Hitler descends into his bunker

Hitler descends into his bunker


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Adolf Hitler takes to his underground bunker, where he remains for 105 days until he died by suicide.

Hitler retired to his bunker after deciding to remain in Berlin for the last great siege of the war. Fifty-five feet under the chancellery (Hitler’s headquarters as chancellor), the shelter contained 18 small rooms and was fully self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. He left only rarely (once to decorate a squadron of Hitler Youth) and spent most of his time micromanaging what was left of German defenses and entertaining Nazi colleagues like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Constantly at his side during this time were his companion, Eva Braun, and his Alsatian, Blondi.

On April 29, Hitler married Eva in their bunker hideaway. Eva Braun met Hitler while working as an assistant to Hitler’s official photographer. Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler’s political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the bunker even as the Russians closed in.

Only hours after they were united in marriage, both Hitler and Eva died by suicide. Warned by officers that the Russians were only about a day from overtaking the chancellery and urged to escape to Berchtesgaden, a small town in the Bavarian Alps where Hitler owned a home, the dictator instead chose to take his life. Both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules (which had been tested for their efficacy on his “beloved” dog and her pups). For good measure, he shot himself with his pistol.

READ MORE: Hitler's Teeth Reveal Nazi Dictator's Cause of Death


Hitler descends into his bunker - Jan 16, 1945 - HISTORY.com

TSgt Joe C.

On this day, Adolf Hitler takes to his underground bunker, where he remains for 105 days until he commits suicide.

Hitler retired to his bunker after deciding to remain in Berlin for the last great siege of the war. Fifty-five feet under the chancellery (Hitler’s headquarters as chancellor), the shelter contained 18 small rooms and was fully self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. He left only rarely (once to decorate a squadron of Hitler Youth) and spent most of his time micromanaging what was left of German defenses and entertaining Nazi colleagues like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Constantly at his side during this time were his companion, Eva Braun, and his Alsatian, Blondi.

On April 29, Hitler married Eva in their bunker hideaway. Eva Braun met Hitler while working as an assistant to Hitler’s official photographer. Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler’s political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the bunker even as the Russians closed in.

Only hours after they were united in marriage, both Hitler and Eva committed suicide. Warned by officers that the Russians were only about a day from overtaking the chancellery and urged to escape to Berchtesgarden, a small town in the Bavarian Alps where Hitler owned a home, the dictator instead chose to take his life. Both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules (which had been tested for their efficacy on his “beloved” dog and her pups). For good measure, he shot himself with his pistol.


Hitler descends into his bunker

SGT (Join to see)

On January 16, 1945, Adolf Hitler moved into the Fuhrerbunker, his underground bunker in Berlin. From the article:

"Hitler descends into his bunker
Adolf Hitler takes to his underground bunker, where he remains for 105 days until he died by suicide.

Hitler retired to his bunker after deciding to remain in Berlin for the last great siege of the war. Fifty-five feet under the chancellery (Hitler’s headquarters as chancellor), the shelter contained 18 small rooms and was fully self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. He left only rarely (once to decorate a squadron of Hitler Youth) and spent most of his time micromanaging what was left of German defenses and entertaining Nazi colleagues like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Constantly at his side during this time were his companion, Eva Braun, and his Alsatian, Blondi.

On April 29, Hitler married Eva in their bunker hideaway. Eva Braun met Hitler while working as an assistant to Hitler’s official photographer. Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler’s political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the bunker even as the Russians closed in.

Only hours after they were united in marriage, both Hitler and Eva died by suicide. Warned by officers that the Russians were only about a day from overtaking the chancellery and urged to escape to Berchtesgaden, a small town in the Bavarian Alps where Hitler owned a home, the dictator instead chose to take his life. Both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules (which had been tested for their efficacy on his “beloved” dog and her pups). For good measure, he shot himself with his pistol."


Grasping Reality by Brad DeLong

On this day, Adolf Hitler takes to his underground bunker, where he remains for 105 days until he commits suicide.

