Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (1947) book breakdown
WHO HUGH TREVOR-ROPER WAS: FROM BLETCHLEY PARK TO OXFORD
Hugh Trevor-Roper was born in January 1914 in a small rural village called Glanton, in the very North of England. His father was a local doctor. The future historian was educated at Belhaven Hill School and then at Charterhouse. Hugh Trevor-Roper continued his education at Christ Church and Merton College (a college of Oxford University). He specialized in Classical Ancient History and succeeded in his Bachelor’s degree as a 20-year-old student, who managed to win prestige scholarship. But Hugh Trevor-Roper soon grew bored with Classics and shifted his academic and personal interests to History (earning his degree two years later). The first known book written by Hugh Trevor-Roper was a thorough biography of William Laud, Archbishop of the XVII century.
During the Second World War, Hugh Trevor-Roper served as an officer in the Radio Security Service of the MI6 Intelligence Service. After a while, he was transferred to a team, which was responsible for the interception and decryption of German Intelligence messages (Abwehr). In 1940, this team of officers succeeded in intercepting a massive amount of data, which, among other things, influenced secret decryption within Bletchley Park. Hugh Trevor-Roper, as a young and promising officer, already had a vision that old and skilled servants of the Intelligence Service were now unable to face the new War and its changes – in contrast with young, motivated officers of a new generation, like himself.
He began work in September 1945 and delivered his report to the Four Powers on 1 November, after two months. The book, which grew out of the report, was finished in the summer of 1946. This assignment of great political importance then became the basis for the well-known book, called “The Last Days of Hitler” by Hugh Trevor-Roper. The author engaged himself in the upcoming Cold War and expressed enthusiasm for the struggle against Communism – he then became one of the founders of Encounter magazine, once well-known in England. He continued to research and write academic works on History with a particular passion for the History of England in the XVI-XVII centuries. Hugh Trevor-Roper never escaped debates on the approaches to historical research, which sometimes resulted in conflicts with his colleagues.
Hugh Trevor-Roper is extremely recognizable for his studies on the Second World War and the Third Reich, in particular with two major and widely discussed books: Hitler Table Talk and The Last Days of Hitler. Some of his statements were deeply criticized among historians, but HT Trevor-Roper did not back away from academic disputes with other established historians of WWII. He took issue with the corrosive scepticism of Alan Bullock and A.J.P. Taylor, who treated Hitler as an opportunist and a charlatan; Trevor-Roper saw him as a man driven by a coherent, if monstrous, vision. Trevor-Roper has himself been criticised — for giving the Holocaust little space in his work on the Third Reich, and, by some, for attitudes in his private correspondence.
In 1980 Trevor-Roper left Oxford, where he had held the Regius Chair of Modern History since 1957, to become Master of Peterhouse — the oldest of the Cambridge colleges, founded in 1284. He resigned after seven years and described the period as a waste of time.
The Hitler diaries, 1983: the mistake that followed him
In April 1983 the West German magazine Stern announced that it had acquired sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries, covering 1932 to 1945, recovered — so the story went — from an aircraft that had crashed in East Germany at the end of the war and hidden for decades in a barn. Stern had paid its source 9.3 million Deutschmarks, then about three and a half million dollars, and had begun selling serialisation rights: to Newsweek, to Time, and to two of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, The Times and The Sunday Times. The Sunday Times needed someone to authenticate them, and it had the obvious man on its own board. Hugh Trevor-Roper was an independent director of the paper, and the author of the book that had established how Hitler died. He was flown to a Swiss bank vault to examine the volumes. He was sceptical at first. What changed his mind was not the handwriting but the sheer bulk of the material — sixty volumes seemed beyond a forger — and Stern‘s assurance that the paper had already been chemically tested. That assurance was false; no such test had been made. He pronounced the diaries genuine, and his name went to press.
