Hitler

forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the Nazis were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere … then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women. I am sure I should have the same feelings if I were in Greece or Poland. But I happen to be in Germany, and write of what I see here.’ The moral price was, if anything, even more immeasurable. Decades would not fully erase the simple but compelling sentiment painted in huge letters at the scene of Hitler’s annual celebration of the 1923 putsch, the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, in May 1945: ‘I am ashamed to be a German.’ ‘Europe has never known such a calamity to her civilization and nobody can say when she will begin to recover from its effects,’ was the telling and at the same time prophetic comment of one British newspaper, the
Manchester Guardian
, only three days after the suicide in the bunker. The trauma which was Hitler’s lasting legacy was only just beginning.
    V
    Never in history has such ruination – physical and moral – been associated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and actions of this one man has been evident in the preceding chapters. That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler’s name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times.The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour, was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.
    Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead and millions more grieving their lost ones and trying to put their shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end wrecked, its remnants to be divided among the victorious and occupying powers. The arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich capital itself and presided over half of Europe. Even the German people, whose survival he had said was the very reason for his political fight, had proved ultimately dispensable to him.
    In the event, the German people he was prepared to see damned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler. Beyond the repairing of broken lives and broken homes in broken towns and cities, the searing moral imprint of Hitler’s era would remain. Gradually, nevertheless, a new society, resting in time, mercifully, on new values, would emerge from the ruins of the old. For in its maelstrom of destruction Hitler’s rule had also conclusively demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into calamitous war.
    The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis.

Main Published Primary Sources on Hitler
    Adolf Hitler: Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims
, ed. Werner Jochmann, Hamburg, 1980 (
Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944
, introd. by H. R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1953).
    Akten der Partei-Kanzlei
, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 4 vols, Munich, 1983–92.
    Akten der Reichskanzlei. Die Regierung Hitler 1933–1938
, 4 vols, Boppard/Munich, 1983–99.
    Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945. (Serie D: 1.9.37–11.12.41; Serie E: 1941–1945).
    Baur, Hans,
Ich flog Mächtige der Erde
, Kempten, 1956.
    Becker, Josef and Ruth (eds.),
Hitlers Machtergreifung
, 2nd edn, Munich, 1992.
    Below, Nicolaus von,
Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937–1945
, Mainz, 1980 (
At Hitler’s Side
, London, 2001).
    The Bormann Letters: The Private Correspondence between Martin Bormann and his Wife from January 1943