Five Brothers and a War

Hitler Commits Suicide

Hitler committed suicide April 30, at about 3:30 pm—just two days after the killing of Benito Mussolini. That afternoon, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz had gotten a message indicating that Hitler had named Dönitz to succeed him. It should come as no surprise that Hitler completely ignored the provisions of leadership succession in the German Constitution in doing this, as he never intended to be a legitimate political leader. The concept that a current leader can write a last will and testament to name his successor would be, if not so horrible, laughable. The other thing to note is that Hitler named a separate President than Chancellor, thereby weakening the leader from the start. While that may have been Hitler's intent, the new Chancellor was to be Goebbels, who committed suicide himself (having just fed his five children morphine, then cyanide after they lost consciousness) the following day, May 1. Thus, the two offices were separate for just longer than one day. His sole act as chancellor was to write a letter to the Soviets suggesting that with the death of Hitler, a ceasefire be agreed to, whereby a Fascist state of Germany could be set up in order to be hostile to the West. At almost the same time Goebbels was committing suicide, May 1, 1945, Seyß-Inquart traveled by Schnellboot ( “speedboat” ) across the North Sea to Flensburg (a small town on the German/Danish border) in order to report to Reich president Dönitz at his headquarters in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein. By the time he got there, Dönitz had just received a radio message at 3:18 pm which read:

nazi germany

Five Brothers and a War

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