The long death of Adolf Hitler, Caroline Sharples, Yale University Press, £25

On 20 April 1945 – Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday – Soviet artillery began shelling Berlin. Over the course of the next 13 days, Red Army artillery would rain around 1.8 million shells down on the Nazi capital – a tonnage of explosives that exceeded that dropped by British and American bombers during the previous five years.

Hitler’s final descent into the bunker below the Reich Chancellery occurred on 20 April. Earlier that day, he had emerged from his subterranean lair to receive birthday greetings from a section of the Courland Army, the SS-Division ‘Berlin’ and 20 boys from the Hitler Youth. Stooped, his hand shaking, his collar turned against the wind, he patted a few of the latter on the cheek, delivered some scarcely audible words of thanks, and then, having lunched with his secretaries, returned to the safety of the bunker. Ten days later, with Russian tanks just streets away, he married his mistress, Eva Braun, and shot himself. Braun swallowed cyanide. The bodies were then covered in blankets, carried out into the Chancellery garden, doused with petrol and set on fire.

That should have been the end. But, as Caroline Sharples shows in this forensically researched post-mortem, the circumstances surrounding the Nazi leader’s death have had a curious and complicated afterlife. By shooting himself, Hitler escaped official justice. By having his body cremated, he eluded his adversaries to an even greater extent.

As Sharples chronicles in her opening chapters, the Führer’s death had long been anticipated. ‘What’s the difference between a pig’s tail and Hitler’s funeral?’, asked the British comedian Rue Lambert in November 1938? ‘None: both the end of the swine.’ During the war, the idea of hastening Hitler’s death, ‘galvanised fundraising campaigns and the meeting of production targets’, writes Sharples. ‘Visual references to Hitler’s corpse were embedded within propaganda posters while, at grassroots level, countless civilians invoked “Hitler’s funeral” as the goal that enabled them to contend with the temporary deprivations caused by rationing, blackouts and price rises.’

There was no funeral and one wonders what historical purpose is served by Sharples spending several pages imagining what Hitler’s funeral would have looked like had the dictator died before 1945. More problematic for the British and the Americans was the uncertainty surrounding the Führer’s demise.

On 1 May 1945, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, appointed by Hitler as his successor, announced on German radio that ‘Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen.’ No details were supplied. The next day, the word ‘gefallen’ (killed in action), appeared in the few German and Austrian newspapers still in circulation. While some celebrated in Allied nations, others remained sceptical. ‘I’m quite sure he’s not dead’, declared a 30-year-old woman in Hampstead to a Mass Observation volunteer. ‘I feel it somehow. I’d feel different from this if he was dead… I know I would.’ Pravda, the organ of the Kremlin, denounced the announcement as a ‘fascist trick to cover Hitler’s disappearance from the scene’. But then Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet Zone Commander, told reporters on 6 June that SMERSH agents had recovered four bodies from the grounds of the Reich Chancellery and that one of them, based on an examination of dental records, was Hitler’s. Three days later, on Stalin’s orders, Zhukov retracted this statement. Hitler’s corpse had not been recovered, he now told journalists, before speculating that the dictator and his bride had fled the German capital by aeroplane.

Hitler’s body had become a battleground in the nascent Cold War; a fixation of Stalin’s paranoid imagination. Plainly, the western powers could not allow the mystery to remain unresolved. In September 1945, the head of British counter-intelligence in Berlin, Dick White, charged the 31-year-old Oxford historian and intelligence officer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, with investigating the Führer’s fate. Over the next seven weeks, Trevor-Roper interrogated as many witnesses to Hitler’s final days as could be found. (Several key witnesses had been removed to Moscow, while others remained at large.) On 1 November, before an array of journalists gathered at Berlin’s Hotel am Zoo, he presented his findings.

Trevor Roper’s report, later expanded into a bestselling book, established the story of Hitler’s last days with which we are now familiar: the oppressive atmosphere in the Bunker; the repeated talk of suicide; the departure of the paladins; the farewells to the domestic staff; and, finally, the bullet and the cyanide that ended the lives of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. And yet, as Sharples recounts in the second half of her clearly written text, even this was not the end. There was the discovery of Hitler’s will and political testament, including the words ‘I choose death’; the emergence of new witnesses, such as the Führer’s personal pilot and the bunker guard Harry Mengershausen; the bureaucratic rigmarole leading to the issuance of a death certificate in 1956; the continual rumours (subsequently exploited by television production companies) about the Nazi leader’s postwar life in Spain, Ireland or South America; the authentication of a piece of jawbone held in Moscow since the end of the war; and the dispute over a section of cranium complete with bullet hole.

Sharples has covered every conceivable aspect of Hitler’s death, from Allied fantasies about the event, to reactions to the news, and, finally, the web of intrigue, deception and obfuscation surrounding the Nazi leader’s departure from this world. Her research has been extensive, her prose is clear and engaging. It is hard to imagine what else could be said on this subject. Although Adolf Hitler will doubtless continue to fascinate future generations, the mystery about the dictator’s death and the mystery about the mystery is now well and truly buried.

Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler was awarded the 2026 Duff Cooper Prize.