Hitler retired to his bunker after deciding to remain in Berlin for the last great siege of the war. Fifty-five feet under the chancellery (Hitler's headquarters as chancellor), the shelter contained 18 small rooms and was fully self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. He left only rarely (once to decorate a squadron of Hitler Youth) and spent most of his time micromanaging what was left of German defenses and entertaining Nazi colleagues like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Constantly at his side during this time were his companion, Eva Braun, and his Alsatian, Blondi.

On April 29, Hitler married Eva in their bunker hideaway. Eva Braun met Hitler while working as an assistant to Hitler's official photographer. Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler's political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the bunker even as the Russians closed in.

Only hours after they were united in marriage, both Hitler and Eva committed suicide. Warned by officers that the Russians were only about a day from overtaking the chancellery and urged to escape to Berchtesgarden, a small town in the Bavarian Alps where Hitler owned a home, the dictator instead chose to take his life. Both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules (which had been tested for their efficacy on his 'beloved' dog and her pups). For good measure, he shot himself with his pistol."


Bollywood descends into Hitler's bunker

The movie’s backers showed 10 minutes of out-takes from the picture to market buyers and reporters on the sidelines of the festival’s sprawling European Film Market.

The scenes bear more than a passing resemblance to the Oscar-nominated 2004 German film “Downfall” starring Bruno Ganz, but juxtapose the story against Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent struggle for Indian independence from the British. The Fuehrer, as played by veteran Indian actor Raghubir Yadav, sports the trademark truncated moustache and harangues his generals deep in his Berlin bunker, albeit in clipped Hindi.

Former Miss India Neha Dhupia portrays Eva Braun, whom Hitler married hours before they committed suicide in the bunker in April 1945.

The title alludes to two letters Gandhi wrote in which he appealed to the Nazi dictator in the vain hope of stopping the war.

Even before its premiere, the film has drawn opposition from sections of India’s small Jewish community and campaigners abroad for what they feared would be a trivialised portrayal of the fascist leader.

But producer Anil Sharma defended the theme of the movie, which is a rare foray into dark material for the Bollywood film industry, more famous for its vast and colourful dance routines and suggestive love scenes.

“We are not glorifying any character,” he said. “We are just telling a lost chapter of Indian independence history.”

Sharma said that the title had generated intense “curiosity” among international buyers in the German capital.

“We have just finished the production of the film and we came to this festival to show it for the first time,” he said.

“We are negotiating with a lot of buyers and exploring possibilities,” he added.
The film contrasts the fall of the Third Reich with Gandhi’s vision for a bloodless struggle that would free India from the British, which Sharma called the ideological clash between “world peace and world turmoil”. The original lead actor, Bollywood star Anupam Kher, pulled out of the production early on in the face of protests.


From Hitler to Gaddafi: Dictators and their bunkers

The ruins of Bab al-Azizia, Colonel Gaddafi’s “Splendid Gate”, are as vast and as provocative as anything left by the many kings, emperors and dictators who have disgraced the pages of world history. The smashed three-metre-thick olive-green walls of the former Libyan leader’s compound stretch for kilometres on the western fringes of Tripoli. They are watched over by machine-gun posts set at 50m intervals. Like a medieval castle, these concrete defences enclose inner walls and then, over fields of what has been gunfire in recent days, stands a cluster of culturally inarticulate living quarters, a clumsy Zenga Zenga palace with the inevitable marble-lined walls, gold fittings, steam rooms and jacuzzis.

Here, in the grounds, is the House of Resistance, a ruin even before the present revolution, prized by the Libyan dictator as a symbol of his survival against US bombing 25 years ago. And, there, deep below the caboodle of kitsch on ground level, is what makes Bab al-Azizia so deeply unsplendid: a bunker.

The word suggests both ruthlessness and weakness. We think of bunkers as the preserve of tyrants, especially when they are cornered, their empires and regimes crumbling above ground. The bunker is the hole they dig themselves into, as if the earth itself were swallowing them up.

