would get  ready as quickly as possible as if playing  

a child’s game. Then Linge would pass Hitler  his spectacles and the morning newspapers. 

On one of the days close to his death,  Hitler wasn’t exactly in a great mood.  

He looked at Linge seriously and said, “You must  never allow my corpse to fall into the hands of  

the Russians. They would make a spectacle in  Moscow out of my body and put it in waxworks.” 

Linge also gave Hitler some cocaine drops  for his painful right eye. He also handed him  

some pills for a flatulence problem. Hitler  had many health problems close to the end,  

for which he took something like 28 different  medications. In fact, he was starting to look like  

a man on the verge of dying from natural causes. A Hitler Youth who later escaped the bunker,  

described what the Fuhrer looked like  during those final days. He said: 

“He was like a ghost - he didn't seem to  see me or anyone. He just stared ahead,  

lost in thought. At that moment, the bunker was  shaken by a strong tremor as a bomb hit. Dirt and  

mortar trickled down on us, but he made no attempt  to brush it off. He looked so much more unhealthy  

than 10 days earlier at his birthday reception  when I had first met him. It looked like he was  

suffering from jaundice. His face was sallow.” It was around this time that Hitler heard the  

news about the death of the Italian  fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

He’d been summarily executed, which could  only mean one thing to Hitler. He too,  

he knew, would very likely suffer a similar  fate. Even worse, he heard that Mussolini,  

along with his dead mistress, had been dumped  like dead cattle in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.  

There, crowds spat at the bodies  before hanging them up by meat hooks. 

Hitler then heard that the Dachau Concentration  Camp had fallen into the hands of the Americans.

He very likely heard what had happened there.  The US soldiers had been so appalled at what  

they saw, that they gave no quarter  to the German soldiers they captured.  

Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks later  said the smell of death was “overpowering.”  

What those soldiers witnessed was  human cruelty on another level.

It may never be known what happened on that  day. Some reports say US soldiers massacred  

520 Germans, but other reports say the number was  as low as 50. After an investigation, it was ruled  

that while international law had been breached,  “in the light of the conditions which greeted  

the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not  believed that justice or equity demand that the  

difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing  individual responsibility now be undertaken.” 

Hitler, on hearing the news in his bunker,  likely thought about this violent retribution  

while the image of the dead Mussolini and  his mistress was still in his mind. Also,  

in the distance, he knew the Soviet  army was laying waste to his city. 

It was around this time that Hitler  called on that secretary, Traudl Junge.

She would die an old woman in 2002, and always  said she wasn’t aware of the depth of Nazi  

atrocities. She also admitted she loved  her dear leader, something in later life  

that gave her cause to feel guilty. She once said, “I admit,  

I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was  a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend.  

I deliberately ignored all the warning voices  inside me and enjoyed the time by his side, almost  

until the bitter end. It wasn't what he said, but  the way he said things and how he did things.” 

She said Hitler had made it clear to  everyone in that bunker that the one  

thing that he could not allow was his body to  fall into the hands of the encroaching Soviets. 

As for the writing of his will, Junge had  woken up from her usual nap around 11 pm.  

After that, she went to see Hitler as she  would usually drink tea with him at that time.  

Hitler’s vegetarian cook, Fraulein Constanze  Manzialy, also attended the tea drinking sessions. 

But that night when she knocked on his door,  something was different. Hitler said to her,  

“Have you had a nice little rest, child?” She replied, “Yes, I have slept a little.”  

Hitler said, “Come along, I  want to dictate something.” 

One thing he told her was that his body  was to be cremated. He said he wanted  

his art collection to go to a gallery in the  town of Linz, which he called his hometown.  

As for the little things, of perhaps mere  sentimental value, or what he called items  

“for the maintenance of a modest simple life”,  they should go to relatives and his “faithful  

workers.” Anything else of value he said should  go to the National Socialist German Workers Party. 

Here’s a snippet from his  testament, word for word: 

“Since I did not think I should take the  responsibility of entering into marriage during  

the years of combat, I have decided now before  termination of life on this Earth, to marry the  

woman who, after many years of true friendship,  entered voluntarily into this already almost  

besieged city, to share my fate. She goes to death  with me as my wife, according to her own desire.” 

He then went for a bit, talking about how he’d  given his life to the service of his country,  

saying he had not intended to go to war in  1939. He said of the reason for the war,  

“It was desired and provoked entirely by those  international statesmen who were either of  

Jewish origin or worked in the Jewish interest.” He had the gall to add, “The responsibility of  

the outbreak of this war cannot rest on me.”  He even said history won’t blame him for the  

bloodbath of the war but will blame “international  Jewry and its assistants.” The British, he said,  

were offered a solution to what he called  the Polish-German problem, but “responsible  

circles in English politics wanted war.” He then called out Himmler and Goering  

as traitors and wrote down a list of names who  should fulfill certain positions. His final words: 

“Above all, I obligate the leadership of  the nation and its followers to the most  

minute observation of the racial laws and to  pitiless resistance against the universal poisoner  

of all people, international Judaism. Given at Berlin, 29 April, 1945, 4 am. 

Adolf Hitler” There were four witness names:  

Goebbels, Bormann, Burgdorf and Krebs. All four would soon be dead. 

Sometime later, while Hitler's SS bodyguards were  destroying all the documents around the bunker,  

doctors followed orders and poisoned  his much loved Alsatian dog,  

Blondi. Braun's spaniel was also forced  into the afterlife. It was around this time,  

someone heard Braun say, “I would rather  die here. I do not want to escape.” 

A lot of silent hand-shaking took place as Hitler  looked for the last time in the eyes of the people  

that had supported him. It seems that Braun’s  last words were to the secretary, Junge,  

who accepted the gift of a coat. With it,  she heard the words, “Take my fur coat as  

a memory. I always like well-dressed women.” It was Goebbels that announced the death of  

Hitler, stating in a message that the time  of death was 3:30 p.m., April 30. Hitler and  

Braun were subsequently cremated in the garden  of the Reich Chancellery as Soviet artillery  

could be heard close by. Goebbels and Bormann  soaked the bodies in petrol and lit them,  

after which they gave the Nazi salute. The fighting didn’t just stop after that.  

As an observer of this extra bloodshed, a  British Lieutenant named David Fraser, remarked,  

“There is still too much vile cruelty  in the world for us to be able to say  

with true satisfaction, ‘Good is victorious.” Let’s hope nothing like it ever happens again. 

Now you need to watch “What Actually Happened  to Nazi Leaders After World War 2?” Or,  

see what happened in those camps with “The  Sea Water Torture - Nazi Camp Experiments.”