The True Hitler

The Bunker By James P. O’Donnell Houghton Mifflin, 339 pp., $13.95 The more than a dozen attempts to kill Hitler during his 12-year dictatorship all failed—thanks to Providence, as he himself frequently boasted. Others, in turn, were led to question the workings of Providence, since, for every day his good luck enabled him to survive, it brought misery and death to countless innocents. James P. O’Donnell’s book, although it is a factual, colorful report on the unhappy ending of Hitler and his Reich rather than a treatise on theodicy, might supply an answer: almost certainly, Hitler’s death by tyrannicide would have brought forth the legend of a superman who would have won his war and realized all his visions of Aryan glory had he not been stabbed in the back by a traitor.

Instead, Hitler left the world as an anti-hero, a man unable to face failure, destroyed by the demons within himself, sick in body, mind, and soul, as addicted to his daily drug injections as to his imperial dreams. Hiding out in the warren of tiny cubicles deep down in the cellar of his Chancellery, while enemy troops surrounded him and Berlin burned, he continued to send battle orders to German armies that had ceased to exist, and cursed the German people with all the venomous hatred that he had previously hurled at “international Jewry,” “American plutocrats,” and the aristocracy. In his extremity, Hitler annihilated his own myth. As Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg remarked in July 1944 before he paid with his life for his assassination plot against the Führer, “Hitler in the bunker, that is the true Hitler.”

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Norbert Muhlen

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The Bunker By James P. O’Donnell Houghton Mifflin, 339 pp., $13.95 The more than a dozen attempts to kill Hitler during his 12-year dictatorship all failed—thanks to Providence, as he himself frequently boasted. Others, in turn, were led to question the workings of Providence, since, for every day his good luck enabled him to survive, it brought misery and death to countless innocents. James P. O’Donnell’s book, although it is a factual, colorful report on the unhappy ending of Hitler and his Reich rather than a treatise on theodicy, might supply an answer: almost certainly, Hitler’s death by tyrannicide would have brought forth the legend of a superman who would have won his war and realized all his visions of Aryan glory had he not been stabbed in the back by a traitor.

Instead, Hitler left the world as an anti-hero, a man unable to face failure, destroyed by the demons within himself, sick in body, mind, and soul, as addicted to his daily drug injections as to his imperial dreams. Hiding out in the warren of tiny cubicles deep down in the cellar of his Chancellery, while enemy troops surrounded him and Berlin burned, he continued to send battle orders to German armies that had ceased to exist, and cursed the German people with all the venomous hatred that he had previously hurled at “international Jewry,” “American plutocrats,” and the aristocracy. In his extremity, Hitler annihilated his own myth. As Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg remarked in July 1944 before he paid with his life for his assassination plot against the Führer, “Hitler in the bunker, that is the true Hitler.”