Führerbunker
Infamously, Adolf Hitler attempted to direct the course of world history from a bunker set in the gardens of the old Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Cameras poked by journalists into the depths of Gaddafi’s bunker have revealed a world of steel doors and clinical rooms very much like those of the Führerbunker. If the kind of leader who invests in such a place has not lost touch with reality before he — always he, it seems — descends into the sub-palatial depths, living in a bunker would soon drive anyone slightly insane.

In 1924, Franz Kafka wrote The Burrow, a harrowing and unfinished story told in the first person by a mole-like creature that has spent its life completing a burrow with labyrinthine passages and many rooms. While he should feel safe, he worries horribly about the Beast, a creature that may well be digging its way towards him, all teeth and claws. The Red Army must have been that beast for Hitler as he waited for the end, while giving orders to fictional German armies, in a concrete hell of his own making.

Hitler is an extreme case in that he built bunkers almost anywhere he spent more than a few days during World War II. The ruins of Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Fort), his command headquarters in East Prussia, Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) in the Taunus Mountains, and Wehrwolf (Defence Wolf), in a pine forest near Vinnytsia in the Ukraine, remain grimly instructive. At Adlerhorst, concrete bunkers emerged from the ground clad in traditional German half-timbering. Wehrwolf, a 34-hour train ride from Berlin, boasted log cabins, each with its own concrete bunker. There was a swimming pool, a cinema and a tearoom where Hitler would eat cake, and even a vegetable garden for his awkward meals. At Wolfsschanze, the ruined bunkers are like concrete caverns: destroyed by the retreating Nazis, this huge forest compound — 4km in diameter compared with the 3.68km of Bab al-Azizia — seems to look back dimly to the era of cave men.

Or perhaps to the ancient Greeks. They liked to believe that King Minos of Crete, their mythical enemy from some even older past, had hidden a hellish monster that devoured the flower of Greek youth in the fathomless Labyrinth set below the palace of Knossos.

History’s bad guys
And yet, although in the popular imagination bunkers are for history’s bad guys, the curious thing about them is that they have also served democratic governments. Winston Churchill wanted us to move forwards into broad, sunlit uplands after the fight with Hitler, yet he spent many sunless days and brandy nights ensconced in a concrete bunker set beneath Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. There were bedrooms and a dining room for Mr and Mrs Churchill, just as there were more or less identical rooms for Hitler and Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker. One key difference was that Churchill’s bunker was set just three metres below blacked-out London streets, while Hitler’s was about 12m beneath the old Reich Chancellery gardens. The former, as Churchill was well aware, would not have withstood a direct hit by a large bomb the latter survived intact until the Red Army stormed in.

Stanley Kubrick saw a dark humour in the netherworld of the “democratic” bunker. In his 1964 film Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a US president, his gormless generals and a mad former-Nazi rocket scientist take the world to the brink of nuclear war. And, then, after much political ineptitude, diplomatic folly and military idiocy, a Playboy-reading major rides a “nuke” like a bucking bronco down from a B-52 bomber to explode somewhere in the Soviet Union, triggering a doomsday device that destroys the world. End of film. Much of the action takes place inside the Pentagon’s war room, a bunker by any other name, set deep underground and, as Kubrick implies, far from reality. Here, the good guys, hunkered down dimly in their modern cave, trigger something more instantly and conclusively destructive than Armageddon itself.

The war room — a set designed brilliantly by Ken Adam, an emigre from Nazi Germany — seemed so real that when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president of the US, one of the first things he wanted to know was where it was. Just as well, perhaps, that it was the stuff of fiction. Adam had already made a name for himself by designing the early James Bond films, with special emphasis on their villains’ lairs. Bond villains often wanted to take over the world their bases were inevitably bunkers. What made them so comically sinister is that they were always luxurious: in real life, villains’ bunkers are claustrophobic places made worse by an atmosphere of paranoia.