Then, within days, he took it back — and he did it in the worst possible place. At the press conference held to launch the serialisation, in front of the world’s media, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind. He had learned that Stern could not identify its own source. In the same room, the historian David Irving, who had his own reasons for wanting the diaries discredited, was shouting for the ink to be tested and being escorted out. The ink was tested. Within about two weeks, the West German Federal Archives had established that the paper contained a whitener not manufactured until after the war, that the ink was of 1980s production, and that the contents were riddled with errors copied from a published collection of Hitler’s speeches. The Bundesarchiv called them grotesquely crude fakes. They were the work of Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart dealer in Nazi memorabilia who had been forging Hitler paintings and documents since the 1970s and who had supplied, as the «genuine» comparison samples used in the handwriting tests, more of his own forgeries. Kujau and the Stern reporter who had bought the diaries, Gerd Heidemann, both went to prison. Editors at Stern, The Sunday Times and Newsweek lost their jobs. A quarter of a million copies of Stern were pulped.
Hugh Trevor-Roper passed away in 2003 from a combination of age and cancer.
THE 1945 INVESTIGATION: WHY BRITAIN NEEDED TO PROVE HITLER WAS DEAD
In the Autumn of 1945, four months after the German unconditional surrender and the death of Adolf Hitler, the world press and even military circles were discussing a variety of versions of how Adolf Hitler had met his death, if he did at all. Tabloids revealed multiple crazy rumors, from the rumors that the former German leader was being hidden by the Allies to his calm rural life in Albania, Spain, or Argentina, where he had managed to escape using a U-boat. In his book The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper highlighted and emphasized two main reasons why Britain’s government gave MI6 intelligence to perform thorough research on the issue of Hitler’s last days. The first matter was to eliminate these crazy rumors circulating all over Europe and false mystifications and the false claims, which multiplied week by week, were damaging relations between the Allies.s. The other reason was to solve a dispute with the Soviet Union, which claimed the Allies kept Adolf Hitler alive. Along with that, the USSR had access to the site of former Hitler’s bunker, even to burned remains and all main eyewitnesses.
Hugh Trevor-Roper emphasizes all the privileges he and his team received on behalf of the British government and Intelligence Service to find out all possible facts and the truth about the last days of Adolf Hitler. He had access to all parts of the territory occupied by American-British forces, as well as to the witnesses (both in POW camps and civil) who captured German documents. Hugh Trevor-Roper could call on any assistance he needed, including from the French zone. The main obstacle to the issue of revealing all the facts and circumstances was the opposition and antagonism of the Soviet Union. So-called allies now ignored official requests to provide access to the notebooks of Hitler’s war adjutants, which had been previously mentioned to exist by Marshal Georgy Zhukov. The Soviet party also ignored the claim to get an arrangement with several important eyewitnesses of the last days of Hitler, such as Hans Baur, the fuhrer’s pilot; Otto Günsche, Hitler’s S.S. adjutant; Heinz Linge, his personal servant; and Johann Rattenhuber, the commander of his bodyguard. Possibly valuable findings in Bunker were also concealed.
The first version of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s official report was revealed on November 1, 1945, after a two-month investigation. At the same time, most of it was given to the public press. In his book The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper notes that the conclusions of the report were admitted to be questionable as a divisive issue. On the one hand, the Soviet Union now openly ignored the obvious facts, while declaring Stalin’s paranoid concept that Hitler was alive. On the other – disputers and conspiracy theorists could not agree on a definite answer or the actual version: that Hitler was dead and his body had been burned in a bomb pit with gasoline. A period after the publication of the report witnessed the revealing of some other authentic documents (such as Hitler’s last will) and witnesses from the bunker on Hitler’s last days.
After a short vacation, Hugh Trevor-Roper accepted an allowance to take the report as a basis for the future book, taking into account new findings. Generally, ‘The Last Days of Hitler’ was finished in the Summer of 1946 and included updated and new data, which had not modified the main claims and concepts of the initial investigation (which had already become an official British version on the issue), taken in 1945. The first edition of the book, called The Last Days of Hitler, came out in 1947, and since then it has been translated into more than twenty languages and has stood the test of time with multiple editions. The first author’s reprint, moderated by Hugh Trevor-Roper himself, was published in 1950. Historians claim that he made few changes to the original text, just adding new testimonies and documents, supporting initial conclusions. Even with access to German POWs, who had come back home in the 1950s, the last English reedition preserved the original.
