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Pages of History
April 1945 brought the deaths of three wartime leaders. One died of natural causes. One was brutally assassinated. One took his own life. The first to go was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died unexpectedly on April 12, 1945, just as the war in Europe was entering its final phase.
Due in part to the national press covering up Roosevelt’s deteriorating health, Americans were stunned to learn of the president’s death. In February Roosevelt had traveled 14,000 miles to and from the Russian resort city of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula for a conference with Churchill and Stalin to discuss how Europe would be divided up after the war. At the Yalta conference Roosevelt remarked: “I think that if I give him (Stalin) everything that I possibly can and ask nothing in return, he will work for a world of democracy and peace.“ As we now know, things didn’t work out as planned.
The stress of the long trip and the difficult negotiations at Yalta contributed to the president’s deteriorating health. On March 29, he traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest and recuperate. While sitting for a portrait during the afternoon of April 12, the president was stricken with a massive stroke and died two hours later.
Harry S. Truman, who had been vice president less than three months, found himself saddled with the task of ending the war. Truman, who was not as fond of Stalin, would preside over the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War and the war in Korea.
Two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Benito Mussolini, the former Italian dictator and founder of a political movement known as Fascism, was executed by Communist partisans. Following the U.S. invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini was deposed and arrested. He was subsequently freed by German special forces and taken to a German-occupied section of Northern Italy to preside over a puppet regime.
As American forces closed in on that region, Mussolini was forced to evacuate. On the morning of April 27, 1945, Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and several other Fascist officials headed for Switzerland in a column of German trucks.
Along the way, the convoy was ambushed by Communist partisans. Mussolini, Petacci, and others in his group were summarily executed. Their bodies were then loaded in a truck and taken to Milan where their corpses were badly abused and hung upside down from the girders of a filling station under construction. The site is now occupied by a McDonalds restaurant.
Adolf Hitler had been hunkered down in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin since January. From there he continued to direct the German war effort while hoping for a miracle.
The news of Roosevelt’s sudden death on April 12 reached him that evening. The next day Hitler issued a proclamation that began with a reference to “Our mortal enemies, the Jewish Bolsheviks” and closed with a reference to Roosevelt: “At this moment when fate has carried off the greatest war criminal of all times from the face of the Earth, the war’s turning point has come.“ But it hadn’t — at least not in favor of Germany. During the next two weeks, Soviet forces tightened the noose around Berlin and were closing in on Hitler’s final refuge beneath the ruins of the Chancellery.
Shortly after midnight on April 29, Hitler married Eva Braun, his longtime mistress. Later that day, he learned of the fate of his former ally Mussolini. By that time, Hitler knew the jig was up and he did not want to suffer a similar indignation at the hands of the Soviets. He and Eva decided to commit suicide the next day.
Hitler had previously obtained cyanide capsules for just such an emergency. One was administered to his favorite dog, a German Shepherd named Blondi. According to his secretary, Hitler was grief-stricken by Blondi’s death. After her master’s death, Blondi’s five puppies also were destroyed to prevent them from falling into Soviet hands.
At approximately 3:30 in the afternoon of April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun entered a small room in the bunker, closed the door, and sat down on a couch. Eva put her head on Hitler’s shoulder and bit down on a cyanide capsule. Death came quickly, but not painlessly. Hitler then raised his pistol to his head, bit down on another capsule, and pulled the trigger.
Following Hitler’s orders, one of his aides then carried the bodies up the stairs to the Chancellery garden, doused them with gasoline, and burned them. “I would not want my body put on display in some waxworks in the future,“ Hitler said.
On May 7, 1945, General Alfred Jodl signed a document of unconditional surrender at Reims, France. But because Stalin objected to the document on the grounds Jodl was not the highest ranking German military official, another document was signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Berlin the following day. May 8, 1945, is the date celebrated as Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. The fighting in Asia continued for another three months.
NOTE: Much of the information concerning Hitler’s final days was found in this writer’s signed copy of “Hitler’s War“ by the British historian David Irving.
Irving was an acclaimed historian of World War II until he was accused of being a “Holocaust denier.” He was subsequently “ca-nceled” and his work was shunned by all major publishing houses.
In the early 2000s this writer purchased many of his books and attended several of his lectures. Irving is now 87 years old and in poor health but most of his books still can be obtained on his website. I recommend them.
