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April 30th, 1945
The Twentieth Century’s Finest Day
500-Word Contest Entry
By Thomas Keyes
May 12, 2007
On April 30, 1945,
Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide by ingesting
cyanide capsules and shooting themselves.
Hitler’s subalterns drenched their bodies in gasoline and set them
afire. Hitler had already dictated
his last will and testament. Only
two days earlier, Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot
by Italian communists who had captured them. Their bodies were hanged upside-down in
a piazza in Milan and butchered by the mob. The war was lost. The Allies had won. The Axis had failed.
A few days later, on
May 8, now known as VE Day, victory in Europe was celebrated by the
Allies. On August 14, VJ Day also would
be celebrated, commemorating the victory over Japan.
But the most signal day
of all was the day that the German Führer and his mistress took their own
lives, a day when the Russian-Byelorussian forces, led by Marshal Georgi
Zhukov, were within blocks of the Führerbunker, the bomb shelter where Hitler
spent most of the war, far removed from the bombings and shootings, the wounded
and the dying, the fatigue, the famine and the cold.
Hitler had enjoyed
stunning successes as he knocked over European nations like so many
dominoes: Austria, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Hungary, Romania,
Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. But
what he really thirsted after was the USSR. He had declared this in his book, Mein Kampf, dictated by him in prison
long before his rise to power.
Hitler considered Slavic people inferior to Germans, and planned merely
to enslave however many remained after the conquest he envisioned.
Ironically, Josef
Stalin, the supreme ruler of the USSR, was not Russian at all, and not even
Slavic, but of course such considerations were immaterial. It wouldn’t have made a difference
to Hitler who lived in in the USSR.
He had his sights set on the fertile lands of the Ukraine, and on a
country where factories and assembly lines were already functioning. He disdained to conquer underdeveloped
Africa, where Germany had a foothold in the Cameroons.
Hitler professed to
hate Communism, but in retrospect, it’s hard to see much difference
between the social systems in place in both countries. The rule was give your all for the
state, and expect little in return.
Had Hitler made himself the ally of Stalin, instead of his enemy,
there’s no telling what heights they might have ascended. Fortunately for us today, neither Hitler
nor Stalin even considered such an alliance. Each man wanted all for himself.
Reading about the war
in Russia, one can hardly believe the carnage that took place. Twenty-seven million citizens of the
USSR were slain in what was the greatest genocide in history.
The war in the east became
a duel between Hitler and Stalin.
At first, the German onslaught seemed inexpugnable, but little by
little, the USSR began to turn the tide, repulsing the Germans and driving them
back through Poland and Czechoslovakia, all the way to Berlin.
When he finally
admitted all was lost, he killed himself.
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