The bunkers built by democratic governments at the time of the Cold War were costly, numerous and, like Dr Strangelove himself, slightly absurd. Some years ago, I went on a tour of one of the biggest. This was not on the outskirts of Washington or even London, but of Ottawa. Decommissioned in 1994, the nuclear fallout bunker at Carp, Ontario, where aliens are said to have once landed, was the largest of the Canadian “Diefenbunkers” built from 1957, the year the Soviet Sputnik went into orbit. They were named after John Diefenbaker, the country’s Progressive Conservative prime minister. The four-storey bunker was built in 1959 to withstand strikes from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. The government and members of the military and civil service would have burrowed here, along with the gold reserve of the Bank of Canada. They had food and water to last several weeks, so the burrowers would have come up for air laden with gold to spend on nothing from shops that had been blasted away and a population that had been vaporised.

Would the Soviets ever have attacked Canada? The fallout from south of the border might well have been a problem. But in any case, the nuclear bunkers have dropped out of use. Since 1994, Carp has been a national historic site of Canada, a popular tourist destination and a mesmerising lesson from the school of bunker design and thinking. Doubtless, other bunkers still exist, ready to hide democratically elected governments from unrest, from the enemy and from their own people. Rumour has it that there is a giant bunker somewhere near the Barbican in London. Is this where the prime minister might dash to hide in the event of some terrifying social meltdown or devastating military attack?

It has been claimed that there are 40-odd underground bunkers dug into mountainsides within 160km of Washington DC for use by the US government and military. Some are said to boast chambers big enough to house aircraft. Mount Weather, Virginia, and Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, have been compared to small underground cities. But such places remain secret.

Hiding away from trouble
This sense of hiding away from trouble and of leaders being detached from the world remains one of the problems with bunkers. Dictators clatter down the stairs and batten down the hatches as their regimes implode democratic politicians make a beeline for them, forgetting that they are meant to be the servants of the people. If everyone up top dies in a nuclear war, there would be nobody left to serve, much less to legislate for.

Churchill understood this absurdity. His place was either in the House of Commons or out in the open, ready to fight on the beaches, landing grounds, fields and streets. Even if Hitler had invaded and defeated Britain, who can imagine Churchill hiding in a spider’s hole like Saddam Hussein or rushing down with the Bank of England’s gold reserve to some furtive concrete bunker?

Strangely, and comically, a concrete bunker capable of withstanding a direct hit from anything the Germans could throw at it was built for Churchill’s use, and that of his wartime government. This was not in Whitehall, nor was it out in the forests. No, Churchill’s secret bunker was in Private Eye‘s favourite north London suburb, Neasden.

Built in 1938, the top-secret bunker was codenamed Paddock. Set on Brook Road between Gladstone Park and the North Circular Road, the entrance leads down to a long and dank gas-proof concrete corridor. Forty rooms file off it, some of them so damp that they are filled today with stalagmites and stalactites formed by calcium dripping from the sodden concrete. One is the map room from where the British resistance might have been conducted. There is a kitchen and there are cell-like bedrooms. Is this really what British democracy might have been reduced to? It is a hellish place. Churchill clearly agreed, because he made just a single visit and said no thank you. The bunker has been empty ever since.

The Neasden bunker — pointless, horrid and pathetic, although intensely fascinating — sums up the sorry world of the bunker. Who, except the most paranoid or terrified, would think of locking themselves away for days, weeks or months in a nightmare such as this? Even Colonel Gaddafi — and the bunker beneath Bab al-Azizia is more comfortable than most — appears to have made a run for it rather than embrace the bunker mentality. – guardian.co.uk

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5 comments on &ldquoMedia Knew at the Time: Hitler Probably Did Not Die in the Bunker&rdquo

Not sure DNA evidence is the ultimate determinant of authenticity, since a Lizard sample sent to 23 & me came back Jewish.

Sounds plausible to me. Too bad for the double. A good task for David Irving, to look further at this.