THE 42 WITNESSES: WHO TREVOR-ROPER INTERVIEWED AND WHO HE COULD NOT
In one of his book’s appendices, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated that 42 personalities form the story of his book, The Last Days of Hitler. Some of them were rarely mentioned, once or a few times. Other testimonies play an important role in revealing the historical truth. Seven important witnesses were interviewed between September and November 1945 by Hugh Trevor-Roper himself. Testimonies of others are reachable by employing memoirs (while alive or posthumously, after release from detention) or interviews. Few of these personalities had become figures in the Nuremberg trials and had given multiple testimonies on the events of the Spring of 1945 and the last days of Hitler. 21 of these 42 witnesses within the book were directly connected with the events between April 22 and May 1, 1945. In the list below, I will give “top-10” personalities, based on the number of mentions within the text. Therewith, some of the less-mentioned personalities were more important to the investigation, rather than such ones as Albert Speer, Heinrich Himmler, or Walter Schellenberg.
Heinrich Himmler – 394
Albert Speer – 188
Walter Schellenberg – 166
Hermann Goering – 127
Karl Koller – 64
Schwerin von Krosigk – 48
Nicolaus von Below – 40
Doctor Karl Brandt – 32
Karl Gebhardt – 31
Willy Johannmeyer – 31
CHAPTER BY CHAPTER: WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN THE BOOK
It’s important to emphasize that the titles of chapters within Hugh Trevor-Roper’s ‘The Last Days of Hitler’ book sometimes do not correspond to the content and have some linear structure. Within his first three chapters, Hugh Trevor-Roper pays attention to the main sources of investigation, evaluates the most sophisticated conspiracy theories on Hitler’s last days and Adolf Hitler’s death, and highlights the political environment and situation on opposite sides of the barricades and the circumstances which led Hitler to the Bunker in Berlin. The main issues of Chapter 4 are a) Hitler’s 56th birthday, b) the massive exodus on April 22, and c) Hitler’s decision to deny command and then to take it back as a supreme commander. Then Hugh Trevor-Roper shifts focus to particular personalities of the Third Reich inner circle, such as Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler. Chapter 7, which is called “Death of Hitler,” resumes all the facts, testimonies, and conclusions of the investigation of what had happened to Hitler and his body. Those who enjoyed the “Der Untergang” movie (2004) would appreciate this part of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s ‘The Last Days of Hitler’, also because of the constant mentions of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s former secretary.
What Trevor-Roper concluded and how he established it
The report he delivered on 1 November 1945, and the book that grew out of it, established the following, and it has not been overturned in eighty years. Adolf Hitler killed himself in the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden on the afternoon of 30 April 1945, at some point after three o’clock. He shot himself in the head. Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day, died beside him of cyanide poisoning. On his own prior written and verbal instructions, their bodies were carried up the stairs and out through the bunker’s emergency exit into the Chancellery garden, doused with petrol and burned, while Soviet shells were falling on the garden. The cremation was incomplete. What remained was buried in a shell crater and found by Soviet troops on 5 May.
This is the part that matters, and it is the part no summary of the book ever gives. Trevor-Roper had no body, no autopsy, no forensic access to the site, and no cooperation from the power that held all three. What he had was testimony, documents and arithmetic.
The witnesses. He interviewed seven people himself between September and November 1945 and drew on the interrogations of many more conducted by British and American officers — Hitler’s personal staff, secretaries, adjutants, guards, drivers. The key evidence was not any single account but the fact that accounts taken separately, from people held in different places who had no opportunity to coordinate, agreed on the sequence of events: the farewells in the corridor, the closing of the study door, the single shot, the bodies on the sofa, the carrying-out, the petrol, the burning. Where they differed — and they did differ, on the time by a quarter of an hour, on who carried whom, on whether there was blood on the temple or the mouth — they differed in the way real witnesses to a real event differ, and not in the way a fabricated story falls apart.
The documents. He had the papers seized by the British at Flensburg, including the last telegrams sent out of the bunker, which allow the collapse of the regime to be dated almost hour by hour. He later added Hitler’s two testaments — the personal and the political — and the marriage certificate, all of which surfaced in the Western zones after the report was delivered. Those documents did two things: they confirmed the chronology the witnesses described, and they proved that Hitler had been preparing for his own death rather than for an escape.
The negative evidence. A great part of the book is the systematic destruction of the alternative. If Hitler had left Berlin, somebody would have flown him out; Trevor-Roper accounted for the aircraft and the pilots. If he had gone by U-boat, there would be a record; there was none. Every named witness who was supposed to have seen him afterwards either did not exist, could not be produced, or had been somewhere else. This is why the book reads less like a narrative than like a prosecution case, and it is why it worked.
