Book Review: Hitler's Death: The Case Against Conspiracy

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by Luke Daly-Groves

Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2019. Pp. xvii, 222. Illus., notes, biblio., index. $22.00. ISBN: 1472834542

Did Hitler Get Away?

A specialist in Anglo-American intelligence activities in postwar Germany, Dr. Daly-Groves (Leeds University), takes on the seemingly never ending subject of whether Hitler killed himself in his bunker in 1945 or, as has been asserted time and again since, managed to escape.

Daly-Groves strongly confirms the suicide in the bunker. He presents evidence still classified when earlier historians, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, worked on the question. During the immediate post-war period and well into the Cold War, Allied intelligence and war crimes officials kept a lot of material under wraps in order to protect the identity of agents and informants, as well as because the information was useful in pursuing Nazis who really had escaped and was often valuable for dealing with neo-Nazi activities in Germany and elsewhere.

Naturally, Daly-Groves also demolishes, the numerous escape theories, of which there are so many – and some so ludicrous – that they often become inherently contradictory. As he does so, he also demonstrates that some of these stories were circulated by the Soviets to suggest that the western Allies were pro-Nazi, and others by former Nazis and neo-Nazis, if only to give Hitler a more heroic fate than suicide.

By no means casual reading, Hitler’s Death will be of value to those seriously interested in the Second World War, Nazism, or the purposes of “fake news”.

 

Note: Hitler’s Death is also available in several e-editions.

 

StrategyPage reviews are shared with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

 

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Reviewer: A. A. Nofi, Review Editor   


Buy it at Amazon.com

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