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 . 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 , or had “fallen in his command post at the Reich
chancellery” , 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 at Braunau in
Austria-Hungary, among the blue foothills of the Tirolean redoubt.
