Hitler's Last Days (23 page)

Thirty-fourth president of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower arrives for a meeting in London, 1959.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

U.S. General Omar Bradley
, commander of the Twelfth Army Group, continued to serve until August 1953, first as army chief of staff and eventually rising to the rank of five-star general. As the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Bradley provided military advice in the Korean War. In civilian life, he consulted with President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. Bradley died in 1981 at age eighty-eight.

A formal portrait of General Omar Bradley.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
enjoyed a long life. Though he was overweight, a heavy drinker, and rarely seen without a cigar, Britain's wartime prime minister lived to be ninety. He died on January 24, 1965. Churchill's funeral was the largest state ceremony in world history at that time, with delegates from 112 nations attending to pay their respects. As a wooden boat carried his casket down the Thames River, the dock cranes lining the waterway lowered their jibs in salute.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives his customary “V for Victory” sign.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin
ruled the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years, dying in 1953 at the age of seventy-three from a brain hemorrhage. His body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum next to that of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union. It was on public display for eight years in Moscow's Red Square until October 31, 1961, when Stalin's remains were moved to the Kremlin Wall necropolis.

Russian leader and military commander Joseph Stalin.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

German General Walther Wenck
, commander of the Twelfth Army, was arrested and held as a prisoner of war by the Americans until 1947. He died in 1982 following an automobile crash. He was eighty-one years old.

 

German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel
, Hitler's commander of the armed forces, was tried at the Nuremberg war crime trials, found guilty, and hanged on October 16, 1946.

General Wilhelm Keitel in his prison cell at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany.
[National Archives and Records Administration, College Park]

 

The day after Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun died,
Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels
and his wife, Magda, poisoned their six children and then committed suicide.

Heinrich Himmler
, head of the SS, betrayed Hitler in the last days of the war by sending a message to Eisenhower suggesting negotiations for surrender. One of the last things Hitler did before he committed suicide was to strip Himmler of his rank. Himmler disguised himself and acquired papers in another name. After he was arrested by the Russians and turned over to the British, he confessed his identity. He committed suicide on May 23, 1945, by biting a cyanide pill he had hidden on his person.

Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of James Blevins]

 

Martin Bormann
, head of the Nazi Party chancellery, died while fleeing Berlin. His remains were not positively identified until 1973, so many people thought he had escaped. Bormann was tried in absentia at Nuremberg and sentenced to death.

Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery.
[National Archives and Records Administration, College Park]

At his trial in Nuremberg,
German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer
admitted to using slave labor at the munitions factories he controlled. Speer was sentenced to twenty years in prison. When he got out, he wrote a bestselling book,
Inside the Third Reich.
He died in London on September 1, 1981.

Albert Speer on trial at Nuremberg.
[Harry S. Truman Library, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Robert Jackson and Robert Kempner]

U.S. General George Marshall,
the man who served as army chief of staff and general of the army during the war, died in Washington, D.C., in 1959 at the age of seventy-eight. In his lifetime, he served as secretary of state and secretary of defense. He was
Time
magazine's Man of the Year twice and won the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize. His most enduring legacy was the Marshall Plan, which allowed Europe to rebuild after the war with financial assistance from the United States. President Harry Truman once said that Marshall was the greatest man of World War II.

General George Marshall in 1947.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery
was named First Viscount Montgomery of Alamein after the war, a title referring to his epic defeat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the Egyptian desert. Montgomery served as Britain's chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 to 1948 and deputy commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1951 to 1958, when he retired at the age of seventy-one. He died in 1976 at age eighty-eight.