Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute.
The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories.