Der Fuhrer: was: it is alleged: in a very bad way: drug dependent: depression
is also alleged: It goes without saying his personality was such:: a man
possessed with his perception of History: Stalin was the same but he
was a paranoid psychopath: both had the perchant: of the ego: and charisma to carry the show: but in reality: when faced with their own demise:
to face the World: cowered and defeated: this would never happen:
The real story here is the legacy: of Hitler: who and how he was created
He was after all a creation: sanctioned and financed: not from the coffers
of Germany: there were some very deep pockets: that financed the Nazi:

As with the Bolsheviks: in the mass blood letting of the Russian Revolution:
Lenin: was not a Russe he was something else: from the same house as
the Sabbatians: History: is loaded with these groups: as they transmute
into the corridors of power: loyal to oaths : initiates not Country: but
to a manifest of belief: of the enlightened:: Those who take it upon themselves: the mantel of deciding the course of humanity: for these
the masses : will destroy the garden:!

Since the times of the mystery schools: the esoteric: the so called chosen
the Families: the evolution of the Triad::of Control: City if London:
The Vat- i -can: Washington D.C. the sub stratum of the East India Company: and many others who represented the great houses of Europe:
The expansion: lead to alliances: an evolution: the New World: and the East:
The First World Order:

The then Entreaties: after the first World War::secured: the vast potential:
the vast economic gain of the Oil Wealth: of the Middle East: the invention
of Israel: the creation of the House of Saud: as the Kingdom: protected:
As the Ottoman Empire and the Austro- Hungarian: Empires : along with
Czarist Russia: dissolved into History:
The evolution of such untold wealth: brought with it : the charlatans and
the pretenders: As with the end of the Napoleonic Empire: the rise of
the Bankers : So from the New World: the Rockefeller: the great innovators
Henry Ford: Bell: Tesla: and a bevy of Bankers: the Boom and Bust: the
controlled and contrived instability: the Economic crescendo: of development: unsustainable: oh yes: it must change:
So it was laid the foundations of change :: through conflict: and a massive
financial treaty::this war would pay for itself: this Bankers War:
The Yalta Conference: in the Crimea: (Argonaut) the War reparations:1945:
Bretton Woods 1944: New Hampshire: 44 Allied Nations:
The new financial order: The Second New World Order:

The pattern is clear: the evolution of the World has been at a pace:
Financial Crisis: have come and gone: but the avalanche is building
as it teeters on collapse: all efforts to engage and foster major conflict
has failed::apart from the measured surgical regime change : the long
drawn out conflicts in Vietnam: the Balkans: Afghanistan: there is no
appetite: for more: as it doesn’t raise a tick of interest: this born out:
by the genocide in Yemen:
The Silent Weapons: Wars inside minds : unrelenting programming posing
as entertainment: social idolatry of celebrity : the destruction of standards
Sex: Drugs: and Rock and Roll: mind control: psychological conditioning
Your World is now a movie set:! Roll em’:
They have you convinced they own you through technology: Ai is invincible:
Is it:? convince the mind of the parody: the disease is now your life:
A dead thing owns your mind and rules through fear: and all the minions:
in the movie: want to be rescued::
Like always they have given you names: built a relationship to your fears:
Virus: Contagion: retro- virus Ebola: Zika: Hiv: h1n1: pandemic:5G:
These are the new weapons: and oh yes: some are very dangerous:
Are those who create this are they immune:? are they not as fragile as
we:? living in holes in the ground is no escape: it is a sentence:
The Third New World Order: shares the same DNA: of the other
Iterations: wealth : power control: Sustainability and all the buzz words
climate: are the symptoms: of the needs of those who claim dominion:

Our Forbears: have endured the same things: for thousands of years
We have been told in the writings and the vast technologies they left
behind: some of it is hidden: but it is still there all we have to do is learn
to read it: it is in our DNA: our record of existence::junk DNA: no it is us:

So der Fuhrer: was a success: he was hired for the job: his psychosis
of who and what he was . was known: used and cultivated: he is of the
kind ::who are chosen:: dwell on this and think why:!
Adolf : got what he wanted: a place in History: immortalised: in mystery:
Infamous: and derided for his cruelty: but remembered:
We must remember: he was Not One Man: he was many:! Those who stood
behind him: those in the shadows: and those who benefit from the
horror:
They walk : even now among us: they are the same as they always have
been: all like us : The Beast:!

