Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Wrong Day for It. Readers may well conclude from the two volumes that Hitler's death in the ruins of Berlin is not so hard to believe as his continued survival through a dozen years of intraparty intrigue. As far back as 1938, German bigwigs planned their first Putsch. In on the deal, according to Gisevius, were Chief of Staff Franz Haider, General Erwin von Witzleben and a string of other generals. Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, Major General Hans Oster (the brains of Wehrmacht counterintelligence) and Author Gisevius himself were among the conspirators. The calendar, he says, explains...
...some years a Prussian civil servant, later vice consul in Zurich, Author Gisevius claims to have been a member of an eager, unstable and heterogeneous group which schemed against Hitler from the Reichstag fire (1933) down through World War II. He regards Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg (the man who nearly killed Hitler on July 20, 1944) as a Johnny-come-lately with half-Nazi ideas of his own. It was Stauffenberg who lugged a bomb-laden briefcase into field headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, and left it to explode under Hitler's nose. The blast gave Hitler...
Nibelung Nonsense. British Historian Trevor-Roper, whose book is the August co-choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, picks up the pieces where Gisevius drops them and reconstructs a Wagnerian drama of the suicide "love death" of Hitler and Eva Braun. His evidence, gathered from documents and survivors, is circumstantial but pretty convincing. From the Führer-bunker, deep under the Reich Chancellery garden, the war "was directed by somnambulist decisions," he says. Russian shells crashed down overhead; Berlin was almost surrounded; in G.I. slang, the doomed party leaders were getting "bunker happy." Hitler himself deteriorated rapidly...
...Venice . . . studded with jewels . . . and a swastika of gleaming pearls. . . ." Himmler, deluded to the end, maintained a "school of eager researchers [who] studied . . . Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, the symbolism of the suppression of the harp in Ulster, and the occult significance of Gothic pinnacles and top-hats at Eton." Hitler himself sometimes rose from his "modest supper of vegetable pie and distilled water to prance upon the table and identify himself with the great conquerors of the past...
Angelic Antics. In this megalomaniac delusion, Goebbels played his usual sycophantic role. One night, as the bombs thundered above them, he read to Hitler from Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great. When he had finished, "tears stood in the Führer's eyes" and two horoscopes were sent for-Hitler's and that of the German Republic. They predicted a change of fortune after a period of disaster. A few days later came news of Roosevelt's death. Reported a witness, Count Schwerin von Krosigk: "We felt the wings of the Angel of History...