The one point of dispute. There was exactly one significant disagreement between Trevor-Roper’s account and the Soviet one, and it was not about whether Hitler died. It was about how. Every Western witness said he shot himself. The Soviet position, based on their own autopsy, was that he took cyanide. Trevor-Roper examined the question and wrote that «although Hitler may conceivably have taken poison as well, he certainly killed himself with a revolver-shot». He held that position for the rest of his life, and when the witnesses who had been in Soviet captivity came home in 1956 — Günsche, Linge, Baur, Rattenhuber, the four men he had asked for and been refused in 1945 — they confirmed the gunshot. The disagreement had a political explanation rather than a forensic one. A Hitler who shot himself had, in the crude reading, acted like a soldier. A Hitler who swallowed poison had died like a coward, and in 1945 that was the version Moscow preferred. By 1948 the Soviet government had quietly accepted the verdict of its own 1945 inquiry; the cyanide version continued to be published in the Soviet Union for another twenty years.
Why the conclusion held. It held because it was built the way a legal case is built rather than the way a story is told. Trevor-Roper did not have the strongest evidence available — the Soviets had that — and he knew it, and he said so in print. What he did was assemble everything obtainable on one side of the line, cross-check it against itself, and state precisely where the gaps were. When the gaps were filled, first by the returning prisoners in 1956, then by the Soviet archives after 1991, and finally by forensic work on the dental remains, they were filled in his favour. That is an unusual thing for a book written in two months, by a thirty-one-year-old, about an event nobody was allowed to examine.
How reliable is the book today?
If you are citing a source written in 1947 about an event the author was not allowed to examine, this is the question you need answered, and it has three parts.
1. What Trevor-Roper did not have. Everything on the Soviet side. The bunker, the garden, the remains, the autopsy, and the most important witnesses were all in Soviet hands, and every British request was refused. He did not take this quietly. He asked Moscow for cooperation and, to make it easier, named four men he knew they were holding: Otto Günsche, Hitler’s SS adjutant, who was in the bunker on 30 April and helped carry the bodies out; Heinz Linge, his valet, who was outside the study door; Hans Baur, his pilot, the man who would have flown him out had there been a flight; and Johann Rattenhuber, the commander of his personal bodyguard. Every request was ignored. He was also refused access to the notebooks of Hitler’s military adjutants, whose existence Marshal Zhukov had himself mentioned in public. So the honest description of the book is this: it proves its case on Western evidence alone, and it says so. Trevor-Roper did not pretend the record was complete. He listed what he was missing and named the people who were withholding it — which is, in method, the opposite of the overconfidence his critics later accused him of.
2. What has come out since. Four waves of new evidence, and all four went the same way. 1956. The witnesses he had asked for came home from Soviet captivity. Günsche, Linge, Baur and Rattenhuber gave testimony in West Germany, and between 1952 and 1956 a series of West German court proceedings — needed to settle Hitler’s legal death and the estate — took sworn statements from most of the surviving bunker staff. They confirmed the gunshot and the sequence Trevor-Roper had reconstructed. He added the new material to the 1950 and later editions without altering a conclusion. 1968. The Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski published The Death of Adolf Hitler, printing what purported to be the Soviet autopsy report of May 1945. It concluded cyanide poisoning. It also, as critics pointed out immediately, recorded no dissection of the internal organs that such a conclusion would require, and contradicted every eyewitness. Trevor-Roper answered it the same year in the New York Review of Books, and the exchange is worth reading as a piece of method: he did not dismiss the document; he examined what it did and did not contain. 1995. Two books used the newly opened Russian archives. Ada Petrova and Peter Watson, The Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives, published the Soviet file itself. And Anton Joachimsthaler, whose The Last Days of Hitler: The Legends, The Evidence, The Truth deliberately takes the same title, went through the whole question again on the 1952–56 court testimony plus the archives. Joachimsthaler is sharply critical of the Soviet forensic work — unpreserved jaw fragments, X-rays withheld until 1968, a conclusion reached before the examination — and confirms Trevor-Roper’s reconstruction on every material point. He also establishes the identification of the body through the dental bridgework, matched to pre-war charts by Hitler’s dental assistant Käthe Heusermann and the technician Fritz Echtmann, both of whom the Soviets had interrogated in 1945 and then imprisoned for a decade. 2000 onwards. Russian officials confirmed that the state archive holds bone and dental fragments attributed to Hitler, and forensic examination of the teeth has since supported the identification. The physical evidence, when it finally became available, matched the testimony collected in 1945.