You have tremendous knowledge of how the world “is run”, John. Thank you for sharing your insights.


13 Actors Who Played Hitler in Movies and TV, From Charlie Chaplin to Taika Waititi (Photos)

Playing a villain in a movie is a great career move for an actor, but playing a real-life, universally reviled monster like Adolf Hitler is not necessarily a decision that's made lightly. Even in the history of countless movie Nazis, having the guts and gravitas to actually play Hitler is something else entirely. Taika Waititi, who portrays a satirical, imaginary version of Der Führer inside a young boy's mind for his latest film "Jojo Rabbit," only got his movie made under the studio's condition that he play the part of Hitler. But he's not the only actor who's made that leap:

Charles Chaplin - "The Great Dictator" (1940)

Though Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp and Adolf Hitler shared the same pencil-thin mustache, Chaplin took a risk making a satire about the German dictator. He directly associated his most iconic character with the world leader at a time in history when many Americans were still torn about the need to enter the war. The film has many classic Chaplin gags, including a famous sequence of a ballet with the globe, but the tone was far different, and the film predictably got banned in several countries. Chaplin would never play The Tramp again.

Alec Guinness - "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" (1973)

Alec Guinness was one of the first high profile actors to portray Hitler in the post-war period, and he stressed that he aimed to not do anything to make Hitler appear sympathetic in his performance, sticking to a British accent and just embodying his mannerisms. Though Guinness told The New York Times that he went nearly method to embody both the hate and senility that had sunk in during Hitler's last ten days of his life. "As an actor, I cannot possibly make Hitler a sympathetic figure. I can only make him human," Guinness said in an interview. "While the film is anti-Hitler, and while I'm most decidedly anti-Hitler, as an actor, I must see only Hitler's point of view. I'm afraid I'll be most hateful, and, as a precaution, I've asked the company to take out insurance against an attempt on my life. The think I'm being frivolous, but I'm not. It's for my wife's sake. The point is, I must present Hitler truthfully, else there is no point in playing him."

Anthony Hopkins - "The Bunker" (1981)

Though he's more famous for his other villainous turn as Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins portrayed Hitler in his final days hiding in an underground bunker. "The Bunker" was a three-hour, TV movie event on CBS, and The New York Times said Hopkins' performance was "riveting" and "extraordinarily powerful." "Hitler is mad, often contemptible, but always understandable," the Times wrote. "He is not made sympathetic, exactly, but he is given decidedly pathetic dimensions, making him just that much more ''acceptable'' as a dramatic and historical character."

Michael Sheard - "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989)

You don't get too many fun moments with Hitler in the movies, but this one from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" finds Indy infiltrating a Nazi rally with the Führer in attendance, only to get caught in a crowd and find himself face-to-face with the tyrant. He thinks he's done for, only for Hitler to take a book from his hands and sign his autograph.

Ian McKellen - "Countdown to War" (1989)

Before he played Magneto or Gandalf the Gray, British thespian Ian McKellen portrayed Hitler in this docudrama produced by PBS. It showed the build up to the war in 1939, including a dramatized moment in which Hitler has just learned that France and the U.K. jointly declared war on Germany.

Noah Taylor - "Max" (2002)/"Preacher" (2017)

Noah Taylor is the one actor who had the distinction (fortune doesn't feel like the right word) of playing Hitler twice. His first stint was opposite John Cusack in "Max," which looked at Hitler's youth as a struggling artist and how Max Rothman coached Hitler and ultimately failed to get him to channel his rage to the canvas. Then when Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were casting "Preacher," they wanted a Hitler-type that was like what they saw in "Max," but ended up casting Taylor himself. It's a more satirical version of Hitler in which he's now escaped from Hell and is found working at a sandwich shop.

Robert Carlyle - "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" (2003)

"The Full Monty" actor Robert Carlyle had never played a real-life figure before taking the role of Adolf Hitler for this Canadian miniseries that charted Hitler's growing influence within the Nazi party and Germany. Carlyle also stars in the miniseries opposite Peter O'Toole as Paul von Hindenberg.

