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Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe's two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan (see below). Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich. Whether or not he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (as reported from Stockholm), or had "fallen in his command post at the Reich chancellery" (as reported by the Hamburg radio, which said that he had been succeeded as Führer by Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz), or was a prisoner of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler as a political force had been expunged. If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.
If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler's eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to last 1,000 years, sank to embers as the flames fused over its gutted cities. The historic crash of what had been Europe's most formidable state was audible in the shrieks of dying men and the point-blank artillery fire against its buckling buildings.
All that was certain to remain after 1,000 years was the all but incredible story of the demonic little man who rose through the grating of a gutter to make himself absolute master of-most of Europe and to change the history of the world more decisively than any other 20th-century man but Lenin. Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. It was impossible to dismiss him as a mountebank, a paper hanger. The suffering and desolation that he wrought was beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The bodies of his victims were heaped across Europe from Stalingrad to London. The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived. How had it happened? If it was necessary to exterminate Hitler and his works, it was equally necessary to try to understand him.
Clearly so absurd a character, so warped and inadequate a mind, despite its coldblooded political discernment, could not in so short a time have worked such universal havoc if it had not embodied forces of evil in the world far greater than itself.
Blue Hills of Austria. Everything—backward environment, shabby heredity, dingy ambitions, neurotic sensitivity— prepared Hitler for his future role. But the beginnings of the future scourge of mankind were bucolic, even idyllic. Hitler was born (1889) at Braunau in Austria-Hungary, among the blue foothills of the Tirolean redoubt.