Not to be confused with:
— Anton Joachimsthaler, The Last Days of Hitler: The Legends, The Evidence, The Truth (1995). Same title, deliberately. A re-examination of the same question using the Russian archives and the West German court testimony. Discussed above.
— Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigie, Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute (2015). A single day — 30 April 1945 — reconstructed as a timeline, across Berlin and beyond.
— David Gardner, The Last of the Hitlers. Not about the bunker at all: about Hitler’s surviving relatives, and specifically his brother Alois’s descendants living in the United States under another name.
— Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), the feature film with Alec Guinness, based on Gerhard Boldt’s memoir rather than on Trevor-Roper. If you want the bunker on screen, Der Untergang (2004) is the closer companion to this book, and it draws on the same body of testimony.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Hugh Trevor-Roper? A British historian, 1914–2003, who specialised in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and spent the Second World War in the Radio Security Service decrypting German intelligence traffic. In September 1945, British intelligence assigned him to establish what had happened to Hitler; his report became The Last Days of Hitler. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1957 and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1980 to 1987. He was created Baron Dacre of Glanton in 1979.
When was The Last Days of Hitler published? In 1947, by Macmillan, based on the report Trevor-Roper delivered to the Four Powers on 1 November 1945. He revised it himself for the 1950 edition and added material to later ones, always without changing the conclusions.
How did Trevor-Roper establish that Hitler was dead? Through testimony and documents, because the physical evidence was in Soviet hands and he was refused access to it. He interviewed seven bunker witnesses himself and used the interrogations of many more, conducted separately by British and American officers; the accounts agreed on the sequence of events while differing in the small ways genuine witnesses differ. To these he added the documents seized at Flensburg, including the last telegrams out of the bunker, and later Hitler’s two testaments. He also demonstrated that every alternative — the U-boat, Argentina, the monastery — collapsed on examination.
What did he conclude? That Hitler shot himself in the head in the Führerbunker on the afternoon of 30 April 1945; that Eva Braun died beside him of cyanide; and that their bodies were burned in the Chancellery garden on his prior instructions. The Soviet position was that Hitler too had taken cyanide. Trevor-Roper wrote that he may conceivably have taken poison as well, but «certainly killed himself with a revolver-shot» — and the witnesses who came home from Soviet captivity in 1956 confirmed it.
Why couldn’t he use Soviet evidence? Because the Soviet Union held the bunker, the garden, the remains, the autopsy and the most important witnesses, and refused every British request. He asked for four men by name — Otto Günsche, Heinz Linge, Hans Baur and Johann Rattenhuber — and was ignored, as he was over the adjutants’ notebooks whose existence Marshal Zhukov had mentioned publicly. At the same time Moscow was suggesting in public that the Western Allies were concealing Hitler alive.
Is The Last Days of Hitler a reliable source? For the reconstruction of events in the bunker and for the refutation of the survival stories, yes — it remains a standard source and is still in print, and nothing that has emerged since has overturned its findings. For the forensic identification of the remains and anything resting on Soviet material, cite Anton Joachimsthaler’s 1995 study or Petrova and Watson alongside it, because in 1947 Trevor-Roper could not reach that evidence at all.
Did Trevor-Roper authenticate the fake Hitler diaries? Yes, in April 1983, for The Sunday Times, on whose board he sat. He recanted publicly within days — at the press conference held to launch the serialisation — before the forensic tests that exposed the forgery. The section above sets out what happened and why the two cases are not comparable.
How many witnesses does the book use? Forty-two are listed, of whom twenty-one were directly involved in events between 22 April and 1 May 1945. Trevor-Roper interviewed seven of them himself between September and November 1945. By number of mentions in the text, the leading figures are Himmler (394), Speer (188), Schellenberg (166), Göring (127) and Karl Koller (64) — a distribution that says a good deal about what the investigation was really about: not only Hitler’s death, but the disintegration of the men around him.
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