On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, along with Eva Braun, whom he had just officially married, in his Berlin bunker. Their bodies, burned, are found by the Soviets in the gardens of the Chancellery. But what happens to the relatives of this master of a Reich which was, according to his wishes, to last 1000 years? The question is asked at the end of the documentary by Isabelle Clark and Daniel Costelle, Apocalypse, Hitler’s Twilightbroadcast on February 21, 2023, at 9:10 p.m., on France 2. Overview of the fate reserved for close Nazi dictators.
The poison or the gun
Minister of People’s Education and Propaganda, active force in the persecution of the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, designated by Hitler as his heir, will only be chancellor for 24 hours. On the evening of May 1, after his wife Magda poisoned their six children with cyanide, the Goebbels couple shot themselves to death. They thus escape the judgment of a court. Eminence grise and private secretary to the Führer, Martin Boorman only survived them for a day. Died during the capture of Berlin by the Soviets, his body was not immediately found, which accredits the hypothesis that this relative fled among Hitler’s relatives. It was not until road works in Berlin in 1972 that Boorman’s remains were exhumed and identified. Master of the SS, Minister of the Interior, directly responsible for millions of deaths, Heinrich Himmler is in disgrace the last days of the Führer, the latter having learned that he would negotiate in secret with the allies. The failure of his schemes forced him to flee but, arrested by British troops, he committed suicide using a cyanide capsule on May 23, 1945. Reich Minister of Aviation, a corrupt man until the marrow and emblematic figure of the regime, also disgraced following Boorman’s intervention, Hermann Göring surrendered himself to the American army on May 8, 1945. Appearing, like other Nazi “dignitaries”, at the Nuremberg trials and Sentenced to death by hanging, Göring managed to commit suicide before being executed by poisoning himself with cyanide on October 15, 1946.
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survive the war
Also judged in Nuremberg, the Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production Albert Speer escaped the death penalty. This close friend of Hitler, best known for being the chief architect of the regime, manages to receive a 20-year sentence in Spandau prison, despite his proven knowledge of the criminal activities of the power he served without moods. After his release in 1966, he wrote two successful autobiographies and died of a heart attack at the age of 76 in 1981. For his part, Rudolf Hess had a completely different fate. Chief of the Chancellery of the party, he took off alone from Germany to Great Britain, on May 10, 1941, to – he would say – negotiate a separate peace treaty with the United Kingdom. Arrested, imprisoned in Great Britain, then also translated at the Nuremberg trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. After forty-six years of detention, he was found hanged in 1987, in his cell, at the age of 93.