Bruno Ganz - "Downfall" (2004)

His performance has become an endless meme as the Internet has found ways to invent their own subtitles and show Hitler reacting to just about anything, but Bruno Ganz gives a remarkable performance in this film about Hitler's final days. Roger Ebert called Ganz nearly unrecognizable as the German dictator, "hunched over, shrunken, his injured left hand fluttering behind his back like a trapped bird."

David Bamber - "Valkyrie" (2008)

Tom Cruise stars as a loyal German officer staging an unsuccessful coup attempt by assassinating Hitler. David Bamber has a small but powerful role in Bryan Singer's thriller, talking about the need to understand the music of Wagner and lending his voice to a sinister and tense phone call late in the film as he demands to take all the traitors to the Nazi cause alive.

Martin Wuttke - "Inglourious Basterds" (2009)

It's a brief but showstopping performance in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds," punctuated by Martin Wuttke pounding on the table screaming "Nein!" He's paranoid about the emergence of The Bear Jew marching through France. And though it's a broad performance, it feels scarily realistic. No spoilers, but it doesn't exactly end well for this Hitler in Tarantino's alternate history.

Wolf Muser - "The Man in the High Castle" (2015)

The first season of Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle" ended with a twist from Philip K. Dick's novel when it was revealed that the man in the titular high castle -- the person a resistance force against the Nazis had been passing secrets to -- was actually an elderly Adolf Hitler, as played by Wolf Muser. Except that wasn't the whole story, and it wasn't until the second season that we met the real man the title refers to.

Sarah Silverman - "Conan" (2016)

This one's fun. Conan O'Brien enlisted Sarah Silverman for a routine when then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump was frequently being directly compared to Hitler. Silverman's Hitler didn't take kindly to that comparison: "Don't get me wrong, I agree with a lot of what he says, like a lot, 90%, I'm like 'this guy gets it," "Hitler" joked. "Sometimes I watch him, and I'm like, 'Is that how people see me?'"

Taika Waititi - "Jojo Rabbit" (2019)

Waititi may be playing a broad satire of Hitler that's not unlike some of his other cornball character. But he descends into some scary depths as even this imaginary version of the Führer starts to threaten Jojo and flaunt his charismatic evil.


1945 : Hitler descends into his bunker


On this day, Adolf Hitler takes to his underground bunker, where he remains for 105 days until he commits suicide.
Hitler retired to his bunker after deciding to remain in Berlin for the last great siege of the war. Fifty-five feet under the chancellery (Hitler's headquarters as chancellor), the shelter contained 18 small rooms and was fully self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. He left only rarely (once to decorate a squadron of Hitler Youth) and spent most of his time micromanaging what was left of German defenses and entertaining Nazi colleagues like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Constantly at his side during this time were his companion, Eva Braun, and his Alsatian, Blondi.
On April 29, Hitler married Eva in their bunker hideaway. Eva Braun met Hitler while working as an assistant to Hitler's official photographer. Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler's political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the bunker even as the Russians closed in.
Only hours after they were united in marriage, both Hitler and Eva committed suicide. Warned by officers that the Russians were only about a day from overtaking the chancellery and urged to escape to Berchtesgarden, a small town in the Bavarian Alps where Hitler owned a home, the dictator instead chose to take his life. Both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules (which had been tested for their efficacy on his "beloved" dog and her pups). For good measure, he shot himself with his pistol.


Movies: The Human Face of Evil

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    Here's a moviegoing opportunity you may want to refuse but should not: spending 21/2 hours trapped underground in a dank bunker with world history's most loathsome creature.

    Downfall is a German film--epic in scale, painstaking in detail, superbly acted--that recounts the last days of Adolf Hitler and his circle of associate monsters in the spring of 1945. The locale is ruined Berlin, encircled by the implacably advancing Russians as its population descends into anarchy. Belowstairs, Hitler (toweringly played by Bruno Ganz) spirals deeper into unreality. Hunched over his maps, he orders imaginary armies to attack, while his toadies, in their spiffy.